Rambling about nothing
SOMETIMES, quite often, in fact, my son will wake me up saying he has a secret to tell me. On the most recent occasion, this urgent bit of clandestine information was that Bob ( his cuddly toy badger) was celebrating his sixth birthday.
The day before, it was that Farida ( a girl in his class) had seen more than “ten- hundred films”.
Call me a cynic but when someone promises to tell me a secret, these days I don’t expect all that much. I did, however, expect that SECRET BRITAIN ( BBC1), airing at the weighty hour of 9pm, might have something to sink my teeth into.
I’ll freely admit, having not read the listings closely, I spent a whole day expecting underground bunkers, disappearing dossiers, UFO encounters, panthers on Dartmoor, all that jazz. I was let down by a show which possibly wouldn’t have let me down quite as much if it had a different title and been broadcast at 7pm on BBC2.
Presented by Countryfile’s fine pair Adam Henson and Ellie Harrison, this was “secret” as in “things that quite a few people know... and even more will know after this”.
Having asked Countryfile viewers to send in their favourite “secret” ( that is, “not secret”) spots around the kingdom, this show is the result. Perhaps aware that the secrets aren’t secrets, and therefore not actually that good, the BBC have spent very little money on the programme.
It has the look and feel and sound of those locally- made ads that used to appear on the big screen at the cinema. Cheesy music married to a monstrous script.
Henson and Harrison, I suspect, didn’t want much to do with it, and agreed on the basis that they’d read out only half- sentences as they rambled about the Welsh countryisde.
I might not have minded this, or even noticed it, if there were any genuinely exciting things being passed on.
As it was, what with a small lake, a big rock, a river, a bloke who’d been in an air crash but couldn’t remember any of it and a woman whose mum used to live on a farm, this was a catalogue of the dullest, least- secret secrets ever to not be kept secret.
The night before last, on BBC3, film- maker Stacey Dooley took us around a sprawling cemetery in a Mexican town. It was hard, in fact to see where the town ended and the cemetery began because the latter was full of three- storey villas, domed chapels and mini, ultra- modern glass and steel skyscrapers.
They represented a grim form of death architecture. Monuments, complete with electricity and air- con, for myriad fallen drug barons, or rather, for their families to show other families how much money the dead men had left behind.
Bizarrely, last night, TREASURES OF ANCIENT GREECE ( BBC4) took up the theme, showing us, in the capable hands of art critic Alastair Sooke, how classical art had been fuelled by such ugly, human urges.
At Delphi, a sacred site where the voice of a god was believed to answer questions from a crack in a rock, wealthy cities put up ever grander monuments.
Dedicated to the gods, they were, of course, really just dedicated to keeping up with the Joneses.