Flaming bongos! Those drums could drive you utterly bonkers
THIS week’s viewing schedules are looking as bare as supermarket shelves at the start of lockdown. Fresh stocks of EastEnders, which might unkindly be described as the toilet roll of telly, have completely run out.
We’re still having to cough up for the TV licence, of course: £13.20 if you pay monthly, as I do.
For this, we got an eight-year-old football match and a repeat of the Antiques Roadshow on BBC1 yesterday, and we can look forward to Wimbledon replays, remakes of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads playlets and a rerun of Peter Kay’s Car Share.
What the Beeb ought to do, out of simple decency, is to supply everyone with three months’ free subscription to BritBox, the streaming video channel it launched with ITV as an online archive for decades of top television — everything from costume drama to comedy to Corrie.
At least that way we’d each be able to choose what repeats we wanted to see.
What new shows were on offer provided thin fare for a Sunday. Lost Pyramids Of The Aztecs (C4) looked as though it was originally intended as a low-budget documentary for the More4 channel.
Recounting the blood-drenched rise and fall of the medieval Mexican empire, it resorted to cartoons instead of re-enactments. Every new discovery was accompanied by urgent drumming, a standard TV trick to help viewers imagine they’re watching something important and dramatic. Actually, we were just staring at a tubby American who called himself an ‘experimental archaeologist’ building a miniature Aztec pyramid.
The precise scale of the replica wasn’t explained but it looked about the right size for sacrificing an Action Man to the gods. obviously, in our more civilised times, the ritual disembowelment of anybody is frowned upon, but I think I’d make an exception for whoever was playing those flaming bongos.
Despite the Aztecs’ brutality (they performed more than 50 human sacrifices a day), it seems we could learn a lot from their engineering genius. They built a city on wetlands, a sort of Mexican Venice, and created a network of floating fields called chinampas to feed the 200,000 inhabitants.
Then, because the swamp was brackish, they pumped in fresh water supplies via a clay aqueduct balanced on reed beds. Given how often large swathes of Britain now flood each winter, we might want to think about doing something similar.
That idea makes more sense than the plot of The Luminaries ( BBC1), a bodice- ripping romance set in the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s.
Eve Hewson, daughter of U2 frontman Bono, plays an innocent Irish maid called Anna who arrives in the southern seas to seek her fortune.
What she finds are some uncouth men with deplorable manners and a nasty, sly woman who gives her free bed and board but steals her purse.
How Anna feels about this is hard to know, because Miss
Hewson has only one facial expression — a sort of preoccupied discomfort, as if her bra has come undone and she can’t think of anything else.
We haven’t been told why Anna fled Ireland with only her purse, nor whether she left any family behind.
She seems to have led a sheltered life, yet she can knock back half a pint of brandy like it’s lemon barley water.
Her only hope lies with harddrinking Mr Crosbie Wells, played by Aussie actor Ewen Leslie. He appears to be doing a Sheffield accent stolen from Jarvis Cocker, the lanky lead singer of Pulp.
Jarvis should demand it back.
MUDBATH OF THE WEEKEND:
With Glastonbury cancelled, BBC2 gave us Bruce, Bowie, Lady Gaga and Coldplay from the vaults. But for the authentic experience you needed to watch in the shower . . . with both feet in a bag of manure.