Even in holy India, Sue reads us the rites of Hampstead atheism
WHY are Britain’s Lefties so terrified of admitting that they want to believe in God? Comedian Sue Perkins was exploring India’s most sacred river, awed by the spiritual power of the landscape in documentary The Ganges (BBC1), but mortified at the idea that her pals at home might think she’d got religious.
She ended the first episode insisting: ‘I’m not a religious person. I may not believe in gods and goddesses, but this pilgrimage has genuinely touched me.’
Yet five minutes earlier she had been telling a child: ‘God is everywhere.’ She was overcome with emotion at meeting saintly hermits and holy men. In such a divine place, it must be exhausting to cling to atheism so hard.
The problem for professional luvvies like Sue is that she must abide by the Laws of the Hampstead Dinner Party at all times. And rule number one is that all religion is an unscientific con-trick (except for Islam, which is multicultural and lovely).
Sue obeyed rule number two as well: always remind everyone that you despise Donald Trump. She got a couple of good digs in. But Trump won’t be watching, and the rest of us can probably guess her views on The Donald’s presidency.
what a shame she couldn’t surrender to the magic of India and leave her political hang-ups far behind.
There were moments when she was overwhelmed by the East. Sue is one of those people who can’t help adopting the accents of the people she meets. ‘I have come 5,000km to see Ganga,’ she said, sounding like Peter Sellers and waggling her head unconsciously.
She is an arch and self-conscious commentator, constantly searching for jokes.
Sometimes it feels as if she’s not trying to be witty, just defensive. She admits that her mind is full of ‘chattering chimps, endless psychobabble’, and seemed quite relieved when altitude sickness in the Himalayas left her too exhausted to talk.
But her reflex jibes were needed when she visited a factory run by a swami (a Hindu sage) who claimed to reject all wealth while running a multi-billion-pound business policed by a private army of gunmen. She called him ‘equal parts mad monk and Bond villain’.
The knee-jerk jokes were dropped when Sue movingly explained that, six months before the expedition, her beloved father had died. She had been unable to grieve in Britain and was desperately hoping that in India she would find ways to cope with the pain.
That same grief for a lost father underpinned every part of the natural world documentary H Is For Hawk: A New Chapter (BBC 2). Cambridge academic Helen Macdonald published a bestseller three years ago, describing how an obsession with falconry helped her survive her own father’s unexpected death.
She trained a goshawk at the time, the hardest of the British birds of prey to rear. Now she wanted to do it again, but this time with the help of friends, instead of in total solitude. Macdonald is a poet. She captures the lethal, ethereal beauty of these birds: ‘Half dragon, half leopard... spooky, pale-eyed, feathered ghosts that lived and killed in woodland thickets.’
But she also conveys the devastation of losing a parent. ‘Grief broke me,’ she says simply. ‘I didn’t know who I was any more. I fled from humanity.’
Falconry soothed her, she explains, because it was ‘all about things that can fly away choosing to come back to you’.
This heartfelt documentary was gorgeously filmed, but might have been better as a shorter, 30-minute film. Sometimes the best poems are the brief ones.
£%&*@ OF THE NIGHT: Gordon Ramsay On Cocaine (ITV) was an hour-long look at the drug trade. But it could have been done in half the time without the foul-mouthed chef’s constant effing and blinding. It adds nothing. And it’s boring.