The BBC’s really lost the plot: it’s spoiled next week’s Howards End!
LAST WEEKEND’S TV Howards End Big Ben: Saving The World’s Most Famous Clock HHIII
HOW very badmannered for us to be shown a 70second spoiler for episode two at the end of part one of Howards
End (BBC1), the Edwardian costume drama of manners and genteel romance.
All the surprises in store next Sunday were revealed, in a trailer as pointless as peeking at the last page of a novel. Were you wondering why the enigmatic Mrs Wilcox (Julia Ormond) seemed so tired and drawn? Well, guess what — spoiler alert — she dies! Look, it’s her funeral.
And did you detect a flash of electricity between spinster Margaret (Hayley Atwell) and Mr Wilcox (Matthew Macfadyen)? Not half — as soon as he’s widowed, he throws himself at her. A crass montage of scenes gave it all away.
It’s as though some anonymous Beeb executive who grew up on music videos thought the first episode of Howards End was too slow, and decided to condense the next one into a blur of highlights.
You could argue that the story is more than 100 years old, so spoilers are impossible: anyone who has seen the 1992 movie, or read the 1910 book for that matter, will know what happens. But that’s hardly an excuse.
The Merchant-Ivory version featured the ultimate Hampstead and mortification at rudeness. The plot is not the point. But that doesn’t mean we want a shovelful of spoilers.
The surprising twist in the tale of Big Ben: Saving The World’s Most Famous Clock (C4) is that this London landmark has to be wound by hand every three days.
Like a gigantic grandfather clock, its clockwork mechanism is powered by gravity and the weights that keep it ticking have to be spooled back up by hand with a crankshaft.
Dr Anna Keay, presenting this look at Big Ben’s inner workings, took a quick turn at the handle then hurried on, without letting the news sink in. I’m still boggling — it has to be wound up, like a toy train or an old wristwatch.
She glossed over other fascinating facts, too. Apparently, the entire clock tower is lurching sideways. It’s 11in out of true, owing to subsidence. Will it fall over one day? We weren’t told.
And somewhere in the tower, Dr Keay casually mentioned, there’s a prison for unruly MPs. But she didn’t say if anyone had been incarcerated there or what they had done to deserve it. Touching someone’s knee, perhaps.
Most of the documentary was padding and filler. It was a 30minute show, dragged out for three times that long. And it still managed to skate over the most interesting bits.