This Mexican art journey put everyone in the picture
Usually at the BBC, the task of telling a nation’s story in art falls to Andrew Graham-dixon. But he can’t be everywhere. To present The Art That Made Mexico: Paradise, Power, Prayers (BBC Four), the gig was shrewdly given to a rookie who is incontestably close to the subject. British-mexican photographer Alinka Echeverría has repaid that faith.
Indeed, she’s so embedded in the culture that her native pronunciations were splendidly indecipherable. Take the artist Saturnino Herrán, who painted the first truly Mexican landscape depicting two volcanoes – darkly smouldering Popocatépetl and white-capped Iztaccíhuatl – in human form. Later, he painted an iconic image of indigenous peasants transporting marigolds along a canal in Xochimilco.
Apart from the contractual promise to take the viewer “on a journey”, this introduction was bracingly stripped of cliché. Echeverría veered more towards a doctoral lexicon to describe art which is “about projecting topographies of ideology and identity”.
This first episode cantered through the story of the Mexican landscape. It began with Mesoamerican culture preserved in astonishingly alive frescoes at Teotihuacan. Along came the Aztecs, whose surviving scrolls are so precious that they’re locked in vaults. But the main event was Mexico’s declaration of artistic independence from a European aesthetic imposed by Spanish conquistadors.
The only internationally renowned artist on view was Diego Rivera, whose spectacular fresco cycle
The Fertile Earth had its meaning carefully unpacked. Even seasoned gallerygoers won’t have had that story at their fingertips.
There are no women yet: Frida Kahlo is being kept up a sleeve. Other artists explored included the painter of epic landscapes José María Velasco, unflinching chronicler of war Francisco Goitia and, most dramatically of all, the self-styled Dr Atl, who in the Forties spent several years capturing the eruptions of Parícutin, a newly formed volcano.
In his blistering canvases it was as if the landscape was creating itself. A similar effect happened more slowly in Las Pozas, the surrealist sculpture park of English eccentric Edward James. He wanted the vegetation to grow over his creation, as if painting itself into the picture.
Afrosty legal letter must have prompted the disclaimer at the top of The Real Marigold on Tour (BBC One). The show, it explained, is “inspired but otherwise unrelated to” the hit film whose brand identity has been shamelessly filched. It portrays, furthermore, “the authentic experience of a group of famous senior citizens”.
Authentic? Pull the other one. “The group have decided,” Tom Hollander’s voice-over kept saying. The only decision any of them took was who got the best bedroom. The answer: Miriam Margolyes.
India, Japan and the US were explored in two previous series, now the idea is to see how the aged get by elsewhere in the world. The first stop: Chengdu in China, where the concept of British pensioners choosing to live out their golden years is far less plausible. So this was much more overtly a travelogue.
The problem is that the quartet of oddballs were not particularly good or charming guides. Vast dull chasms of time went on transport, accommodation and introductions. It felt like being trapped in the opening chapter of a windy novel.
The chef Rosemary Shrager was easily the most game and culturally open. The charms of former darts player Bobby George, recently in ITV’S wearyingly similar Gone to Pot, are thinning out. Ditto Wayne Sleep’s pirouettes. Who didn’t want to send him home when, at a ticket kiosk, his best guess for four was “quattro”?
Mainly, we need to talk about Miriam. Margolyes, 76, was a fun novelty in the first series but a little of her shtick goes an awfully long way. A peremptory old fusspot whose dagger stares blame random individuals for imperceptible slights, she didn’t eat the food, got frightfully stroppy at the enormo-pool and then burst into floods of tears in the panda sanctuary. “Interesting,” suggested Sleep. Not really. She’s just alarmingly in touch with her inner six-year-old.
There were some fun insights into the lives of Chinese retirees, but not enough to fill a whole hour. This was quite a clever concept once upon a time, but like a pensioner on a long-distance trek, it looks completely tired.
The Art that Made Mexico: Paradise, Power and Prayers ★★★★
The Real Marigold on Tour ★★