A jolly good look at the origins of the selfie
One of the aims of Civilisations (BBC Two) is to offer alternatives to the white male gaze. Thus after Simon Schama opened the batting last week, in this second episode Mary Beard strode to the crease with a quite different agenda. Being the BBC’S top classicist, it was her job, in a film titled How Do We Look?, to explain what happened when humanity grew addicted to capturing its own image, beach-body ready and often without a stitch on.
Beard has her own street style. Clad in silver trainers, she spurns Schama’s silver tongue for an earthier demotic. “It really is big,” she said, unprofessorially, of a vast Olmec head in Mexico in the opening sequence. The object was, furthermore, “a powerful in-your-face reminder” that humans have always liked looking at images of themselves.
They still do. Shots of tourists taking selfies at the Acropolis craftily argued that as a species we are incurable narcissists. It’s all just a question of degree. Qin Shi Huang’s terracotta army offered him military protection in the underworld, while Rameses II commissioned gigantic portraits of himself in Thebes which reminded Beard of today’s needy bare-chested potentates. Think she means you, Mr Putin.
The hemisphere-spanning travel budget took her far and wide. But Beard will always be strongest on her home territory, urging us to “try hard” to enjoy intimate encounters with remote antiquities. Her easy access to jollity certainly helps. Inspecting two of her favourite Greek vases, she pointed to satyrs “balancing goblets in very silly places”. (You can guess where.)
Beard deployed some finger-wagging lexicon that would never have tumbled from the lips of Kenneth Clark in the original Civilisations: she talked of art that was “deeply gendered”, “troubling”, “awkward”. She fetched up at Syon House, which Lord Clark visited in the landmark series 50 years ago. There she inspected the Apollo Belvedere
– “Belvedearie” in her pronunciation – and tacitly rebuked Clark for the “distorting and sometimes divisive lens” through which the West views other cultures.
It was a bit of a sneaky low blow in an otherwise inclusive, democratising essay. “Ancient art can tell us … about ourselves,” she concluded, “about how we look.”
It was a fun pun to end on. Preachy, yes, but approachable.
In the golden age of the sitcom, some shows were recorded in front of a studio audience and the others had canned laughter superimposed. The former now costs too much and the latter, in which producers decided where the laughs are placed in post-production, has long been thought too tacky. But there is a third way. When Still Game (BBC One) was recording its seventh series two years ago, an audience attended a screening and supplied the laughter track.
There were 200 seats, for which a staggering 100,000 Glaswegians applied. The reason for the show’s popularity is clear. It delivers on the promise of waggish codger comedy, and the pleasure starts with the credits, in which pensioners Jack Jarvis and Victor Mcdade, played by show creators Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill, age before your eyes.
In the style of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’s Old Gits, half the cast are comically thatched with wigs and trowelled in make-up so that they look more gnarled, while their physicality remains sprightly with vigour. I could have sworn that Paul Young, who plays Hugh “Shug” Mclaughlin, had been fitted with joke-shop ears to aid gags about his pin-sharp hearing, but apparently they’re for real.
The show’s origins as a stage comedy is also transparent. These actors can sell a punchline, and the script is full of age-appropriate references. In this episode, the first of a new series, it was Marvin Hagler and Hemingway.
The plot was a neatly constructed playlet which riffed on the idea of retirees treating pubs as care homes. They were so stingy that Boabby the Barman (Gavin Mitchell) had to turn his into a gastropub to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the nosy Isa (Jane Mccarry), an acquired taste, was itching to find out about her surprise party.
The plot lines merged in a clever move up the blindside, while there were smart sight gags, culminating in a cheering sequence in which the regulars gathered in a room over the pub, sawed a hole in the floor and sent a fishing line down to liberate bottles. This is a sharp-witted, old-school sitcom, but with an original twist.