Television Roger Lewis
This is Lacy [like lacy underwear, she added helpfully] in Austin, Texas! I have a 1999 Honda Accord and parts of my engine are starting to jump out!’
Well, it was quite fun. So-so. Still, I looked forward to returning – greeted by a cry of ‘Oh my God – you’re back!’, from upstairs in our bedroom, which did not inspire my confidence in our housesitters. On the day of our return, Simon Russell Beale was reading Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust for two-anda-half hours on Radio 4. That exquisite voice! (Then off we went to see him, brilliantly sinister in the film The Death of Stalin).
And best of all, that Saturday night – as Oldie deadline loomed – was that the Archive on 4 subject was ‘Driven’. Yes, cars again. Peter Curran – the droll Ulsterman who ad-libs on bunk beds with Patrick Marber – devised and fronted this programme on the future and the driverless car.
I’m nominating it for this year’s best documentary, and here is why. It took an important theme: are we ready for this change in the culture – not driving cars? It presented the facts: we spend billions of hours in jams; our cities are clogged with parked cars. Life could be safer, cleaner, less wasteful. It used archives – Mr Toad, Disney’s Herbie, Barbara Cartland in her white Roller, Rob Bryden’s minicab-driver Geoff – intelligently. It invoked car stuff from Noddy to Jack Kerouac, to the Ford Cortina, to the Mini. It invited us to mock the man thing of equating car with status: ‘What you driving these days?’
Alexei Sayle quoted Barthes, saying cars were our medieval cathedrals, a spiritual home; his Marxist friends chose 2CVS or mini-vans, opting out of motorised, bourgeois competitiveness. We were reminded that Adolf Hitler gave us the VW Beetle. Four decades of Top Gear have reflected motorists’ changing attitudes, from ‘sensible’ to ‘transgressive’.
But the car-driving era, said Curran, is now coasting to a close. Running a car is too expensive and, in the millennial mindset, learning to drive seems ‘antiquated’. But, for our generation, there’s a flaw in the utopian future. Shall we really be seated in splendid isolation in a driverless car, like a sedan chair?
‘No,’ said Curran. ‘The door will slide open and a total stranger will snuggle in beside you.’
‘No!’ cried Alexei. ‘I may go on about social justice, but I’m not sharing a driverless car with anybody. Sorry.’ Have you noticed how the characters in
Cold Feet are always in the kitchen chopping carrots?
I’ve started to find the programme too cosy. Real pain is avoided – I hated the abortion sequence. People break up, go bust, fall ill, lose sleep; yet everything always comes together in a big group hug. The actors deserve better. When is someone going to take James Nesbitt aside and tell him the George Robey eyebrows don’t work? Written in 1987, Ian Mcewan’s The
Child in Time is set in a London before CCTV, mobiles, texts and tweets. The characters exchange postcards, write letters, walk to the postbox. Thatcher is in charge and there is a back-to-basics ethos about childcare and citizenship.
The recent adaptation with Benedict Cumberbatch, set in the present, lost this period texture – and made no procedural Smile: Larkin and his beloved Rolleiflex
sense. An infant lost in a supermarket in 2017 would be found by security cameras. Nor can an adult, post-dunblane, wander into a primary school. There are locked doors, surveillance, signing-in protocols.
The trailers were misleading, as they implied a Madeleine Mccann-type thriller. It was hardly that. Where Mcewan bolstered his novel, which is about shattered worlds, with complex metaphors to do with physics (chaos theory, blind accident, the instability of matter, and the subjective sensation of time, which can run backwards), the film was more straightforwardly about chronic grief. Cumberbatch spent ninety minutes finding different ways to howl and sob.
A great literary experience – Mcewan’s surreal and unfathomable air – became a mediocre, grating televisual one.
Philip Larkin wasn’t only a major poet; he was a passionate photographer. Through the Lens with Larkin was a documentary about his archive of snaps, extensive images of muddy estuaries, pale skies, bomb craters, industrial cranes and Hull’s wharves, which, like his verse, showed the effects of time and the approach of death.
The albums had a ‘curious, despondent beauty’, in the words of Richard Bradford, the talking head. Larkin owned a Rolleiflex, bought in 1957 – ‘professional quality kit’, we were assured. He evidently took good care with the composition and detail, and he was fond of the self-timer – he’d set up the camera and then scurry into shot. (‘He was addicted to taking selfies.’) Nevertheless, I was left feeling a bit queasy – not only because Larkin’s mother looked like Larkin in drag (a Psycho effect), but also because Larkin and his horse-faced lover, headscarved Monica, posing on rocks and on bleak moors in the Sixties, reminded me of those chilling souvenir pictures taken by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley.
The other major English poet, WH Auden, was the subject of Stop All the Clocks, directed by Adam Low. I don’t like hearing poetry read out loud. Here we had Alan Bennett’s trademark lugubriousness, his Yorkshire camp at odds with Auden’s astringency. Someone called Paul Muldoon waffled with an Irish brogue, making Auden’s verse into Irish whimsy. Isherwood’s voice was that of an old lady, as if Sally Bowles was in a home.
The idea was that Auden is now important because he was prescient – all those Thirties works about Nazi rallies, fascist crowds, tyrants, soldiers, bombs, curfews, anxiety and unidentified