Television
Roger Lewis
An elderly reader, Lord Gnome, aka Richard Ingrams, whom I often see being pushed along the seafront in St Leonards-on-sea by his private nurse, has asked me to talk about his favourite programme, Bargain Hunt (BBC1).
I am happy to do so. I am always watching Bargain Hunt and its interchangeable BBC variants: Antiques Road Trip, Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, with unrecognisable celebrities, Flog It! and Cash in the Attic. There are no doubt others, as the formula is pretty simple. Basically, the idea is that contestants come across a bit of junk in a shop or at the back of a cupboard and hope a profit can be made in a provincial saleroom.
Money is never made, however – and no wonder. Who in their right mind can get excited about brass rings, chipped vases, bent ladles, stopped clocks and biscuit barrels inscribed ‘To Tracy who is off to Saudi and pastures new’?
Well, the experts who advise the Blue team and the Red team get excited enough – these overweight, ugly, camp and sour dealers who go in for bow ties and moustaches, roll their eyes and tell the clueless members of the public to throw away their money: ‘Should do well at auction!’
Pig’s bum. A particularly egregious expert is Anita, a Glaswegian woman with a black tea cosy clamped on her head. She annoys me almost as much as Greta Thunberg, and that is saying something.
The ‘bonus buys’, as chosen by the experts, are always even more rubbishy – decanter stoppers, novelty golf clubs and wicker baskets badly made by the blind. Then, at the finish, everyone has to link arms and give a jaunty kick. At least Tim Wonnacott has disappeared as a presenter, though he still does the voice-overs.
Apparently, when the camera was switched off, some of these presenters get a bit temperamental. Who can blame them? Years and years of behaving like a prat, when in fact you know your stuff about fine art, historical bric-a-brac and stately homes, would make anyone want to run amok with a swordstick.
What makes Doc Martin (ITV) such a success is its implausibility. Picturesque spots, such as Cornish villages (or in my case the Herefordshire Balkans), are in fact a grey and dripping hell, with nothing to do all day except get drunk and commit adultery or murder.
In the realms of the sitcom, however, the sun shines, the local bobby is a smiling buffoon, villagers are eccentric characters rather than deadly bores, and there is no hanging about to see the GP, who can get test results back within an hour.
Martin Clunes does his best to rise above the falsity. He gives a great performance, I think – the grumpy doctor with his stiff gait and buttoned-up suit. Clunes never makes Ellingham likeable, never softens the edges, and I love the way he glares with hatred at his dog.
The character, though, despite the rudeness and forthrightness, is somehow lost, and we respond to that – and he always saves the day, too, and brings the community together when people are electrocuted, fall off the roof, get bitten
by seals or collapse with rare heart conditions. Clunes is as good as Leonard Rossiter would have been in the role.
There is a marvellous supporting cast: Selina Cadell as Mrs Tishell, the besotted pharmacist; Ian Mcneice as Bert Large (can he get any larger; is it his glands?), trying to sell goat ice cream; and Eileen Atkins, who wanders the cobbled streets with little to do, except possibly wonder why room wasn’t found for her in Downton Abbey.
Episodes always end with contentious outsiders (the nasty woman from the General Medical Council; the nasty woman who took over from Louisa as headmistress) being stretchered off in an ambulance.
The latest eight-part adaptation of Umberto Eco’s Sherlockian tushery, The Name of the Rose (BBC2), is lavishly done, like a medieval fresco, with snowy Italian landscapes and cities on hills. On the other hand, it is the gayest romp ever devised – sinister monks with sibilant voices, torture-chamber rituals as used to be popular in Greenwich Village, bitchy abbots and popes, and Damian Hardung, as Adso the apprentice, who is a Piero della Francesca angel or pin-up.
Swishy in his cowl, Rupert Everett, as a grand inquisitor ‘impelled by the Devil’, perhaps to his own surprise, is now officially the new Julian Orchard, twisting his long face, comically baring his squirrel teeth.
Catastrophically bad as Oscar Wilde, Rupert has at last found his niche, and what an Ugly Sister he’d have made alongside Terry Scott.