Television Roger Lewis
A panorama of decay at the best of times, Hastings, during the prolonged months of lockdown, is like an end-of-the-world zombie apocalypse movie.
The shops, cafés, pubs and restaurants are shuttered and abandoned, the doorways unswept, windows broken and unwashed. The pier has been locked for months. The pavements are strewn with rubbish and dog mess. Nothing gleams. Everything is weed-choked. It is hard to picture it ever coming back to life. What a bore the brown winter sea is, anyway.
The telly, consequently, is my window on a nicer world – and what do I watch? Only Foyle’s War, which is set in Hastings. I also liked Mighty Trains, which is about a mighty train traversing Australia, except there was a derailment and they had to reverse – not that the passengers missed much. Australia is nothing but a lot of red earth and a kangaroo, which hopped over a fence.
A similar programme was Mighty Cruise Ships, in which a mighty cruise ship veered around the Canary Islands. There’s no ship’s wheel today – only a computer mouse. Indeed, ships don’t even look like ships. They are floating metal boxes, with no curving lines, no elegance, nothing to link them with the old Cunarders. On board, there are circus performances, dozens of bars and a German crew. Why do German men when speaking English always sound as gay as geese?
Joanna Lumley, in defiance of lockdown, has been on the move. She’s already been to Russia and India, but she can’t go to Africa as the ivory-poachers would bag her for those splendid lateral incisors.
Instead of ending up as a piano, she ‘makes her most personal journey yet’ and, in Home Sweet Home, finds herself with a camera crew in a plague village in Derbyshire. Then she is in the Rovers talking to Ken Barlow; on a Scottish island looking almost with interest at a tweed loom; and, keeping an impressively tight lid on satire, in Ulster, showing a blind man a mural on the side of a house.
In every scene, Joanna wears a different coat. She goes to Whitby and dresses up as a Goth. She goes to Bradford and starts talking in a dialect of Hindi. She looks at a waterfall and puts on a sympathetic face when a do-gooder explains how the very landscape of England is racist, and everyone must do more ‘to promote access to the countryside for people from diverse backgrounds’. Why?
What a breathy voice she has, like a human hairdryer. Joanna sighs, gasps, pants. She swoops about, gesticulating in slow motion. Surely they can find room for her in the preposterous Bridgerton, with its broughams and bustles, fans and balls, powdered wigs and plates piled high with multicoloured macaroons?
The series is a fantasy of social reversal, an alternative Regency England where the monarchy and aristocracy are black people, white men are bullying weaklings and all the girls are wily protofeminists, their opinions and attitudes formed as if by Germaine Greer.
Panto season prevails, with Ugly Sisters, Broker’s Men, matchmaking wars and crazy courtship protocols.
I was amazed I managed as many as two episodes, before switching to a Jack Warner film on Talking Pictures TV.
Were I a younger man, however, I’d quite fall in love with Phoebe Dynevor – who turns out to be the actual daughter of Coronation Street’s Sally Dynevor – Sally Whittaker as was, Kevin’s wife, also called Sally, a sexy pixie. Forty years ago, I fell in love with her, too.
Longing for sunshiny oases and desert islands – or at least geraniums in urns – I watch all those shows from the Lost World, when crowds existed, before people went about wearing face nappies.
The appeal of Antiques Road Trip, which is frequently on in the middle of the night, is no longer the buffoons poking about in junk shops, robbing the owners and dealers – it is the miracle of travelling freely; the open road.
What makes me laugh about Celebrity Antiques Road Trip is that I’ve seldom heard of the celebrities, many of whom have by now also dropped off the twig, eg somebody named William Simons from something called Heartbeat.
Then there is Coach Trip, where contestants are usually called on to ride camels in Marbella. I’ve never followed the programme’s rules – all this bickering about tactical voting. Yet the big question remains: is Brendan a celebrity yet? Or is he stuck in the doldrums, like Jeremy Spake from Airport and Maureen from Driving School? Welsh beauty Maureen, who ran over her husband’s foot, went to Calais ‘to practise her French’.