Made of flesh and flood
WHETHER you believe the Bible is divine or not, it is certainly a treasure chest of human stories. In among the big, bizarre stuff ( the fiery visions and the parting seas) there are constant, tiny reminders that these were stories about real people.
When Abraham’s wife is told she’s going to have another child, she laughs ( and what 80- year- old woman wouldn’t?). When the infant Jesus goes missing at a wedding his parents hunt for him frantically, just as any parents would today.
It is that combination, perhaps, of extraordinary things happening to ordinary people, that has attracted so many writers and film- makers to biblical tales.
Latest in line, with THE ARK
( BBC1), is former EastEnders writer Tony Jordan, whose back catalogue ( stretching from Minder to Hustle and recent First World War drama The Passing Bells) reads like an Old Testament of classic telly.
The Ark was interesting, not least for the pairing of David Threlfall and Joanne Whalley as Noah and the woman whom Genesis only records as “Noah’s wife”.
There was a touch of the Pennsylvania Amish about Noah and his sons, all living the simple life out in the sticks and scorning the fleshpots of the nearby town.
Only one of his brood, the restless Kenan, was tempted to seek adventure, choosing, with impeccably bad timing, the moment God had decided to wipe almost everyone out with a cataclysmic flood.
There was a reason, though, that Jordan called this drama The Ark and not The Flood: the first raindrops came just 10 minutes before the end.
This wasn’t a disaster movie ( although disaster movies have, of course, continually borrowed from the biblical flood) but a tale of faith and single- mindedness. It was here, perhaps, that the writer’s kitchen- sink background came to the fore: treating Noah and tribe, not as symbols in an old legend but as flesh- and- blood people.
Before the old man had his big powwow with the messenger of God, his sons and their wives were bickering about the problems of sleeping in a big tent with their in- laws just a goat- skin away. And when Noah announced that the flood was coming, his family, justifiably, thought he was losing it.
In this telling of the tale the Ark was less a magical escape vessel, more a big, woody protest at the lewd and callous city just over the hill. It was about a man making a stand, however odd, however doubted he might be and persuading others, through the sheer force of example, to follow.
DRILLS, DENTURES AND DENTISTRY: AN ORAL HISTORY ( BBC4) tried hard to overcome our natural squeamishness. As if aware that the piercing whine of the drill would be an overload, the programme- makers hired the soft, husky voice of Professor Joanna Bourke to counteract it.
Nothing could alter the material, though, which was both ghastly and a bit thin on the ground for an hour- long programme.
The problem with historians, meanwhile, is that they always want to link everything to the past. In the case of dentistry, we are not, as the good professor insisted, afraid because of the stain on our collective memories left by medieval extraction techniques and false teeth made from battlefield corpses.
We’re afraid because, novocaine or not, having your teeth fixed still blooming hurts.