Strictly’s Katie shows us how to walk and talk, but that’s about it
THIS may have been mentioned before, but it deserves to be said again: no TV presenter is better at walking and talking than Katie Derham.
When the likes of Jeremy Paxman or David Dimbleby are prised away from their desks, they gingerly put one foot in front of another as though they’re treading a tightrope. One hand grasps unconsciously for a safety rail.
Even the more assured type, such as Michael Portillo, rarely accelerates beyond a saunter. Perhaps it’s her Strictly training, but Katie can recite pages of script with effortless fluency, while dashing down pavements so swiftly that the crew can’t keep up. All Together Now: The Great Orches
tra Challenge (BBC4) saw her waltz past the camera, carry on chatting over her shoulder, and then turn to keep talking while walking backwards. And she didn’t fluff a word.
Sadly, the programme had no other use for her at all. She was needed about as much as a saxophone in a string quartet.
Amateur music makers like the five part-time orchestras in this contest are familiar characters on television, and their shows should follow a wellworn format. A flamboyant enthusiast flounces into their rehearsals, wrings his hands, makes them laugh, makes them cry, and transforms them into chart-toppers.
Choirmaster Gareth Malone is the champ, but he’s strictly vocal. You won’t catch him wrestling with the brass section. In his place, coaching the amateurs hoping to be chosen as stars of the BBC’s proms in Hyde Park was conductor Paul Daniel.
But Paul was too understated to be a TV personality. He didn’t even wear colourful trousers. His assistant, Chi- Chi Nwanoku, seemed promising when she arrived to chide some double bassists, but then she barely spoke again.
We did meet some engaging characters from the orchestras, including a transgender gardener called Paula who played the tuba, and Jacqueline, who worked on the supermarket check-out and had to go round to her mum’s house when she wanted to practise the flute.
But these encounters were piecemeal, without anyone to draw them together. To make it even more fragmented, we were introduced to five orchestras in half an hour. It became impossible to keep track of who was in which string section.
It did seem, at first, as though Paul was going to try some Bake Off innuendo, to gee-up proceedings. He told the London Gay Symphony Orchestra: ‘You’re not letting the sound come from the bottom, which is where all the great sounds come from.’ That was the last joke of the evening.
Even the producers seemed unsure of what they were making. The ensembles were practising great symphonic works, such as Beethoven’s Fifth and Berlioz’s Fantastique. But the links between segments were mostly Eighties rock and reggae. Why would that appeal to fans of the classics?
This series has no clue of who its audience is, or how it wants to tell its stories — a good idea wasted.
Katie would have been better employed on New York: America’s
Busiest City (BBC2), a travelogue in which most of the items were shot in real time, without edits, to convey the city’s sense of bustle.
At one point, a cameraman on a packed subway train whacked a commuter in the face with his lens, forcing presenter Anita Rani to break off her commentary and apologise profusely before a fight broke out. Moments later, she tried to deliver a link to camera while travellers streamed past, throwing her filthy looks.
This would have been great, if the subject matter had not been so stultifyingly dull. Whose brilliant idea was it to go to the world’s most vibrant city and make a documentary about the history of its transport system?
New York means Broadway, Sinatra, the mob, speakeasys, King Kong, West Side Story, Woody Allen . . . the information desk at Grand Central Station and the timetable of the Staten Island ferry are less evocative.
‘ Passenger numbers,’ Anita informed us as she delved into the decline of the metropolitan railways, ‘plummeted by a third between 1946 and 1964.’ What could be more boring than that?