ROGER LEWIS
As the son of a butcher, I’ve never gone in for anthropomorphism. Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Paddington, Peppa Pig: hate ’em all, unless they come fricasseed. The creatures I detest most are dolphins, with their smug, squeaky, beady-eyed personalities, like columnists on a middle-brow tabloid.
This disgruntlement means I am in the tiny minority who failed to applaud
What’s hidden beneath the waves is ‘beyond our imagination’, intoned David Attenborough fatuously. Except it isn’t – the natural world, in these documentaries, is a traditional freak show, with the fish and the fowl, walruses and polar bears, predictably killing, eating and fornicating, served up for the viewer as if we are visiting an 18th-century Bedlam.
I know we must salute the photography – the pin-sharp close-ups of swivelling eyes and tendrils, spume, coral and the water’s glint. I found it boring after a while, like a screensaver. We darted about the globe meaninglessly: ‘Here in Alaska’… ‘In the underwater forests off northern Japan.’
Yet whether it was Mexico or New Zealand, the soundtrack was polluted with horrible, electronic, keyboardinduced whines and a woo-woo-woo choir. Whatever happened to real orchestras?
At first, I thought Gunpowder was The Three Musketeers. Bearded, swarthy Condé Nast boys, wearing cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, having sword fights in taverns. Then the story of the plot to blow up Parliament, turned into one of those dramas with heaps of contemporary parallels. The Catholics, going about their ‘holy work’, seeing themselves as members of ‘the one true Church’, firebrands willing to do violence for their ‘cause’, were like jihadists. Meantime, the government, having a spot of bother with the Spanish, went through its version of Brexit negotiations: ‘Foreign princes will never give us the remedy we seek’; ‘This is England, sir. Our laws are naught to do with Spain.’
You know when Mark Gatiss comes on that the spirit of Vincent Price has risen again from his crypt. Gatiss played Robert Cecil, the Witchfinder General, as a serpentine hunchback, gleefully organising hangings, drawings and quarterings, which were depicted in some detail – bloody entrails, waterboarding, the rack, with arms wrenched out of sockets. We had priest holes behind secret panels, brutal interrogations, and speeches about having to cleanse a society ‘rancid with popery’.
Of course, it all built up to nothing. As King James was played, absurdly, as a mad, gay Glaswegian, I was disappointed when, in accordance with history, the gunpowder plot had to be thwarted.
Will Millard, the slightly overboisterous (ie incredibly irritating) presenter of Hidden Cardiff, loves poking about in undercrofts as much as he does climbing cast-iron gasometers. Hoping to show us the Welsh city’s overlooked gems, he waded along flooded tunnels, claustrophobic sluices and clogged canals, tracing the infrastructure of the docks during the Victorian period, when ‘it was Welsh coal that fuelled the British Empire’. We were shown the abandoned mansions of the ship-owners, the mahogany and alabaster rooms crying out for restoration. Entire streets, constructed in a lavish, Gothick revival fashion, are now the premises of shabby fast-food chains.
Millard found an abandoned
The Oldie