Television Roger Lewis
The late Auberon Waugh once addressed the Stogumber Young Wives on the topic ‘It is high time we had a civil war in this country.’
I wonder how the old satirist would have reacted, had he known such turbulence would indeed one day come about and no longer remain a joke? Brexit: The Uncivil War put me in mind of Russia in 1917, with Lenin and Trotsky dismantling the tsarist autocracy; the quotas, maps and statistical projections – the technocratic fervour presaging a suspicion of saboteurs, arbitrary executions, police dogs and famines. Benedict Cumberbatch in a bald wig was his usual irritating boffin. By some necromantic means, Eric Morecambe was cast as Michael Gove.
One of the reasons I can’t stand colour-blind casting is I’m not colourblind. Why spend a fortune making authentic costumes and building period sets, ironing out all manner of anachronisms, and then Inspector Javert blows in and he’s as black as your hat. It clashes terribly with me, and I mean no disrespect to the great David Oyelowo. Likewise, in this new adaptation of Les Misérables, who told Dominic West, an Old Etonian, that a good way of portraying tough proletarian grit and worthiness was to assume a northern accent? Or was Sean Bean unavailable? If there was a bit of a homoerotic subtext here between Javert and Valjean, Andrew Davies, the workmanlike scriptwriter, was not being original. Do look at Charles Laughton and Fredric March in the film version of 1935.
There was a black priest in Thirties London in The ABC Murders, but that was the least of my concerns. By trying to shock us with images of bloody rags in sinks, pulsating cysts and boils, upended chamber pots and copious vomiting, this lavish production foolishly ditched Agatha Christie’s mathematical plot structure, with its brilliant double twist. Instead we had a lot about guilt and unhappiness, England as a fascist state, kinky stockings salesmen, and Poirot as a shabby refugee. John Malkovich was pretty terrible (what was his accent? Albanian?) – though it was an original stroke to play Poirot as dim and startled.
Raymond Briggs, as we were reminded in Snowmen, Bogeymen and Milkmen, is a great man, who in his fine crayon drawings always manages to evoke a nicer Britain of outside loos and redbrick streets, striped pyjamas and pots of tea. He was educated at the Slade, and his love for Vermeer is reflected in his own mysterious interiors, his rooms and houses.
His wife, Jean, suffered from schizophrenia, we were told, and died of leukaemia. His next partner also died. Briggs’s shocking grief somehow permeated his work. ‘One battled on,’ he said courageously – creating Fungus the Bogeyman, where everything rotten
and slimy and dank was delightful, and Father Christmas, who is unmasked as a cantankerous W C Fields. The little boy in The Snowman, everyone’s favourite, is able to imply an unreachable emotional need – 5.5 million copies have been sold. If Briggs has a philosophy, it is this and it is hard won: everything melts.
I have had a busy time in Hastings lately. Some do-gooder has been chalking ‘Go Vegan for 2019’ on the pavements. Under the cover of darkness, I have been chalking the word ‘Don’t’ at the beginning of every example I have found. (A compromise: my wife, Anna, wouldn’t let me insert profanities.) I am proudly a butcher’s son, you see; so my response to The Truth about Vegans can easily be surmised. As much as their ‘extreme tactics’ used against farmers, it is the self-righteousness I deplore, plus the wonky logic, which would have us all trying to live off the inert gases in the air we breathe. Except someone will point out that there are mites and microbes with feelings that may be hurt even on that stringent diet.
It’s not unlike colour-blind casting really – which I will only go along with when Daniel Day Lewis plays Malcolm X or a white actor can again essay Othello: that would be to be colour-blind likewise – or the Metoo madness, and the transgender insanity, and identity politics bullying, where none shall rest until every heterosexual male is castrated.
Ideological schemes always drift towards totalitarianism. Bron would have said as much in Stogumber.