Television
‘Itchy, sore posterior? Ask your pharmacist today.’
And no doubt I would have done so with alacrity – as indeed I obey the injunctions in all the advertisements aimed at my demographic (stairlifts, mobility scooters, funeral plans, conservatory insulation, denture glue, and some comical gadget to send electric currents up the fetlock, as endorsed by Sir Botham).
But I have been quite flung from reason’s throne by the likes of Mums Make Porn, in which women old enough to have known better attended a ‘scriptwriting masterclass’ with a dirty movie maestro named Dick Bush. If this wasn’t detumescent enough, an hour earlier there was Orgasms on Sale: The Sex Business, an ‘intimate and honest look’ at the titillation trade.
Not for the first time, I gave thanks for my Type 2 Diabetes, which has consigned most of what goes on in what Peter Cook and Dudley Moore termed ‘the toilet area’ to the history books.
I am much happier watching Abandoned Engineering, in which we were guided around disused hospitals and asylums, spooky lost aerodromes and Soviet military installations, covered with films of toxic dust. I particularly relished the baroque railway station, situated somewhere in the Pyrenees. Huge booking halls, neoclassical flights of steps and restaurants – the whole thing crumbling and lovely, like a palace inhabited by the ghost of Orson Welles.
I always quite liked Morecambe, as nothing happened there save sunsets. Morecambe gave Eric Bartholomew his stage name; it was the birthplace of Dame Thora; Alan Bennett set any number of his plays thereabouts. Now, however, it is the location for The Bay, a murder mystery about dead and missing children, drug mules and hunks in fishing smacks.
Morven Christie, who has taken over these roles from Olivia Colman, now that Colman has taken over from Dame Dench, had a bunk-up in a ginnel with the stepdad of one of the troubled teens. Morven, it then transpired, was a family liaison officer, and before long she was being told, ‘The biological dad, he’s come forward.’ Her boss rubbed in the plot development when he said, ‘Get an update from uniform. He’s out there somewhere.’
The dialogue was marginally more comprehensible than in Line of Duty, where I found I didn’t know my UCO (undercover officer) from my OCG (organised crime group), from my itchy, sore posterior.
It was nevertheless good to know that a spine shattered by gunshots and an alarming fall down several concrete stairways – or whatever combination of calamities put DS Arnott in a wheelchair – can heal up fully; as there little DS Arnott was, with barely a twinge, leaping about like a stuntman, jumping on top of fleeing suspects.
There were so many people wearing dark balaclavas, I thought I was looking at a lost episode of The Black and White Minstrels, especially as the characters have names such as Tatleen, Maneet and Vihaan. The twists
were easy to anticipate – whatever looks obvious, think the opposite, is the Jed Mercurio formula – and it has become a programme where, as everyone is investigating everyone else, conspiring and blackmailing and double-crossing like billy-o, there are no innocent parties left. Corruption is endemic. Inducements, bribes, cash under the floorboards – they are all culpable. My favourite moment was Superintendent Hastings in a budget hotel with a toilet that refused to flush – it summed up the futility of existence.
Though Jean Rhys said of demure women, watch out, ‘they’ll kick your face to bits if you let them,’ it has not been a kind month for crushed petals. In Cheat, a pretty student had her revenge on all the men who thought she was pretty. In Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened, the bang-tidy Emilia Fox usefully brought the skills she has learned when acting the role of a pathologist in Silent Witness to bear upon an actual ‘popular phenomenon of serial murder’. I was reminded of Thurber’s theory that the Ripper was Queen Victoria.
Twenty years ago, Jill Dando was slain on her own doorstep. The Murder of Jill Dando alluded to Serbian hitmen, the IRA and a paedophile ring, but nothing was conclusive, except that Jill was a double for Princess Diana.
Easier to solve was the puzzle in The Yorkshire Ripper Files, as clearly the guilty party wasn’t only Peter Sutcliffe. It was every male person alive in the Seventies, when savage chauvinism (especially in the West Yorkshire Police) was the norm.