Television
Was it watching Gregg Wallace exploring a Ribena factory that made me finally flip? Or the analysis of Finnish chamber music on BBC4 ? The fixing of a pair of fire tongs in The Repair Shop was serious provocation, as was Nurse Crane learning to speak Spanish during Call the Midwife. But sometimes the idea for a programme is so transcendentally boring, I find myself mesmerised. A1: Britain’s Longest Road had me reaching for my pills. Border Control, however, about people opening their suitcases at airports in Australia, was utterly compulsive. I’ve been getting up at three in the morning to see passengers ticked off because their visas have expired. In one episode, a Japanese chap brought a bag of contraband mushrooms as far as Melbourne. The series is popular around the world and has been dubbed into Polish and Italian.
I’ve looked at the repeats of The Alan Clark Diaries. John Hurt was too nice, too twinkly, to portray Clark, who was nasty, arrogant, selfish, vain – and deeply bored, as people who are too rich can often be. The supporting cast was good, however: Jenny Agutter, before she took the veil, as the masochistic wife; Hugh Fraser and Nicholas Jones as Tory grandees; the fabulous Julia Davis as one of Clark’s civil servants, who with a glance saw straight through him.
I never thought highly of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The famous paradox, about you don’t need to be mad to work in this war, but if you are it helps, always seemed laboured, tendentious. The expensive series starring George Clooney, who shouted and cursed, and Christopher Abbott, as the American Air Force bombardier who realises that the chief enemy is his own side, didn’t surprise me by being very flat. Hugh Laurie’s eccentric major, with his golf clubs and gramophone, was a marked casualty. To alleviate the boredom there were space-filling Henry Scott Tuke sequences of naked soldiers swimming in amber sunlight.
Richard Burton once pondered doing panto in Porthcawl. I was reminded of this when I saw Hollywood star Rob Lowe running across a cabbage patch in Lincolnshire. The (unlikely) notion behind Wild Bill is that an American policeman, with a fondness for statistics, algorithms and graphs, has become Chief Constable in some grim East Midlands manor, shaking up the local force, taking on Russian gangsters and sleeping with Dame Diana Rigg’s daughter, Rachael Stirling.
It started well, with some nice black comedy. There was a severed head in a freezer, which the police assumed was an ‘art project’ and made of marzipan. The hefty and conscientious detective, Bronwyn James, had a line that made me laugh: ‘I’m not fat,’ she said glumly; ‘I’m farm stock.’ But by the third episode it had become boring, and all I could think was that Rob Lowe’s hitherto unfeasible
prettiness was now a bit mummified. Nevertheless, it is terrifying to think I am only three years older than he is – I could play his grandfather.
When a policeman falls in love, the object of his affection is always the killer, or else on the morning of the wedding there is a fatal accident. This timehonoured truth was discussed in Matt Berry’s Year of the Rabbit, which was a boisterous mix of modern coppering (a sign on the wall said: ‘Working Together for a Safer City’) and 19th-century jokes – a little girl hoped to grow up to be a WPC as ‘I want to kick wrong-uns in the bollocks’. It was colourfully squalid and rude – until halfway through the second episode, when it suddenly became lazy and reliant on swearing. Alun Armstrong was funny, but Keeley Hawes, fitting this in amongst her million other assignments, was arch and dull.
Great Canal Journeys, in which Tim West and Pru Scales float about the planet at four miles an hour, ought to be soporific. In fact, the documentaries have a massive and affecting charm. Pru, a bit forgetful at 87, is very gracious and lovely in her straw hats. Tim is a knowledgeable Mr Pastry, telling us about the engineering marvels adjacent. In the latest episodes, about Cambodia and the Mekong Delta, there were beautiful twilight shots of wide rivers. The whole project, which I always watch with total joy, puts me in mind of Larkin’s line – as the Wests are such a devoted couple – ‘Give me your arm, old toad; help me down Cemetery Road.’