Television
Roger Lewis
I see less television than T E Utley, the late political writer and telly critic, who was blind.
The wonders of coastal paths, snooker championships and garden makeovers with Charlie Dimmock – I find I avert my gaze. The Clovelly Lobster Festival, group therapy sessions in prisons, demonstrations of traditional sheepshearing methods and anything to do with rescue dogs – excellent subjects for documentaries, I am sure, but I prefer historical soaps about harlots and monarchs, as used to be presented by David Starkey. Well, he’s in the soup, or rather some Red China-style gulag, undergoing forcible re-education.
What I do enjoy are the many programmes about people selling up, moving abroad and thinking everything will be nicer in the sunshine. On one such show, a Huddersfield couple ‘looked to build a new life in Spain’, and honestly who could blame them ?
It is a frightful delusion, however, as I know from extensive personal experience. I am currently renovating a place in southern Italy, where, such is the furnace heat, the red wine comes out of the fridge.
I thought I could be like Eric Newby, hiding in the hills from the Nazis. But, of course, noisy little cars have replaced donkeys, the traditional old ladies in black lace are getting harder to find, the wise peasants have mobile phones, and a way of life unaltered since medieval times is altering at top speed and out of all recognition.
Except some things are all too recognisable. In the out-of-the-way village cafés and restaurants I frequent, instead of a valve-driven black-and-white apparatus showing variety bills with Toto and the speeches of Mussolini, these days there’s always a big, flat-screen telly bolted high up on the wall. It is never switched off and pours forth loud and irritating cartoons, panic-stricken news bulletins about collapsing municipal infrastructure, peculiar cheap films about shark attacks, and lots of game shows.
It was only after a longish while that I noticed a marked similarity with our own game shows – the format, the editing, the stupid celebrity presenters and the gormless members of the public enjoying their 15 minutes of fame.
It was quite sobering – no mean trick after several litres of Montepulciano – to realise that in Italy, and no doubt in other countries besides, there are local doubles and duplicates of Leslie Crowther presenting OK, il prezzo è giusto!, which is what they call The Price Is Right. An Italian Noel Edmonds is at large showing off in Affari tuoi, or Deal or No Deal. The shag asking the questions in Chi vuol essere milionario? has even borrowed Chris Tarrant’s terrible suits. I don’t know what Simon Cowell’s clout is with Italia’s Got Talent, but they haven’t even bothered to translate it.
Masterchef was on, except Italian cooks can cook. There was a Strictly Come Bake Off equivalent, with Felliniesque grotesques easily standing in for our beloved Mary Berry, Jo Brand and the Eskimo woman Sandi Toksvig.
Funnily enough, though, there don’t seem to be moving-house or fleeingabroad shows – as why would anyone sane want to leave Italy? Were an Italian couple to relocate to, say, Merthyr Tydfil, they’d be giddy kippers indeed.
However, it must have happened at one time. In my part of South Wales,
there were loads of Bernis, Sevinis, Risolis and Spinettis, who owned the chip shops – Victor Spinetti was a scion.
Back in Britain, it is already winter, if the chilly The Deceived was any indication – bare trees, spooky lanes, a rain-lashed haunted house, flames in the nursery and scary knockings emanating from empty cupboards and locked rooms. The main character is a freshfaced blonde called Ophelia – and Open University viewers will remember that, in Hamlet, Ophelia says she is ‘the more deceived’ as she thought the prince loved her, but he says he did not.
If the allusions were picked up, the mystery was at once solved. An extra point if you made mention of Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived.
Lovely Emily Reid runs about outside in her pyjamas, lies back in a petalbestrewn bath like Ophelia as painted by Holman Hunt, and for several episodes is made to feel she’s losing her mind and seeing things. We were in Ireland, and folk songs in the pub did duty for Shakespeare’s mournful ditties.
Despite the Gothic trappings, however, which were superbly sustained, everything was prosaic at the finish: life-insurance diddles, plagiarism of a student’s novel and semi-accidental deaths, all planned by creepy husband Emmett J Scanlan, who was implausibly meant to be a Cambridge academic – though this did explain the terrible beard.