Television
What I’d commission were I in charge – Freddie Fox starring in his dad’s old role in a six-part serial of The Day of the Jackal, set in 1963, recreating a France since lost underneath the unrestricted immigration of British expatriates.
I’d want to find the new Jack Hargreaves, who can impart pearls of wisdom from his potting shed on how to eradicate seagulls. There’d be a classic series based on my own Seasonal Suicide Notes, destined to be funnier and more beloved by audiences than Fawlty Towers, and starring Simon Russell Beale and Rosamund Pike.
Perhaps this has been done and I missed it – but Miranda Hart was surely born to play Aroon, the gawky daughter of a decaying big house, in an adaptation of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour. A tragicomedy set in Ireland after the Great War, the novel will make classic television – the heroine who longs for love and approval and ‘to make a good impression’, and who has no idea what is going on; everybody’s manners, discretion and silences concealing alcoholism, homosexuality, adultery and murder.
Anyway, instead of my proposed schedules, what do we have? Cheaply and unimaginatively made travelogues, with all these minor celebrities out and about – Paul Merton in a camper van, Pam Ayres gasping when she catches sight of Blenheim Palace, even though she’s from Oxfordshire and will have seen it before, and Fern Britton in a static caravan in My Cornwall.
What I did sit through, as I hail from thereabouts, was four hours of chubbycheeked Michael Ball tooling around Wonderful Wales. ‘Wales. From coastline to castles. Majestic mountaintops to vast valleys. Join me, Michael Ball, as I receive a welcome in the hillside.’ Tranquillising narration like that hasn’t been heard since the fifties, when archaic little colour films were made about touring Devon in a motorcoach.
‘I do feel Welsh,’ said Ball, whose mother was born in Mountain Ash. We met his aunties, still found in the vicinity, who baked coronary-inducing fairy cakes. Ball went to the Welsh Mining Experience Heritage Centre in Merthyr – the shaft goes 1,400 feet straight down to New Zealand and there are miles of tunnels. Wales earned a black mark here, however, as it was Welsh coal that powered the Empire, allowing the British merchant fleet and Royal Navy to rule the waves. We are meant to feel guilty about that, though I don’t myself.
Ball then went cockle-hunting in the Gower – the cockles go to Spain. We saw a lot of filthy wildlife, gulls, falcons, dogfish and bison – all apparently these days indigenous. And, of course, the ebullient – ever jolly – Ball, with arms
outspread and legs apart, kept bursting into song, in the street, on the beach and in a slate quarry; anywhere, really.
Here was a man turning in full public view into Harry Secombe, who was also known as Neddy Seagoon, though in fairness Ball has yet to start blowing raspberries. The eagerness of manner is exactly like Sir Harry’s, as is the wobbly, strained tenor and sheer love of being loud. Good luck to him, when it comes to reviving Pickwick and If I Ruled the World!
The producer was fond of aerial drone shots – you don’t need a helicopter these days. Two things struck me. First, the documentaries were filmed on the only day when it wasn’t raining. Secondly, what a lot of empty Welsh countryside there is.
There was another one on A Year in the Beacons, narrated by Dame Siân Phillips, Mrs Peter O’toole as was, but by then I’d had a gutsful of the Principality. I heard that Gyles Brandreth did a programme about the Brontës. I didn’t see that, either. But I hope Gyles dressed up in a frock and bonnet, as Valerie Singleton did on Blue Peter years ago, when she went to the Parsonage. Another week, Valerie got into character as St Thérèse of Lisieux.
The one many of us are hoping Gyles will soon re-make is the Blue Peter Royal Safari, of 1971, where Valerie had a peep around Kenya with Princess Anne.