It is in the nature of this job that I have to watch some programmes on tape — in fact, I’m sent dozens and dozens of tapes by thrusting, eager young Tristrams, keen to catch my gimlet eye. Last week, I got one called Does Prayer Work? (titles couched as questions are always hostages to snappy retorts). The programme followed an American experiment that prays for some cancer patients but not others, then sees which hang on the longest. I was mildly interested, principally because it spookily mimicked a story line on The West Wing. At this point, I should be able to tell you whether prayer kills all known germs and gets to the tumours scalpels cannot reach, but I can’t, because, at the moment critique, a sign came up telling me I had to watch next week to find out the answer. Well, you can imagine they hadn’t a prayer of getting a review.
While I’m here, the answer to the question “Does prayer work?” is “Yes”, but only at what it was designed for: glorifying God. Prayer is one definition of God’s existence; that is its purpose. We pray to thank God for what he has already given us: raindrops and roses and bow-legged women. In fact, you could say (and many have) that the winners of the prayer contest would be those that died quickest, thereby being excused pain and humiliation, and getting to God soonest. The prayer used in this experiment was multidenominational, fusion pleading. A fundamentalist vicar claimed that ruined the point: what he wanted was knockout prayer, to slug it out with Muslims over the terminal ward. Frankly, I’m with the Southern, poof-roasting, born-again bigots here. It would have made much better television. “This week, we say goodbye to the Zoroastrians and the Calvinists. The Methodists and the Angolan witch doctor are still neck and neck, but this week’s healing prayer comes from Gareth the Copt.”
The terminal case that badly needs this is religious broadcasting. Let’s get back to the Middle Ages, with Ducking-Stool Challenge, Heretic Squares and Trial by Fire. Actually, that last one is not my idea. It was an original format proposal from St Francis of Assisi, who challenged Muslims to walk through flame with him just to see whose God was the best asbestos suit. Brilliant. He may have been a saint, but he really understood mass entertainment. Bit of a pun there.
Anyway, I mention all this so that people who send me tapes will stop trying to tell me how to do my job.
The tape of Beckham’s Body Parts (Tuesday, ITV1) came with fantastically stern warnings all over it: not to reveal the content under any circumstances (why send it to a journalist?), and not to grab stills from the images. As if what the world is really deprived of is facts and photographs of David Beckham. The whole programme had the look of a man who dives from a great height into a deep and popular pool, only to discover that the tide has just gone out. Beckham is a bandwagon that is passing. Don’t ask me how I know: it’s a pheromone thing, celebrity gaydar. I just feel that the Beckhams’ saga has moved on, it has crested, crossed the equator of interest.
The clumsy, jerry-built armature that this programme’s collection of worn-out clips and talking heads hung on was to take the man apart and reflect on his dismembered bits. The member bit was only sniggeringly referred to obliquely. It turned out that Beckham is not a very good footballer, according to people who sounded as if they thought they knew about these things; lots of other people are much better at footie. And apparently he isn’t very handsome, according to a facially challenged chap from a model agency who pointed out that lots and lots of blokes are far better-looking. And he’s not really fashionable, to those in the know. There are far, far more fashionable men than Beckham (one or two of them straight). And his hair ... Oliver James, for inevitably, it was he, pointed out that Beckham’s tonsorial exuberance was really regressive teenage rebellion, and that many people had better hair than Becks — though not Oliver James. And there is his voice. Well, everyone who doesn’t have to have their tummy pressed to make a noise has a better voice than Beckham.
But here was the kicker, as they say in Changing Rooms: put it all together and you have the most successful, envied and adored man on the planet. Isn’t that amazing? It promotes a response to those mean-spirited reactionaries who claim Beckham is a bad role model for today’s youth. Who, I ask, could possibly be a better hero for the underachiever? Just think what heights Beckham might have reached if he had been just that little bit worse at kicking, if his clothes had been a tad more anoraky, if he had been a bit plainer, had had alopecia and had been not just squeaky, but Brummie? Most programmes — in fact, almost all programmes — are a lot better than this one. So, by its own lights, the Tristram who made it probably thinks it’s the cleverest thing on TV.
What television does best is telly things. Of all its Reithian imperatives, education is the one it fulfils most comprehensively. There are thousands of programmes telling you all sorts of stuff, channels of fact. Most of what you know came off the box. Sadly, a small black hole in this pantheon of pub-quizzery is post-Einstein quantum physics. What you know about that could be written on the back of a quark. But undaunted, your TV has had a go, with an American, one of those trendy scientists of the sort originally begotten by Carl Sagan, all rollneck sweaters and double-bass-player’s fingers. What he enthusiastically wanted to explain to us was string theory and a unified theory of the universe and everything.
For those of you who saw Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, The Theory of Everything (Sunday, C4) will all have been ho-hum old hat. But for those of you who didn’t, it will be an anti-dunce’s cap. The programme set out to be an idiots’ guide. Which is fine, except that it depends, in a Newtonian sense, on the audience being idiots, not the presenter being idiotic. What ended up on the screen was absurdly like the Sesame Street version of physics, with Big Bird telling us that today’s number is infinity. And this being television from the parallel learning zone, every sentence, every moment of unbent time, had to be filled with computer dumbery. When there wasn’t an obvious image to go with an idea, they used patterns.
The glaring fault of this idiots’ lecture was the supposition that complicated theories can be rendered simple if cut into small enough pieces. But with quantum physics and string theory, it isn’t understanding that’s the problem, it’s comprehending. I understand that light bends and that gravity can make time go round corners. I understand that Schrödinger’s cat can be dead and alive at once. I just can’t comprehend it without my ears bleeding and essential bits of my brain trying to escape down my nose.
Finally, the smartest thing on television by a million crooked light years is Monkey Dust (Tuesday, BBC3). Brilliant satire and crude rudery of the highest order. This is where you go when you graduate from South Park.
