There is nothing fresh to say about Tony Blair, but
The Trial of Tony Blair (Monday, More4; Thursday, C4) just came out and said it anyway. This satirical drama took an unpopular prime minister, clinging to office and worried about his legacy, and turned him into an unpopular prime minister, clinging to office and worried about his legacy.
Ironically, by the time the credits rolled, it proved that Blair need have no worries on the legacy front. His gift to the nation is clear — the death of political satire. You can stick this man in the stocks of ridicule and lob as much rotten fruit as your budget will allow, yet he will emerge unscathed, boasting about the tough decisions he has failed to flinch from. Television cannot invent anything to compete with real life. Alistair Beaton is a gifted comic writer, but cannot write better lines about Blair than he produces himself. This is not a time for glib phrases, but as I write I can feel the hand of history on my shoulder.
So, The Trial of Tony Blair was not really satire, but therapy. Some will have felt better watching Robert Lindsay’s Blair climb into the back of a police van on his way to the war-crimes tribunal in the Hague. It will be a comforting memory to cling on to when Blair is making his fortune on the Bill Clinton lecture circuit.
The one politician who might have been watching in a sulk was Gordon Brown. The funniest moment was when Brown visits a primary school. Posing with the children, he can think of absolutely nothing to say to them. This Brown was brooding, politically timid, prone to bitter bouts of anger and uneasy in company. Meanwhile, David Cameron was shallow. He rode a bicycle, but kept a change of clothes in his Lexus. Goodness, where do television people get their ideas? Of all the politicians who have dabbled in broadcasting, perhaps Ann Widdecombe is the most unlikely.
Everything about her is defiantly unfashionable. She is an unfashionable shape, she has an unfashionably peculiar voice, and — among television folk — she holds unorthodox views about sex, suspecting it to be overrated. What makes her so good is that she speaks her mind and is a stranger to embarrassment (as exhibit one, m’lud, I offer series one of Celebrity Fit Club).
In the first episode of Ann Widdecombe v The Hoodies (Monday and Friday, ITV1), she went to live for a week on one of north London’s roughest estates. As she rolled up in her Cameron-friendly Smart car, you could see that parts of the estate seem to have been built with a lucrative street-robbery franchise in mind: lots of dark corners, and long corridors with hidden doorways for assailants to hide in. Her hosts for the week once discovered a masked man in their back garden, who promptly threatened to kill them. Teenagers amuse themselves at night by throwing paving slabs. One neighbour’s garden was renowned for its beauty — so somebody put that right by dumping acid on it.
Widdecombe discovered an Asbo team moving stealthily about the estate in yellow fluorescent jackets, trying to bring order to the mean streets. “What do you do?” she wondered. “We give out leaflets,” they said. No, don’t laugh. If you roll up one of those leaflets tightly enough, you might be able to fend off an attacker by jabbing them in the eye. There were CCTV cameras, but they hadn’t been working for 18 months, and the police knocked off at 11pm. Alas, street robbers don’t seem to work regular shifts. Widdecombe, to her great credit, went out at night for a chat with some local toughs. “Do you worry about frightening old ladies?” she wondered. “F*** off,” came the reply. Fair enough. Pretty much what we expected.
Watching Prison Break (Monday, Five), I realised that there are strict rules about jail-escape dramas. The most important is that the escapees must run across a field towards a train within the first five minutes. The train must be travelling slowly enough for the convicts to catch it, but quickly enough to ensure that this is in doubt. Trains that pass prisons should also remember to leave a wagon door open so the fugitives can jump in. Prisoners must always announce early that they have buried cash somewhere, and the person in charge of catching them should always wear dark glasses, to make himself look more threatening.
Prison Break stuck faithfully to all these rules. It is the sort of fast-moving conspiracy drama that seems very popular in America at the moment. This probably says something about the relationship between governments and the governed in the early 21st century, but I leave that sort of speculation to Bryan Appleyard. All I know is that the required feeling of disorientation and helplessness was helped by the relentless background music — which meant I missed crucial bits of dialogue — and low-attention-span editing style. Yet I still want to know what happens. Despite its faults, Prison Break is clever and inventive. It’s the television equivalent of The Da Vinci Code book — so crammed with twists and turns of plot that you forgive its other faults.
Worried that it might have been showing its age, Panorama (Monday, BBC1) has been away for a bit of liposuction. Now 53 years old, it took a long look in the mirror and was shocked to find its grey-haired old dad staring back. So the battered panama and shabby cords have gone, and there is the suspicion of cosmetic dental work. What this means, in television terms, is that the show has moved back to Monday; it has a primetime 8.30pm slot and is shorter and glossier, with more use of split screen and other techniques; and it is now introduced by Jeremy Vine, chiselled of jaw and fashionable of neck scarf.
Shorter is good. The first new-look report went into the country’s most successful private IVF clinic and offered the resulting undercover film to a team of experts (including Lord Winston). The experts were duly horrified, the regulators moved in, job done.
Will this be enough to restore Panorama back to the glory days? I don’t think so. There is just too much competition. We are awash with current affairs. On the Monday that Panorama relaunched, there was breakfast news, lunchtime news, a bulletin at 3.20pm, the six o’clock news, regional news and the 10 o’clock news. And that was just BBC1. Over on BBC2, there was Working Lunch and The Daily Politics. Newsnight occasionally tackles Panorama-style investigations, and let’s not forget the 24-hour news channels. Meanwhile, on Channel 4, Dispatches went head-to-head, except that its hour-long programme started at 8pm.
In The Roadkill Chef (Tuesday, BBC3), Fergus Drennan urged us all to eat quality, locally sourced fresh food. The programme’s selling point was that he picks dead badgers, squirrels and pheasants from the road and cooks them. Actually, he seemed more interested in the vegetarian menu — seaweed, mushrooms, seaweed, stinging nettles, seaweed. Foraging is all very well for Fergus, who makes a living by gathering berries for restaurants, but the countryside won’t thank him for suggesting it to the rest of us — we’d be like locusts with Nectar cards.
AA Gill is away
