Do you think we are going to get anything like as excited about our own democracy as we have been about the Yankees’ one? If Blair called an election for next month, would you all wave your napkins and say, “Oh no, please, we couldn’t digest another argument”? The media has sucked the face of the presidential election. Television wallowed in the daily minutiae of Ohio’s voting intentions. Pundits argued and explained as if their opinions were worth a single hanging chad. I half expected Jon Snow to tell us all to go out and get registered. The obsession with American voters was a pathetic act of collective media hubris and vain self-importance. They pressed their noses up against the window of a party they weren’t invited to.
Television lives in a never-never, old-new world. Half its output is American; its vernacular looks and sounds transatlantic. I’ve lost count of how many special election reports and documentaries there have been. Last week, as part of Channel 4’s Greatest Democracy on Earth season — which, incidentally, you and I might foolishly have imagined was India — we got The Dirty Race for the White House (Monday, C4). The journalist Peter Oborne made a lumpy programme based on the shock-horror revelation that the president would actually be chosen by some voters in some state. I couldn’t quite work out why he was so hot and bothered by this, or what he thought they should do. This is, after all, how clumsy old democracy works. Sometimes a lot of people win, sometimes a few win and sometimes nobody seems to win. You get the democracy you vote for — or, in America, pay for. Getting upset about it in Britain is impotent and embarrassing. Can we stop it now? Nobody is listening.
The leylandii-like growth of gardening programmes defies explanation. Who would have thought so many of you would have been quite so keen on watching grass grow in your sitting room? Gardens are as close as the English get to optimism. They are, by their nature, hopeful; and, consequently, gardens on television are always spoken of in the future tense. Their past is neglected, but it was obvious that, sooner or later, someone would come up with a history of gardens, thereby ploughing two popular furrows with one programme.
What is surprising is that Diarmuid Gavin should have been chosen as the David Starkey of the potting shed. Diarmuid is the bad boy of gardening, a bit of a little rude rebel, a red-hot poker among the lilies. Gavin defends his wicked rep with a surly naughtiness; he abuses plants, swears at hedges, sneers at shrubs and beams with a buttercup joy when he says something shocking, like: “Roses smell.” As with a lot of presenters with regional accents, his is growing ever more rustic. It is now positively thatched. The Irish, bog-thick brogue would fit perfectly into a 1950s Ealing comedy.
Gardens Through Time (Tuesday, BBC2) is a nice idea. They build gardens in the style of the past and explain how and why they were the way they were. All have been miniaturised and made back-to-back, like Disneyland. The problem is that the gardeners have been caught on the gnomon of their own sundial. Gardens take time, and these ones had obviously been built in a tearing hurry, with little money and far too much optimism. To kick off, dirty Diarmuid offered us his interpretation of a Regency garden, cramming Repton and Brown and the Royal Botanical Society into a 6ft square. What he made was crass and ugly. It looked like all makeover television gardens look: cheap, temporary and soulless. Gavin seems to hate the past and the gardens that lived in it. His Attila the Digger self-image is largely based on tearing up the past and planting the future with balls on. It’s childish, sandpit gardening.
This series is, sadly, a missed opportunity. It’s a good subject and deserved to be treated more sympathetically and seriously. Gardens and gardening have a central role in the culture of the English. In fact, they may be the only uniquely indigenous culture the English have, and they deserve better than this lippy crazy-paving-layer sneering at them.
Regency gardens got off lightly compared to Raphael: A Mortal God (Sunday, BBC1). Raphael is the most eye-bulgingly facile artist who ever drew a line. This dramatised story of his life matched its subject by being the most farcical depiction of an artist I think I’ve ever seen. The little theatrical tableaus were masterpieces of execrable taste and Mills & Boon sentimentality. It was perfect kitsch, like watching an old- master Etch A Sketch or paint on velvet. But in a bizarre way, it implicitly hinted at Raphael’s central dilemma. He was an artist trapped by the smoothness of his craft. His unsurpassed slickness polished the earthly out of his work, leaving silky high-Catholic dogma. Leonardo and Michelangelo, both of whom he copied, remain moving and dramatic today precisely because they’re fallible and allow empathy. Raphael did a famous drawing of Michelangelo’s David, pedantically and effortlessly correcting its anatomy. What he rendered was a glossy, soft-porn version. Raphael was varnished, french-polished by genius; the terrible warning of what happens when the dead hand of craft is combined with too much sickly emotion. And that could be a pretty good working definition of kitsch.
John Lydon was never a man burdened by too much craft. He did, though, have handfuls of raw genius. His programme on sharks, John Lydon’s Shark Attack (Wednesday, Five) was a sorry thing. We saw the great Sex Pistol in a stripy wetsuit in a swimming pool, sitting his diving exams and then getting into an underwater playpen-cum-Zimmer frame to coo and gurgle at big fish. It was both surreal and rather sad. The nihilistic urban anarchist has become a gurning eco-nerd.
Nothing is such a salutary reminder of our mortality as the ageing of the rock god of our youth. But we could have wished for a more disgraceful middle age for Lydon than becoming a cross between Wilfred Bramble and Gavin the naughty gardener.
It is always a hostage to fortune to say that a particular television genre has reached the fetid pits, scraped through the bottom of the barrel. There is invariably some young Tristram who will make that extra effort to extract any vestiges of style, wit or intelligence from an idea, but I feel confident in saying that Time to Get Your House in Order (Tuesday, C4) isn’t going to be worsted this year. It’s the latest in the “We send an expert to sort out your sad life” programmes. This one lets loose a time-and-motion-study hotelier on some poor Untermensch house. This man, whose name I haven’t learnt so I won’t have to make the effort to forget it, is the most deranged justification for mercy killing I’ve yet seen. The setup is beyond caring or description, the process repels interest and the denouement has all the anticipatory excitement of a blocked lavatory. The only conceivable reason for airing this was to bring the presenter to the greater public ridicule he so gratingly deserves.
