The quangos responsible for these things have withdrawn their collective finger from the dyke and said that, as far as they were concerned, the other side of the watershed could be a deluge of filth, a torrent of enhanced copulation and cosmetic surgery, punctuated by dark puddles of devil worship and anarchy. They have officially given up trying to police the airwaves on the grounds of taste after 9pm. So there will be nobody except a couple of Tristrams to flash the yardstick of acceptability. Television will become like the embattled Roman empire: order and reason, a police state on this side, and, on the other, all Huns, Goths, vandals and barbarism.
The general reaction in the press has been either handwringing or handwashing. Our own India Knight, writing last week, said television was now a vile bouillabaisse of increasingly crass and nihilistic sex and violence (that’s my paraphrase), and that television programmes were made about stupid people by stupid people for stupid people. I don’t want to get into a row with India, but I would love it if she could tell me where I might find the violence.
The truth is that there hasn’t been any violence on television for about 20 years. The regular casual thumping of the pre-watershed Sweeney would never be shown today, and men being violent to women is never shown at all. As for sex, well, unless I’m doing it all wrong, there’s not much of that, either. Plenty of nudity, some of it grotesque but generally not very sophisticated, and a lot of talking about it and sniggering, but little of what even a bird and a bee would call your actual congress. And even less that could remotely be classed as erotic. When was the last time you saw a love scene that made you think “I think I’ll go upstairs and do that right now”? So it’s two cheers for the end of policing the watershed. It’s about time. Broadcasting hemlines based on a supposed average kid’s bedtime have been ridiculous for years. The reason television has so little sex and no violence isn’t because of committees and quangos but because it’s the first cultural platform run and made by as many women as men. It is also watched by more women than men, and, indeed, by more mothers than any other women. Terrestrial television reflects the interests and the excitement of the people who make it and watch it.
As for being stupid, I wouldn’t like to make that judgment, seeing as I spend such a lot of time watching it myself. What I would say is that there is more excellent television than there are excellent novels or operas or ballets or plays or films at the moment. Television is the most energetic and inventive cultural medium by an electronic mile, but because there is so much of it, there is also a lot more dross. But as a percentage, television gives you more quality than anything else you can pick up. Of course, if you don’t like the medium itself, then it’s all going to be meretricious junk; and if you switch on only to confirm your prejudices, you’ll find plenty that suits you. But if you don’t get TV, it’s not the fault of TV, just as if you don’t get classical music, it’s not Beethoven’s fault.
Which, with all the effortful grace of a Radio 4 continuity announcer, brings us to Beethoven: The Rebel (Friday, BBC2). They’re playing all his notes, one after the other, on the wireless this month (see Radio Waves). It amounts to something like three headfuls of music. If you’re not up to that, then perhaps this potted television life is more up your street. With the tortured Paul Rhys not so much playing as frowning Ludwig Van, the first episode was a bit Howard Goodall musical explanation, a bit Sunday costume drama and a bit History channel hagiography. Ideally, these should have been three movements in a symphony, moving effortlessly together, providing counterpoint and harmony. Sadly, it was like watching someone trying to waltz while playing a jig and singing lieder. There was not enough of the music, and nobody had a character that developed beyond their costume.
Worst of all, there was no context. More than any other composer, except perhaps Shostakovich, Beethoven was formed by the politics of his time. In passing, we were told he had decided to rescind the dedication of the Eroica to Napoleon, but without explanation. Beethoven’s romantic radicalism was never explained. The programme began with the famous first performance of the Ninth. Profoundly deaf, Beethoven had to be turned to see the audience applaud. We weren’t shown him fainting when he counted the money. Bernard Levin wrote that when you hear the Choral symphony, it made your hair stand on end just to begin to imagine what Beethoven’s Tenth might have sounded like. Sadly, this biopic didn’t make me want to watch episode two, let alone listen to the music. Mind you, it is marginally better than turning the genius of the greatest romantic composer into a musical endurance event.
It is good and straitening for a critic to be proved wrong, and I have to hold up my hand and admit the criticism I made of James Nesbitt yesterday wouldn’t be true or just today. I think I said he was the laziest actor on screen, including Sooty, and that he was the fat hen night’s George Clooney, and that the first run of Murphy’s Law (Thursday, BBC1) was pretty tired, a flabby, half-hearted, derivative, gag-guzzling star vehicle, or words to that effect. But now that’s all blood and bile under the bridge: I was amazed it was recommissioned, and how wrong I was. Or alternatively, Mr Nesbitt took my firm but fair words to heart and practised in front of a mirror. Because the new series is in a different league, and he is a completely made-over actor. Watchable, believable and, who’d have thought it, dangerously exciting, without once winsomely smiling that crooked smile at the camera instead of thinking. Now, James, can you please stop stalking me. Murphy’s Law was a good example of violence on television: it was full of thuggery, beatings, torture and murder. Actually, it was all implied incredibly realistically, but there wasn’t a single image a censor could have cut.
Storyville is a strand that is really held together only by its name and an obliquely uncool title sequence. I’ve never understood what it’s supposed to be, other than a left-luggage office for lost documentaries. Occasionally, it comes up with a gem like French Beauty (Wednesday, BBC4), a loving and suitably existential look at Gallic movie stars from Bardot and Moreau to Audrey Tautou. There is a particular French look, a sexy intelligence, that no other nation’s movies have managed to come close to. There is also a level of incomprehensible, self-justifying bollocks that only a beautiful French woman dares utter. Sadly, my children won’t have a New Wave to grow up with. These magic women and their films are irretrievably woven into the life you had when you first saw them. It is impossible to look at the French films of your youth dispassionately. Moreau singing that nursery rhyme in Jules et Jim is one of the great moments in cinema, but only if you saw it when young and before you saw Star Wars.
