You probably don’t remember public service announcements. These were short films that were shown late at night. They had a wordy safety message paid for by the Ministry of Don’t Do That. Things like: don’t leave a chip pan on when you go on holiday; don’t keep fish-hooks in a baby’s pram; don’t put lit cigarettes down the back of the sofa before going to bed; don’t invite strange men in to help you polish the silver.
My favourite, now something of a cult classic, was: don’t go to sea in a boat with a hole in it. As a child, I used to try to imagine to whom this would come as useful and original information. I tried it out on my father as he left for the office. “Dad, don’t go to sea in a boat with a hole in it.” He imagined I was being elliptically and metaphorically sagacious beyond my years, and sent me to boarding school. The other one I liked was: don’t bury broken bottles in the sand on a beach. All that’s left of this comforting nanny oeuvre is the annual drink-drive commercial.
Public information films died because they were obvious, useless truisms, but also because most television is a public information broadcast. Those who complain, usually from the Parnassian heights of print journalism, that TV is dumbed-down and peddles dross to the lowest common denominator, citing Big Brother or Celibate Love Island, miss the point.
Reality TV is the exception; it’s a tiny proportion of television’s output. Most of broadcasting tells you things, and it’s TV’s great gift to impart information. The real criticism should be that it doesn’t differentiate enough. It doesn’t know the value of the stuff it pours out in a constant warm stream. We absorb what’s useful and interesting.
In barely a generation, the information from television has changed the way we see the world and everyone in it. That’s no small achievement. Television really does make a difference. There are obvious individual examples: Cathy Come Home; the newsreel of the Vietnam war in America; the Ethiopian famine here; the rebellion in Biafra. And television has utterly changed sport. Do you imagine there’d be anything like this fuss over an Olympics bid if it was only going to be shown on Pathé newsreel? On a broader level, the environmental movement would still be five beardies up a tree if it weren’t for television. Charities and pressure groups, from pillar-box conservation to animal welfare and cancer research, glean power and funds from tiny exposures on the box. It can bring down walls, save lives and right wrongs. It can also tell you how to put a water feature on your patio.
Last week, we were offered programmes from two people who have made good partisan use of the medium. Richard Curtis and Bob Geldof offered programmes aimed at the G8 summit. Curtis and Geldof are good things. We want to be on their team; or, rather, we don’t want to be on a team that doesn’t have them in it. I interviewed Curtis recently, and prefaced a question with: “Playing devil’s advocate ...” He interrupted: “No, don’t. Why not just be on the right side?” I know what he means. There are too many people being Beelzebub’s mouthpiece just for the hell of it about him, Geldof, Africa and G8, so I won’t be.
The Girl in the Cafe (Saturday, BBC1), Curtis’s made-for-TV film about getting governments to make the right decisions, had all the goodwill in the world going for it. You could feel the gusts of encouragement willing it to be a success; and in the sense that this was a drama that was a message first and an entertainment second, it succeeded nobly. It did what Curtis wanted it to do: put into a context the conversations we all have in our heads after watching the news.
As drama, it was a curate’s egg. The curate was Bill Nighy, everyone’s favourite actor. He played the weary, accommodating civil servant with so many sociophobic twitches and so much self-deprecating angst that he was almost a candidate for care in the community. His character grew ever more unbelievable and unfanciable, until the arid consummation of his truncated love affair with Kelly Macdonald was too weird and embarrassing to be the release the audience needed. Macdonald, though, gave a thoughtful and intense performance.
The downbeat, not happy ending was an arbitrary decision that wasn’t implicit in the plot. I felt it was made because Curtis had grown fed up with writing happy endings and wanted to see what a not-happy one felt like. Well, now we know. It feels not happy. The writing was warm and witty, as ever, brilliantly and enviably mixing the personal with the profound. The first half made promises the second half couldn’t fulfil, and its best feature was the mercurial Ken Stott as Gordon Dark Brown. What the audience needed was for it to be a bit more Tracy and Hepburn and a bit less Ken Loach does The West Wing. As an act of civil disobedience, it was well directed; as a comedy, it was wrongly directed. But in every way that really matters, it was a good programme. The rest was Curtis trying to find a genre after romcom. Let’s call it work in progress.
Geldof in Africa (Monday, BBC1) is an immensely welcome series. Africa on television is either sentimental anthropomorphic animals or news horror and dehumanised people. Now, after years of drought, we have a deluge of Africa. The first episode in Geldof’s trek, The Luminous Continent, was a beguiling mix of high-ground morality, mystical anthropology, pressure politics and a love letter. This is the agitprop version of Michael Palin. The filming was beautiful and elegiac, and it was just wonderful to see Africans who weren’t in extremis. It wasn’t perfect: it occasionally lacked cohesion and direction; sometimes the writer’s anger came across as petulance; and the stylised look was prone to bathos. But these were small things compared with the big thing it did, which was to give us Africa vibrant, vital and alive, rather than sad and dead. Geldof has that marvellously punchy turn of phrase and an eye for a winning simile. And his hard-edged energy is a welcome antidote to the soft, sybaritic voyeurism of most television travel.
Michael Portillo, in Nelson’s Trafalgar (Wednesday, BBC1), led us on a predictable rumpty-tumpty romp through the great admiral’s life and heroic death, just in time for the 200th anniversary of the battle. When Portillo talked eagerly about “our side”, I wanted to tap the screen and say: sorry, but which side do you consider to be your side, señor? Portillo has become a polished and effective presenter, but he really does need to have a look at his wardrobe — a Barbour gilet and Timberland boots are far too weekend-trendy-butch. He needs to have a sartorial word with Geldof. Compare Curtis, Geldof and Portillo, and ask yourself: who out of the three has wielded the least power? Plainly, it’s Portillo. He’s only been the minister for defence and chief secretary to the Treasury; but now, sensibly, he’s left the small time of politics and moved into the real world of TV, where he really can begin to make a difference.
