A particularly sodden and cynical backbencher at a Labour conference once gnomically informed me: “There are no accidents in politics.” Then he paused and added: “Or else everything’s an accident. I can’t remember which.”
I doubt it was an accident that the BBC’s big new comic drama, The Amazing Mrs Pritchard (Tuesday, BBC1), started in party-conference season. Politicians are filling the news with their set-piece speeches and stylised insults. It must have looked just the right time to spin Jane Horrocks as the ordinary, decent, commonsensical alternative PM from real England who can tap into a well of popular common sense and start a women’s purple party (mix red and blue — get it?), but without purple prose.
The first thing that strikes you is that, actually, the party conferences have rather shot Horrocks’s fox. Politics is full of “Call me Tony/Dave; I’m not really a politician” politicians, and Mrs Pritchard looks very much like one of Cameron’s fast-track, A-list candidates, just a bit more thespian. Actually, what she reminded me of was Mary Poppins. She plays a supermarket manageress who, apropos of very little, decides to run for parliament because she isn’t a politician and has no political platform, policies or opinions, which, coincidentally, is politically fashionable.
There is a fallacy at the heart of that conceit. People may well be fed up with politicians, but that’s only half the truth. What they’re fed up with is bad politicians, in the same way they’re fed up with bad hospitals. It doesn’t necessarily mean that what they want is a supermarket manageress to sort out their colon cancer. The answer to bad politics isn’t no politics; it’s better politics. Anyway, the slightly manic, messianic, strident self-belief of grocer Horrocks wasn’t apolitical, it was spookily nostalgic of the grocer’s daughter from Grantham.
As a Swiftian commentary on the state of democracy in modern Britain, this series is as misjudged as a rotten borough. It lacked conviction on every level. The opening script telegraphed future plot developments with all the subtlety of John Prescott’s wit and wisdom. A dodgy husband, a nubile daughter, manipulative and duplicitous hangers-on — it’s all going to be a descent into deceit and compromise and the sundering of family values. Depressingly, The Amazing Mrs Pritchard is not remotely amazing, and is a waste of Horrocks, who has a fantastic small-screen presence. And it’s another example of British drama’s inability to treat politics as anything other than a joke, from Yes, Minister to the benighted The Thick of It. Nobody has yet come up with a home-grown equivalent of The West Wing. Perhaps one of the reasons we get the politics and the politicians we do is that, like sniggering kids, we refuse to take them seriously.
There’s one last odd thing. In recent years, Horrocks has been best known for advertising a supermarket, playing the daughter of Prunella Scales, whose character seems to be at least partly based on mad old Margaret Thatcher. Coincidence? I think not. There are no accidents on TV.
Cracker (Sunday, ITV1) is one of the best characters ever created for the glass bucket. In a genre that is a vegetable basket of hard-boiled sociopaths with interchangeable defects, like the features on Mr Potato Head, Robbie Coltrane managed to make Fitz an engaging, believable and exciting sleuth. He took all the tired old clichés — the booze, the fags, the disintegrating love life — and delivered them with a new gusto and empathy. He was also given whip-smart scripts. I always thought he walked away from the character too soon, but when to take a bow is a fine judgment for an actor to make. It’s a brave decision to leave the audience howling for encores. Less of a fine judgment, though — in fact, as plain as the nose on Coltrane’s face — is that once you walk away, you shouldn’t change your mind.
Reheating the soufflé, fumbling to strike up the old magic, always looks like cashing in. The story line for this new Cracker was everything the old Cracker wasn’t: flaccidly contrived, psychologically and practically unbelievable, and as taut and exciting as waiting for a delayed flight to Hull.
Robin Hood (Saturday, BBC1) has also had a rethink. For my generation, there will only ever be one king of the greenwood, Richard Greene. We know Robin Hood wore tights and Brylcreem. This latest version was shot in Hungary, presumably because Nottingham is just too dangerously medieval. Magyar gangsters stole half the film and held it to ransom — which was critically appropriate. Sadly, they didn’t get all of it. The first episode looked as if it had been cast from discarded boybands. Apparently, they couldn’t get Ant and Dec to do Friar Tuck and Little John. I’ll tell you how bad all this was: Keith Allen was the best thing in it, that’s how bad it was.
What Not to Wear (Thursday, BBC1) has had a makeover. Trinny is now Lisa Butcher, with astonishingly globular breasts and the sort of face that doesn’t register on the Richter scale; and Susannah is black. I can’t say either is an improvement. The two new Gradgrinds of style look like evacuees from Big Brother, but as I get older, everyone begins to look like the effluvium of reality TV in search of a cosy bit of presenting. These two have the exaggerated jollity of a stilt-walker’s sock drawer. What they don’t seem to have is any particular qualification or aptitude for sartorial instruction, beyond a willingness to get stuck in and a thong-clenching desire to be on telly.
The original or classic Trinny and Susannah have been forced to leave their format behind, having jumped channels so they can spend more time with their money. They’ve been given a new format, Trinny and Susannah Undress (Tuesday, ITV1), which, to be perfectly honest, I don’t really understand, but I expect that’s my fault. What Not to Wear was so brilliantly simple. They gave an ugly bird new clothes; she got a new life. All of philosophy and psychology, fitted into a changing room. The new version seems to be: they give you a new life and throw in a couple of shirts and a vibrator. What Not to Wear started out as your regular Guantanamo ritual humiliation but ended up as feelgood TV. What the new version sadly lacks is that big sigh of a payoff moment. There is no clear happy ending, and it’s a problem.
They have, though, come up with a brand-new torture that’s just legal under the terms of the Geneva Conventions. They set up a white screen with a bright light, and behind it the hapless, misshapen, unloved couple have to get naked and stand in silhouette, like a pay-per-view Balinese puppet show. Then Trinny asks them to shout out which lumpy bits and saggy protuberances they like best about each other. It is gonad-shrinking, and that’s just for the audience. I’m sure it’ll be immensely popular, and you should all try it at home. It would make a marvellous party game. Dangly karaoke. Remember, as the original makeover maestros Plato and Socrates said, the unexamined wardrobe is not worth wearing.
