There seems to be a lot of science fiction about at the moment. It’s always a sign of the times. Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they’re both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present. Nothing dates as fast as science fiction. And no genre is as precisely and easily recognisable as coming from the year of its conception. So, the monsters and flying saucers from the golden age of sci-fi movies look risibly like the 1950s, and their stories are barely veiled metaphors for the cold war. Science fiction, or, at least, childish, lukewarm science fantasy, is the modish Thought for the Day.
Hyperdrive (Wednesday, BBC2) is a new sci-fi comedy show whose thin raison d’être is a spoof cloning of Star Trek. It stars Nick Frost, fresh from mocking zombies in Shaun of the Dead. A parody is all very good and funny, but you get the length and breadth of its joke very quickly. It is essentially an arid form of entertainment: once it has consumed the original subject, there’s nowhere left for it to go. Hyperdrive has its moments: most of them relied on treating extreme or extraordinary futuristic events and situations as mundane, or placing mundane ones in an extraordinary context.
The good thing about sci-fi, for the terrestrial Tristrams who produce it, is that it attracts unarguably the least discriminating, most tunnel-visioned yet loyal audience of any oeuvre in any medium — and that includes Wagnerphiles, although Wagner could probably be seen as science fiction. People who read sci-fi read little else. Star Wars fans are a weird closed society, bearable only to each other. And there are still people writing me letters begging me to use my influence to bring back Blake’s 7; or could I possibly beam them up episode 57 of Red Dwarf to complete their set? So I expect Hyperdrive will attract a collection of smelly flotsam fantasists who will permanently orbit it. It’s a shame it doesn’t seem to be prepared to be about more than just science fiction. The original Star Trek, after all, was the best critique of late-20th-century American foreign policy ever broadcast on TV.
Life on Mars (Monday, BBC1) is a big production that the BBC has put a lot of publicity effort into. It’s the familiar old formula of someone falling through a hole in the rich tapestry of life and ending up in the past. Danny Kaye did it, as did Bing Crosby and Michael J Fox. You remember, the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true. (Actually, why do we remember that?) This time, it’s a contemporary copper who’s whisked back to the dark ages of the 1970s. Generally when this happens, the time traveller gets over the shock in one or two scenes, then concentrates on finding whatever unbelievable bit of business will get him home again, having fallen in love with the princess. But with Life on Mars, the policeman was too procedural to grasp what had happened to him. This might have been natural, but what’s nature got to do with time travel? If the audience can suspend disbelief, then the least we can ask is that the cast make an effort and do the same.
The real reason for this convoluted, credibility-stretching conceit is to get television back into the golden age of cops: The Sweeney, The Professionals, Torvill and Doyle, or whatever they were called. It’s really your TV that’s trying to get back to the future. This was the time before political correctness, equal opportunities, Asbos and the Priory; before, in fact, all the social and economic improvements of the past 30 years. The more bigoted, blinkered and blind-eyed life is, the better time the Old Bill have, and this was just a way of showing them again without appearing to condone them. Because the reason The Sweeney et al aren’t on prime time any more is that they are far too racist, sexist and morally reductive — and way, way too violent — to be broadcast. And, just in case you are wondering, it’s a good thing they’re not.
This breathtakingly cynical and hypocritical use of mildly comic irony may well grab an audience, but it didn’t do much for me. Then again, neither did the originals. Life on Mars is like waking up and finding yourself stuck in a Richard Littlejohn column. Frankly, you couldn’t make it up.
Whose Britain Is It Anyway? (Tuesday, BBC2) was a down-to-earth programme presented by the Snows, father and son. It’s an adaptation of the book Who Owns Britain, an exhaustive and exhausting work of venerable barminess. The Snows set out to walk through picturesque bits of England, pointing out with inflated awe and surprise that the Forestry Commission owns a lot of trees, the army fires guns and aristocrats have big houses. And that together, all these types have a lot more of the country than people who live in high-rise flats, semis and those places called cities. They also told us that the church owns less than it used to, and that the biggest landlord in London is the Duke of Westminster.
All this will have come as a surprise only to the odd Polish plumber who might have been watching. The show was overladen with terrible graphics and the sort of pie charts that have made Snow père such an ornament of elections, but illuminate very little. Snow fils showed off a bewildering number of rather gay adventure-holiday jackets. In the end, between them they failed to answer, or even properly ask, the big question that had been banging on the door like an irate bailiff: why were they making this programme in the first place? What were we supposed to think? Was it a call for mass redistribution of land in a Zimbabwe-like grab? Was it a nostalgic look at what a good job titled folk had made at management? Was it a complaint about the crammed eyesores of modern development? Or was it simply a vehicle for free- floating avarice? We weren’t told.
What we were left with was a good example of loads of data piled up together, saying nothing coherent or terribly interesting at all. However, the Snows are a classy double act. Next time, they should do something with more thought and fewer facts.
Scientists all over the nation must hold their heads and groan whenever Richard Dawkins appears on television, as he did in The Root of All Evil? (Monday, C4). He is such a terrible advertisement, such an awful embarrassment, the Billy Graham of the senior common room. His splenetic, small-minded, viciously vindictive falsetto rant at all belief that isn’t completely rooted in the natural sciences is laughable. Dawkins is a born-again Darwinist, an atheist, so why is he devoting so much blood pressure and time to arguing with something he knows doesn’t exist? If it’s not there, Richard, why do you keep shouting at it? He looks like a scientific bag lady screaming at the traffic, and watching him argue with a fundamentalist Christian, you realise they were cut from identical cloth, separated at birth. Dawkins is, of course, the archetype of a man who protests too much, and I’d say he’s well on his way to, if not a Pauline, then at least a Muggeridgian conversion. Any day now, he’ll be back on telly quoting CS Lewis.
