Attila the Hun ought to be a great subject for Boy’s Own television history.
Everyone knows his name, but few of us would recognise him on the bus. In
fact, we’d have great difficulty recognising any of the Huns. After their
moment in history, they melted back into the mud of Europe. They may have
originated on the great central plains of Asia, that pony club of murderous
light cavalry. They gave their name to Hungary and laid waste Goths, both
Ostro and Visi, Gauls and the twin Roman empires, eastern and western. The
Huns donated the word “horde” to the language, which was their definition of
a quiet family get-together. All in all, they were the barbarian’s
barbarians. So, respect.
Attila also gave his name to generations of drug-dealers’ pit bull terriers,
but, after watching BBC1’s biopic, Attila the Hun (Wednesday),
you wouldn’t have known any of that. Because of CGI and computer wizardry,
they can now tell epic stories with lashings of added epic, so we were given
hordes of horde, all screaming and galumphing. What they don’t have yet is
an electronic program for setting out the facts in an interesting way or
writing a decent script.
This came from the Yul Brynner school of ponytail-and-pillage slasher movie.
The performances were as cartoonishly ridiculous as men with humiliating
hair saying portentous things to a “green screen” generally are. The little
we do know about Attila and his horde of Huns never made it to the screen,
and would have made a much better programme. He was known as the Scourge of
God, but he met the Pope, who miraculously convinced him not to sack the
Vatican. And his defeat of the Visigoths forced them into Italy, where they
fell out with the Romans and would eventually bring down the empire. Attila
himself died on his wedding night: he got falling-down drunk and had a
nosebleed that choked him to death. Which just goes to show that you can
scourge God all you like, but He always has the last laugh.
The very personable, slight and fastidious Simon Reeve is back, which must be
a relief to his mother. This is the wee lad who came up with the simplest
journey idea known to travel programmes: following the equator. It must have
made every other nomadic adventurer with a video camera beat themselves on
the head with a satellite phone. As a follow-up, he has brilliantly decided
on a slightly shorter route, round the Tropic of Capricorn (Sunday,
BBC2). We started in Namibia, in a school-project way, describing the Herero
and Namaqua rebellions, in which German colonial troops murdered 65,000
Namibians, 85% of the population, mostly by denying them water. It was the
first genocide of the 20th century, and one of the most unmitigated and
shameful of all colonial acts in Africa. Reeve trotted through it in a
jolly, local-colour sort of way, just after sliding down sand dunes on a
toboggan and going off to Botswana to deal with the relocation of the
Bushmen in the same whimsical manner. It came across like a blog home from a
gap year, or random pages from a Lonely Planet guide, where pogrom, useful
local words, handicraft shops, breakfast and minding the secret police are
all given the same jolly emphasis.
This is a well-meaning, polite and indiscriminately escapist travel show, and
I don’t want to sound too much like a bearded geography teacher. But there
is an embarrassing danger of the creeping Palinisation of the television
world, where historic struggles for nationality and the calamities of the
past all get gently and inoffensively merged into a heritage pageant of
charming character, along with dancing, strange instruments, silly sports,
comically hot food and amusing hats. People rarely see their own country as
exotic, eccentric and memorable for the communal singing.
Dreaming of finding yourself naked on television must be a pretty standard
anxiety nightmare. Few of us would consider it a programme synopsis.
Everybody has a modesty zone, and people who tell you that being naked is
somehow natural, and the default setting of nonsexual human interaction, are
nonconformist vegans, German or properly hideous. Public nudity is always in
your face, which makes it a perfect subject for reality television, where it
is the current cliché. Trinny and Susannah have been flirting with it for
years, and there’s that odd creature, Wok or Glok, who does a prewatershed
show based solely on telling women their arses aren’t as big as they think,
and they look really, really sexy because they’re really, really real –
which is rather like saying that you can sing beautifully because your voice
is so loud.
This week, we were offered a peek at Dawn Gets Naked (Thursday, BBC3).
The Dawn that promised to come up like thunder was Dawn Porter, who looked
like Lily Allen’s auntie and sounded like Bridget Jones. She took for ever
to coyly strip away her kit and show us that the images of women’s bodies in
magazines are impossible to imitate in real life. Taking off your clothes to
protest at the exploitation of women’s bodies might, to the less socially
sophisticated of you, appear to come from the same agitprop box as posting
sexy videos on the internet against pornography. You might also think that
the simplest thing to do about the whole sorry business of body envy and
dysmorphia from glossy magazines would be to stop looking at them, or to
grow up and find something more important to worry about.
In the end, after all the talk of empowerment and bravery and deep breaths and
reclaiming your breasts and flabby bits, Dawn flunked it. She didn’t get
naked. Without explanation or apology, she wore a silly pantomime fig-leaf
affair, which was humiliating not because it revealed so much of her body,
but because it revealed so much of her lack of conviction. A lot of other
women did agree to bounce up and down, variously undressed, proving, if
proof were needed, that with a combination of genetics, age, bad diet and
lack of exercise, you, too, can remove almost every iota of sensuality from
your body.
What is interesting about the exhibitionism genre is the assumption that
television is less fake and fraudulent than photographs. All reality
television stands on the wobbly foundation that you believe that what you
see on television is as real as being there. Well, it isn’t. Being nude on
screen is not the same as being nude in the room. There is also the
assumption that some women are more real than others. Nobody would have made
this programme using Elle Macpherson or Naomi Campbell as the brave
presenters, because it’s assumed real women look lumpy and unattractive in
real life. And only women suffer this attention: nobody wants to see penises
before the watershed. Also, men don’t do reality formats as gullibly well as
women. They don’t get as upset or as excited, and aren’t as easy to
manipulate. There is an enormous telly industry exploiting women’s
insecurities about themselves, and most of these programmes are made by
women. The worst are the ones that claim to be liberating when they are part
of the same carping, belittling obsession. Dawn Gets Naked reminded me of
something, and I remembered what it was. It was a feature I’ve seen a dozen
times in glossy fashion magazines.
