Due to seasonal overstuffing, I wasn’t able to fit in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays (New Year’s Day, ITV1) last week. It was a strangely gripping, even moving adaptation.
Master Brown was a ravishing blond, of a type we old armchair Athenians haven’t seen since little Tadzio vogued for Mahler in Death in Venice. Stephen Fry played Dr Arnold, Rugby’s mythical headmaster — well, a real headmaster, but with a mythic missionary zeal — like a man who knows what an English public-school education actually means. Wasn’t it just last year that Martin Clunes gave us a fine Mr Chips? What is it with late-Victorian boys’ schools that attracts a modern audience who would never dream of sending their seven-year-old children away? Answers on one side of the paper only, please.
At least Dr Arnold is a more engaging and complex figure than Prof Dumbledore, and Tom Brown is a more engaging child than Harry Potter. This was one of the few programmes over Christmas I could actually watch with my children with equal-opportunity enjoyment. Television spends so much time chasing specific audiences that it makes little that is, as they say on the box, “suitable for all ages”.
Desperate Housewives (Wednesday, C4) is the new series with all the buzz: a comedy drama made for ABC, now owned by Disney. That’s important, because, normally, these left-of-centre things are made for HBO. It’s been huge in the USA. The story of suburban women with frantic lives full of bleak insignificance, it’s The Stepford Wives out of American Beauty, by way of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. The women are all improbably pulchritudinous, in that American way that makes it difficult to tell them apart. I spent most of the first episode muttering “Who’s doing who?”, like a mad owl.
The show has all the appearance of being terribly smart and chic. The arch styling, the touches of surrealism, the flat, innocuous dialogue, timed with a wink and a hint of dark portent, tell you this isn’t just what it appears on the surface. And the narrator is a dead woman, which gives it an existential frisson. Yet it’s all pose over content, with the look and feel of sophisticated allegory, but dressing a plot and characters that are little different from your average Australian soap, with sharper packaging.
What it’s not is revealing or enlightening or particularly intelligent. The sniggerable, shallow probity of the suburbs, so the received wisdom goes, hides wells of bitter tears and twisted desire buried under every patio. The mundane and simple acts of housekeeping, cooking and gardening become hysterical emblems of idiotically repetitive lives when done in a cul-de-sac. The basis of this programme is a juvenile snobbery about the provinces. It’s diverting, but the diversion is just the usual burlesque of attractive, bitchy women thinking about sex. It’s as clichéd, parochial and self-regardingly predictable as the life it sets out to mock.
According to Bex (Friday, BBC1) features another comedy woman: young-ish, pretty-ish, sexy-ish, successful-ish, happy-ish. The premise is that humour rests in the soft, malleable ishness of things. It is the compromises we make that show our weakness, vanity and vulnerability, and this is therefore where the humour lies. The laughs here came with the tired, punchy one-two of British sitcoms: statement or question, followed by comic put-down or pithy observation. It is like watching tennis played by people who aren’t very good. The banter rallies once or twice, then hits the net, and someone has to serve a question again. It all trundled on pretty much regardless of character, plot or point. Surprisingly, it unapologetically and artlessly mimicked Bridget Jones. The dilemmas and narrow focus were Bridget with added cynicism, both in the writing and, I suspect, the commissioning. Jessica Stevenson made a funny-ish fist of Bex. She is a fine actor who was wonderful in Tomorrow La Scala!, and blessed with swift precision timing. Sadly, she got a Swiss comedy script to practise it on.
Adolf Hitler is the King Lear of the small screen: the monumental part you get to do when you are a character actor who has grown too characterful for rural doctors and detectives with drink problems. They can’t complain there’s no meat in Hitler, no scope, no challenge. He’s the big one, the Man, a surefire Bafta nomination. Have you noticed that, as a rule, hammy actors play Churchill, but only good method actors play Hitler? But Churchill is invariably portrayed more believably than Hitler. It’s in the nature of evil. He’s so bad, we have to assume he’s mad; but if he’s played as just mad and bad, his success at being able to organise a world war becomes inexplicable. Actors always leave out the two things memoirs always stress: he was mesmerising and had enormous charm. Nobody wants to make Hitler lovable.
It was Ken Stott’s turn to step up to the Reich last week, in Uncle Adolf (Monday, ITV1). He kept his Scots accent, which made Hitler sound rather like Gordon Brown, and he behaved like an old-time union leader. The story here was the dubious gossip about his relationship with his niece, who committed suicide because, we are told, Uncle Dolfi kept bumping off her boyfriends and weeping on her bosom. Stott couldn’t bring himself to do the charm or the sexiness. He’d clearly studied all the newsreels and had the walk and the hand movement. He just couldn’t fill the suit with a real person. Women threw themselves at Hitler; they begged to have his children. But with no charm or sensuality, this story was just a pantomime with a dirty ending. And that’s the problem with Hitler on the small screen. More often than not, he becomes Abanazer, and if you don’t give him real humanity, you don’t make him believable; and if you don’t make him believable, you remove the moral point of doing him at all. This was not Stott’s finest hour.
Dead Man Weds (Wednesday, ITV1) is the latest vehicle for Johnny Vegas. You get the feeling it’s either the last bus or hearse. The situation is a northern local newspaper, with Vegas as its chief reporter. The comedy revolves around Kelvin MacKenzie-style punny tabloid headlines. Dramas about journalism are always hopelessly wide of reality, but I suppose publicans must think that about the Queen Vic. Leaving that aside, we are left with Vegas, who, whatever the brilliance of his raw and emotional comedic talent, shambles his way through this like some huge shaved quadruped. He seems not to be making the remotest attempt at acting, presuming, probably rightly, that the punters will have switched on to see him being Johnny Vegas. But then he doesn’t appear to make any attempt to accommodate the rest of the cast, who do need to act; and because he is speaking someone else’s lines without care, conviction or thought, he isn’t remotely funny. Just a bit embarrassing and sad.
Peter Kay and Steve Coogan are the best examples of this sort of comedian’s bespoke sitcom, and they are both actors before they are funny. If you need to act, then being an actor helps — and that’s my profound critical aphorism for this week.
