The Tristrams now huddle under their duvets in their converted gardeners’ cottages on a ducal estate, trembling at the howling outside and wondering if it’s the wind, born-again foxes or righteous Christians come to martyr them. They might want to take a communion crumb of consolation from the furore over Jerry Springer — The Opera: at least someone still thinks television is more than a peddler of electric Mogadon and a platform for product placement. Jerry Springer has been playing for three years, and the only people who have demonstrated outside the box office are those wanting tickets.
Television is the prime medium for social, political and metaphysical debate in this country, or at least it’s the one most people care most about. You may think that’s sad and a shame, but the reason is obvious. While the rest of the culture has to become ever more pigeonholed, tailored and consumer-specific, the electric hatch is the last place that can speak to a wide, come-as-you-are audience. The religious right doesn’t care about theatre because theatre is watched by theatre audiences, and who cares what they think? I have seen a man beg to be sodomised with a serrated knife live on stage; Spaniards have had penetrative sex in Hammersmith and it barely registered. The Guardian speaks to Guardian readers, Radio 4 to Radio 4 listeners. Only terrestrial television has that sense of reaching all the corners of the nation simultaneously. Despite the furore, only 1.8m viewers watched Jerry Springer on TV; but that’s still more than would have seen it in three years in the theatre.
The lesson for Tristrams in all this is that television misses its greatest asset if they chase exclusive demographics. Its purpose isn’t to show minorities what they want to see, but to take minority interests and ideas, and show them to the majority. And BBC staff officers shouldn’t always squeal with surprise, like the young girl caught in the bath in a horror movie, whenever the audience actually shows it cares and takes umbrage. Mind you, what sort of ecumenical respect are we supposed to have for a religious movement that wants to censor Jerry Springer — The Opera, but has not a word to say about Jerry Springer, the original TV programme? I fear we are all in for a bumpy year of counterintolerance.
BBC2 kicked it off with Sweeney Investigates: The Kabbalah Centre (Thursday, BBC2). A big, open goal, you might think. Isn’t Kabbalah another risible fad of the rich and trendy? What we got was Sweeney, dressed up like a bald Philip Marlowe, sneering and backhanding innuendos because he didn’t have much else to hand. As an investigation, this was pretty empty. He revealed nothing about Kabbalah that wouldn’t equally apply to Catholics and Buddhists. His accusations were general rather than specific. Most religions believe weird and wacky things; indeed, a belief in weird and wacky stuff is almost the definition of religion. But this is a cult, he sneered, without bothering to tell us what Kabbalahists believed. The accusation was plainly enough. But isn’t a cult just a matter of numbers and history? Didn’t every religion start as a cult? This was a disappointing programme, as prurient and journalistically rigorous as a double-page spread in a celebrity rag. Most depressingly, Sweeney assumed he could leave most of the argument to the shared prejudice of a cynical secular audience. It was an embarrassing and dilatory poor show from a journalist who knows better. But then, he was right on the bigotry button of the zeitgeist.
The dramatic prejudice of Rescue Me (Thursday, Sky One) came as a breath of fresh air. No ethnic group, or religious, medical or sexual persuasion or condition, was left unridiculed or trounced. In fact, to be left out of the crude odium might well have been ground for complaint. This is Denis Leary’s dark comedy about New York firemen, made for the nether reaches of American cable TV. It has been a huge success with the audience. On the face of it, it’s another piece of blue-collar male bonding that is entertaining, gross and a little predictable. We have been down these wisecracking, hard-boiled mean streets so often, they have become a garden path. What gives it the edge is that it’s the first American series to attempt to incorporate 9/11 in a way that isn’t vomitously saccharine and flag-swaddled, or doesn’t involve bombing other countries. Firemen have earned carte blanche to say whatever the hell they like. Nobody is going to pick them up for being racist, sexist and insensitive. It has become a hagiofied profession, and part of this show confronts the absurdity of their public image, contrasting it with the great bouts of sentiment that men who have nowhere to put their feelings are prone to. But before any of it becomes mawkish, the script is always ready with a vicious act of humour.
Tommy Gavin (played by Leary) sees and talks to dead people — wiseacre ghosts are this year’s must-have accessory for television comedy with pretension. Remember when it used to be a wacky haircut or a muscle car? I am getting to the end of my tolerance for the chorus of deceased as a plot device. But the rest of it works very well. Gavin is hard-headed and thin-skinned, a teetering alcoholic, and his wife has gone off with someone in a white collar, so all the familiar cop-show clichés are present and correct. But the clannish inability of certain groups of men to express or cope with great emotion makes this more than just a sharp-tongued macho lads’ show with laughs.
It has been said, probably by me, and probably too often, that Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison defined a moment. Helen Mirren’s character was a marvellous parable of Thatcherism — this unlikeable but admirable woman, surrounded by men who fawned, plotted, sneered and were terrified. The feeling that society was full of predators and victims was so evocative of that pumped-up moment of post-Falklands Britain. What, then, should we deconstruct from Amanda Burton as Clare Blake in The Commander (Monday, ITV)? Tennison was high-Victorian certainty; Blake is tortured, visionary mysticism: a very new-Labour commander. And Burton is much more like Carole Caplin, with an unsuitable love life, a sister dying of cancer and a modishly arid designer flat. Mirren’s brilliance was to square the circle of her character, make her unlike-able but sympathetic. Burton is annoying without managing to claim our involvement or understanding. The performance is brusquely polished and rarely strikes a false note; neither do those of the supporting cast, particularly an excellently simmering Poppy Miller. But I didn’t care about any of them. The crooks weren’t evil enough for me to feel they needed to be caught. The plot was both overcomplex and unconvincing.
The defining difference between Tennison and Blake is that Tennison was deeply moral and Blake is people-pleasingly expedient. That may well also be the defining difference between Thatcherism and new Labour. It also points to a truth about drama: you want a left-wing writer and a right-wing subject.
