Beautiful People (BBC Two)

Camp can be subtle or it can be Esther Williams and twenty synchronised swimmers with bejewelled turbans; it can be waspish wit, or fruity bitchiness with a dollop of cream and sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. It can be a withering put-down or a troupe of 40 parachuting drag queens. Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful People falls into the parachuting drag queens category. It is shrill, it is streaked with absurdity. You may love it, hate it or be bamboozled by it: a bit like Harvey’s other journey into sitcom-land, Gimme, Gimme Gimme.

Harvey is a brilliant playwright – Beautiful Thing, his story of two teenage boys falling in love on a London council estate, became a classic – and his scripts for Coronation Street revel in the inherent camp of that show, as in an upcoming episode in which Norris puts his back out thanks to misjudging a box of paperweights.

Beautiful People, like Gimme Gimme Gimme, is loud and brash. I got into a total decade and age muddle with it. It is based on the memoirs of Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barney’s department store in New York, with one important difference. Doonan is 56 and the producers have updated things so on the show “Simon” is in his teens in the 1990s. The first episode was book-ended with him enjoying his life of “fabulosity” in New York with a muscle-mary boyfriend.

But they look in their thirties, not early twenties. Yet despite the Nineties music everything feels weirdly Eighties. There was a puzzling moment of wry nostalgia around Blair going into No 10 to the strains of D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better, implying popular culture has already consigned that event to the same sepia drawer as the Beatles playing at the Cavern club. But it’s just too recent. The Nineties didn’t feel past enough in Beautiful People to get nostalgic about. Why not set Beautiful People at the time of Doonan’s actual memoirs? As a taster visit his fabulous website.

Beautiful People is funny and adventurous, breaking off for dream or fantasy sequences: Simon’s mother’s row with her neighbour becomes a wrestling match, while Simon imagines or recalls a queer-bashing at school with him playing I Will Survive in his head as he gets held down and punched by the school bully. Harvey doesn’t want to tell a conventional tale, so homophobia is not really an issue. Simon is like the kid in Ugly Betty, gay without anyone saying so as if being gay isn’t so much the point as being different.

Faced with name calling, Simon and best friend Kyle (or Kylie as Simon calls him) roll their eyes and continue criticising people’s dress sense, imagining a life away from these close-minded, badly turned out ignoramuses. When his mother finds out Simon has been wearing women’s clothes she’s just offended they’re not her own. On one level you might consider that refreshing; on another, it’s hard to imagine a boy feeling like Gloria Gaynor when he’s getting his head kicked in.

The other problem is the women: Simon’s mum, the next door neighbour, the mad, blind aunt played by Meera Syal, and the sister, all sound, with their raucous, expletive-laden screeching, like the women of Beautiful Thing. The brilliant Tameka Empson turns up as a spacey hairdresser, reminding some of us of the moment she went all Mama Cass on drugs in Beautiful Thing. At moments, Beautiful People feels a little too like Beautiful Thing.

None of this is fatal. At the heart of Beautiful People are winning performances from the two young actors Luke Ward-Wilkinson (as young Simon) and Layton Williams (as Kyle/Kylie). Some will complain that they are just yet more stereo-typical camp gays in prime-time, that it’s unreal and homophobia is nothing to fetishise with a disco track – but Harvey has never dwelt in neutral characters or stock political responses; he likes the Technicolor, outlandish and weird. It takes a special writer to create a guide dog with an appalling sense of direction.

Ian Hislop Goes Off the Rails (BBC Four)

Wittily directed, incisive and illuminating, Ian Hislop Goes Off the Rails did the impossible and made the history of our railways gripping, whether focusing on the golden age of railways at the turn of the 20th century or the effects of Beeching’s report that led to the axeing of much of the network in the early 1960s. It also showed that we shouldn’t be surprised by the contradictory brew of scrappy policy-making and nostalgia that surrounds the network. We have always loved, and loved to hate, our trains.

Natural Born Sellers (ITV1)

The Apprentice has a rival. Appropriately, given that they’re both about “sellin’”, it’s cheaper, spikier and it absolutely rocks. Natural Born Sellers is an elimination contest featuring salesmen and what a fantastic, venomous sack of snakes they are: notable at this early stage are a woman with mad, starey eyes who unbuttons her blouse every two seconds because “sex sells” and an angry man who wards off “nega’ivi’eee” by blasting tinny trance music. You can smell the sweat of their non-iron shirts.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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