I am not entirely sure where the recession stands on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.
Ideally, it would get together with climate change and turn his annoyingly
smug holiday home into a dust bowl, then he’d have to put on a denim
bib, get into a Model T and go and do potato-lifting and
Brussels-sprout-testing for Tesco. On the one hand, recession might be seen
as a good thing for grow-your-own folk; on the other, a home-grown tomato
will be the most expensive you ever eat if you factor in the billions that
are spent in garden centres and the cost of your own labour. Kitchen
gardening is essentially a Marie Antoinette game, bucolic role-play, Thomas
Hardy annual.
One of the first casualties of this depression has been organic everything.
Growing your own vegetables is a bit like making your own fridge or
whittling a car. Possible, but stupid. And no furrow has been as intensively
and commercially ploughed as Fearnley-Whittingstall’s back garden. If we
asked him what he gets to an acre, he could probably tell us: “Twelve
episodes, a couple of books, a diffusion range of chutney, 50 public
appearances and an endorsement in a pear tree”. Not bad for a back yard. If
you work out his carbon footprint, however, it’s probably the size of Milton
Keynes.
The electronic seasons come round with a dull predictability — seed-time and
harvest, Doctor Who and The X Factor — and Hugh comes with them. What else
is there left to say about growing vegetables and making sausages? His shows
rely on the cosy repetition, the absence of surprises, the huggable sense
that bad things happen only in cities, and that somewhere just off the M25
is a never-never happy valley where Hugh lives, surrounded by smiley,
monosyllabic peasants who knit those appalling jerseys and turn slugs and
stinging nettles into delicious fizzy pop. It’s The Archers without a
plot; a made-up telly place of maximum medieval effort for minimum reward.
Last week in River Cottage Autumn we were taken creeling for velvet
crabs. These are rarely eaten in this country, he pointed out, and I’ll tell
you why: there’s not enough in one of them to make a fish-paste sandwich for
a garden gnome. As an exercise in self-sufficiency, spending two days wading
chest-deep in a November sea to catch three crabs is the fast track to
extinction. I wouldn’t mind any of this whimsical folie de verdure if it
were just the nostalgic good life, if Hugh were the Guardian-reading
reincarnation of Jack Hargreaves. Remember Jack Hargreaves? He had a thing
about the feel of wizened tools. Always rolling something knobby between his
callused fingers. But Hugh hectors us — he gets all schoolmarmy and wags his
greener-than-thou finger at us. He sows guilt among the radishes.
Why should poor, fearful folk have to put up with a bucketful of organic
new-age anxiety to go with the anxiety their imperfect lives manufacture all
on their own, especially when it’s created by a home-made television
presenter in a Beatrix Potter set? The idea that ideal people should strive
to live like 18th-century crofters is intellectual silage. The enthusiasm
may be charming, but this fetishising of food is part of the problem, not
the solution. Shirley Conran once said that life was too short to stuff a
mushroom. She was wrong. But you’d have to live an awfully long time to make
making your own baked beans on toast worthwhile. Self-sufficiency is not an
admirable goal, it’s small-minded, selfish, mean, mistrustful and ultimately
fascist. It ends up with people waving shotguns at strangers over their
garden gates. We live in a complex, mutually reliant society, and the answer
to our problems is not each to his own cabbage patch.
Mum, Heroin and Me was a self-help programme of a very different hue.
It was a look at the life of a 20-year-old heroin addict and her mother. I
suspect it won’t have grabbed an enormous audience. There was no reality
element. She didn’t have to win a series of auditions to get to the Priory.
And we tend to see drug addiction as a problem for non-drug-takers, one of
theft, break-ins and muggings, of contagious diseases and messy stairwells
in multistorey car parks. It’s society that is the victim of addiction.
Addicts are the cause. They need treatment the way TB needs treatment. Drugs
are that easy plot accessory for cop dramas where junkies are the
snivelling, sweaty Untermensch. Television knows all it needs to about drug
addicts, thank you very much.
This documentary, however, was the best attempt I’ve seen at telling the truth
about junkie life. It didn’t have much of a narrative arc. It didn’t pulsate
with drama. There wasn’t a race against time. It wasn’t titillatingly
sordid. Neither was it much of a parable. The life of an addict isn’t like a
play, or a movie, or a TV show about addicts. Using drugs doesn’t look like
nirvana, and cold turkey isn’t like being covered with a thousand
cockroaches and disembowelled with a blunt spoon. Actually, they both look
remarkably similar, like mild flu. Addicts’ lives are a slow, infuriating
monotone of pointless boredom, and this film caught that perfectly. It was
real in the old-fashioned meaning of the word.
It was also horribly poignant, television with the pandering entertainment
taken out. Every so often that’s such a pleasure. The director, Jane Treays,
resisted the urge to exaggerate the horror and the danger, or to
sentimentalise the sadness. It offered no tears, no histrionics and not much
hope. There wasn’t any grunge or glamour or fun. It simply was what it was:
a desperate, sad waste of life. It reminded me of the first documentaries
made by Lindsay Anderson and the Freedom Film Unit: minutely budgeted short
films that showed the truth about working-class lives because nobody was
looking. They thought real life mattered on its own terms. At the end of
this film, there was no doubt who the victims of addiction are.
He’s here, he’s there, he’s every Sky+ where — Alan Yentob, Alan Yentob. . .
Yum Yum, as he’s affectionately known, is celebrating 40 years as a
Tristram. That’s quite something. Someone should make a documentary about
him. In his long and Machiavellian career, Yentob has probably thought more
thoughts about television than anyone else in the world. He certainly must
have come up with more proposals for programmes than anyone else. He is still
the great facilitator and mentor of small-screen stuff, the silky moderator,
the maître d’ of fine ideas to the literati, the proctologist of ego and
vanity.
The last in his trilogy The Story of the Guitar was a classic
old-school Arena arts documentary. Animate the inanimate. Use a thing as the
key to culture. Elevate the ordinary. The guitar is the defining instrument
of our age, but only a generation ago, it was the picky accompaniment of
gypsies and folkies. Then it became the sound first of youth, and now youth
and middle age. Although the subject was good, I’m not entirely convinced it
sustained a triptych of programmes; but the last was the best. This is where
we got to the great axemen of rock, those blokes who could make their
guitars gently weep while barely being able to string two words together.
One of the abiding truths of rock music is that it made the sense of words
redundant and gave a marvellously empty verbosity to sullen kids. None of
the awkward profundity of the guitarists could touch the subtle eloquence of
their fingers. It’s a conundrum that, out of all the stuff invented in the
20th century, it should be a simplified central Asian stringed box plugged
into a loudspeaker that said the most about us, and to us.
It was also hard not to notice that there were no women in this ultimate
electric Valhalla. The strut and low-slung pubic pose of the guitar is such
a patently cocky deal. As all the other courtship rituals and manly displays
have been removed or degendered from our culture, joining a pop group is
still an overtly adolescent male right; and Yum Yum sat at the knees of the
alpha males, with their threadbare youthfulness, barely containing his
yearning to windmill and twang and ride the feedback. We were also shown the
players of air guitar, the miming eunuchs of pop. Yentob interviewed one
with a barely contained sneer. You play thin air, he said. No, came the
reply, we play air guitars. A guitar made out of air. If you don’t have one,
you can’t do it. It was the only joined-up and witty thing said by any of the
guitarists, and it struck me that that’s exactly what Yentob has always
been. He is the supreme performer of air television.
Paper View: The Best of The Sunday Times Television Columns by AA Gill is
published on Thursday by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
River Cottage Autumn (Channel 4, Thursday)
Mum, Heroin and Me (Channel 4, Thursday)
The Story of the Guitar (BBC4, Friday)
