A boot stamping on a face over and over: boot, face, face, boot — George
Orwell’s vision of the domestic screen of the future as seen from 1948.
Three minutes’ hate. This was before television was a mass medium. He was
thinking more of Pathé newsreel, but still it seems prophetic. Though not
directed by a centralised dictatorship, as it turns out government doesn’t
need to manipulate the communal vitriol. We can manage that on our own. And
they don’t have to invent hate figures. Television does it with a deft ease.
Simply to appear on the box is to be instantly loathed by vast numbers of
viewers.
I’ve been thinking about boot-in-face television a lot recently. I wasn’t
going to write about the Brand/Ross thing because any more comment seems
wearying and otiose, and also because it all happened on the wireless. But,
last week, I had dozens of news bods calling me up demanding a quote or that
I go on a panel to discuss the future of the BBC, broadcasting, liberalism,
respect, humour, sex, reruns, haircuts. All of which I declined, because I
just think all of it is absurd and what I do know is that none of it was
about what it was about. It was all really in the timing — comedy is all
about timing.
If this had happened six months ago, nobody would have picked up a phone or a
pen. But then everything changed, and now the future looks bad and we’re all
frightened and angry and there’s nobody who seems guilty. All those faceless
bastards who got us into this are playing the victim, and we need someone to
take the blame, to take the fall, to eat dirt and walk the plank.So, why not
that one that gets too much sex and the other one that gets too much money?
It’s this very British thing — well, actually, it’s a very English thing —
self-indulgent ire. Two complaints from people who heard the broadcast;
30,000 from folk who didn’t. The English just love to be given permission to
indulge their anger.
The past two weeks have had the carnival excitement of a festive stoning that
ended with every politician who could get to a microphone lobbing half a
brick. We need a word for the joy of blame. Might I posit Tonbridge:
Tonbridge, the pleasure of justified fury. You’re having a real Tonbridge at
the moment. There is a national sense of Tonbridge. A couple of things came
out of the week’s Tonbridging. One was the unpleasant sight of radio and
television personalities scrabbling to become part of the mob and sling dung
at their erstwhile colleagues. I particularly remember Parkinson sucking his
teeth, more in avuncular sorrow than anger, while sitting coyly in front of
a pile of his latest book. Pity to waste the opportunity: only a couple of
weeks before, he’d been happily plugging it on Jonathan Ross’s show.
We should be careful what we Tonbridge over. If Ross doesn’t come back, who do
you think you’re going to get instead? I’ll tell you who: Simon Cowell’s
mini-me, Piers Morgan, a man I can’t abide. In my book, he’s the most
amateurishly unpleasant, small-minded, bottom-sniffing, drip-dry tosspot to
grace your living room. And if that thought doesn’t send you to the e-mail
begging the BBC to bring Ross back, then he probably owes you one.
Ross and Brand are two of the most talented, original and consistently funny performers
on television. They are part of what makes our home-grown broadcasting an
interesting and entertaining thing, and I can only wish them both well and
that they come back soon, unchastened. It really wasn’t about you, lads. It
was about the rest of us. And if you think I’m only writing this because I’m
part of the cosy, metropolitan, liberal, intellectual elite, well, of course
I am. What else would I be? Who else do you think works in the media? What
do you want? Your papers and TV made by provincial, draconian, philistine
nonentities? Well, then: grow up and get a grip.
Sharpe is back. Never has a name seemed such a sad mockery. Dull, blunt, soft,
tired and dumb. And such a shame. What kidult didn’t love Sharpe and doesn’t
think Sean Bean was one of the best small-screen action heroes? Let’s share
a moment’s reverie. The music, for a start, the old English folk songs
played on a penny whistle. The great casting. Remember Pete Postlethwaite,
remember Elizabeth Hurley, remember Elizabeth Hurley’s breasts and the
slogging up the peninsula? Sharpe was that rare thing, really good expensive
drama for boys. Every other book adaptation is made for girls who want to
wash Mr Darcy’s smalls. Once in a decade, blokes get Sharpe or Hornblower.
But Sharpe’s Peril had the look of hole-in-the-wall television. You stick your
cardboard character in the slot, tap in your lines and out comes a whole lot
of cash. Bean left, all those years ago, young and vital, aggressive and
dangerous, an actor who filled the screen with raw sexual power. Now he’s
back, with thinning hair, stiff legs, a fleshy belly, a puffy face. The
power has become petulance, the sex an ogling prurience; and he exudes all
the coiled danger and energy of a bus conductor on the school run. It was a
dire travesty of the Sharpe we once loved. The fighting was pants, the love
interest wasn’t interesting. And although the production values were long on
extras (it was India, after all), it was entirely bereft of imagination,
pace or suspense. It looked as if it had been filmed and edited as a school
project. Slow and lazy and boring. Zounds, how do you make Sharpe boring?
HarperCollins, the publishers, were credited as co-producers. Perhaps the
point was to make people turn off and pick up a book.
The Prince Charles Generation is not the most eyeball-grabbing, must-see title
of the week, conjuring up as it does strangulated men fiddling with their
cuffs, saying “Have you been waiting long?” to daffodils. Actually, it
turned out to be winsomely touching. The conceit was to look at the lives of
men born on the same day as the Prince of Wales. They ranged from Michael
Dobbs, Mrs Thatcher’s putto, to a loner who had spent two decades on the
dole. Between them, there were millionaires and bankrupts. Stories of death
and triumph, of things built and knocked down. Of life. And although they
were all rather too politely selective, still they were watchable, marking
the progress from birth to retirement of a generation. It was all gently
done.
The great hole in the middle of the doughnut was, of course, Charles Windsor.
We saw his birth being announced on the BBC as “Her Majesty was safely
delivered of a prince”. And we thought it was a binary option: a boy or a
girl. Charles continued to be unlike the rest of us. A strange pampered
human who has yet to be taken out of the box and used for anything. While
all the other men had lived interesting, fulfilling lives that were more
challenging than his, he is a pitiably sorry mannequin, abused by a stony
heredity and chilly privilege.
This was an example of one of those things TV does best. It makes ordinary
lives memorable, gives the commonplace and the unexamined space and dignity
without patronage. Television is the only cultural medium that welcomes the
common or garden without snobbery. And that was exactly what was all wrong
about My Family at War. As it billed itself, this was some of the best-loved
television personalities taken back to the first world war — Matthew Kelly,
Eamonn Holmes, Kirsty Wark and Kate Silverton, to name just a few of the
most adored. They were asked to retrace the footsteps of an ancestor back to
the great war. Everything about this was embarrassing, demeaning and
irreverent. First, the automatic assumption that the way into every subject,
however mordant or grave, is through celebrity, and that any celebrity who
will do it will do. And worse, that the only way an audience can understand
a subject is if you personalise it and make it contemporary. But surely the
very heart of the pathos of the great war was that it was more about
ordinary men, citizen soldiers unclouded by rank, privilege or celebrity? It
was a people’s war, and out of the monumental sacrifice it brought forth the
century of socialism, universal suffrage, human rights and meritocracy.
Dumping Rolf Harris and his hideous, infantile Two Little Boys pop song (now fortuitously
rereleased as a Christmas single) onto the trenches in the week before
Remembrance Sunday is an act of such towering, vile bad taste, a huge
skidding lapse of judgment, that you wonder why there haven’t been thousands
of calls to complain, to demand he never appear on TV again and that
someone’s head must roll
Sharpe’s Peril (ITV1, Sunday); The Prince Charles Generation (Channel 4,
Thursday); My Family at War (BBC1, Monday-Wednesday)
