There is a crisis at the very heart of democracy. Last week, just as the
American media proved that, yes, they could manipulate the man they loved
into the White House, so it was here in Britain, mother of parliaments. The
crisis is that the electorate have got it all wrong in two polls — on The X
Factor and Nonentities Come Dancing. All right-thinking people realised the
masses had made a desperate error, akin to Germany in 1933, by voting off
some dumpy-arsed, tearful cruise-ship warbler from The X Factor. Cheryl Cole
said it was a travesty, and Simon Cowell that it was plain the public
weren’t voting for talent. In the Upper House, on Strictly Come Dancing, a
terpsichorially challenged audience failed to dismiss the political
broadcaster John Sergeant for not dancing properly, or at all. One of the
judges — the strangest collection of human effluvia this side of Grimms’
Fairy Tales — admonished us by saying we must remember this was a dancing
competition.
Now, I think it’s time I called the old dancing judges, Cheryl and Simon into
my office to remind them of a few home truths. Listen carefully, all of you.
Strictly Come Dancing is not a dancing competition. The X Factor is not a
talent contest. The Queen Vic is not a real pub, and Basil Brush isn’t
actually a talking fox. They are all entertainments. Dragons’ Den isn’t real
venture capitalism, and I’m a Celebrity. . . Get Me Out of Here! isn’t a
real jungle or, indeed, real celebrity, and everybody there has been begging
their agents to get them in it. You are all suffering from a common
green-room delusion: you believe your own billing. You are not on television
because you’re experts or gurus. You’re there because you’re either funny,
hateful or shaggable, and if you’re in any doubt which, then it’s not the
latter.
The public votes for what makes the best television. If that means dismissing
a dull genius for amusing crapness, they’ll do it without thinking. Hands up
anyone who remembers the name of the men’s ski-jump gold medallists the year
Eddie the Eagle came last? Exactly. Who knows, who cares?
There have been some interesting studies done on the wisdom of crowds. It
turns out they’re almost always intuitively right. You really can’t chase
ratings, court popularity and then claim your audience has got it wrong.
They understand that the airwaves and iTunes are chock-a-block with talent
they will never get round to listening to, better than anything on The X
Factor, and that there was once a real dance competition on television. Only
late-night drunks watched it. What we want is a fat oik who’ll sing Nessun
Dorma once a week, and that kid who fell on his back in the shower. The
audience isn’t a talent agency. They want to switch on the telly and be
amused for an hour, and John Sergeant dancing is Dr Johnson’s dog and,
therefore, entertainment.
When the rough cut for the first episode of Oceans dropped into the
commissioning editor’s DVD player, he must have cried the Pacific. It is
titanic, sink-with-all-hands television and was spectacular in its empty
nothingness. They must have shot an albatross on day one. This is a big,
expensive co-production that has come back with film that looks like a
second-marriage honeymoon from the Red Sea. The bar for underwater nature
has been set pretty high by The Blue Planet and that mermaid lady who holds
her breath and frots dolphins. Failing to get any aquatic film of
interesting fish, they decided to point the camera at each other. The crew
were an overexcited group of challengeable “experts”, as vocal and coherent
as seagulls and about as likeably watchable as a get-to-know-you party of
Cornish swingers in a Jacuzzi. I can just about understand that the idea was
to get as involved in the derring-do of an attractive pod of enthusiasts as
they have adventures, but what came across was a bonding weekend for a team
of environmental-health officers.
Worse than the empty Sea of Cortez, worse than the horrible presenters, was
the utterly bereft script. A sea of intellectual plankton, an ocean of
clichés, truisms, non-sequiturs and the mood music of happy-feely words. It
was chronically embarrassing. The hug-a-halibut environmental message was
depressingly childish; the anthropological element, showing us happy Indians
collecting clams by hand then wagging a finger, telling us this was a model
of sustainability for the world, was cretinously idiotic. Altogether, it was
dispiriting and depressing.
One of the presenters is the grandson of Jacques Cousteau, the man who first
drew our attention to the ecological degradation of the seas and invented
television’s attitude to nature. The difference between then and now
couldn’t be better illustrated than by the difference in these two
generations. Grandpa Cousteau led what looked like legionnaires in Speedos
to discover an element that was as strange and awe-inspiring as outer space.
Grandson Cousteau has a beach-bum American accent and talks with a dim
sentimentality, with meaning-neutered exclamations about his feelings.
Things are great, because he’s seen them. They’re marvellous, because he’s
here. It’s the hideous solipsism of the vain gap-year blog, and this is what
you get when you make co-productions with the Discovery Channel.
World War II: Behind Closed Doors claimed to look at forgotten or unknown
aspects of the second world war, bringing them to life with purpose-made
reconstructed newsreel. The first episode examined the Soviet-Nazi pact. How
much is unknown depends on how little you know. The fact of Stalin and
Hitler’s agreement of mutual backstabbing is quite well known to people who
know. What was interesting here were the brief interviews with Russian and
German participants, in particular a chilling old NKVD officer who’d taken
part in the executions of the Polish officer class.
Less illuminating was the reconstructed newsreel, a retrospective reality
that, we were unequivocally told, had been painstakingly put together from
eyewitness accounts and was, therefore, exactly as it happened. Not a
dramatic reconstruction, but a sort of tele-clairvoyance. And as with all
clairvoyants, it was a bogus trick, worse than faction or docudrama. The
moment you compared it with authentic film, you saw what a laughable forgery
it was, a kitsch reality. I watched it for the mistakes: the wrong kind of
champagne glasses, the wrong shoes, bad hair and, most glaring, awful,
hammy, self-conscious smoking.
It was ironic that this retrospective fakery should be all about Stalin, the
great manipulator of images. All this dramatic tat was like watching
animated Norman Rockwell paintings; they obscured the serious inquiry and
the history, which was a mockery and a shame.
The Barristers is another pearl on the distinguished thread of
behind-the-scenes looks that had previously included various regiments, the
National Trust, Kew, the British Museum, Windsor and Savile Row. They all
tend to look and sound rather the same. There is the same quietly
conspiratorial voice-over, like a man leaning over your shoulder, explaining
the rules of cricket and the sexual proclivities of the wicket-keeper — in
this case, it was the safe voice box of Timothy West, saying things like:
“It’s Wednesday morning, and Kate has her big day ahead of her. But at the
moment, she’s more concerned with finding her knickers.” It gives all the
characters a similar, slightly bonkers look. They morph into one stressed
obsessive, who could be a guardsman, an equerry, a curator or an
arboriculturist. This format is so strong and beguiling, it flattens and
smooths its subjects to fit its atmosphere of benign inquiry.
With The Barristers, there are a host of elephant-sized problems in the room.
To begin with, it’s full of barristers. Caring about lawyers, or what
happens to them, is not a natural human emotion, and these pre-bar briefs
were like a nursery of crocodiles. The only ones we can care a little for
are the ones who are bad at it: the failures. Almost by definition, a
successful barrister is not a winning, warm or fanciable human being. God
made the law as a compensation for ugly people, and there is a reason they
all end up shagging each other. Not least that they can share wigs.
And perhaps most damning was that we couldn’t be shown what it is they
actually do — apart from drink wine, that is. You still can’t film in court.
In reality, the best lawyers are still actors, the comedy ones — Ally
McBeal, Boston Legal, the incomparable Judge Judy.
The X Factor; Strictly Come Dancing (ITV1, Saturday; BBC1, Saturday); Oceans
(BBC2, Wednesday); World War II: Behind Closed Doors (BBC2, Monday); The
Barristers (BBC2, Friday)
