How many of you remember Sir Lancelot Spratt? Great name, great part, played by that old autopsy of a ham, James Robertson Justice. He came from a time when the English stage, screen and nascent box were replete with gentleman character actors who would tip up to do their larger-than-life thing. When they weren’t playing the comedy parts in Shakespeare’s histories, they were turning in naval officers in black and white, saying stuff like:
“Depth charges away, number two.” Robertson Justice was a jobbing character actor with trademark facial hair, and his thing was being incandescently bad-tempered. There was plenty of scope for a fat man, a booming voice and assertive hair to be angry on stage and screen. His defining character was Sir Lancelot in the Doctor series.
I mention him because Hugh Laurie reminds me of him in the latest American import, House (Thursday, Five), about a house doctor called House. Laurie couldn’t be less like Justice in every particular, except that this part is a contemporary reworking of Spratt. Fifty years ago, men in authority bellowed insults. Now they sarcastically sigh irony. Surgeons were once people of immense public standing and justified fear. Today, a surgeon is medicine’s janitor. All the smart stuff is being done on the surface.
Laurie plays a diagnostic detective with a bad case of misanthropy. After all the selfless, sleepless, sugar-coated angels of ER, General Hospital, Casualty and every other medical drama, a doctor who doesn’t like patients, other doctors or himself, who thinks the point of medicine is to treat illness, not people, is a bit of a welcome poppet. And Laurie plays him like an old hand in a rubber glove. He’s particularly good at doing thinking. When he stops and considers or fathoms some problem, you really believe he’s thinking about it. You watch the doctors on ER. When they do that medical rap stuff over the barging trolley, they’re not thinking, they’re desperately remembering.
House plugs into our current fascination for medicine and death. We seem to be having a moment of corporeal fear. Medical dramas used to be about playing doctors and nurses. The sickies were a plot device. Now illness and mortality are the point. Hence all those plastic surgery shows and the multiple, compulsive crime-scene investigative dramas. We seem to have got a ghoulish teenage fascination with the mechanics of mortality; or, as Dr House might point out, that is just a symptom of being purposefully and cynically frightened by governments and officials who find us more malleable if we’re a little terrified. So we like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes, House, it’s elementary. On the other hand, you might say that hospitals are still the best libraries of life-and-death plots.
I read somewhere that Julie Burchill claims that if the Daily Mail doesn’t call for the banning of her new drama, Sugar Rush (Tuesday, Channel 4), she’ll have failed. Leaving aside the esoteric self-imposed measure of success, far from banning her output, the Mail used to pay for it and publish it. And perhaps it’s coincidental her characters are perfect Mail readers: a new middle-class family living on the south coast, where he does the cooking and she does the handyman stuff, and their dreamy daughter, who is pubescently clearly lusting after her best friend. The sapphic element is what Burchill hopes is going to grab the Mail by the short and curlies, but I’m not sure it has a position on lesbians, unless they’re gypsy lesbians, of course. I think, like Queen Victoria, it doesn’t think they exist. And, given Burchill’s brilliant journalism, the first episode of this drama was limply trite, vanilla stuff. The lazy formula of giving the lead character an internal monologue gave it the breathless feel of a girls’ public-school pash transferred to a comprehensive in the suburbs. The acting was B+ Grange Hill and the writing A- Teachers. It was far less challenging, or indeed interesting, than Queer as Folk. The gay element was the only ingredient that stopped this being an unwatchably dull story about terminally boring people. And the gay bit was no more than a lot of sighing inside a girl’s head. Nothing about Burchill’s previous writing would imply that she also wrote this. It’s like being told that William Deedes is the author of Nip/Tuck, only not that interesting.
David Dimbleby started his great walk across the beauty spots of Britain to advertise the great exhibition of landscape art at Tate Britain, A Picture of Britain (Sunday, BBC1). Or perhaps the exhibition has been put on to advertise David Dimbleby. I couldn’t help noticing that he’s been carefully styled for the trip around Britain’s postcards, so as not to appear out of place. Indeed, he looks rather like a character from a prewar Shell poster. Stout boots, trousers tucked into socks, woolly jacket, canvas rucksack, trusty stick. All that was missing was the pipe. No hint of a Day-Glo modern hiker here, because this series is a reverie through a never-never Britain. A series of beautiful camera shots with speeded-up film to make the light dapple and the clouds scud along, with a score of lofty, elegiac, English-ish classical music. And here’s David walking through the shot to give everything some scale. He’s pretty much the only human being who seems to live in England. He kicked off with a Mr Chips-style rolling chapel preamble. What we boys and girls were in for was a glorious trip round peaks and mountains, lochs and lakes, rolling country and downs. Oh really, sir: peaks and mountains, lochs and lakes? We started off in the Loch Lake District, where artistic England’s love of the country conveniently begins. He makes a pretty good fist of imparting bits of information with attractive anecdotes, but then so he should. Presenting is, after all, his birthright, and he does it with an honest and amused entitlement, but still it sounded like the captions for the photographs in the coffee-table book that goes with the series.
There is an obvious problem about what height to aim the information at. This is expensive telly. It has to glean a sizeable audience and will be sold around the world to people who can’t tell a loch from a lake. Still, I drew a sharp breath when David dug up a “forgotten” painter, who had apparently been lying in the dark until a Dimbleby dragged him into the public gaze. Well, I’m sorry, but Thomas Girtin really isn’t an obscure painter, and nobody who knows him has forgotten him. But I expect there are many people who will never have heard of him, because many people haven’t heard of everyone and everything.
Pretending the audience doesn’t know an artist because the artist has been misplaced is a smarmy nonsense. They won’t have heard of Cotman or Crome, Ravilious, Nash, Nevinson, Algernon Newton or Varley. But that’s not because we forgot where we put them. It’s because the audience are ignorant, which is not the same as stupid, and it’s telly’s job to dis-ignorify, not to pander to their emptiness or connive in their stupidity.
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