The most indefensible and embarrassing skid mark of patriotism is cultural one-upmanship. Our Shakespeare could beat your Molière and Schiller over three acts and a sonnet with one prologue tied behind his back. An English country house would never live in a French chateau. Italian opera arm-wrestling German, who’d win? It’s a central tenet of every saloon-bar bore that our country’s first XI could take on everybody else’s. And that everyone born in the country bears some credit and responsibility for the contents of the national oeuvre, even if they’ve never picked up a book or stepped into a theatre or gallery. Along with the bill against inciting religious hatred, the government should really include a clause against demeaning Greek dancing, laughing at French pop music or falling asleep in Dutch films. The great international cultural grudge match is always against the nation that you think steals your culture and sells it back to you at a premium. Is Pinocchio Italian or Disney? Why does Winnie the Pooh have an American accent? And why were so many negro spirituals written by middle-European Jews in New York? I can think of no reason for us buying the American version of
The Office (Tuesday, BBC3), other than to give English audiences a damned good laugh at seeing it done so badly. The pleasure is all in laughing at rather than laughing with. Schadenfreude is not a pretty emotion, and it’s not a proud motive for disseminating the international language of art. The American Office may not have been that great, it may have been a pale, gawky imitation of the Slough version, but we could have seen it as a compliment, a homage to a great bit of comedy. Rather in the way that they look at our baseball teams and Jude Law’s American accent, we could have been gracious. But then where would the belly laugh have been in that? The truth is, the American version wasn’t all that awful. The Yankification of the cultural references was neatly done, although, oddly, they changed the theme tune from The Muppets to “Wassup”, from the Budweiser advertisement. Perhaps they thought Kermit was French. The new David Brent was suitably and similarly ghastly, although a lot better-looking. To us, though, he appears to come on like someone doing an impression. Then again, seeing as a lot of Brent’s character is based on him doing bad impressions, there is something weirdly appropriate in that.
In fact, halfway through the first episode, it crossed my mind that the whole thing might have been a great practical joke on the audience, made so that millions of people at home could behave like Brent, snigger at the “septics” getting it wrong and do their own little impressions of the wrong Gareth saying Jell-o instead of jelly. Perhaps this programme was never shown in America at all. Maybe it’s not made by Americans, but is really an elaborate spoof done by Canadians, or indeed Ricky Gervais himself, as a final brilliant exploration of a comic character who is a genius because he is crap. That would be funny. As it stands, The Office isn’t very funny, and that’s its great joy. If it had been even worse, we could have liked it even better. Now there’s an entertainment conundrum for you.
I would love to be able to tell you that Five had got someone else to be Desmond Tutu explaining Christianity in the series Big Ideas That Changed the World (Tuesday, Five), and that this wasn’t really the archbishop of Cape Town, chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Nobel laureate. Sadly, I can’t. It really was that Desmond Tutu whizzing us through 2,000 years of Christianity as if it were a court report or the voice-over for a police-camera film. It perked up when he got to its role in the peaceful collapse of apartheid, though, strangely, he never managed to get round to mentioning the Dutch Reformed Church’s role not just in propping up apartheid, but in supplying the moral and spiritual foundation for it. Tutu is an inspiring man who has always been a convincing advocate of belief, and the story of South Africa’s renaissance doesn’t grow dull with retelling. It was good, too, to be reminded of Trevor Huddleston, one of the great men of our age, but this programme was spectacularly badly put together. It was so awful, it made me wonder why Five had wanted to make it at all. Why care so little and fill the screen with this visual garbage, and this duff a soundtrack? It all looked as if it had been put together as sixth-form IT coursework from available copyright-free spam. It was as bad as anything you’ll ever see on terrestrial TV. If you’re going to take this little trouble, why make the programme at all? This series on ideas, which kicked off with Germaine Greer and still has Mikhail Gorbachev to come, is a series that apparently has not the faintest idea of what it’s doing. But then I’ve never really understood what Five thought it was about anyway. What does it think it looks like? Who does it imagine watches, in among the police-camera carnage and the boot-sale imports it drops in, an arts programme on the history of ideas? Five has some weird inbred culture all of its own. It is a station whose ident ought to be a little kid in dungarees, sitting on a bridge playing the banjo.
Martha and Me (Monday, BBC2) was a documentary made by someone who thought that tonight, Matthew, they’d be Jon Ronson, who in turn thought he might be Louis Theroux, who by coincidence always wanted to be Nick Broomfield. Broomfield is brilliant, and they get progressively worse as the imitation gets weaker. This last one did that tired, worn-out old thing of trying not very hard to get an interview with someone who’s never going to give them the time of day, then making a film about not succeeding. Broomfield did this first with Margaret Thatcher. It was gripping, and there was a point. Jamie Campbell was trying to get close to Martha Stewart. He looked and sounded suspiciously like a stalker, and there was precious little point except to get himself on television. It wasn’t incisive, revealing, amusing or wacky. It was rather spooky, in a borderline dysfunctional way. Of course, Stewart is someone who herself seems to be a dozen people. I had dinner with her once, and I tried to make conversation, but she stopped me to point out that I wasn’t doing it properly, and that all I needed was some fresh, home-made topics, attractively arranged, tied up with a little wit and some imported aphorisms, then I’d be away. I must say, she was very good at it. Such a pity I didn’t have a camera with me.
Television at the moment is full of people who are pretending to be someone else. And now we’re getting to the summer doldrums, when the Tristrams go off to Tuscany and pretend to be writing a novel or a screenplay, and the TV schedules are full of repeats. And I predict that somewhere, someone is pitching the idea of giving the Sky News Michael Jackson lookalike court roundup a comedy show all of its own.
