So, he for whom all conundrums are literal has prematurely taken one from the top. Farewell, then, Richard Whiteley, friend to the long-term unemployed and those in sheltered accommodation. He was the Mother Teresa of television, a person who tirelessly loved the unlovely and the marginal. Countdown was, as I’m sure you know, the first programme to be shown on Channel 4, and probably still the cheapest. Whiteley had presented every single one for 23 years, which is something, but not as much something as having spent 23 years with Carol Vorderman, an act of unbelievable and unimaginable endurance.
I met Richard once at a party conference in Blackpool. He was Yorkshire TV’s political correspondent — not many people outside God’s own county know that. We had a couple of drinks, and I can confirm that he was possibly the nicest man who ever existed in a cathode-ray tube. He was utterly without side or artifice; in fact, disappointingly, Whiteley wasn’t a conundrum at all. He was, though, hopeless as a TV presenter: gauche, clumsy, slow, tongue-tied, forgetful, dull and disengaged. He was a walking dictionary of traits, any one of which should have barred him from appearing in front of a camera twice.
Not only did he not miss a day for 23 years, he didn’t get one iota better. To stoically remain that utterly useless at what you do, but continue doggedly doing it, and with eternal sunny optimism, is actually quite inspirational. So, there we are, that’s Richard Whiteley: part Mother Teresa, part Candide. I do hope they play the Countdown tune as he goes through the curtain to the crem.
It’s ITV’s 50th birthday, and it couldn’t be a worse moment to be reminded that you’re middle-aged and not as fresh and perky and pulchritudinous as you used to be. ITV is going through a midlife crisis at the moment. It doesn’t seem to be able to catch a hit or the public’s attention. It is squeezed by the cash- and ratings-immune BBC, on the one hand, and the cash- and ratings-bereft satellite, on the other. Melvyn Bragg introduced The Story of ITV (Sunday, ITV), the self-patting rundown of smash hits from the people’s channel. He started on a downbeat note, reminding us of the Establishment’s crawling opening party to launch the channel, which was full of snobbery and intellectual pretension. Which immediately begged the question: so why did they get Melvyn to present this programme, if not because of a moment of insecure intellectual forelock-tugging? Melvyn made the best fist he could of it — actually, it’s not a fist he makes, it’s a strange up-and-down movement with cupped hands, as if he’s milking a large cow or ... something. You’d have thought they’d have got Bruce Forsyth, or Ant and Dec, or the cast of Coronation Street. This show lacked the big, glitzy pizzazz that made ITV a success in the first place. There was no expectation, no drum roll or showmanship. As a child, I remember the gloom that emanated from Sunday Night at the London Palladium. For a small boy, it was an evening of desperate boredom and it’s left me with a lifelong loathing of variety. But ITV was a last life support for the dying days of music-hall, and variety was the great opening success of ITV. That and a thousand quiz shows, and the first reality television, such as Opportunity Knocks, with the odious and sinister Hughie Green, and Take Your Pick, with the astonishingly miscast Michael Miles, who looked and sounded like a minister for the colonies who’d got lost on his way to being interviewed by Robin Day. Leaving aside the towering success of Coronation Street, the line-up of late ITV greats seemed a bit desperate and tatty, but that’s the nature of popular entertainment. It tends not to travel well.
The early story of ITV is of the Grades, proprietors who were a mixed blessing for a channel, with a fixed and quite old-fashioned idea of what entertainment should look like. A programme that looks just at ITV — or, indeed, just at the BBC — misses the intensely active relationship of the two. It’s like showing one player in a tennis match: they only exist as a pair. Together, they were what made British television.
It needed the stimulus of competition, of ideas, of snobbery, and the poaching of staff. For instance, Bragg rightly lauded Michael Apted’s Seven Up, but failed to point out that the commercial network lost interest in this ratings hole, and the BBC picked it up and now makes it. After the audience, the biggest casualty of a weak and disorientated ITV is the corporation. The greatest double act on television wasn’t Morecambe and Wise or the Two Ronnies or Trevor and McDonald. It is ITV and the BBC.
You knew they weren’t going to take us knocking them for the remake of The Office lying down. You knew the Americans were going to get their own back. Well, their revenge has been swift and it’s been mighty. MTV’s Pimp My Ride has been a cult favourite over here for some time. It’s the second-best car show on television. (I have to say that or Clarkson will sulk.) It’s a combination of makeover and reality show, where some American teenager gets their clapped-out banger “pimped” — that is, transformed into an astonishing hot rod, with opalescent paint, wide wheels and all sorts of teenage head-damaging, sense-depriving stuff plugged into the back. The end of every show is a classic reveal, when the kid collects the car and goes loopily ecstatic in the way only Americans seem to be able to.
So they’ve made a British version (Sunday, MTV), and I can barely speak. It’s way, way more awful than you could ever make up, far worse than the American Office. It’s a car wreck, literally and metaphorically. Where the American version is so clever is that it’s not selling a made-over car, it’s offering spotty white kids a bit of black street cool. It’s actually a socially and philosophically profound message about symbols and status in society. The English version has some hopelessly ghastly middle-aged Harry Enfield wigga wannabe and a set of mechanics who look like Kwik-Fit fitters, but not as fit. Who on earth wants to gain the social cachet of a Kwik-Fit fitter? The kid collected her car and said ta ever so, in an English way. She hadn’t been pimped so much as nerded. Nerd my ride — homie, James, and don’t spare the horses.
When Toby Met Julie (Monday, BBC Four) — who gives a flying trapeze? Who is supposed to care about the Groucho peeves of journalists Toby Young, Julie Burchill and Cosmo Landesman, two of whom are readable, and their defunct magazine that nobody read? The Modern Review should be a parable for BBC Four, which commissioned this dull rehash of a hack trade dispute. If you make a magazine or programme on subjects that only you and your mates are interested in, full of private jokes and agendas and score-settling for a self-defining elite, then only you will end up reading it or watching it. Even your mates won’t be bothered to give a flying trapeze. After a strong start, BBC Four is in danger of vanishing up its own self-regarding, smirky fundament.
