Rolf Harris: a name that is to the art world what woodworm is to an antiques shop. Purely by accident, I caught sight of him in Africa last Sunday, daubing fake San rock art and terrifying Ghanaian children with his chronic musical panting, which always sounds so unpleasantly suggestive. And then, the all-round entertainer was off carving an Ashanti stool. “I’m thinking of doing a Jake the Peg thing with this and giving it a third leg, ” he breathlessly told us, before mentioning that Picasso liked an African mask, and finally painting, in acrylic, a hideous, cheap, plagiarising, crassly patronising, culturally steam-rolling postcard picture of a colourful woman with a baby strapped to her back that defied either irony or excuse.
All this coming the day after Live 8 was a bit of a shock. Haven’t they suffered enough? Is the price of making poverty history importing cultural poverty? What has Africa done to deserve Rolf on African Art (Sunday, BBC1), on top of everything else? Some time ago, I said that it was difficult to hate Rolf Harris, but that we should persevere, because he is probably the devil. What do you think the devil is going to look like — Vincent Price? Peter Mandelson? No, he’s going to be Rolf Harris. Since I wrote that, we’ve had a couple of stern letters from my learned friends and, as a consequence, have to publish this correction: “The devil has never at any time taken on, doppelgängered or in any way occupied the persona of Mr Rolf Harris. The devil takes strong exception to the implication that he might be or might use the methods of Mr Harris.
“The devil has always appeared solely and only as himself and is the author of all his own work. Furthermore, he never dabbles in cultural abomination. There are strict rules about that sort of thing.
“He is evil, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”
Well, I’m happy to put that straight and offer an unconditional apology.
To the Ends of the Earth (Wednesday, BBC2) is an adaptation of William Golding’s complexly claustrophobic ocean-going trilogy. The rogues, rigging and rogering genre is a particularly popular one with English-language writers, from CS Forester to Patrick O’Brian. Men at sea are an obviously attractive dramatic setting for people who live on an island. Golding’s story, however, is quite unlike other salt-water books, which tend to rely on outside events — the weather or the French — to get a ripping yarn going. Golding’s is always about the hideously close and fretful unpleasantness of a long sea journey, the stripping away of the pretensions and defences of the crew and passengers. It’s not unlike a grown-up Lord of the Flies.
As ever with costume drama, I began watching with guarded, low expectations, but after the obligatory opening shot of a horse-drawn carriage, it started to build an oppressive and fetid atmosphere. The ship and the re-creation of its grim, filthy life, with the smells and the drink, the cruelty, depression and boredom, was well engineered. The plot grew slowly, like mould out of the sodden planks. The first episode followed the downfall of a pathetically sad preacher, whose bullying and self-revelation led to suicide by shame. It showed the brittle, shallow facade of hierarchy and servility on board.
The story is told through the eyes of Talbot, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. He’s a minor aristocrat with powerful connections, and not a sympathetic character. Nobody is particularly likeable or attractive, and this makes it difficult to empathise, but at the same time it makes the atmosphere ever more compulsively grim. There is nothing to like on the ship except the ship itself. As ever with nautical stories, the show is effortlessly stolen by the set.
Talking of Lord of the Flies, children get a rough deal on television. They are dipped in sugar and treated with a smiley patronage or used as props by frantic children’s presenters, or as plot devices in domestic dramas. They come as impossibly Pollyanna-ish goody-goodies, Little Nell-like victims or hooded barbarians at the front gate. In those video-outtake shows, kids are dumped in with amusing pets. Everyone speaks for children, but television rarely listens to them. This week saw a remarkable change. My Life as a Child (Tuesday, BBC2) gave video cameras to junior-school students and asked them to record their thoughts and lives. It was surprisingly powerful.
The first programme focused on absent fathers. The children were eloquent and sophisticated beyond their TV years, thoughtful and aware of the dynamics of their lives. In real life, all children are like that; it’s only on the box that we expect them to be monosyllabic muppets. The stories these children revealed, and their relationships to the adults in their lives, were both touching and hopeful. Theirs is a generation that is completely relaxed not just with television, but with the technology for recording television. They understand how it works far better than most grown-ups. Watching life from the height of an eight-year-old is a small revelation. One girl went to meet her dad at the airport and filmed the whole encounter with a single close-up of her own mouth. Being able to see only this huge smile was far more affecting than an intrusive and prurient shot that an adult director would have been terrified of missing.
My Life as a Child will undoubtedly lead to a spate of reality programmes made by children. If they are as sensitively and meticulously researched as this one, it will be an important way of allowing children, who make up the most committed and enthusiastic portion of the audience, to participate in the making of television. But this should also be a word of caution. The editing is still in the hands of grown-ups — not just any old grown-ups, but Tristrams. And it is the editing that ultimately imposes structure and emphasis, that leads our sympathies. We should also never forget that as children have seen so much TV, they are highly aware of its dramatic rules and emotional possibilities. Anyone who’s ever had an eight-year-old knows they can be just as manipulative and patronising as any adult. Overall, though, this was the sort of well-crafted and inquiring programme TV was made for.
Escape to the Legion (Monday, C4) was brought to us by Bear Grylls, who implied this was going to be something more than just another tired, yomping, break-’em-to-make-’em boys’ makeover, sadism for couch potatoes. Well, it wasn’t. It was all the usual bullying and exhaustion that is usually meted out by ex-SAS with pixelated faces, but this time with weird little French Foreign Legionnaires. When, after the first day, one chap sensibly decided to leave, Bear mourned and pleaded as if he were leaving his manhood behind and failing at something that would haunt him for the rest of his life, as if pretending to be Beau Geste in front of a camera crew was “real”.
Sometimes, I think the only people who don’t know that telly is just telly are the people who make it.
