The coverage of the New Orleans flood has been very strange. It is as if none of the news teams knows how to treat what is in essence a Third World disaster in a First World country. News grows to be a formula in much the same way as all other genres grow to be formulas — it has its reusable and repetitive shorthand. Wars grow to look the same, demonstrations are cut from a loop of video, and natural disasters have their stock shots, their reverential tone and their lexicon of clichés. But the news never really agreed what this story was. Was it the disaster, or was it America having a disaster? Usually, the name of the country is just a tag, because natural bad stuff most often dumps on Third World people whose addresses are only really of importance to themselves.
It turned out that CNN was the most all at sea. It likes to think of itself as a stateless, pan-global news purveyor. It doesn’t have foreign correspondents, because nowhere’s foreign to it. But it utterly lost the plot, and any sense of dispassion or distance, over this story. The emotional range of the reporters grew operatic as they tried to outdo each other in mawkish empathy. I watched with surprised disgust as reporters repeatedly broke into manly tears.
The low point was passed on to me by another viewer, who said she had seen CNN follow a woman who had been rescued but whose child had been washed away. They found the child and set up a classic Esther Rantzen-style “You thought he was dead, but in fact ...” sentiment sting. They waited a few hours so they could get the moment on camera. It was adding a little reality TV to reality. How many seconds of thinking your kid is dead do you reckon is worth a news award? It all got very Broadcast News. The tearful reporters, the set-up sympathy. It was a reminder, if we needed any more reminders, that there is no such thing as disinterested news, and that you must always question not just what’s in front of the camera, but who’s behind it. At a time when Channel 4 is thinking about dumping ITN (yet again) and Sky is looking to expand its news service, nobody can be proud of their coverage of this story.
As a restaurant critic, I’m often asked about good places to eat. People ask Clarkson about good cars, and I expect they ask Cosmo Landesman to recommend films and Waldemar Januszczak to point them towards art. But with me, all they want to do is tell me how bad television is. And how incredulous they are when I say that, actually, TV is pretty great, and if they don’t like it, it’s because they are functionally TV-illiterate. If you’re seeing rubbish, you don’t know how to look. Libraries are full of incomprehensible nonsense if you can’t read.
One of the finest and most consistently good reasons why television isn’t rubbish was 30 this week. Arena (Monday-Wednesday, BBC4), the BBC’s arts strand, is, for people of my generation, one of our cultural cornerstones. It’s made more high points of my television life than any other show. There is a fine line between a critic and a fan, and when Arena’s message-in-a-bottle logo and evocative theme come on, I’m just a fan. Last week, I watched with fresh admiration the repeats of The Private Life of the Ford Cortina and My Way.
Arena did many things for the medium, but perhaps the most important was to write a vernacular for arts documentaries that was specific to television.
Not an illustrated lecture or a moving coffee-table book, but a way of looking at the culture that was new and iconoclastic. And it found new places to look, new definitions and new art forms. It didn’t make distinctions between brows. It opened up the possibilities for liberal enthusiasms. And some of the most entertaining and inventive and good Tristrams have done their time on Arena.
One programme that foreshadowed the Arena strand in approach was a 1960s Omnibus on Blake’s poem The Tyger. It was an original look at a single poem, part of it filmed in an English lesson in a boarding school. If you look carefully, you can catch a fleeting glimpse of me. The incredible, entertaining and lucid criticism of Peter Scupham (the English teacher) was what inspired me to write, so here we are, with some weird, pointless synchronicity. Mind you, Arena can be bloody pretentious sometimes, but then again, so can I.
Ruby Wax told me that the moment she heard the title, she said yes to Celebrity Shark Bait (Sunday, ITV). It’s a snappy moniker, and by far and away the best thing about the programme that was attached to it, like a hook through bait. Ruby, Richard E Grant and two other people from the green room of celebrities known only to God were put in a cage off the Cape. Sharks turned up, and Ruby screamed. Richard said it was a wonderful experience, which was nice, because I’d have hated it to have been a waste of absolutely everybody’s time. Cue joke here about there being some things that even sharks won’t eat.
But, frankly, what is there left to know about sharks? There must have been a thousand programmes devoted to them. Every conceivable permutation of sharkishness has been chewed to death. I can’t wait for great whites to go the way of the Norwegian Blue. Finding a shark on the box has become the entertainment equivalent of finding a shark in the bath.
Talking of flogging dead scenarios brings me naturally to Only Fools and Horses. A hundred years ago, I rather enjoyed this sitcom. It had laughs and characters, and moments of what could almost be called pathos. Over the years, though, amusement turned to familiarity, then to tedium, irritation and now a deep, skin-crawling loathing. I just can’t hear that Chas and Dave-ish theme tune without yearning to be a wireless critic. Nothing could survive the repeats that Only Fools and Horses has suffered.
If there was ever going to be a spin-off, you’d imagine that it would have been about Rodney and his upwardly mobile wife. Nicholas Lyndhurst gave the most beautifully measured performance. You really wouldn’t have picked what’s-his-name, the car dealer, who was barely more than a flat surface for bouncing jokes off. So, The Green Green Grass (Friday, BBC1) came with the sound of another grating theme tune and not a little ill will. It’s the old chavs-move-to-the-country story — Birds of a Feather meets The Good Life by way of To the Manor Born. I don’t have to say any more, do I? Even on the first showing, this looks like the umpteenth repeat. We’ve all been yawning over these characters, situations, gags and setups since black-and-white. How can anyone still write this slurry? Who’s still alive that can write like this? The performances are enough to make Terry Scott consider a comeback, and he’s dead. He is dead, isn’t he?
