Last Saturday, I went to the National Gallery for a seminar and talks about
Civilisation, Lord Clark’s 13-part arts series for BBC2 in 1969. My father
was a co-producer. The seminar had been organised by a young academic who’s
written a book about it, Jonathan Conlin. Nicholas Penny, the director of
the National Gallery, spoke about Clark’s time as director there, Simon
Schama waxed about arts on television and compared Clark’s approach to John
Berger’s, and David Attenborough chatted about commissioning series and the
birth of BBC2. All interesting if you’re interested in that sort of thing,
which I am, but, I’d have thought, an arcane backwater of the culture.
So what was really astonishing was that the large lecture hall was packed. All
day. Even given the undoubted pulling power of Attenborough and Schama, the
thinking lady’s kosher art totty, I’d imagined this would be a cosy
get-together of perhaps half a dozen, dipping down to just my mum and a
couple of homeless curators after lunch. But it was standing room only for
five hours, and I think that proved something. It’s more evidence that there
is an enormous appetite for facts, for information; people want to be told
stuff, and there is a new seriousness abroad. Lectures and talks and
discussions are spinning out everywhere — in lecture halls and libraries,
theatres and spare bedrooms — and they’re all oversubscribed. All this, in
no small part, is the legacy of Civilisation.
The authored documentary is one of the most enduring and satisfying formats on
television. The liveliness and erudition of people like Schama and
Attenborough — and, indeed, Clarkson — has made knowledge attractive and
addictive, and it’s leapt out of the box and onto public daises and into
endless web forums and blogs. The tone, the tenor and the expectation all
comes from television. I sense we’re entering a sober-minded age after a
long decade of sweaty chuckles with everything. Comedians have been the
universal spokesmen and presenters of every aspect of life, but I think
people want to have a more rewarding response to the world than smirking at
it. So I’m looking forward to replacing red noses with bluestocking day.
What would have gratified Clark most about a day devoted to his series would
have been that it was held in the National Gallery. Forty years ago, such a
cultural institution wouldn’t have dreamt of lowering its academic standards
to include a talk about television. Today, it can fill a lecture hall, not
because standards have declined, but because television is made by Schama
and Attenborough, and it’s raised the national interest and informed every
debate on every subject.
How pleased were you that Gail Trimble, the classics postgrad, led Corpus
Christi to victory in University Challenge’s final? Incredibly clever
girls are just really hot. I know that’s not an admirable or worthy
admission from a middle-aged man, but it’s true. Spectacled academics with
split ends and logarithmically come-hither expressions who might whisper the
periodic table in your ear are deeply sexy. In place of “GSOH” attached to
lonely hearts ads, very soon we’ll be getting “KAT2” — Knows a Thing or Two.
I’m torn by University Challenge. Having given Paxman a kicking last week, I
should say he is exceptionally good at keeping this very simple quiz show
exciting and vaguely human. Never having personally troubled academia, and
being a chippy autodidact who will never use a short word when three
etiolated, logorrheically otiose ones are available, I naturally and
cravenly find it winning, as I also found the contestants marvellously
risible. It’s that delicious mixture of self-conscious youth trying to look
cool while simultaneously showing off, and my own shaming surge of smugness
when I get a starter for 10 ahead of the wonky egghead.
Drama departments can’t get over Margaret Thatcher. They’re drawn back to her
like foxes to a corpse, and every new play seems to be another episode of
cathartic trauma therapy. She was so roundly and unquestionably loathed by
anybody who is moved to write a play or perform in one. But they can’t keep
away from her, for reasons I think they still haven’t quite fathomed. She is
an immensely meaty character, and the awful make far better dramas than the
good. And we have a surfeit of talented and underemployed female character
actors, for whom Thatcher must be an irresistible challenge.
Lindsay Duncan was the latest to drop an octave, cock her head like a hungry
kestrel and carry a handbag as if it were a suicide bomb. Watching her in Margaret,
I realised Mrs T has been transposed into a contemporary Elizabeth I. She is
the Fairie Queene, the majestic dispatcher of armadas, vanquisher of
Hispanics, whose fortune was made in the New World. She is a mythic figure,
terrifying and beguiling. The English have a peculiar erotic fondness for
their lady leaders. She focused the nation as a Madonna mummy.
This play was an Elizabethan court drama following the final frenzied collapse
of Thatcher’s reign. It began with the usual mealy disclaimer that some of
it was true and some of it wasn’t. Meaning that if you want to sue them,
it’s fiction. But if you want to nominate them for a Bafta, it’s all fact.
Mostly, it was Spitting Image: The Live Show, with lots of men made up to
sort of resemble cabinet members you’d happily forgotten about. There was
some really atrocious wig work, and they had to keep referring to each other
by their full names so we could remember which craven, terrified Tory
time-server they were supposed to be. The male performances ranged from
cartoonish impersonation to Hammer-horror gothic. It was unimaginative and
stagey, and it felt bogus — it was the little things like Michael Heseltine
sporting five buttons on his cuff and Alan Clark with three. My, he’d have
guffawed with mockery at that.
There were, though, two characters who were in a drama all of their own, in a
different league: John Sessions, as the murderously mousy Geoffrey Howe,
turned in the best thing he’s ever done on television (not necessarily an
onerously high bar); and Duncan herself was the best Thatcher yet.
Brilliantly Elizabethan, radiantly Gloriana and winningly human. The
steeliness and the cruelty, the moments of self-pity, the vision and the
failure — Duncan caught it all with utter truth, without pastiche or
impersonation. She was the only thing that kept this cornily written thing
watchable.
Why on earth did ITV buy the format for Law & Order and make it Law &
Order UK? It’s an excellent series, but long in the tooth. The English
version felt very strange. The cast was good, but English actors don’t do
hard-boiled Method policemen the way the Americans do. They like their
theatrical flourishes. They do truth rather than fact. The American
soundtrack was distracting, though the story was better than usual, and they
might have got away with it except that there’s one huge procedural hole in
the format. An American district attorney is not the same as the Crown
Prosecution Service, so the dramatic tension between police and judiciary is
not the same, it’s not believable. They could have given this cast a
brand-new police station and a couple of good scripts and they’d have done
better than Law & Order UK, which is a sad example of ITV continuing to lose
confidence and plot. This is the sort of thing Greek television does — puts
on an off-the-peg wife-beater format.
FM is that quaintly old-fashioned thing, a sitcom performed by
comedians and alternative comic actors, including the nearly funny one from
The IT Crowd. It comes with lots of swearing and back-door innuendo, if you
get my thrust, but like last year’s fashion, you sort of wonder why you
could ever have laughed at these things. And while FM, set in a radio
station, is 90% the same as every other comedy, the extra 10% was actually
quite funny. Obviously, not funny in an improving, useful, knowledgeable
way, just funny in a slacker’s hand down your tracky fronts, bucket
o’chicken kind of way.
Each of the three dramas that I’ve reviewed this week had exceptionally
talented casts, though not necessarily performing very well. But even the
smallest parts were played by actors whose agents might expect them to carry
an above-the-title role. One of the things our yearning for polytechnic
knowledge is doing is killing off drama — that, and the expense.
This is not a good moment to start being an actor, so all you kids looking at
Slumdog and the Oscars and thinking, well, there are no real careers out
there, maybe I should answer the siren call of the greasepaint . . . just
don’t. Don’t even think about it.
Actually, on deuxieme pensées, go for it. You’re going to be unemployed either way,
and you’re more likely to pull as a resting actor than as a redundant
University Challenge runner-up.
University Challenge (BBC2, Monday)
Margaret (BBC2, Thursday)
Law & Order UK (ITV1, Monday)
FM (ITV2, Wednesday)
