Read more of Caitlin Moran's TV
reviews
Red Riding (C4)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (BBC Two)
Heston's Victorian Feast (C4)
Grow Your Own Drugs (BBC Two)
The adaptation of 1974 has been heading down the M1 for some time, making
ominous noises; its windows blacked out, and unsettling. As the first of
David Peace's Red Riding trilogy - 1980 and 1983 follow in the coming weeks
- Peace's books are infamous for being so bleak that, by the end, you're
left both adrenalised and wiped out, and the shift to TV has, it seems, made
little difference.
It is the North, in 1974 - the same beiges, drizzles, cigarette fug and
polyester collars as Life on Mars, but there is no pounding Bowie soundtrack
here. Absolutely no one here is saying, “It's tea-time, and I've 'avin'
'oops.” This is Life on Mars as directed by Orwell, 1974 as the end of the
world, and Yorkshire as the softest, wettest, most oozing patch of brown rot
on the entire Earth.
Andrew Garfield plays Eddie Dunford, a local journalist who's been “down
South” for the past couple of years. This absence seems to have saved him
for, as the story unfolds, it is revealed that he is the only one in his
home town who isn't hopelessly infected, corrupted and compromised. Eddie
returns to Yorkshire just as a schoolgirl is found murdered, in a manner so
awful that it's half-magic. She has been tortured, killed, and left
face-down in a lake. Swans' wings have been sewn into her back, and “FOR
LUV” scored into her skin with a razor.
As Eddie investigates the killing, he makes links with other child murders in
the area, but discovers that his editor at the paper (John Henshaw) and DCS
Bill Molloy (Warren Clarke) are extremely reluctant about him taking the
matter any further.
“This is the North, you see, where they do what they like,” he is told. For
pretty much the next hour, every effort Eddie makes to uncover the truth
results in him being repeatedly, brutally and inventively beaten up by the
local police. South Yorkshire Police, in the 1970s, are depicted as
rampaging, Clockwork Orange-style Droogs, with only marginally less silly
hats. They are insane with corruption, and corruption has made them insane.
Smashed in the nuts, punched in the face, whipped across the knuckles with
handcuffs - Eddie has his hand slammed in a car door, is stripped and hosed
down in the dark, and, eventually, ends up in the back of a police van
gunning across the moors. One copper has buried a gun in the back of his
head, while another is hysterically kissing his face, and screaming, “We're
only having a laugh! We're only having a laugh, Eddie!”
Garfield whimpers like a man whose adrenalin is exhausted, and whose only hope
of escape is to become insane.
The director of photography, Rob Hardy, shoots it all with a brutal, slightly
opiated edge - paint boils off the walls, the moors look like a place where
infinite pain could occur with no witness; but then there will be a sudden,
blurry, unfocused shot, lending an air of woozy unreality to the whole
thing. You can see why all the other protagonists are able to pretend it's
not happening - prolonged fear and hopelessness can have an oddly soporific
effect. Perhaps it's only the pain from Eddie's broken fingers that is
keeping him awake, and fighting. God, it's all horrible, really - a world
where everything is wrong, knowledge is despair, and love is just something
that leaves your left flank vulnerable.
And it's not as if next week's episode, 1980, is going to be any chirpier,
either. That's all about the Ripper. It would be ill-advised to be expecting
Chucklevision. But, as things stand at the moment, next year's Baftas are
going to be the words “Red Riding”, “Red Riding”, “Red Riding” called out,
over and over again, as dreamlike shots of a swan-winged girl flash up, and
the whole country feels anxious all over again.
Another Bafta possibility came with Darwin's Dangerous Idea - although,
since Ross Kemp won a Best Documentary Bafta for Ross Kemp on Gangs, it's
best not to read too much into these things. It all appears to be decided by
monkeys riding tiny bicycles anyway.
Presented by Andrew Marr - looking, as he ages, increasingly and incongruously
like Joni Mitchell. That's just a fact - Darwin breezily dismissed the old
Galapagos thing with a wave of the hand. Instead he pointed up Darwin's time
in Tierra del Fuego as the real pivotal moment in his theorising, and made a
neat, theoretical plumb-line from Darwin to Marx to Freud: “From ‘We are
descended from animals' to ‘We still have that animal inside us',” as Marr
succinctly encapsulated. He also explained that the German high command
condoned wartime atrocities because they viewed the Second World War as a
test of the theory of evolution.
“If the Germans lost, then it was because they were on the wrong evolutionary
track. And if they won, it was because they were on the right evolutionary
track - and everything else must be crushed into extinction.”
Darwin's Dangerous Idea is proving to be perfectly spiced intellectual
protein, and totally enthralling - and that's before we get to Marr's
impression of Nietzsche which, for reasons I doubt anyone will ever explain,
least of all Marr, sounds like David Bellamy: “When one gives up the
Cwistian faith, one pulls the wight to Cwistian mowality out fwom under
one's feet.”
Well, qwuite. So now we have, finally, found Marr's sole broadcasting weak
point - accurate impressions of Weimar classicist philosophers. Indeed, his
capacity was so poor, it made you cry out, “Why, Marr?”*
Let's hope the following two episodes aren't Marred** by it.
After Marr's meaty bwain burger, the MSG-spritzed widdle-soup of
Heston's Victorian Feast and Grow Your Own Drugs proved a particularly
insulting contrast.
As a chef, Heston Blumenthal is one of the Seven Wonders of Modern Britain - a
piquant and unlikely emulsion of lunatic and nerd. As a TV presenter,
however, he appears to have been given recent “TV Presenting Lessons” by an
idiot, which make him constantly say hateful, TV2009™ things such as: “I'm
on a journey” and “This is my passion,” rather than just actually going on a
journey, or showing us his passion.
Of course, once Blumenthal forgets about “presenting”, and just gets out his
pans, refractometer and liquid nitrogen, and gets cooking, it's enthralling.
The opening episode is themed on Victorian dishes, and Alice in Wonderland,
and a Celebrity Tumbril has seemingly been wheeled through Soho House to
find lucky B-listers to chow down on Blumenthal's Nasa/LSD buffet. The trawl
has yielded Rageh Omaar, Toby Young - who so closely resembles Blumenthal
that it's a little like flicking between Dolly the Sheep, and that other
Dolly the Sheep - and Kathy Lette, who starts being Kathy Lette the minute
she arrives on camera.
“Ah, champagne. The way to a woman's heart. And other body parts!” she says,
as they sit down at a feast including a 3ft glow-in-the-dark absinthe jelly,
animated with vibrators; and deep-fried meal-worms, injected with onion
mayonnaise. Does Lette ever stop punning and quipping? I can imagine, at her
funeral, a perky voice issuing from the grave: “Dying! The only time a woman
isn't happy to be sent flowers for lying flat on her back!”
Still, the meal also inspires this week's best quote: “Making a realistic
fob-watch out of stock isn't easy.” Well, thank God someone finally came out
and said what we were all thinking.
Alas, then, for James Wong on Grow Your Own Drugs, who is also an awful
presenter - but doesn't have three Michelin stars and a vibrating boozy
sex-jelly to fall back on.
Wong is an “ethno-botanist”, who ostensibly wishes to show us how to make
“drugs” (cough medicine, face-packs) from natural ingredients
(fruit, twigs, etc).
“It's growing all around you - it's just a different kind of packaging!” he
declares, in a sentence that appears to be trying to make us feel
comfortable by urging us to think of the natural world as being just like a
small, laminated box by L'Oreal and is, therefore, one of the most
depressing things said in the past ten years.
However, there are two far more fatal problems with his show's format. The
first is that, since the “Dr” Gillian McKeith debacle, TV lawyers are
super-twitchy about any medicinal claims. As a result, Wong's remedies have
to be studded with so many “coulds” “suggests” and “not a medical trials”
that you're apt to think halfway through: “Oh bugger it, I'll just go to the
chemist and get some Benylin, instead.”
The other is just how awful a presenter Wong is. I'm not apt to be negative,
but his absurdly self-satisfied brand of cosseted eco-smuggery - compounded
with a kind of Naked Chef-esque thumbs-up blokedom - is so potent that my
husband came into the room ten minutes into the show and said: “Ugh! Who is
this arse?” without even looking at the screen. That's a considerable
charisma-disability. He might want to see if he can heal it, with a fleabane
and banana-juice poultice.
*Did you see what I did there?
** And again?
