Building the Olympic Dream (BBC Two)

Last week BBC Two’s brilliant series Building the Olympic Dream, featured a new star in Martin Green, the head of Olympic ceremonies, fag in hand and trying to oversee the planning and execution of the eight minutes of the closing ceremony of the Beijing Games given over to promoting London 2012: a wincing story of creative tensions and red buses becoming hedges.

This week Min Clough’s equally absorbing The Last Stand at Stratford focused on those pesky local residents, businesses and allotment holders who stood obstinately in the way of the horrific bulldozers that are chomping caverns in the earth of the Stratford site. It was a depressing snapshot: at the beginning you sensed, well knew, the inevitability of change no matter the “consultation processes” and placating on-site visits from the Olympic bigwigs.

Presenting them with a plastic bag of vegetables was never going to work, even if the allotment holders were united . . . and they weren’t. There was the old guard, led by a quorum of grumbling goats, and there was the younger Julie, the assistant secretary, struggling not only with the giant Olympics maw, and the relocation of the allotments to a site in Walthamstow, but also with the grumbling of the old guard over missing meeting minutes. The election of a new young secretary was brutal. The older incumbent gave way immediately after the result with a “Good luck son, you’re going to need it”.

The allotments people also had to deal with the defenders or upholders of “Lammas”, common land. They shouted and squawked that they didn’t want the allotment holders moving to their open space. One resident fruitlessly fought the authorities who wanted to raze his home. Lance Forman, the owner of smoked-salmon producers H. Forman and Son, had managed to secure a bigger factory out of the move but wasn’t moving until the time, his time, was right. The authorities behaved with the dead-eyed arrogance of the powerful; lip service was paid to dissent but people’s lives and livelihoods were essentially treated as an irritation, an obstacle to be bulldozed.

Anyway, surely an allotment, with paths and somehow integrated into the fabric of the Olympic village, would have been a distinctly British design quirk. After a busy day at the long jump, or battering your limbs in the 400m relay, what better way to unwind than by propagating some toms?

Jade: Bride to Be (Living)

Jade: Bride to Be followed the pastel-coloured preparations for Jade Goody’s wedding to Jack Tweed. Considering the media gyre around her and the daily death stopwatch — She’s going blind! She’s too scared to sleep! — this was bizarrely welcome in its sheer blandness. If Goody’s deeper pain or feelings, and any tensions and rows, were airbrushed out then maybe it was for her good and ours.

Instead, we watched her buy her wedding dress, talk about the colour of her tights, teeth whitening, the vows she wanted to exchange. The gravity of her illness was visible but unspoken. From a journalistic point of view, that was frustrating, but it was soothing to see ordinariness — giggling, laughing, padding about the house, the Marie Curie nurses in the kitchen — rather than the blaring emotion that those headlines played out.

We learnt that the “lollipop” Goody is seen sucking is a pain-control dabbing stick. Bridesmaids tried on dresses (one, the producer of this show, got appendicitis). Goody spoke about the moment she met Tweed in a club. She thought he was “well fit”, he took her to a restaurant with a piano. They got drunk and danced to Time of My Life, Goody was insistent that the bridesmaids’ eyeshadow not be “Pat Butcher blue” which, considering that she is often accused of being thick, was a brilliant bit of phrase-making.

It ended with Goody touching down via helicopter for the wedding itself (and tomorrow night’s episode). There was a raw bit of emotion as the sun set during this journey. “If I die, I’m going to miss all this,” she sobbed, before rallying. “Such a lucky girl. I don’t want anyone to take it away from me.” Whether you view the circus around her as ghoulish, you understood perfectly why passers-by applaud her.

— Thanks for the many e-mails — agreeing, dissenting and everywhere in between — regarding my “Gay bashing” column of last week, which noted the rise in casual and overt homophobia in comedy and on television generally, alongside the continued, comparative invisibility of gays and lesbians on our screens. My colleague Andrew Billen wondered yesterday if Mathew Horne and James Corden’s comedy show was “camp”, according to Susan Sontag’s definition of that word. For me, the sexualised and dismissive posturing around homosexuality takes Horne and Corden’s comedy beyond Sontag’s definition.

They are, more simply, gay-obsessed — or maybe (yet again, what a misery guts) I am missing the irony of their new movie Lesbian Vampire Killers, in which the pair play, yes, lesbian vampire killers. Don’t be so “politically correct”, right? Of course the vampires had to be hot, sexed-up lesbians. It’s integral to the plot. “Lighten up,” one correspondent recommended last week. Not just yet.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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