I was away for the big golly-gosh moment on Britain’s Got Talent,
but so many of you told me about it, with that “did you see?” excitement,
that oh-so-rare coming together of the nation at the electronic hearth, that
I just had to go and see it. No moment is fleeting any more, the whole of
life can be rewound on YouTube, which is the sort of dementia of the
collective id, random images and memories. I must say it was a bizarre
thing. There’s this terrible, lumpy, misbegotten, blinking, tongue-tied
creature, who is also a starstruck showoff, with a barnet like Queen Kong’s
pubic hair and a horribly embarrassing flirtatiousness. And just as I was
sniggering, the mouth opens and out comes this noise — and it still sounds
just like the same old Piers Morgan.
Historians always say, over steepled fingers and hooded eyes, their heads
tilted to one side, that only the very naive think history is really about
the past. Oh dear me, no — history is a quizzing glass through which we see
the present. It’s very annoying of them. It’s a bit like saying breakfast is
the harbinger of lunch. I wonder what television’s inability to let go of
the Tudors is supposed to say about the present. How many more times are we
going to have to sit through Henry VIII’s bizarre family life before the
groat drops and we get the point? What is it about this fat monster that’s
supposed to be so current and relevant?
This week, it was announced that births out of wedlock have overtaken
marriages in this country, which is quite the opposite of Henry. He was a
vain, self-pitying bully who made a prat of himself abroad, was a lousy
politician, a worse diplomat, a man with few scruples and fewer morals, and
an erratic military commander whose greatest martial success, the battle of
Flodden, was actually achieved by his wife when he was nancying about in
France.
In Henry VIII — Mind of a Tyrant, David Starkey led us through
the overfamiliar progress of Henry’s sorry passion for Anne Boleyn and her
vile dispatch. As is traditional with Starkey’s Tudorbethan stockbrokers’
histories, this was told with actors declaiming in costume, like an animated
Madame Tussauds, a cheap, tatty tableau moribond. The whole thing came
across as Hello! history, a series of alternately salacious and fawning
anecdotes and gossipy innuendos. Starkey is a top-down historian, a
nostalgic snob of the sort that collects souvenir egg cups; a man who, in
the high Victorian sense, likes the past to be a pageant of gaily accoutred
titled folk, the more titled the better. The world is moved by the very few;
the masses are merely their ball bearings and barely get a mention unless
they are diseased or revolting or dead. According to Starkey, the
Reformation is a result of Henry’s fat-boy libido: he would have us believe
that of all the countries in Europe that became Protestant, England alone
did so not through agonised conviction or religious conversion, but because
the king wanted a better class of shag.
Starkey may know a lot of Tudor knicker-drawer tittle-tattle, but he either
doesn’t know or doesn’t care about any parallel social or ecclesiastical
history. Rather more disturbingly, throughout his plummy backstairs
narrative there is the constant hum of misogyny, a hint at distaste for
women. It’s Henry’s victims who get at least partially blamed. Women are a
cause, and occasionally an effect, rather than people. None of this is
original to Starkey. The truth is that history isn’t necessarily about the
past, as it isn’t invariably a vision of the present, but it is always an
insight into the historian.
Tudor historians are an odd collection. It’s an era that attracts historian
interior decorators and fey academics who might otherwise be drawn to
romantic fiction. Historians so often cross the line to join in their
specialist age. They imagine it reflects the present because to them it is
the present.
Starkey is an Elizabethan courtier, bitchy, scheming, sexist, sycophantic and
oblivious to the voices outside the window. And someone really should have
told him that that suit, that beige suit, is way too small.
Like Henry, he had a burst of girth and a gouty temper.
Leonard Rossiter is still famous for two brilliant sitcoms and having the
largest penis in all of light entertainment. In the remake of Reginald
Perrin, there was a joke about Reggie not needing e-mailed penis enlargement
— I do hope this wasn’t merely a coincidence. The born-again Perrin is
Martin Clunes, famous for having the biggest ears in light entertainment.
And you know what they say about big ears — very secure glasses!
I know a lot of people object to remaking classics, as if it was somehow
culturally immoral, like finding a stranger at the door saying: “I am the
reincarnation of your dead husband.” I can’t raise any ire over this. It
only seems to apply to comedies. Nobody objects to endless remakes of Robin
Hood or Sherlock Holmes. Still, Reggie Perrin is an odd choice for
reincarnation. It was such a specific vehicle for Rossiter: the suited
anarchist who rails against the surreal absurdity of office life.
The dullness of middle-class mediocrity and repetitive white-collar work was a
constant riff in 1970s fiction and television comedy, with shows like The
Good Life and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? But offices aren’t the
same environment today. Technology has completely changed them. Clunes has a
secretary and refers to his computer. But a secretary is a job description
that has been made redundant by computers everywhere except in sitcoms,
where the poor girls still have to walk on to be the receptacles of tired
old jokes. So the remake of Reggie Perrin starts off with a sense of
nostalgic unreality, and you realise it has already been more accurately
remade by Ricky Gervais as The Office.
Clunes, on his way to work, walks past Sunshine Desserts, where Rossiter raged
at having to do market research for ice creams. He now toils in a company
that makes razors. This isn’t a comic improvement. And Clunes’s character is
much cosier and more cuddly. What’s missing is the naked current of fury. It
was Rossiter’s barely contained rage that made sense of Reggie Perrin’s
revolt and disappearance. Rossiter was an undercover terrorist. Clunes is
merely an above-the-line victim. Is it funny? Not really. Actually, not
remotely. Clunes isn’t funny. It’s not what he does. He’s popular instead.
He’s a popular unfunny funny man, hugely likeable. Funny people are
generally unpleasant. Clunes has swapped being unpleasant for not being
funny. He’s one of the very, very rare actors who is format-proof. His
appeal transcends the script. This isn’t so much a remake of Reggie Perrin
as another gentle outing for the same old Martin Clunes, who shows no sign
of disappearing.
