People being transported or transmogrified into other people, sofas or
rough-haired terriers is a narrative trick as old as storytelling. “So I was
just sitting there feeding the ducks, and along comes this swan — and before
you know it, I’ve laid Castor and Pollux.” The man who becomes a woman is an
overfamiliar Hollywood plot. Mel Gibson shaving his legs, Mrs Doubtfire,
Some Like It Hot, Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie, Steve Martin in All of Me. So
when ITV decided to make a series, Boy Meets Girl, that began with
the all-important but rather hackneyed thunderstorm — which contained the
bolt of lightning that would make Martin Freeman and Rachael Stirling
exchange corporeal casings, thereby setting up the drama — it was a big
topic and we sort of knew what was coming. But never mind. Boy meets girl,
boy becomes girl, and we’re off.
It isn’t my job as a critic to offer notes to directors or actors. I’m not
here to improve them or tell them what they should have done. But within
five minutes of all this kicking off, I was shouting stage directions at the
screen. I really can’t remember when a drama got its own format so
spectacularly wrong.
To start with, the man and the woman were remarkably similar in type, and
neither of them was particularly sympathetic or likeable. The whole point of
becoming the opposite sex is to learn, illuminate and laugh at the essential
truths about the differences — and the sameness — of our genders. So, the
misogynist finds himself recast as a lap dancer, the feminist becomes a
builder, a big man gets to be a petite woman, the nun lives as a lothario.
But here we were offered a bloke who pretty much got to be himself in drag.
And here’s the other thing about this turnaround business: it’s inherently
funny. That’s the point. It’s funny and embarrassing. But for reasons known
only to its own id, Boy Meets Girl was played straight, as a sort of
whodunnit adventure, taking its tone from Ashes to Ashes.
The minute you try to be serious about this concept, it instantly beggars
belief. It’s plainly absurd. You can suspend credulity if it’s funny, but
this wasn’t. Not only was it not funny, it was terribly slow. The story
setup went on for ever, repeating itself. The audience was way ahead of the
script. We’ve seen this sort of thing before. So, there you have it. Boy
Meets Girl is a slow, unfunny drama about not very nice people you won’t
care for and who, you just know, somewhere not very far down the line, are
going to shag each other, or at least snog, and it won’t be hilarious, it’ll
be skin-crawling. Imagine trying to get your leg over a stroppy bird who
looks just like you. It would be more fun having it off with a swan.
In America, there used to be a show called Movie of the Week. This was a
made-for-the-small-screen biopic that was, more often than not, the
heart-warming or inspirational story of a baseball player who got cancer or
a schoolgirl country singer or a small boy who walked 1,000 miles to find
the house his dog had moved to. That sort of thing. They were almost without
exception desiccatingly awful, and I was reminded of them by the opening
credits of Best — His Mother’s Son, the heartbreaking
story of a young footballer whose mother is an alcoholic.
The difference is that, over here, we’ve rather elevated the genre to be
faction or docudrama, and instead of having actors named Flint Dang and
Candy Pink, these biopics are cast with some of the finest thespians known
to the boards. In this case, the Irish boards. They were given a potato
famine of a script. What there was of it was rotten. George Best’s story is
more familiar to most of us than our own grandad’s. He was the first
celebrity life-crash. The journey he took has become a motorway, a celebrity
dodgems. But Best was the first, he invented it. This film chose to look at
the less well-known and, it must be said, less interesting footnote of his
family back in Northern Ireland and his mother’s swift slide down the
bottle, which was to become the precursor of his own, longer decline.
Now, I know a little about alcoholism. The central truth of all addiction,
which is never shown on the screen, is that it is dumbly repetitive,
relentlessly tedious. The only thing that’s more boring than living with a
drunk is living as a drunk. And just by chance, this drama managed to catch
the essence of that. It was quite as dull as drinking cooking sherry on your
own. Not much happened, and when it did it was uninteresting and had an
Ulster accent. They performed with the utmost, methodical professionalism.
After a while, I thought this is what it must be like to have Cirque du
Soleil come and baby-sit.
Right at the end, after the obligatory little bit of type to tell us what
happened next, there was a clip of Best talking to Michael Parkinson, a sad
and brave remembrance of waste and valour; and in that soundbite was
everything that had been missing and wrong with this film. The fictionalised
Best never did much more than smile and say sorry. He was an uncharacter, a
hole around which his tiresome family revolved. So many biopics fail to
grasp the great lesson of Shakespeare, that drama and truth are not to be
found in stamp collections of facts or in rearranging the furniture. Who
cares that Macbeth was probably rather a diligent and decent man who prayed
a lot and went to bed early and that his lady wife baked dundee cakes?
Best’s life was a classical tragedy, with hubris, nemesis and catharsis.
This sorry drama would have none of it. They even stripped him of his pathos.
Bee Wilson turned up in two separate documentaries as a knowledgeable talking
head. One was a programme about bees, and the other was Farm to Pharma,
a partisan kicking of manufactured food that also boasted Sheila Dillon,
more often heard than seen: she is the producer and presenter of Radio 4’s
The Food Programme, once a warm and eccentric gallimaufry of plumbable
knowledge, a sybaritic wander around the dining rooms of gastronomy, but
under her auspices a Stalinist rant on behalf of salad and peasants.
But it was Bee who really snagged the eye. One of the nice things about
television is that it encourages, nay, demands that we make instant
decisions about people. There’s none of that careful consideration, there’s
no weighing up to do. In the flash of a pixel, I knew I really quite
violently disliked Bee Wilson. I knew that her smiley, podgy head, with its
aloof mien, would forever spout the trite and dismissive truisms of the
born-again eco-amateur orthodoxy. I looked her up and, indeed, she was the
food critic of the New Statesman. Her thesis at Cambridge was on something
like French utopian socialism, and she’d written a book on bees and another
on adulteration, which is like adultery but with cheese. I felt vindicated.
If that’s not the CV of a figure worthy of universal opprobrium, then I’m
not all sweetness and light.
Bee said the modern chemical cookery of Heston Blumenthal, and presumably
elBulli’s Ferran Adria, was so ghastly and masculine. It’s always men, she
added, as if this on its own were incriminating enough. They want to make
things like tobacco ice cream, which nobody has ever made before because
it’s so obviously horrid. Well, actually, it isn’t. Tobacco syrup is utterly
delicious and has been made for years.
Nothing she or this programme thought was really about food. So many
documentaries that pretend to be about food are nothing of the sort. They’re
not about the pleasure of it, the hospitality of it. They’re not about
appetite or inventiveness, epicurean skill or celebration. They’re not
really about eating at all. They’re about food as apocalyptic poison,
plague, pillage and profit. And most importantly, for ladies like Bee and
Sheila, they are food as the new class identifier. The contents of your
cupboard mark you out as one of us and not one of them. Bee is the new plump
and homespun debutante of eco-snobbery.
The premise of the programme, that chemists and mass production had no place
in our kitchens and had produced nothing but ghastliness and malnutrition,
was all wrong. All cooking is chemistry. Every breakfast is science. An
apple tree is mass production. And the last century and a half has produced
a remarkable cornucopia, a renaissance of industrially produced food. Our
palates and our plates overflow with wonderful things nobody had ever eaten
before, ingredients and dishes that are at the heart of our culture: brown
sauce, worcester sauce, Tabasco, Branston Pickle, golden syrup, Jaffa Cakes,
crumpets, tinned peaches, pineapple chunks, Ideal milk, Bovril, Marmite,
Ovaltine, cornflakes, chewing gum. And Bee’s bee documentary failed to
consider honey — how can you make a whole programme and barely mention
honey? It also failed to point out that a beehive is a mono-crop factory
farm where the livestock is worked to death.
Boy Meets Girl (ITV1, Friday)
Best — His Mother’s Son (BBC2, Sunday)
Farm to Pharma: The Rise and Rise of Food Science (BBC4, Thursday)
