When three or four Tristrams get together to moan and boast and ask, in terms
of whingeing despair, what they should do about dwindling revenues, absent
adverts, parsimonious governments, sanctimonious newspapers and the
parasitic YouTube, someone will invoke the mythical name Martin Clunes — and
they’ll all sigh and cross themselves. Not only is Clunes the answer to all
television’s problems, he is the only answer to all television’s problems.
There is no format he can’t be shoehorned into, no subject he can’t bring his
naive, gently self-deprecating, witless wit and polite truisms to. He is
television’s Spartacus. Wherever he goes, he is followed by 5m viewers, who
all look at him and say: “I am Martin Clunes”; “No, I am Martin Clunes”.
Clunes is proof that the first and most important gift of television is
empathy — he is a sausage machine of porky empathy, possibly the most
empathetic man who ever lived. Sometimes I feel I am his Boswell, a man
whose job is merely to write winning captions for his mum’s scrapbook. Well,
it stops here. No more Mr Nice Guy’s nice guy. I have come to the end of my
ability to smile benignly in a humour-free manner at Clunes as he drapes
himself with the motley of some mediocre format. I am sated.
I started to feel sick last week with Islands of Britain. I realised that if I
had even the thinnest wafer more of Clunes, I’d chuck a Multi-Coloured Swap
Shop. This was not merely an exhausted concept, it had rigor mortis and it
smelt. How many more musical, elegiac, softly sentimental gadabouts of this
septic isle can we stand?
I know that some Tristram desperate to save Sunday night from slipping away to
play on its Wii said: “Let’s do islands — who shall we send? Almost everyone
with a pair of hiking boots and a copy of Pevsner is already out there with
a film crew. Let’s send Martin Clunes.” They might as well have done coastal
towns whose names start with Port, or places mentioned in the Domesday Book
— actually, I think they’ve already done that one. But no, for reasons that
nobody bothered to explain, we got islands, and Clunes set off to the north
of Scotland, and stopped when he couldn’t go any further, and stretched out
his arms to tell us that he was on the most northerly northern bit of the
British Isles. He said it as if describing something precious, as if the
fact that there was a northernmost tip to the British Isles might not have
occurred to us, as it plainly hadn’t occurred to him. He also said, with
that comforting labial grin, “It’s always a good journey when you see
dolphins.” Well, no, it’s not — not if you're on the M25, it’s not.
All of Clunes’s observations had the same ponderously sincere idiocy about
them. What marks out islands, he told us, is their sense of community.
Really? Not that they are surrounded by water? These programmes have no
script, so the words that dropped out of Clunes’s mouth and onto our
living-room carpets were all his own. That was a mistake. A big mistake. The
first rule of keeping an actor is, never let it make up its own words —
ever. Clunes is proof that no man is an island, but that’s not a reason not
to drop him into the North Sea and let him have a go.
English Heritage: the very name encapsulates everything that is most
loathsome about this island of nostalgic self-regard. Everything English
Heritage stands for is pious, mimsy, snobbish and intrusive. English
Heritage marks the death of originality, progress and hope. It will kill off
the future faster than global warming. And it was the subject of that
well-worn format, the backhandedly fond serious documentary series that is
used to examine institutions such as the British Museum, the National Trust,
Kew Gardens and almost every regiment in the army. This one may be the best
yet.
The grand panjandrums of heritage may have gimlet eyes for finials and
vermicular stonework, but they all blissfully lack Burns's incantation for
God, “the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us”. They looked
fabulously ridiculous, marvellously cast as characters from EF Benson’s
Tilling. The tiny dapper chap who runs the whole thing wears single-breasted
suits with double-breasted lapels — now, that may not mean much to you, but
for a man whose life revolves around good taste, let me tell you, it’s like
putting hanging baskets on a Palladian villa: it is a piss-elegant faux pas
from which there is no stylish return. Nothing he ever says will ever be
anything but risible.
Endgame was a dramatised reconstruction of the secret talks held prior
to the release of Nelson Mandela and the ultimate collapse of white rule in
South Africa. I apologise: you must be bored reading about my thoughts on
the systemic faults of dramatising real events in a literal Madame Tussaud’s
fashion. In mitigation, let me tell you, nothing like as bored as I am in
writing them
yet again. It seems that almost every drama project now can only be sold if
it’s a “real story”; everything is either a biography or reconstruction.
It’s tedious and falls short of the truth. Endgame failed to be any sort of
exception to this rule. It would have made a far better documentary if the
real participants could have said their own words and recited their own
narrative. The will-they, won’t-they? anticipation of the negotiations was
rather spoilt by the prior knowledge that no, they wouldn’t, and yes, they
did.
It was an expensive, self-righteous waste of time and money; but, more
important, it was a terrible waste of actors. Even by the starry nature of
these things, this was an exceptionally stellar cast — Derek Jacobi, Jonny
Lee Miller, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mbeki — led by William Hurt, a talent who
has fallen on hard scripts and an unforgiving reputation. (He can now also
be seen not doing much in Damages.) All any director ever asks of him is
that he does a lot of thoughtful silence and emotionally taut declamations
of text. Here is one of the best screen actors of our time, wasting away,
performing with a tenth of his potential. Only Mark Strong managed to make
his role fizz with menace. But that was because he had the luck to play the
baddie. These docudramas reduce actors to being bad, lazy mimics and force
them to recite yards of indigestible exposition. And all this is being done
at the cost of real, original drama. Other than soaps and high-concept
detectives such as Wallander and the misbegotten Red Riding, there is
nothing for actors to do on TV except narrate nature films. It’s depressing
to watch and depressing to review.
Compulsion was the exception to all the above, an original,
made-for-television drama with good actors that wasn’t based on anything
real at all, though the plot did seem to have been gleaned from a Japanese
manga comic; in fact, it was a rough reworking of a Jacobean tragedy called
The Changeling. It was such a gothic melodrama that the cast had to take the
story at a dead sprint to stop everyone hooting in disbelief. That said, it
wasn’t done badly. What was odd was the casting. The whole thing revolved
around the question: do you want to see Ray Winstone have sex? To which the
answer for most of us is a horrified, falsetto no. You then have to ask
yourself, would a beautiful young Indian girl from a conservative family
(Parminder Nagra) fall in unstoppable lust with Ray Winstone? Again, the
answer is, probably, you’re having a laugh.
They weren’t; in fact, everybody went about their roles with gusto, even
though the casting had plainly been done with a pin and a pint of gin. That
is, until it came to the sex scene, at which point the only believable
screwing was everybody’s eyes tight shut, not least Winstone’s. He may have
a powerful, if limited, dramatic repertoire, but making the filthy beast
with two backs on camera is not in him. He looked quite as embarrassed and
uncomfortable as the rest of us.
It is a truth that many journalists will do almost anything to get onto the
box. The far edge of the anything they will do was explored by Tim Shaw, who
appeared in Extreme Male Beauty, humiliating his own naked body while
trying to explain male vanity. This was chewed-over territory — plastic
surgery and steroids and the new naughtiness, fleeting shots of supine
willies. Our man’s concept was that he was fat and ugly, and needed to
improve himself. He didn’t have the paunch or the moves he’d promised us, he
was just plain and ordinary. Though, funnily enough, he failed to mention in
his litany of knowing self-criticism the obvious fact that he had a weak jaw
and a receding chin, which he tried to cover up with an undergrowth of
beard. I don’t think Shaw is going to be the next Bruce Parry. You have a
body for print, mate, and a face fit for a byline.
Martin Clunes: Islands of Britain (ITV1, Sunday)
English Heritage (BBC2, Friday)
Endgame (Channel 4, Monday)
Compulsion (ITV1, Monday)
Extreme Male Beauty (Channel 4, Thursday)
