Eurovision 2009 (BBC One) 1066: The Battle For Middle Earth (Channel 4) Dollhouse (Sci Fi) Bear Grylls: Man vs Wild (Channel 4) The Unloved (Channel 4)
Beforehand, it seemed an endeavour beset by anxiety, trepidation and doubt. How could the BBC recast one of the legendary annual broadcasting slots — Terry Wogan, plus hip flask, being mildly traumatised by the Eurovision Song Contest — with the upstart ingénue Graham Norton?
No matter that Norton had volunteered for the job. There were plenty of foolhardy 15-year-old boys in fake moustaches in the trenches in Ypres who volunteered. It didn't alter the fundamental fact: that the BBC was sending a boy (46-year-old broadcaster) to do the job of a man (comment on lesbian Maltese divas).
In the event, of course, the handover proved so simpatico and seamless, it was immediately embarrassing how much everyone had fretted over it. “Yes, I know,” came Norton’s voice over the opening crowd shots. “I miss Terry too.” He continued, with gregarious archness, as the location shifted to take in glamorous shots of Moscow: “I don’t know where they shot this. It’s not the Russia I’m staying in. It’s rather dreary out.”
It was clear that, as production tasks go, it’s just not that difficult to find another sardonic, Irish, one-man Eurovision Beavis and Butthead. I mean, Norton even already had a BBC contract. The paperwork must have been a doddle.
Eurovision 2009, hosted, for the first time, in Moscow, inadvertently played up to every Russian stereotype in the book. As the most spectacular, lavish, technologically advanced Eurovision yet — the stage alone contained, as Norton incredulously reported, “30 per cent of the world’s giant LCD screens” — it was as if the Russians had sat around a huge conference table, and said: “The might of Russian broadcasting must be on display, to prove glorious superiority to Western countries.”
So, inside the arena, vast Perspex tanks were lowered from the ceiling, filled with water. Inside, girls swam above the audience. “Oh look! They’ve just won a girl at a fair!” Norton giggled.
Outside the arena, meanwhile, the Russian police broke up protests by gay rights groups. Perhaps, with a few more years under his belt, Norton would have felt confident enough to mention it more, but as it was, there was a brief, sombre reference, and then it was on to the Azerbaijani entry, and their “mock-Tudor corsets”, and the Portuguese entry’s supposedly “traditional village attire”.
“Only in a village where the mayor is Liberace, dear,” Norton sighed.
The UK’s entry was Jade, in a classy, dull dress, who devoutly gave her all to some plodding piece of Lloyd Webber piecework.
Among the ribboned tambourines, and dancers in green sequined gimp masks, we looked 27 miles, and 50 years, adrift from the rest of Europe. Again.
Continuing the theme of England’s millennia-long differences with the Continent was 1066: The Battle For Middle Earth. This was one of those ideas so palpably conceived in the pub, you could practically smell the Nobby’s Nuts dust on it. In a Nobby’s nutshell, 1066 was a two-part re-creation of the Norman invasion of England. Yes, the agent handling the Bayeux Tapestry has finally sold the serialisation rights. Presumably, it had been stuck in development hell from 1077 to 2005.
Using a volunteer cast of thousands, 1066 aimed to show us pitched battle, Norman-style. It was all peasant-scythe-hittingNorman-helmet here, and womenon-rainswept-battlefield-weeping-over-the-dead there. All to the good, of course. There’s little point in inventing television, and then not using it, at some point, to make a gigantic, bloody, muddy, spoddy re-creation of the Battle of Hastings.
No, the problem with 1066 is that they tried to give it an “emotional” element. The story kicked off with a jolly peasant wedding, which was rudely interrupted by a messenger, bearing news of imminent invasion. This gave the Norman conquest less an air of “history-making AngloSaxon subjugation”, and more the air of “the ultimate Bridezilla nightmare”.
In terms of tone and believability, things were scarcely better pitched on Joss Whedon’s new series Dollhouse. Maverick ex-cop Boyd Langton, and evil techno whiz-kid Topher Brink, are staring at beautiful Echo (Eliza Dushku). Brink habitually erases and reprogrammes Echo’s mind, then hires her out to mad millionaire clients to fulfil their fantasies. I know. We’ve all been there.
“To you, she’s just an empty hat,” Boyd said, accusingly. “And you stuff a rabbit in it. Abracadabra.”
Female viewers would have crossed their legs, wincing. Joss Whedon fans would have crossed the room, wincing — and then banged the top of the TV set, shouting: “This can’t be the new Joss Whedon series. It’s just too . . . rubbish.”
But alas, it was the new Joss Whedon series and it was, alas, too rubbish. Any reasonable television-watcher would think twice before ever criticising Whedon; he did, after all, single-handedly reinvent television with Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a cultural high watermark up there with The Simpsons, Twin Peaks and The Wire. But Dollhouse is too silly, even for the man who pulled off seven series about a cheerleading vampire slayer. As discussed, it’s about programmable human “Dolls”, who live in what appears to be a gigantic spa complex. They can be hired out by billionaire clients, solving a crime here, having some sex there.
When their weekly “adventure” ends, the Dolls’ minds are wiped, and they return to the spa to do sexy t’ai chi, and blank staring. It’s a bit like Charlie’s Angels, but with a side-order of amnesia.
In the first episode, Echo was programmed to rescue a kidnapped girl who had been locked in a fridge. In the second episode she went on a date with a picky billionaire. He concluded an otherwise enjoyable afternoon by saying “I want to see if you are worthy of life”, gave her a five- minute headstart through the woods and then tried to hunt her down with a crossbow. It was, fairly provably, the worst first date in history. And very, very, silly.
Actually, pretty much the whole week’s TV was quite silly. Bear Grylls — the SAS survivalist busted for “surviving” in a hotel during his last series — returned, in Bear Grylls: Man vs. Wild.
The thing about Grylls — real name, Edward — is that although he is undoubtedly skilled at his survival chops, he bafflingly chooses to present this knowledge in shows that resemble a cross between the Bushtucker Trials and It’s A Knockout. Wheeee! There he goes, swinging on a vine across a ravine! Woooo! There he is, eating a spider, fully the size of his hand. That’s still alive.
“Wargh! That was its back end!” Grylls winced, chewing manfully on the spider. This was presumably to allay any fears that, with his reputation, he had actually just eaten a fake spider made of a Tunnock’s Teacake and eight Grissini breadsticks, all painted black by a runner. “That’s a big boa constrictor!” he exclaimed, moments later, in case we thought it was a draught excluder.
Of course, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter to what extent Grylls is authentically surviving in the wild. The most important thing is that he knows how to survive in broadcasting. This is on prime-time, Saturday night. He’s being flown around the world to indulge this errant nonsense. Fellow survivalist Ray Mears, meanwhile, is sitting quietly in a piece of Wiltshire woodland, whittling a spoon in a reflective, low-key and sustainable manner. In a dog-eat-dog world, Grylls is chowing down on a Mears panini while Mears emits small, sad woofs.
It was left to The Unloved to pull this week back from the prospect of being the silliest of 2009 so far. As you may gather from a drama called The Unloved, starring Robert Carlyle, directed by Samantha Morton, and telling the story of an 11-year-old girl being put into care, The Unloved was not a cue for getting some cava in, inviting the girls over and having a raucous Unloved party.
Indeed, the chances were that, within the first ten minutes of viewing, you would have unhappily retracted into a small, sad ball and be crying quite a lot.
In an empty house, Carlyle was shouting: “Why do you make me do this? Be quiet!” as he beat Lucy with his belt-buckle.
Based on events experienced and witnessed by Morton, who had a precarious, peripatetic childhood in and out of care homes, The Unloved was an immense directorial debut for Morton. It had an odd, affecting silence and stillness: the audio dropped in and out; ten minutes would go by without dialogue. Inspired, left-field soundtrack choices — most notably indie avant-gardist Colleen — increased the feeling of suspension. All glittering, prickly chimes and bells, it was as if this were all set in the moment after a cartoon character has run off a cliff, but still hangs in the air, legs windmilling.
And, of course, that was the point at which we were joining Lucy’s life: she jumped off the cliff when she asked her social worker to put her in care, and her children’s home left her hanging in the air with nothing to hold on to. On Christmas morning, she tells her 16-year-old room-mate, Lauren, that she loves her, but Lauren has her thirtysomething careworker in her bed every night, and her attention is elsewhere.
Lucy (Molly Windsor) had scarcely 20 lines of dialogue in 100 minutes; none of the dramatic speeches, or weeping, other scriptwriters might have imagined for her. Instead, she just mutely observed the course of events, while simply and persistently trying to find, and stay close, to anyone who might care for her.
It’s hard to think of a drama about the British care system that has had such an odd beauty and been so immensely affecting; 76,000 children are in care, the final credit noted. Embarrassed by such a miserable fact, I rang Haringey Social Services after I watched it, and awkwardly asked if there was any way I could help my local children’s home. I can’t have been the only one.
