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more of Caitlin Moran's TV reviews
Simon Schama’s John Donne (BBC Two)
Armando Iannucci: Milton’s Heaven and Hell (BBC Two)
Tourettes: No Laughing Matter (BBC One)
Who’s Watching You? (BBC Two)
When people say, “All human life is there!” about television, they don’t
really mean it. Well, they do mean it — but they’re wrong.
You only have to watch television for ten minutes to realise that, in actual
fact, scarcely any of human life is there: it’s all just cockneys, karaoke
and Myleene Klass, occasionally garnished with a lion chasing an antelope.
It’s the same old things, time and time again: “Get ahtah moi pab!”; “I’m
going to sing Wind Beneath my Wings, Simon,” simper, simper; roar,
chew, chew, chew. And then the next day, they do it all over again.
This week, though, was a bit more of a freeform mêlée than the usual routine.
We had Armando Iannucci on Paradise Lost, Simon Schama turning
himself on in the snow with John Donne and the return visit to a documentary
legend — John Davidson, from the 1989 film on Tourette syndrome, John’s
Not Mad. There was also a duff, paranoid hour devoted to CCTV — a
programme that seemed designed solely to give Daily Mail readers
something to quack about on Twitter. But it’s best we don’t think about that
too much.
First up was Simon Schama, clutching a paperback, and combusting with lust in
the snow. I love Schama — he’s still truly scandalised and thrilled about
stuff that happened 500 years ago, which, as qualifications for being an
eminent historian go, does it for me. Essentially, his entire career has
been running into the room, going “Oh my God, have you heard?
They’re only starting the bloody Renaissance!” then delivering
an hour of meticulously researched, gloatingly repeated gossip . . . er, I
mean history. Also hugely in Schama’s favour is that he is the only British
academic whose name sounds like “Schmoo”, as in the 1980s cartoon The
New Shmoo. Until the advent of a rival historian called “Captain
Cavemon” this makes him pretty unbeatable.
This week Schama was running into the room and shouting Oh my God”
about John Donne — the 16th-century metaphysical poet whose smash hits
include “No man is an island”, “For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me
love” and “O my America, my newfound land”.
Schama was totally crushing on Donne. He would, it was clear within minutes,
have done Donne.
“Donne is the poet who takes you right between the sheets,” Schama declared,
standing, swaddled, in London’s February snows. “He is the most electrifying
poet in the English language. No one else had ever anatomised love so
piercingly — its panic, its extravagance. People call him a metaphysical
poet — but to me, he is the most physical of poets. To Donne, the soul is a
thing of flesh, and blood.”
We had lingering shots of Donne’s portrait — dreamy-eyed and lasciviously
lipped. We could see that Schama believed Donne had the biggest flesh and
blood soul he’d seen. We empathised with his Donne-love — doomed to remain
unrequited for several key reasons (Donne was straight, married, and dead
these 400 years).
From Roman Catholicism to apostasy, from ecstatic wenching to celibate
preaching, from his teens until he died — through every phase of Donne’s
life, Schama loved him. He despaired — as Donne must have — that this swishy
hornbag found himself a pitied charity case with 11 children, marooned in
the countryside, by 30. Conversely, Schama seemed quite cheered by Donne’s
later years when — as a broken widower — he became a hellfire preacher,
begging God to enter his soul with the masochistic longing of some ordained
gimp.
By the end of a thunderous, horny hour, you were definitely interested
in googling some of Donne’s shorter poems, probably the sexy ones — as and
when time allowed.
As part of the BBC’s Poetry Season, Schama wasn’t the only hot
broadcaster proselytising on behalf of a favourite poet. Armando The Day
Today/Alan Partridge/The Thick of It Iannucci — a man whose CV makes
everyone else in comedy look as if they, like John Donne, also died in 1631
— stormed on in favour of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
We found Iannucci in an empty warehouse, holding a tattered copy of Lost.
He was taking a novel approach in de-grimming its dolorous, arse-ache
reputation.
“Was airy light/ from pure digestion bred/and temperate vapours bland/ which
th’only sound . . . Here,” Iannuci said, rocking up on to his tiptoes with
delight, “Milton has described, for the first time ever in the English
language, angel farts.” Having previously written a PhD on Paradise
Lost, Iannucci must have been thrilled that all that research was
proving useful in the real world. Not many people get a doctorate and
a documentary out of their dissertation.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell
of Heaven,” he quoted. “This is satanic logic. And it’s spin, isn’t it? Spin
is the Devil’s work,” said the man who is so pained by spin, he invented The
Thick Of It’s spin-thug Malcom Tucker.
In a chatty, gently loving hour, Iannucci told dozens of small stories about a
poem that — rather like China — is huge, famous, and a bit scary. Here was
Milton improbably meeting Galileo, and being inspired subsequently to
describe the heavens in mechanistic, distinctly Galilean terms. There was a
boggle at Milton’s “audacity” in reducing Eve’s cataclysmic moment to,
simply, “She plucked/ She ate” — something that had Iannucci slamming
his hand on the table in excitement. Then Iannucci flipped over on to his
back, and did a bit of inchoate revelling in the phrase “rivers of bliss”.
It really made you want to google some of the shorter bits of Paradise Lost;
until you realised there weren’t any, and gave up.
It is sometimes the conceit of critics to declare that the tragedy of
some artists is that they are compelled to say things other human beings
wouldn’t dare — and that society then damns them accordingly.
But when you see someone who really is compelled to say things other
humans wouldn’t dare, you realise that’s all, ultimately, egregious rubbish.
Milton might have courted outrage by essentially rewriting the Bible from
his point of view, but that’s scarcely walking past a Chinese woman in a
shop shouting, "Chinky! I’m a rapist! Big fat arse.”
John Davidson doesn’t want to say these things. Tourette syndrome
is like being strapped to a suicidal conversation that you don’t want to
have.
“Sweaty bit. I’ve got gay porn in my house. I haven’t really. Sorry. S***!”
In 1989 Davidson was the subject of a renowned documentary on Tourette
syndrome, John’s Not Mad. For anyone who, at the time, was an
adolescent or younger, he became a figure of instant TV freakmythology,
along with Joey Deacon, and that woman who thought she was married to the
Radio 1 DJ Mike Reid.
However, watching this follow-up documentary — Tourettes: No Laughing
Matter — as an infinitely more compassionate adult, you saw the almost
intolerable unhappiness where once you had only sniggered at someone
shouting “F***!”
Twenty years on, Davidson has the gentle, troubled face of a man who has to
apologise with his eyes for what is coming out of his mouth. Still in the
Borders village in which he grew up, he works as a caretaker, although he
can’t go into pubs because his tic makes him sometimes touch women’s
breasts. Still unmarried at 35, he blames the Tourette syndrome, and seems
stoic but weary about a life of always being “How much longer must I wait?
Sometimes you get so lonely — you just need someone to hug you and
tell you your life’s not as bad as your mind’s telling you it is.”
The most upsetting moment came at the end: his friend and his wife left the
house, leaving John standing on the doorstep. I’m sad,” he
shouted, down the road.
Finally, by way of a reminder that “all human life” will, by necessity,
have to encompass both John Donne and a bunch of self-righteous,
self-pitying squawkers, Who’s Watching You? delivered an
hour-long moan on the menace of CCTV.
In a typical moment, Richard Bilton took us to a beach where CCTV had been
installed. This was to catch dog-owners who let their hounds decorate the
foreshore with steaming ziggurats of excreta, then walked away, whistling.
One such dog-owner was Mr Shipman. He had nine dogs that he had emptied out on
the sand, and had later been busted by CCTV footage. “I was brought up on
the Channel Islands during the Nazi occu- pation,” he shrilled, “and this
city is going the same way! It’s absolutely disgraceful!”
No — what’s disgraceful is forcing councils to spend thousands of pounds in
trying to make you act like a decent, responsible human being, all you
kvetching, Clarkson-lite, self-righteous whingers who rail against CCTV,
traffic wardens, speed-bumps and health and safety inspectors.
Shame on you for insisting that we must police you into civility, you idiots.
Shame on you.
