Read more of Caitlin Moran's TV
reviews
Britain’s Got Talent (ITV1)
Big Brother (Channel 4)
My Monkey Baby (Channel 4)
Kate Adie Returns to Tiananmen Square (BBC Two)
River Cottage (Channel 4)
Britain’s Got Talent reached its finale on Saturday. Buoyed by a
preceding week of hysterical front-page tabloid stories, the results show
ended up with a phenomenal 19.2 million viewers; 19.2 million! If the Prince
of Wales contacted Diana, Princess of Wales in a séance, and they got
married all over again at St Paul’s Cathedral it wouldn’t get that much.
People just don’t watch TV in those amounts any more. They’re off
paragliding, or having IPL hair removal on their backs, or doing Second
Life cybersex.
But no. Last Saturday Britain went without its cybersex and sunny weather and
tuned in to watch the shock defeat of Susan Boyle instead. For those who
have managed to avoid the show so far, Boyle is an unruly-haired 48-year-old
church worker from a Scottish village, who was braindamaged during a
difficult birth yet has an unexpectedly proficient voice for musical
theatre.
After her discovery on the Britain’s Got Talent audition shows
six weeks ago, and her Barack Obama-beating 100 million hits on YouTube, the
world’s media have delighted in treating Boyle as some singing virgin
Forrest Gump. They have been metaphorically shouting, “Run, Forrest, run!”
every time she appears on television.
Alas, on Saturday it turned out that Boyle could run no more — she
unexpectedly lost, at the last minute, to a high-energy urban dance crew
called Diversity. This news was immediately reported across the world —
particularly in the US, where Boyle has been championed by Oprah Winfrey and
profiled in Time magazine. The report contained mentions that some
members of the audience who were — with extraordinary irony — “tired of the
Susan Boyle hype” had booed her performance.
Within 48 hours of her shock defeat a wild-eyed Boyle was checked into the
Priory Clinic, with “emotional exhaustion”. A weekend of “erratic behaviour”
had led to her being escorted from her London hotel by police and
paramedics. This was such alarming news that Gordon Brown, appearing on
GMTV, said that he had contacted Simon Cowell to check on Boyle’s progress.
Given that the singer’s breakdown happened in the same week that ten-year-old
Hollie Steel froze in the live semi-finals — alternately sobbing “Mummy!”
and “Please give me another chance, Simon!” when she botched her Edelweiss
— it does start to make the success of Britain’s Got Talent
look a bit . . . unsavoury.
What are we — a grown country — doing with this unsuitable fascination with,
and subsequent media pursuit of, a woman with learning difficulties and a
ten-year-old child? I don’t know whether it’s because I’ve been a mother too
long, but when children play a game that makes anyone else cry, we stop the
game. If we’re not even mentioning stopping Britain’s Got
Talent then we must all, essentially, be getting kind of . . . turned
on by all this hope and innocence being crushed under a landslide of
unendurable media attention.
Boyle and Steel have not been on a lovely primetime “journey” — they went on a
horrible emotional endurance test, which they were wholly ill-equipped to
deal with. Proper celebrities don’t have to put up with all this
harassment — they have security, and PRs, and managers, and agents, stylists
and years of experience and training. Steel, on the other hand, went back to
school after her first appearance. Boyle attended her first photocall in a
pair of ill-fitting slacks, with the fly-zip undone, and was sniggered at on
the front page of every newspaper. And now she’s in a clinic.
You can’t send an amateur to do a professional’s job.
Of course, if Big Brother were a person, it would give its left
eye to be able to exploit people on the same level as Britain’s Got
Talent. It would be thrilled to get one of its contestants so
rattled by constant tabloid headlines that he ended up in a psychiatric
hospital. After all, Big Brother’s most infamous, and totemic,
graduate was Jade Goody. That is a simple fact to understand.
Alas for Big Brother, however — for it doesn’t really have the pulling
power to ruin someone these days. From 9.4 million viewers to 4.7 million,
it has suffered a slow but inexorable slide, both in terms of ratings and
the viewers’ demographic profile. Back in 2000 the chattering classes were
all over C4’s “social experiment”, and phoning in their votes for the
singing lesbian ex-nun.
In 2009, however, it’s become the province of tabloid up-skirt pap shots. The
new contestants went in on Thursday — too late for me to see — but who will
be watching them by the end? If we get that “barbecue summer” that everyone
has been predicting, this could be the series when the show finally enters
its death throes. After all, 9pm is around the time that barbecue coals
reach their optimum-grilling phase.
More C4 freak-showery with My Monkey Baby, a documentary on some
of the 15,000 Americans who “adopt” a baby monkey and treat it as their
child. If you are trying to be positive about this idea it’s worth
remembering that no one thought Clint Eastwood weird when he stuck that
orang-utan on the passenger seat in Every Which Way But Loose. And it
is frankly refreshing to see a C4 documentary that isn’t about sexual
deviants or the grossly obese.
However, such caveats are hard to bear in mind when you are watching a
worryingly intense woman from Missouri sitting on a flouncy bed, applying
lipstick to a capuchin, crooning “Mah baby loves cookies, cakes, donuts,
cupcakes, candy, ice cream, sugar. But she don’t like bananas.”
And then giving the monkey a manicure. And then taking it to a diner, in a
buggy.
From the monkey’s point of view, I guess it’s better than being shot in the
face and then turned into a hat. But my God, the humans don’t come out of it
well. We look really weird. If animals ever learn to talk, all the pigs,
horses, dogs, monkeys, chickens and whales are going to get together and
have such a bitching session about us.
In a week when the Western world seemed to be content to represent
itself as an avaricious emotional retard, drooling slightly as it tried to
chat up its own reflection, Kate Adie Returns to Tiananmen Square was
a welcome hour of brain and balls. It’s 20 years since the pro-democracy
demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Adie is looking from the same hotel
window from which she saw it turn into a massacre. “At the time, I couldn’t
stop crying,” she says, staring out across the square — but, of course, she
did stop crying: she and her crew went out on to the streets, and spent days
collecting stories and statistics and images, in places where the floor
“wasn’t running with blood — it was deep with it.
We were wading through it.” Adie herself was shot in the arm, but continued
broadcasting.
Now returning to Beijing, for the first time in two decades, Adie was soon
slipping out of her hotel room again, and turning in another tranche of
stories, statistics and images. Constantly followed by China’s oppressive
security forces — two of her interviewees were arrested immediately after
she talked to them — Adie found that while China had changed (“There’s a
glittering economy, a middle-class, and Mercedes where there were once
bicycles”), the system that ordered the People’s Army to kill the people has
not.
Adie interviewed people who have served six months in jail for writing poems
about Tiananmen, who are permanently banned from the country for taking part
in the protest.
She interviewed Mrs Zhang, a mother whose massacred son was found buried in
Tiananmen Square, in the grounds of a school. Eventually, the children at
the school protested about the smell and his body was disinterred and moved.
With the massacre never written about, and banned from the internet in China,
the children could smell the dead — but could not know who they were, or why
they died. It was a hard metaphor in a clear-eyed, superior and
old-fashioned piece of documentary-making.
God, we need Kate Adie to make more films. She can cut through so much
stupidity, laziness, disorder and malignancy with one sentence. She can tell
stories about whole nations. It’s an amazing gift to have.
Finally, the return of River Cottage, which is like a fragrant,
late-afternoon breeze, blowing across the schedules like some broadcasting
relaxation exercise. Oh, what a righteous, lo-fi world of pea-sowing,
pig-killing and mead-consumption Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall lives in.
This week, HFW did something deeply satisfying with parsley, and made a
gigantic binful of gorse wine, which he casually left to ferment under the
kitchen table. Next week Hugh is so supremely at ease in his life that he is
apparently going to spend a whole day trying to make garden slugs palatable.
And that, let’s face it, is an incredibly useful thing to be doing.
Could we not all aspire to this — laid-back slug recipe experimentation, and
horticulture? No one ever got a police escort to the Priory when their
biggest ambition was to grow the biggest pumpkin in Dorset. And that’s just
a fact.
