The Apprentice (BBC One)
T. S. Eliot (BBC Four)
Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (BBC Two)
That Mitchell and Webb Look (BBC Two)
Ross Kemp in Search of Pirates (Sky1)
This week television offered up an unusually varied buffet of White Alpha
Males in all their many manifestations. By last night there can barely have
been a sub-species left unrepresented in broadcasting. On the menu — or the manu,
if you will — we had:
Tiny Jewish working-class bear made good (Sir Alan Sugar, The Apprentice);
Bowler-hatted banker secretly exploding poetry behind his desk (T. S.
Eliot); Gay, bald, international comedy power-player (Matt Lucas, Krod
Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire); Cambridge wit rapidly
approaching National Treasure status, plus deeply sensual, Sarlacc-mouthed
sidekick (David Mitchell and Robert Webb, That Mitchell and Webb Look);
shouty Grant Mitchell from EastEnders, continuing his bogglingly
unlikely second career as a Bafta-winning documentarist (Ross Kemp in
Search of Pirates).
It was one hell of a selection box of Caucasian testosterone. It was random.
It was, indeed, mandom.
In fact in many ways the only workable comparison point of equally arbitrary
variety was . . . Coco Electric! — the imaginary chocolate brand from
Saturday’s Apprentice. Devised by the finalist Yasmina, Coco
Electric worked on the hitherto unexplored premise that what everyone really
likes about chocolate isn’t its meltiness, or its trace chemical resemblance
to a minor sexual experience, but, in fact, its ability to make you yelp,
“What in the holy hell was that?” while violently spitting the contents of
your mouth on to the floor. The range included “Strawberry &
Basil”, and “Space-dust & Chilli”. It might well have
included “Ant & Egg”, judging by the look of ambushed horror on
the faces of those eating them.
Battling with Yasmina for the bafflingly coveted chance to become “the next
Lee McQueen” was Kate — the blonde who came across like a replicant air
hostess on a spaceship destined to plunge into the Sun. Kate’s chocolate
idea was “Chocs d’Amour” — his’n’hers chocolates “to share”, packaged in the
world’s first chest of drawers for confectionery.
Of course, in a world where the Cadbury’s Picnic already exists, many would
consider the whole idea of trying to come up with a new chocolate futile, at
best. The best chocolate in the world has already been invented. The
Cadbury’s Picnic has, after all, caramel! Peanuts! Raisins! Crispy cereal!
It’s all killer, no filler! What manner of blindly optimistic fool could
seek to challenge it? Given this simple fact, Yasmina had some
understandable mid-project doubts about Coco Electric. But, like Theo to her
Vincent, the Apprentice legend Philip was on hand with advice on the
true nature of genius: “It’s like Pantsman, Yasmina. They didn’t get it at
the time, but I tell you something — they will eventually.”
“No — that’s a rubbish example, Phil,” Yasmina said. It was, perhaps, the
moment that she won the show. Kate, after all, had chosen to interact with
Philip’s gormless, deludo cheer with a wholly opposite tactic — and had sex
with him, instead.
For many of us, however, enjoyment of The Apprentice was very
short-lived. It lasted four days, to be exact — for on Thursday, the return
of That Mitchell and Webb Look served up a clinical assassination of
the show, and its viewers. Webb and Mitchell are BBC producers, in the
process of inventing The Apprentice. Webb is asking Mitchell why
anyone would want to watch a show where, every week, a bunch of idiots screw
things up.
“Everyone will think that they’re the only person to have
noticed that all the contestants are idiots,” Mitchell beams. “I’ve got a
hunch that, for some reason, people feel this never stops being worth
commenting on.”
“And remind me,” Webb asks, “how do these ironic viewers show up in the
ratings?” “They show up the same, my friend. They show up just the same.”
The culturally incisive nature of Mitchell and Webb’s sketch comedy is one
thing. Increasingly, however, the news that many will want to know about the
third series of That Mitchell and Webb Look is this: currently, just
how scorching do Mitchell and Webb look? Has it become any easier to work
out which one you’d have sex with first? As a diligent correspondent I can
report that the important facts, viz the first episode, are:
Mitchell in full Victorian rig, shouting “Have you got any idea how hot I am?”
Mitchell lounging on a sofa reading a newspaper, just like he would if he were
your husband, and you lived together.
Webb as Santa’s evil brother, Russ, singing an absolutely filthy,
18-certificate version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town — and then
kissing a woman with his sensual, endless man-mouth.
Insane man-hotness aside, this third series of Look has an unexpected,
and profoundly thrilling, sense of going up a gear. In the first episode, at
least, Mitchell and Webb seem to have chucked out all the old stalwarts — no
Numberwang, no tramps with head-cams — and, instead, turned in the tightest,
brightest half-hour of sketch comedy since A Bit of Fry and Laurie.
If the rest of the series is as effortlessly superior as the first episode,
Mitchell and Webb will probably be credited with reviving the long-dormant
TV sketch show. And making a long, hot summer borderline unbearable for a
lot of women.
At the very opposite end of the comedy scale was Krod Mandoon and
the Flaming Sword of Fire, a fantasy satire starring Matt Lucas. Anyone
who had seen the title would have calculated the chances of it not
being bad as pitifully low.
It is a title that makes it very clear that you are entering a world where the
name “Krod Mandoon” is a potent comedy currency — a world where knights say
“Ni!”, and every night is 2-4-1 down the Student Union bar. Krod Mandoon
(played, with wilful casting randomness, by Sean Maguire, aka Tegs from Grange
Hill) is an uptight warrior. His gang of freedom fighters include a
black jive-talking genie with erratic magical powers, and Muldoon’s
pugilistic girlfriend — a foxy pagan who refuses to wear knickers. This
threadbare band of wackily inverted stereotypes has an arch-nemesis:
Chancellor Dongalor (Matt Lucas), whose comedy chops are left uselessly
over-revved on lines as poor as “I am scared of nothing! Except turtles.
They give me the willies”.
The problem with the show is that, as a genre, fantasy is, of course, already
absolutely ludicrous. You can’t satirise it by making it even more
ludicrous — to do so just results in an Upper Sixth trainwreck of
wee-wee-jokes, mild homophobia and gurning.
Anyway, if you want real escapism, the life of T. S. Eliot makes for
far better entertainment. Despite being ploddingly over-long (an hour and a
half! Almost as long as Singin’ in the Rain) and bafflingly
unforthcoming with some hardcore metatextual analysis, the Arena on
T. S. Eliot still had a good story to tell — simply because the story of T.
S. Eliot is a good story to tell.
Eliot, born in the American Midwest, reversed the migratory patterns of the
previous 200 years and went back to the Old World — to London, England — to
find himself, and make his fortune. Reinventing himself as a bowler-hatted
man at Lloyd’s, Eliot had a natural business facility and was destined for a
gold watch-chain and the board of directors. But his health was poor: his
heart beat almost twice as fast as a normal one — surely the perfect
ailment-as-metaphor for a poet.
Where once poets had been blouse-wearing lushes, swooning around orange
groves, Eliot forged a new paradigm. By day, behind a desk, crunching
figures. By night, secretly conducting the English language’s equivalent of
the Moon landings.
He was still working 9-5 in banking, tea-break at 11am, when The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock was published in 1917, and, as Arena had
it, invented modern poetry in its third line:
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like
a patient etherised on the table Seamus Heaney had the best Eliot anecdote,
via Ted Hughes, who had, once, met the majestic Eliot. “What was it like?”
Heaney asked.
“Like standing on a quay, watching the Queen Mary sailing, very
slowly, towards you,” Hughes replied.
Imagining the Queen Mary sailing, very slowly, towards you is
all well and good — but imagine if, as you were watching, the Queen
Mary was attacked by pirates with powerful outboard motors!!!
That’s the kind of very real possibility that Ross Kemp faces in Ross
Kemp in Search of Pirates.
The whole premise of the show is oddly fitting. After all, until recently,
both pirates and Kemp have been light-hearted figures of fun in the national
consciousness.
In recent months, however, we have all had to radically alter our views on the
matter: Somali pirates are posing a quantifiable threat to international
trading routes, and Kemp has won a Bafta as a documentarist.
Everything we know has been turned on its head. This is serious.
In Search of Pirates shows why he does so well at his new trade. Kemp
was off the coast of Somalia, in a Royal Navy dinghy. Heading towards a
suspected pirate boat he was shouting: “The American battleship helicopter
has been scrambled — so it could be a bit of a bun-fight!”
By the end of the first episode Kemp had sketched out the humanitarian
disaster in Somalia that led to the resurgence of piracy, shown us a pirate
who — in his military jacket, sunglasses and face-scarf — looked exactly
like Michael Jackson, and stood by as HMS Northumberland offloaded 16
rounds into a pirate skiff and turned it into a fireball. Next week, Kemp
interviews some actual pirates. I can’t work out for who that will
ultimately be weirder: them, him or us.
