At the beginning of Nasa: Triumph and Tragedy, the throaty masculine
voice that always gets to describe space travel said something about “the
beginning of a new age of discovery”. They always say that. There are a lot
of things they always say about space and astronauts — brave new dawns,
further, faster, higher, bigger. They mention ever-expanding frontiers,
distant horizons and infinite skies. The thing is, though, the Apollo
programme and the moon landings weren’t the beginning of a new age of
discovery: the dawn was false, the horizon went back to where it always had
been. A sizeable percentage of American kids now believe the moon landings
were constructed on a stage in Texas. It’s easier for them to believe in a
conspiracy than to celebrate the fact that the moonshot did what it said on
the tin.
For anyone who sat up all night 40 years ago, watching the fuzzy
black-and-white screen until finally, in the early hours, Neil Armstrong’s
legs skipped down a ladder, looking like a bad Balinese shadow-puppet show,
and he said something indecipherable and ungrammatical, there could be
absolutely no doubt that a man had landed on the moon. And not if you’d
listened to the magnificent and missed James Burke. Apart from anything
else, the moon landing was one of the great high points of broadcasting; the
excitement, the momentous universally shared experience was all
television’s. And afterwards there was nothing to rival that excitement.
Manned space exploration shrank to the space station, a sort of garden shed
at the end of the atmosphere. Forty years later, the space race sounds like
distant history. Never before have humans retreated from a discovery the way
we did from the moon. The conspiracy is not “Did they boldly go?”, but “Why
did they never go boldly back?”
This programme on Nasa was familiar. There have been quite a number of
television reprises of man’s space flight. The best one was a portrait of
the astronauts some years back. Their stories have now been polished to
shiny anecdotage with the nostalgia of old men. They all found God up there
and came back to public speaking, good works and golf slacks. This film,
rather than being a celebration of space, was a confirmation of Pope:
“Presume not God to scan;/The proper study of mankind is man.” What we got
from the moonshot was an amazing image of the earth, the blue planet, that
galvanised and focused the early ecology movement. That and a thousand
satellites: GPS, Sky telly, mobile phones, the web and countless billions of
bits of information all bouncing out of the ether. The death of Neda, the
Iranian girl, was available around the world in minutes because of the space
race. It made us look not up and out, but more and more obsessively in at
ourselves.
I missed the start of Top Gear’s new series last week. I was in New
York. But a number of people have called me in high dudgeon to ask if I
would ask Jeremy Clarkson why he spoilt the fun by revealing that the Stig
is really Michael Schumacher. What was odd was that some of these people
were old enough to drive cars on their own, and what they were exercised
about was not that the Stig was the most successful Formula One champion of
all time, but that he’d taken his helmet off on air. Who needs conspiracy
theories when you can have gullibility instead? It seems everybody under 30
believes either nothing or everything. Michael Schumacher isn’t the Stig,
okay? I know. I know because I can reveal that I am the Stig.
I’m sure at some point James May is going to pull off his hair and reveal that
he is really Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards. He had his own solo show last week,
flying in a U-2 spy jet to the top of the atmosphere. Actually, it was two
shows, James May on the Moon and James May at the Edge of Space, made
out of one show. Actually, back as you were: it was one programme cut into
two programmes. No, start again: it was half a programme stretched thinner
than a Star Trek plot. This is depressing, miserly schedule-stuffing. The
premise was, of course, empathy for space. So May told us why he cared about
space, where he’d been when Armstrong was on the moon, which Airfix kits
he’d made, then invited us to watch him get dressed as an astronaut.
Except he wasn’t going to be a real astronaut, just a passenger in a jet.
What he failed to mention about the U-2 was the only interesting thing about
it — that at the height of the cold war, this invisible plane was shot down,
and Gary Powers, its pilot, became a worldwide celebrity for not eating his
poison pill before being captured. The U-2 is now obsolete, its role usurped
by satellites. I expect it’s used for PR and joyrides for visiting camera
crews.
All this was like watching someone’s rather nerdy holiday video. I am pleased
May enjoyed it, but what was I supposed to get out of watching him fulfil
the dream of a lifetime? His TV persona is a bluff, taciturn,
untouchy-feely, emotionally comatose, old-fashioned English bloke, which is
all fine and funny in the context of other people who aren’t. But he’s
utterly earthbound when it comes to explaining anything with feelings. The
payoff of this film, looking out from the U-2, was ordinary, badly shot and
not much different from what you’d see from the window of a jumbo jet. May
was reduced to the trainee presenter’s tautology of telling us what we could
already see. Finally, he even gave up on that, telling us he couldn’t find
the words to describe what it was like. Well, if you can’t find the words,
what are you doing in my living room, let alone at 70,000ft? Not being able
to find the words is pretty much a disqualification for appearing on
television, unless you’re Marcel Marceau.
When he finally climbed out of the cockpit, he scrabbled around in his
adjectivally neutered woolly head for something Tom Cruise-ish to say and
managed only that everyone — politicians, religious people, everyone —
should do what he’d just done, because it was fantastic. That’s not outer
space, that’s MySpace, and it isn’t television.
Famous, Rich and Homeless is a title that tells you everything that’s
wrong and morally compromised about the programme it’s attached to. I dearly
wish it could be tattooed on the producer’s neck. The premise was that we
should take five well-meaning celebrities (including Rosie Boycott, an
estimable journalist) and that they should be dropped onto the streets of
London and pretend to be homeless for a few days. Everything demeaning,
embarrassing, shallow and dumb about popular documentary-making is
effortlessly ticked in this format. It could well have been a Brass Eye
satire, but I don’t think it was.
There is an unquestioning belief among Tristrams that empathy and celebrity
are the only ways into any difficult subject, but playing at other people’s
misfortune is hideous. Perhaps they could think about having pretend cancer
or pretend cot death; maybe they could be put in a wheelchair for a week, or
pretend to be blind. Actually, I think they’ve already done that.
The celebrities were left on the streets to beg for three days. Of course they
felt deeply aggrieved on behalf of the real homeless, and angry at all the
people who walked past and weren’t homeless. And because this is
feel-your-pain TV, they all took it in turns to cry, except for Jamie
Blandford, the next Duke of Marlborough, who simply cheated — badly — got
discovered, got angry and went home for an early bath and a self-serving
whinge. I know Jamie a little, and even he would admit he’s not the
brightest bulb on the Christmas tree — in fact, if you asked him how dim he
was, he’d probably say, “Can we start with the easy ones?” — but it struck
me, as apparently it did The Big Issue’s editor-in-chief, John Bird, that
his reaction was the only authentic one. He did what everyone living rough
would do: he lied and sneaked into a hotel.
The heightened emotion and the faux revelations of being cold and hungry, with
only a camera crew for company, predictably changed the lives of our
celebrities. (Doesn’t everything?) But it didn’t do much for the homeless.
The mediation of voiceless people’s pitiful lives by a gameshow only
humiliates and demeans them further. The few occasions when the homeless
were allowed to speak for themselves were authentic moments of real interest
and compassion. Why on earth didn’t they dump the format and simply follow
the lives of the homeless; look at the real thing instead of this grim,
gossip-column charity version? I’m still infuriated and astonished by the
patronage and five-star bad taste of this programme, though not yet
speechless.
Nasa: Triumph and Tragedy (BBC2, Wednesday)
Top Gear (BBC2, Sunday)
James May on the Moon/James May at the Edge of Space (BBC2/BBC4, Sunday)
Famous, Rich and Homeless (BBC1, Wednesday)
