A meteorologist once told me windily that England was the Dad’s Army for
weathermen. Nothing dramatic ever happened, but whatever you said was
invariably wrong. We have small, spiteful, capricious weather. It’s more
eccentric than Godlike, less Thor, more incontinent curate. “You have no
idea how stressful and depressing it is for a weatherman,” he added
gloomily, “to have to continually bring scattered showers into people’s
lives. Meteorologists are by nature blue-sky people. We came into this
business for extended sunny intervals.”
Have you noticed how bright the weather forecasters were last week? All
coquettish smiles and Italianate hand gestures. Blue skies over the
Midlands, they said, with an operatic flourish and a lolly-sucking grin.
“We’re the sunshine people, and we are hot,” is their pre-transmission
mantra. Temperatures over 30C, right across the country, they beamed. And
then a health warning came up on the screen, with an NHS helpline number.
Good grief, do we really need a doctor when we get a day with the average
temperature of Provence? How can we have the most varied weather in Europe
and be unable to cope with it?
Take that bloody roof, for instance, the retractable ceiling at Wimbledon. How
much of the tennis commentary was taken up with that big attic window? How
big it was, how long it took to open and shut, how much it weighed, how much
it cost, could you see it from the moon? Oh, and the disappointment when the
weather showed no sign of raining. “Still no sign of the roof being needed,”
said the commentators ruefully. “Back to the studio for the weather. What
are the chances of a roof alert?” And then, finally, there was a spot of
rain, and the Wimbledon roof was pressed into action, like the Mulberry
harbour towed across the Channel, or the final crossbeam on Stonehenge,
hefted into position like Jordan’s Wonderbra. This was, we were assured, a
historic occasion. I’m sorry, but where do you go from there? If closing a
big window is a historic moment, what’s left for the death of kings, the
collapse of empires, the march of human progress? A great hyperbole was
stretched across a tennis court.
I watched with bated breath for the inevitable to happen. All week they’d been
kvetching, havering and whingeing about this dormer roof; it took less than
a set before they were keening and blethering about it. How the roof changed
the atmosphere, the heat, the noise and, my dear, the people. It was like
listening to dowagers complain about second-class carriages. Every year,
Wimbledon effortlessly exhibits everything that is pathetic, weird,
embarrassing and unattractive in England and the English. And every year,
with glib, blind vanity, England and the English assume they are exactly the
reverse, an advertisement for all that is enviable and exceptional in the
old place. Why can’t we just play games like everyone else? Why do we have
to make them these hideous confections of Wallace & Gromit meets
Trooping the Colour? By this evening, someone will have won, someone will
have lost — and they’ll still be on about the roof.
It was announced last week that the Church of England wants to put a new and
wholly pointless bit of roof crown on the architecturally ordinary abbey at
Westminster. There’s bound to be an almighty gnashing of princes and gothic
pooves about this. I suggest they take a look at Wimbledon and have a
retractable corona for whenever there’s a coronation or a funeral. They can
pop up their bell end or whatever it is.
Do you care about Michael Jackson shuffling off the mortal coil, taking the
long moonwalk? Do you really and truly care? I have a feeling this story is
generated by the news channels. Everything about this story smacked of the
press’s wishful thinking and frantic news CPR. What was astonishing were the
streams of truly unpleasant, shameless, exploitative people who turned up to
pick over the corpse and offer a soundbite. The one thing you can say about
Michael Jackson is that he was without peer as the worst judge of character
in the history of mankind. It was as if everyone he’d ever met had been
chosen by Endemol.
Those of you still reading will have noticed I haven’t actually mentioned a
television programme yet. It’s because this was the first week of July and,
as traditional as Wimbledon strawberries, there was nothing worth watching.
This is the season when all Tristrams pack up their children and their
expenses and hop off to Tuscany, switching their BlackBerry to Ignore. At
home, the work experience is left to dump misbegotten programmes into the
schedules — things bought in packages, ideas commissioned as bets or bribes
or while drunk or as golden farewells (I see we’ve just got Trevor
McDonald’s guide to the secret Caribbean), pilots for series that never got
beyond their maiden flight. July is when you see how thin the veneer of
talent and resources is spread over the schedules.
So we were offered UR 50 V4IN, a typical Channel 4 documentary that
should have been subtitled A Homage to Alan Yentob and the Glory Days of
Arena. It was a predictably sniggering look at personalised number plates.
What we were shown was a hopelessly confused, unsatisfactory, lazily
dismissive little film made by a gaggle of girls about men called Nigel. I
couldn’t be bothered to decipher why we were supposed to be interested. This
was what you’d expect as a second-year film-school project.
The Madoff Hustle was a weary, weak rehash of the overexposed American
pyramid salesman. The voice-over was done by Robert Vaughn, who, in the
twilight of his career, stars in a show about con men called Hustle (it’s
salutary to remember he was once one of the Magnificent Seven). I’m sure it
was supposed to be amusing and clever to get him to do the narration, but it
made the subject ridiculous and the whole programme sound like a spoof and a
spiel. A grown-up should have vetoed the avuncular voice-over.
The Best Job in the World was a more hopeful prospect, about the
inspired tourist marketing campaign for northern Queensland that got kids
all over the world to apply to be caretakers on an island in the Great
Barrier Reef, by making them advertise themselves at home, thereby
advertising holidays in Australia all over the world. The story of how a
marketing team manipulated hundreds of thousands of gullible and desperate
teenagers would have been a great subject for a documentary, but what we got
was a pedestrian and unpredictable who-will-win-it reality show. Seeing as
we all knew who won it months ago, it was spectacularly unexciting,
unenlightening and unentertaining. But it wasn’t all bad. They managed to
add a bit more free airtime for the Queensland tourist board.
If it hadn’t been such a deathly week on the box, I might never have seen The
Inbetweeners. I would never have seen it because it’s a horrible title
that implies a reality show about pre-op transsexuals, and because it’s
billed as a comedy series. It turned out to be Grange Hill with irony and
swearing. The Inbetweeners are those awkward years betwixt kid and
adolescent, that moment when you’ve just been given puberty but haven’t
learnt how to play it yet. In television terms, it’s that gap between
Torchwood and Skins, a vehicle for actors who look younger than they are.
What was astonishing was that it made me laugh. Not just once but quite a lot,
repeatedly. The person I share my so-called life with put her head round the
door and asked what that terrible noise was. Just me laughing, dear. “Well,
watch something else, you’re frightening the dog.” On the face of it,
there’s nothing about The Inbetweeners that singles it out for mirth. The
acting is junior-drama-school standard: loads of enthusiasm, little skill.
The setup of a public schoolboy dumped into a comprehensive is hardly
brilliant, but the script is tight and witty and filthy and doesn’t sag. I
think the key to it being sort of brilliant is that all TV comedians have a
relentless arrested development and are pitifully juvenile. So when you see
real adolescents telling jokes and being disgusting, it turns out to be
actually funny.
The main character, the public schoolboy, is a Mini-Me version of David
Mitchell.
The rest of the cast are childish impressions of most of the celebrity guests
on jokey quiz shows, which perhaps proves that comedy really is a young
person’s game, the younger the better. And just as youth is wasted on the
young, so jokes are pathetic on the middle-aged.
UR 50 V4IN (Channel 4, Friday)
The Madoff Hustle (BBC2, Sunday)
The Best Job in the World (BBC1, Thursday)
The Inbetweeners (Channel 4, Tuesday)
