The best thing about television is that there’s so little of it. It may look
like there’s a glut to you, but don’t mistake the variety and the volume for
quantity. The stuff that’s pouring out of the box like a magic piñata may
give the impression that there’s too much, but actually there’s hardly any,
not compared with films or theatre or books or music. Television is a baby
medium, and there is a sense that the best of it is yet to come. And it does
the toddler’s repetition of things that make it happy.
So the schedules never cease to contain surprises, just as they never cease to
be utterly predictable. Take animal programmes. One of the great successes
of television, perhaps its most profound success to date, has been to make
the living world really live, to give nature a narrative and the globe a
plot. So who’d have thought they could make must-see telly out of dead
animals? That there’d be a compelling series in animal autopsies? Inside
Nature’s Giants could well be the title for Peter Andre’s next album, but in
fact it’s cutting up big dead stuff. And who’d have guessed that after all
that Springwatch and reality vet shows, we’d be gripped by eviscerating an
elephant?
Last week’s Inside Nature’s Giants was a remarkable and utterly surprising
epic — a fin whale, beached and dead, off the coast of Ireland. The
production crew had two tides to chop it to bits, so they called in an
expert from America, who turned out to be a short, aggressive, determined
woman, the female version of Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws. She was dressed in
yellow plastic and crawled into the stinking gore of leviathan, an atheist
Jonah, or, rather, Joanna, in search of the creature’s wishbone and residual
back leg, while Irish navvies watched her with awe and scooped up miles of
stinking intestine with their JCBs, all undertaken in biblically bad
weather.
The death and dismemberment and revelation of this vast mammal looked like
magic Melville. The quality of the whole was both grotesque and gothically
beautiful. Then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, there,
blissfully, was Richard Dawkins, Darwin’s Ahab, with the stomping, wooden
delivery, doing cutaways from a studio, biological overviews, bizarrely and
drily dressed in an anorak. When Dawkins and God stay away from each other,
you remember what an interesting and enthusing biology teacher he once was.
This series is a palpable and singular hit, far better than the human
version by that spooky necromancing German in the fedora. Death has always
been what’s missing from natural history films, and Inside Nature’s Giants
brings death back to life. Long may it continue to chop up nature’s long,
short, tall and ugly.
Getting On is a new comedy about geriatric care in the National Health
Service. I say comedy — it’s not a hysterical gag-fest of puns, innuendo,
single entendres and anal-sex jokes, that other comedic staple of family
viewing. It’s the type of steely irony and incredulous sarcasm that makes
people like me nod with a grim, string-mouthed smile and mutter “Bloody
funny, bloody good”, in the manner of Geoffrey Palmer. It is the humour that
rises like gas through a suppurating swamp, the grimly comic observations
that emerge from a situation that is essentially tragic. The plot follows
the selfishness, the care, the absurdities and the bureaucracy of an old
women’s ward, and it’s directed by Peter Capaldi and written by Vicki
Pepperdine, Joanna Scanlan and Jo Brand, who also performs in it and was
once a psychiatric nurse. There is an exceptional cast, which includes the
other two writers, who allow their parts to reveal the absurdities, rather
than milk them. It’s a bit like The Office meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. What I particularly liked is that the humour has a purpose that isn’t
simply the sound of its own cackling. It’s potentially as good and barbed as
The Thick of It.
This might be an appropriate moment to pause for a spot of Jo Brand adoration.
She is the desperate man’s Joanna Lumley. Nobody on television has said yes
to more absurd, pitiful, embarrassing, underhung proposals than Jo Brand.
She has appeared in ridiculous quizzes, ruptured reality shows, dull IQ
tests, humiliating charity dos, terrible chat shows and embarrassing guest
appearances. She has agreed to every nuance of humiliation the box can come
up with, but she’s walked away with her relaxed dignity intact, having left
whatever shambolic, half-arsed programme she’s been on better for having had
her there.
There is a rule for TV personalities that, after prolonged exposure, they
become hardened and coarsened. Their public personalities get simplified and
rubbed away, their character reduced to a series of catch phrases, tics,
expressions, predictable reactions and comic opinions. Brand is one of the
few faces on television who not only appears to maintain the full colour
chart of humanity, but gets nicer the more often you see her. She seems
funny, clever, liberal, thoughtful, sensible and kind, which, let’s be
frank, is not the basket of characteristics that most cutting-edge young
Tristrams are looking for in a popular presenter. Brand is television
anti-matter, the exact opposite of everything that’s deemed to work, which
makes her appearances even more of a pleasure.
Taking the Flak is Drop the Dead Donkey stuffed with Broadcast News and a
wishful pinch of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Whenever television examines its own
hubris, you tend to get more navel-gazing than forensic insight. Foreign
newsgathering is a subject that’s gagging for a good satiric seeing-to. This
script came across like a string of well- sucked traveller’s tales from the
foreign desk. I have covered stories with news teams and, superficially,
this was really not a million miles from the reality. But it suffered from
what it was attempting to lampoon. It never looked beyond the obvious and
went for the jokes that were easiest and simplest.
It was shot on location — when real life intervened, they had to flee from
Kenya to Tanzania — but was set in an imaginary
African country suffering a farcical civil war. The ineptitude, ruthlessness
and crassness of the news teams might have been roughly authentic, but
depicting this made-up nation as a tinpot comic turn of eye-rolling natives
and Third World clichés really wasn’t fair or funny. It’s always Africa
that’s traduced as bongo-bongo land, never given the dignity of being a real
place. African wars aren’t funny. The suffering that, far too rarely,
attracts the world’s news isn’t intrinsically amusing.
Neither can it be diminished to a backdrop for white men behaving badly, just
as the danger journos put themselves in isn’t imaginary or laughable. This
series would have been brilliant had it not given up at the first sentence
to mock the afflicted and traduce the brave, and had it, like Getting On,
allowed the comedy to arise out of the pity and the stupidity. What this
should have been was hard satire. What it was was racist farce.
The most pleasurable and almost redeeming feature was Martin Jarvis playing
John Simpson. Not that he played him very well, but that he played him at
all. They may well flatly deny that this was John Simpson, but it plainly,
obviously and absolutely incontrovertibly was. Anyone who has been anywhere
close to the broad trail left around the world by the BBC’s chief
foreign-reporting panjandrum will know the writers have got the great
liberator of Kabul utterly right and spot-on. I do hope he sees the funny
side.
Just as the next series of Primeval and Robin Hood are cancelled and condemned
to live for ever on the netherworld of repeat channels, we get the next
series of Torchwood. The inexplicable success of this Doctor Who franchise
is beyond me. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be about — it’s
mostly John Barrowman trying to find his inner paratrooper. The science-camp
genre leaves me in the dark. There is no plot twist that can’t be undone
with a sonic screwdriver, no tight corner that doesn’t have a trapdoor of
supernatural gobbledegook. Here, a slow script was kept awake by a lot of
pretentious incidental music that attempted to crank up atmosphere, but
seemed only to underline the fact that they hadn’t written enough words to
fill in the time allotted.
Still, there is an almost infinite pleasure in watching the nation’s favourite
show queen attempting to act butch. It’s a bit like watching Lawrence
Dallaglio do Larry Grayson impressions. My favourite bit is Barrowman
running purposefully. He propels himself with a desperate stridency, hands
pumping with rigid karate fingers, like a man chopping invisible fairy
cakes.
Inside Nature’s Giants (C4, Monday)
Getting On (BBC4, Wednesday)
Taking the Flak (BBC2, Wednesday)
Torchwood (BBC1, Monday-Friday)
