Gill’s first law of television states that to appear on the small screen is to be instantly and indelibly hated by millions of people who previously had only the haziest, most benign thoughts about you. The hatred is open to everyone and free at the point of delivery. Your face will only have to appear for a moment, and millions of bipedal sofa-apes will stare and grunt: “Oh, I can’t bear him — where’s the thingy?” The role of television as a spittoon for social disgust is rarely explored. Orwell foresaw huge flat screens subjecting the audience to two minutes’ hate. The television of the future would be a boot stamping on a face over and over again. Actually, the truth turns out to be the other way round. The two minutes of hate aren’t directed out there but aimed in; and it isn’t a boot, it’s the text number to vote off the contestants you despise most and wish to send to the oven of oblivion.
Smart people who say television is a pernicious medium, responsible for social dysfunction and alienation, never stop to consider what our society would be like if we didn’t have this pantomime outlet for all that pent-up fury. Which naturally brings me to Full Length and Fabulous (Sunday, ITV1), the documentary — no, that’s the wrong term, it’s from a new subgenre of TV, not quite reality, well, not reality as we know it, more a sort of looking-glass fantasy. It’s a gawkumentary: an hour and a half’s mud-wallow, a joyous festival of finger-pointing, eye-rolling, guffawing, shrieking and general celeb-hating.
I watched the hosts of this filmed bash, Mr & Mrs Beckham, on their sofa and thought they were plainly decent, nice, well-meaning people, rather embarrassed by money. The only thing really wrong with them was the camera. They should never, ever appear in front of a film crew. It makes them, instantly, figures of cruel fun. Every well-intentioned gesture and rehearsed expression of niceness is a trigger for sniggers and sneers. This was a slow roast of celebrity: the silliness of the frocks, the vacuousness of the chat, the absurdity of all the fuss, the food, the flowers, the hairdos, the lip gloss, the shrieking hysteria and the embarrassing largesse.
Gill’s fifth rule of TV states you should never, ever be filmed at a dinner party. A black-tie charity event is infinitely worse. Charity is the magic cloak that’s supposed to repel irony and criticism. But even leaving aside the cynicism of eating peanut parfait for famine relief or dancing in Jimmy Choos for a kiddies-in-wheelchairs charity, television has become a huge gunk-tank of maliciousness and bullying, to be dumped on willingly victimised famous folk. It constantly expects the people it elevates to suffer horribly demeaning fates on behalf of the less fortunate. In fact, the humiliation of telethons, reality competitions and these gawking parties has become the real point; the money to black babies is now really just a fee.
I’m sure being there in the Beckhams’ back garden was good fun. People have told me it was very heaven, with Osbournes on top. But by the time it had been filtered by the camera and tipped into our living rooms, it looked like a tumbril packed with the idiotically capering and deservingly condemned. Nobody, not the celebrities, the sans-culotte audience or the invisible charities, came out of this looking good.
Monty Python mined a rich vein in parodying television presenters — the immortal Whicker Island, the exploding newsreaders. Having so astutely and accurately pilloried TV’s talking heads, it’s surprising that so many of the Pythons should have found themselves in front of the camera doing it, and also odd how little they learnt their own lesson. John Cleese was a wooden front man, Michael Palin still turns in a mean Whicker impression, and on occasion Terry Jones tips up with his look at history. As a presenter, Jones is still locked into Python mode. This time he’s parodying himself trying to be serious. In Terry Jones’s Barbarians (Friday, BBC2) he does an awful lot of walking into shot, saying something pithy, pulling a comic face, then walking out of shot. It’s funnier than he can have intended.
His serious point is that the barbarians who surrounded the Roman empire have been given a bad press, principally by the Romans. Rather sensibly, I think, the Romans arranged only to fight wars against people who couldn’t write, thereby always getting a good press. The silence left by the unversed Celts, Huns, Goths, Dacians, Vandals, Hobbits and Borrowers has been filled in for us by Jones with a never-never society of happy, productive, cultured, clever, decent, liberal nonconformists.
Apparently, the non-Roman world was a cross between Swampy’s anti-straight-road protest and Hampstead Garden Suburb. At every opportunity he points out how awful the Romans were and how obviously marvellous the barbarians must have been by comparison if they’d left anything behind to compare.
This is TV contrarianism lifted verbatim from Alan Bennett’s History Boys. The actual evidence that Roman civilisation wasn’t just superior, but was in a legion of its own, is so indisputably obvious that Jones believes it simply has to be wrong. But, of course, none of this is really about the 4th century, it’s all about now. Just as Boris Johnson used Rome on TV as a symbol and argument for European union, so Jones uses the homespun, organic, green barbarians as a sensitive, peace-loving analogy for us, with Rome standing in as the cruel, decadent, industrialised superpower America. This is the trendiest, leftiest piece of self-serving propaganda I’ve seen on the box, though I’m sure his intentions are nuttily Glastonbury.
Actually, romancing the memories of the murderous Herman the German in the Totenberg forest, and Alauric the Goth and Poohstix the Gaul, has uncomfortable echoes, not of liberal greenery, but of blood-and-earth nationalism and Eurofascism. The big question Jones needs to answer is: given the choice, where would he rather have lived — under the Pax Romana, or in the Dark Ages, when his cuddly pikey hordes had Europe all to themselves? Another barely concealed grimace of anti-Americanism was put up in Silent Britain (Wednesday, BBC4): an impassioned paean to the lost masterpieces of British silent film, misplaced, we were told, because of American dirty tricks and megabucks.
Kenneth Clark once told me a great truth about culture’s lost masterpieces: that generally they weren’t masterpieces and they weren’t lost. Usually they’d been dumped for a good reason. One or two films slipping down behind the back of the Roxy might be believable, but to lose an entire generation strains credibility, and, sadly, nothing we saw here inspired that gut-churning sense of being reunited with genius. They looked like silent films always look: mannered, mawkish, slow and sentimental enough to induce cultural diabetes. I wanted to believe there was a national treasure hidden in the BFI, but there isn’t. We were also told the masterpieces were lost because of the crassness and ignorance of critics. But who’d believe that?
