Desperate Romantics (BBC Two)
Midsomer Murders (ITV1)
Anonymous (ITV1)
You know, although I’m generally an “up” kind of person, who likes only to
write positive things, and still gets excited about watching telly — it’s
the magical house-box through which all the world comes! The place where you
can see revolutions, supernovas and Del-Boy falling through the flaps! The
dishwasher just doesn’t offer this breadth of entertainment! — it
is, nonetheless, actually quite enjoyable when television occasionally turns
on you and goes totally, tragically rotten.
As the week progresses, and the dross keeps on racking up at an alarming rate,
you begin cycling through emotions that you don’t usually get to visit at
8pm on a weekday, watching ITV1. Bewilderment. Anger. Concern. Sudden
hunger. Weepiness. Leaden, dragging torpor. Abandonment issues. Loss of
faith. Absolute conviction that you should leave this country and start all
over again, in Denmark. And then, finally, as the credits roll — and you
realise that you are, once again, free — euphoria as great as if you’d just
climbed out of a car wreck. You have survived. You have survived a
week of traitorously bad telly. And as it didn’t kill you, it has,
presumably, made you stronger.
This week’s first delivery of telly knackers came with Desperate
Romantics, the BBC’s big new drama series, commissioned out of the box
of period drama marked “Hey, Teenagers! You Could Watch This! Because
Really, When You Come To Think Of It, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Was A
Bit Like Hollyoaks!”
Ostensibly, Desperate Romantics should have been a bit of a winner. For
starters, it’s about hot artists in Paisley waistcoats, and dreamy-eyed
girls with ginger-ripple hair, revolutionising Victorian art and providing
legendary images for biscuit tins, PVC-coated shopping bags and greetings
cards for decades to come. You would be expecting rustling petticoats,
scandalised Victorian matrons and bottles of turpentine a-go-go. On top of
this was the additional anticipatory thrill factor of the credit “by Peter
Bowker” — hot news given that Bowker wrote last month’s staggeringly good Occupation,
a project in which the ostensibly offputting combination of “James Nesbitt”
and “the psychological aftermath of the Iraqi invasion” turned out to be one
of the best British dramas of 2009.
In the event, however, the script for Desperate Romantics comes across
as a clearly third-rate Bowker side-project. This was, after all, a drama
that contained the lines “Look! Charles Dickens just walked in!” “What shall
we eat — ambition on toast, with a side-order of potential?” and “I am
Gabriel Dante Rossetti — half-Italian, half-mad.”
When Rossetti beamingly asked the innkeeper’s wife for “Mutton stew — and just
a little cheese”, you were inclined to sigh, “That’s not the half of
it, dearie”. Desperate Romantics is so bone-deep cheesy that it
appears to have been written with Primula, on Kraft Cheese Slices, and shot
on location in Cheddar. By Steven Brielberg.
In telling the story of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — William Holman Hunt,
John Everett Millais and Rossetti — the revolutionary artists are presented
like a cobalt-and-cadmium-wielding rock band. A smock band, perhaps. The
child prodigy Millais (Samuel History Boys Barnett) is basically Mark
Owen — all child-faced, lush and adorable. Holman Hunt (Rafe Spall) is
totally nailed up by a ferocious Madonna-whore complex, and essentially your
classic bonkers mutton-chopped shouty Victorian man. Rossetti is the group’s
lead singer — played by Aidan Turner as a cross between Jim Morrison,
pre-smack Peter Doherty, and a booze-wolf.
In the opening episode we quickly established that Victorian art is moribund
(“Where’s the flesh? The blood? The nature?”), the brotherhood are social
outcasts (“Please could you leave the gallery, gentlemen?”) and that their
friendships appear to be closely modelled on the lyrics to Wham!’s Young
Guns (Go For It!) (“We are the brotherhood! We will never desert each
other!”) The rakish Rossetti gets kicked out of his flat and turns up at
Millais’ studio, wackily bearing nothing but canvases, wine and a stuffed
armadillo. Holman Hunt gets conflicted about prostitutes (pray for their
salvation? Or have sex with them on the floor of your studio? It’s a tough
call), and, throughout, Millais looks like he’s about to stand on a beach
and break into Babe. They spend interminable hours wandering around
London, doing lairy male-bonding, and looking for chicks (“I need an
angel!”) who look pre-Raphaelite, so they can get on and invent
Pre-Raphaelism. It is, as I mentioned before, basically Hollyoaks,
but populated by demented FotheringtonThomases (“Hello trees, hello sky,
hello long-haired ladies, where’s my gin?”) Pre-Raphaelites?
Pre-Naffaelites, more like.
The week’s rottenness stepped up a gear with the return of Midsomer
Murders — a series which, in almost every aspect of its existence, is
baffling. Let us list its puzzlements, in order that we not lose our minds:
1 Despite rocking a creepy rural Gothicness — with more than 221 deaths, and
dozens of secret lives/psychoses/blackmail plots/Satanism rings (it’s
basically The Wicker Man with microwaves) — Midsomer is
still unbelievably dull. Rarely can 221 people have died to so little
dramatic effect. The body count might make Goodfellas look like Nanny
McPhee, but coming across Midsomer in the schedules still feels
like driving round a corner and finding a gigantic herd of slow-moving cows
in the road, all mooing stupidly.
2 The length. The length of the thing! This week’s episode — kicking off a new
series — was 144 minutes long. A hundred and fourty-four minutes.
That’s not a drama — that’s a telethon. The very fabric of Midsomer
seems to be some manner of magic time-granule, which can expand almost
infinitely on contact with your eyes. There were moments when, while
watching the show, I actually felt myself starting to think backwards —
driven borderline illogical by the length of time I had spent following a
single plotline. Noah spent less time on the Ark, waiting for the whole
world to drain off, than I spent watching Midsomer this week. And
he got to play with some koalas.
3 On an alarming number of times the viewer is moved to ask, “Is this supposed
to be funny?” Sudden, ominous close-ups of a roast dinner on a table. An
incongruous shot of a man, driving a ridiculously large sit-on lawn mower.
One character delivering a line of dialogue while staring at a wooden door
lintel, stroking it, and saying, “It won’t be long, now.” I cannot, in all
truthfulness, say that at least four people working on Midsomer don’t
believe they’re actually working on a sitcom, instead.
4 With DCI Tom Barnaby, John Nettles is now — since the retirement of David
Jason’s Frost — television’s most senior det- ective. How did that happen?
There is no one surely, for whom John Nettles is The Man? There is no
adjective: “Nettlesian”. And yet, since he made his debut in Bergerac
in 1981, then moved to Midsomer in 1997, Nettles has dominated
primetime schedules by delivering the two dullest, least consequential TV
detectives Britain has seen. To him, the prize. He is a default institution
— the John Major of TV cops.
For the opening episode of this series of Midsomer, some eye-rolling
adrenalin junkie had decided to take things up a notch and set the murders in
a golf club. In terms of excitement this was rather like discovering
that the herd of cows were going extra-slow today, because of extreme ill
health.
A bad man was clubbed to death on a golf course. A mysterious gloved hand — a
recurring cast member of Midsomer — removed some evidence. There was
a pigsty with £100,000 hidden under the floorboards, and an extremely long
bit of extrapolation on the exact refinancing position on someone’s house.
Currently, trying to work out exactly how so little incident took up 144
minutes of my life, I experience feelings of distress, confusion and misty
panic — as if I were trying to recall the part of an evening that followed
being spiked with a savage dose of Rohypnol.
“Still think golf’s a boring game, sir?” Nettles’s junior officer, DC Ben
Jones, asked at the end of the episode. How many people across Britain
shouted out, “Yes! For the love of God, Yes! I do!” before
collapsing on the floor, shivering? There were four in my house, for
starters.
The dead-fly garnish on this week’s bucket of swill was Anonymous,
the new celebrity prank-show on ITV1.
“What happens when celebrities want a day off?” the introduction ran — to the
immediate, incredulous answer from the viewer, “Take the day off?”
But this was not the full question Anonymous was asking. The full
inquiry was, “What happens when celebrities want a day off — and
cause havoc with dozens of cameras, ingeniously hidden from view?”
Well then, in that case, the answer is obviously, “Fill up 45 minutes of
prime-time on a Saturday night and, technically, not really have a day off
at all.”
The “killer” idea of Anonymous is that it gives celebrities
“the biggest makeover — a new face”. Thanks to a much-mentioned “five hours
in prosthetics”, Fiz from Coronation Street got rigged up as a
blonde Essex girl, the X Factor judge Louis Walsh got disguised as an
old man, and the former rugby player Matt Dawson was transformed into a camp
West End choreographer. Thus disguised, the celebrities then pranked their
celebrity friends — usually by behaving with intolerable wackiness, while
their friends acted with bemused good grace.
The essential problem with Anonymous — and it became obvious in minutes
— was the disguises themselves. While the stars certainly weren’t
recognisable as themselves, they also weren’t necessarily
recognisable as normal human beings, either. Frankly, those prosthetics were
poor. Fiz’s chin looked like it was constructed of three pieces of
pre-sliced turkey breast. Matt Dawson’s face had the alarming unyieldingness
of a Bakelite death mask and Louis Walsh looked like a statue of Freddie
Boswell from Bread, as sculpted by the blind woman in the video to Hello.
Even in a post-Simon Weston world, you would momentarily break stride on
sighting them in the street. And in every single prank, the victims
commented on how alarmingly awful the prankers’ prosthetics were.
“As soon as I saw him, I thought, ‘He’s had loads of plastic surgery,’ ”
Austin Healey said of Dawson’s wonky-Spam head.
“I just thought you’d had really bad plastic surgery!” Fiz’s Corrie colleague
Michelle Keegan howled at Fiz, who looked like Nikki Chapman wearing Craig
David’s Bo’ Selecta! chin.
You do have to wonder if the muchvaunted Anonymous “Four hours in
prosthetics!” is strictly necessary. After all, Jeremy Beadle regularly
managed to get people’s houses knocked down while wearing disguises no more
audacious than “a hat”.
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