The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron (Channel 4)
My Friend Michael Jackson: Uri’s Story (ITV1)
Will Ferrell and Bear Grylls: Born Survivors (Discovery)
This week debate rages on the BBC Nottingham website on the subject of just
who the “Greatest Nottinghamian” is.
The general consensus is that it was probably the humanitarian William Booth,
the founder of the Salvation Army, eventually one of the world’s biggest
distributors of aid to the needy.
Of course, this isn’t an entirely uncontested nomination. Sundry contributors
chipped in with “Torvill and Dean, obviously!”, “Overall Robin Hood is the
greatest” and “I can assure you, Su Pollard has made my TV very worthwhile
to watch”.
But when someone mentioned Lord Byron, the response from Nottingham was fairly
dismissive.
“What did Lord Byron ever do for Nottingham? Seems to me he just ponced about
all over Europe!” Betty, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, said dismissively.
And of course it’s here that you will — much in the style of the Dragons on Dragon’s
Den — either be “in” or “out” on the whole subject of Byron. If you
absolutely had to boil Byron down to a single existential trope, then Betty
is undoubtedly right: “Poncing around Europe like a gigantic AC/DC blouse”
is pretty much it. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage — the poem so
seismic that, after its publication, Byron said that he “awoke one morning
and found myself famous” and was never not-famous again — is essentially an
X-rated “what I did on my holidays”, in Spenserian stanzas. Wish
You Were Here presented by Russell Brand instead of Judith Chalmers.
So you can understand Channel 4’s logic when, on commissioning a lavish
two-part series on the life of Byron —The Scandalous Adventures of
Lord Byron — it drafted in Rupert Everett to helm it. “Everett’s a
sybaritic bitch, and looks good in chinos on a marina”, the thinking clearly
went. If anyone’s going to style out sitting in a bath, naked, explaining
how the lame-legged Byron “decided to be sexy and crippled”, it’s going to
be Everett. In terms of star value, if you get Everett to present on the
king of the Romantics, it’s going to very much be “Byron, get one free”.
And it’s not as if Everett didn’t throw himself into the fun side of Byron. As
the locations shifted from Portugal to Albania to Athens, Everett collated
in detail every piece of local filth that might have inspired Byron’s
infamous “Club 18-30 for lords” tour. Homoerotic shadow-puppets in Athens,
17th-century “lift-the-flaps” pornography in Istanbul, extremely graphic
reviews of the steamhouse rent boys. Everett, much like the rent boys, got
stuck in with relish. As a glamorous celebrity, he sold you Byron as a
glamorous celebrity.
But, of course, you don’t really need to do a hard sell on a man who went up
to Cambridge with a pet bear, screwed his half-sister, wrote She Walks in
Beauty and was “mad, bad and dangerous to know”.
But while Everett was very good at covering the “mad” and the “bad”, at the
end of the first episode you felt that you still weren’t in any danger of
knowing Byron any better than you did at the beginning. It was fun, and it
all looked lovely — the cinematography rendered the Med at dusk as a chalky,
Oxford-blue haze, and Everett can rarely have looked more handsome — but it
was all about as deep as a damp flannel. Given that Byron’s sex life would
have had him hanged back at home, his darkness and desperation were all
passed over in favour of a catalogue of high-octane gay sex. And the poetry
was little more than a series of flowery captions — you certainly never got
down to the marrow, platelets and iron in Byron’s prose. It was the arse of
the man, then, rather than the heart.
TV continued to hammer home the unassailable oddness of fame — real, wild,
burning, bushfire, evacuate-the-mountains fame — with My Friend
Michael Jackson: Uri’s Story, a “documentary tribute” to the late
king of moonwalk by his friend Uri Geller (pronounced “Oooori”, as we learnt
within the first minute of the programme).
Well, I say friend. Even Geller would admit that they were, at the time of
Jackson’s death, “former friends” after Geller had brokered the infamous ITV
interview with Martin Bashir. It managed to shift the public perception of
Jackson from “luminescent yet eccentric legend” to “deeply not-normal freak,
who won’t stop holding hands with that 13-year-old boy” in little less than
the hour of its running time. Even if Jackson were entirely innocent of all
the charges about the 13-year-old boy subsequently brought against him in
2005, the documentary was an undeniably unfortunate artefact to have around.
But, you know, it’s not as though Geller was unaware of the accusations
levelled against his former megastar friend. Indeed, as he recounted, at the
height of the scandal, Geller actually took it upon himself to ascertain, on
behalf of the world, just whether Jackson was innocent or not.
“There is a streak of suspicion in me,” as Geller relayed it, in breathless
present tense, looking oddly like Céline Dion, but made of bacon, “which is
why I suddenly confront him under hypnosis. I said, ‘Michael, did you ever
touch a child in an inappropriate way?’ and he said ‘No! I would never do
that!’ ”
Geller regaled all this perfectly guilelessly, as if hypnotising your friends
and then asking them if they had been messing around with some kids recently
is a perfectly normal passage in a friendship, like talking about your
formative drug experiences or what your favourite cheese is.
Poor, sodding Michael Jackson, you were apt to think. I mean, if not even the
subconscious inside your head is safe when you’re with friends then
you really did live in a pitiless and burnt world. In these circumstances,
it probably really is better to be dead. It’s not as if Geller’s
much-heralded “never-before-seen” and “private” footage of Jackson showed a
man joyously grabbing life by the nuts, and really livin’ la vida loca,
anyway. At times, Geller’s spectacular inability to correctly analyse the
footage we were watching bordered on surreal.
“That hug felt like unconditional love,” he yelped, as we watched
a Geller-Jackson embrace from 2001. In reality, “that hug” looked like a
very tired man, on crutches, with a face like a melted doll, out of his mind
on Demerol, wishing that he could sit back down without Geller crying all
over him. This moment was scarcely without back-up in the “most awful
moments in the documentary” category, although strong supporting roles came
from:
1 Jackson in Harrods, crying over the Diana, Princess of Wales memorial, only
for Geller to “cheer him up” by bending a spoon, shouting “Michael, Michael,
look!”
2 Geller referring to his wedding guests with the phrase, “Some friends’
‘celebrities’ came, too”, as if everyone has pet celebrities who they bring
out for important occasions, much in the manner of a hat.
3 Geller replaying an answerphone message from Jackson that starts with “Hello
Uri Geller, this is Michael Jackson”. Jackson relays how he “prays” to be
the first person “in the pop world” to go to the Moon, “but now I hear
’NSync want to do it, so we must take hands across England and pray”.
In this show, there was not, to paraphrase my nana, enough sanity to make a
sailor’s hankie.
The week’s final spin on the celebrity mental-scope came from Will
Ferrell and Bear Grylls: Born Survivors on Discovery. This was an hour
long, shot in HD and set in a beautiful, mountainous part of Sweden, but at
no point during the entire exercise was it explained just why Ferrell —
Hollywood actor and comedian; the legendary Ron Burgundy in Anchorman
— was going all Swiss Family Robinson with Grylls. Why he had opted to
become Will Feral, if you like.
Personally, I don’t mind a certain level of mystery in my TV shows. Often, it
helps to keep the magic alive. But as Grylls and Ferrell smashed through
ice, clambered up frozen waterfalls and ate chargrilled reindeer eye, an
increasingly shrill inner voice panicked: “Why is this happening? Have I
missed a meeting? I know most television is spurious at the best of times,
but are we now entering a new era — an era in which no explanation at all
is given for a celebrity, a survivalist and a camera crew going to the
Arctic Circle? Next week, is it going to be, like, Keith Chegwin and Nick
Broomfield, taking peyote in the Chihuahuan Desert, no questions asked?
Can’t we at least talk about this?”
As always, Grylls — infamous for booking into an hotel during his last series;
he is, perhaps, the only high-profile survivalist to claim his mini-bar back
against VAT — comes across as the campest straight man in Europe. “Will is
200lb of Hollywood muscle,” Grylls shouts, during his over-excitable intro,
“but he’s never rappelled out of a chopper before! Miles away from any kind
of medical aid, a fall here could be fatal.”
It was a statement most viewers would have a problem with. “You’re in Sweden,
Bear!” you wanted to shout. “You’re probably no more than 400m away from a
dedicated cycle-lane and a Socialist collective of pornographers! And it’s
not like Will Ferrell’s rottweiler-like management-team are going to let a
man pulling down $20 million a movie do anything dangerous! He’s from LA!
They don’t let you pretend to have sex with Cameron Diaz there without
stunt-doubles, for Chrissake!”
This extreme and obvious lack of risk was the recurring theme of the hour.
However much Grylls tried to pump things up on voiceover — “Without a source
of warmth, Will could easily slip into hypothermia” — the footage
undeniably showed that they were on the kind of two-day walk that retired
geography teachers called Susan regularly undertake in Cumbria, with little
more back-up than woollen mittens and a bag of Werther’s Original.
The non-perilousness of the situation was particularly highlighted in the
moment when, around teatime, Grylls and Ferrell “came across” a deer carcass
that “a hunter” had left behind. Who knows how many carcasses one usually
finds just “lying around” on the average tundra? But it did all feel just a
little bit ... room service.
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