Would you please convey the following question to Mr Gill in connection with
his comments on The Impressionists in Sunday’s Culture? Is solipsism a
solecism?” Actually, it was misheard by a copytaker. Easy enough to do.
Nobody who knows what both words mean could possibly have misunderstood the
meaning in context. I must get three or four of these a week, couched in the
same faux grandiose, finger-wagging tone. All journalists get them. Sad,
furious, numpty letters from grammar’s angry brigade.
And now the bandwagon of punctuation (Sudoku for the intellectually insecure)
has been given another shove with a quiz horribly called Never Mind
the Full Stops (Thursday, BBC4), where Julian Fellowes reads a
florid, otiose Autocue with a smug bad temper and preens at his own
leather-bound cleverness. “Jolly Good” Fellowes is a cultured and amusing
man, who wrote Gosford Park and made rather a good marriage to a Kitchener,
doncha know. But this wordy, public-school snobbery brings out the worst in
him; indeed, it brings out the worst in screeds of white, middle-class,
middle-aged, middle-English people.
Have no doubts, this colonic one-upmanship isn’t about apostrophes or syntax:
it is code, a metaphor, a thin veil for class snobbery and a sniggering
elitism. The quiz was at best boring — watching people analyse meaningless
paragraphs is hardly Jeux Sans Frontières — and at worst it was laughing at
people who say “like”, and at badly spelt signs in Indian restaurants. This
show isn’t a robust, jocular response to political correctness; it’s a
class-ridden snug-bar embarrassment, and David Aaronovitch, a liberal
essayist and former president of the National Union of Students, looked
suitably uncomfortable to be a contestant. Janet Street-Porter, the champion
of youth television, with a voice that could strangle vowels in their sleep,
should have looked uncomfortable, as should Ned Sherrin. Only Carol Thatcher
has an excuse for being oblivious, too thick of skin and genes to notice.
“Jolly Good” Fellowes looked dreadful in some sort of nasty blazer. Before
lecturing us on the content of our gobs, he really ought to learn to dress.
You never, ever wear a double-breasted coat unbuttoned — it’s too Charlie
Publican.
If anyone wants to know the rules of Never Mind the Full Stops or, indeed, of
grammar, it’s simple — there aren’t any. There never were. There are only
conventions and habits. Nobody speaks better English than you do, whatever
they say or however they say it. The language doesn’t belong to Lynne Truss,
Julian Fellowes, Fowler, the BBC or the Queen. It belongs to everyone who
has something interesting to say.
The trouble with football dramas, Brian, is that they are always so
unbelievably overdramatic. But then, just to prove that fact can bend the
ball of credulity round the wall of fiction, the very week when All
in the Game (Thursday, C4) was broadcast, we had Spurs getting mass
poisoning the night before their biggest match of the decade and a
completely untried 17-year-old being picked to play for England in a World
Cup. You couldn’t make it up.
Certainly, the writers of this pedestrian story about transfer bungs and
warped loyalty couldn’t. All in the Game was the predictable 4-4-2 of a
tabloid footie comic strip: struggling team gets fleeced by devious manager,
who gets comeuppance. The construction had a faint whisper of Webster and
Jacobean tragedy. Ray Winstone played the manager. No, he didn’t play him;
the manager was written to be Ray Winstone.
There is an intrinsic design flaw in being Ray Winstone, which is that nobody
else is Ray Winstone. It’s very, very difficult for anyone else to act on
the same small screen as him. The hugely popular persona has grown so
manically into an operatic cockney Abanazer that he sucks up all the
available atmosphere, completely overwhelming the rest of the cast, who, in
this case, tiptoed around him as if he were a bee-stung boar in a farrowing
pen. The dialogue was all written for Winstone’s benefit. He didn’t just get
the best lines, he got them in rhyming slang. And it was bravura stuff, but
it played the rest of the production to a standstill. This was a drama of
two halves, both being played simultaneously. One was a Winstone masterclass
in baroque-ney; the other was with everybody else. The grand comeuppance
finale was weirdly like Don Giovanni meets EastEnders.
Winstone is a big draw, one of the few actors who can guarantee to deliver a
primetime audience. But he can also almost promise to squash every other
performance in the same frame. When he does play it sotto voce, as in
Sweeney Todd, we feel sort of cheated. I think the answer is that he should
only be cast alongside actors who are as generous with their personalities
as he is. Maybe a caper series with Brian Blessed and Dawn French? It’s just
a thought.
Krakatoa — The Last Days (Sunday, BBC1) was another
programme that got swamped by events. This big special-effects film about
the eruption of the largest volcano of the modern era was just too close to
the tsunami of a year and a half ago. So, having waited a decent interval,
it’s only now being broadcast. But the events of real life are still much
more powerful than this costume drama. It’s a law of television that you
will empathise with people in direct proportion to the silliness of their
hats; and, between them, the Indonesians and the Dutch were pretty madly
hatted. The explosion, they said, was the largest noise ever heard on earth.
I bet it wouldn’t have been as loud as Brian Blessed stubbing his toe on Ray
Winstone’s head in Dawn French’s bathroom.
The Perfect Home (Sunday, C4) is Alain de Botton’s
think-good, be-good, feel-good missive on the way we ought to live now.
Architecture and design have become the new cooking on TV, and de Botton is
their Jamie Oliver, an enthusiastic innocent leading us to new Jerusalems
with Eames chairs and sliding glass doors. The examined life is an open-plan
life. His reasonable encomium for modernism was winning. It certainly
convinced me. It’s just that most people like to visit the present in public
buildings, restaurants and shops, but want to go home to the past. And the
houses he showed us as examples of fine modern living were terribly
predictable and sterile. Why is it that architects and designers always
construct such dull, personality-less waiting rooms to live in? De Botton
also avoided the inherently inescapable truth of aesthetics, which is that
they are not democratic. Not all opinions and tastes are equal. The answer
to bad pastiche housing isn’t listening to the public and trying to coax it
into taking a timid collective risk. Someone has to be a visionary despot
and start pouring the concrete to make tomorrow happen. If you’re lucky, you
get a Wren or a Haussman. If you’re unlucky, you get Lasdun or Spence. The
question that hangs unanswered throughout the series is: when he goes home,
where does our TV Candide live? What is chez de Botton like? We should be
shown. He should put his mullions where his mouth is.
