The only problem with a tropical paradise miles from the hugger-mugger
hurly-burly of the great grind is that it is cut off from news of the
hugger-mugger, hurly-burly of the great grind. All we hacks suffer from an
addiction to news. I have been known to buy papers in languages I don’t
speak, in the desperate hope I might absorb some information by osmosis. I
always imagine I can go cold turkey, that the cornucopia of sybaritism will
detract from the dearth of news, but it never does. I am weak-willed and
creep off to catch a fix of satellite.
For the past week, my only hit has been the BBC’s rolling world-news service.
Desperate though I was for almost anything current, this was almost worse
than nothing. It has been quite some time since I seriously watched the
BBC’s international output, and to say it’s eye-bulgingly, vein-poppingly,
irredeemably stupidly God-awful is actually to be diplomatically reserved.
BBC World News makes Fox sound like the sermon on the mount. It’s not just
that it’s formatted as a pastiche of mid-Atlantic, visually portentous
kitsch, with the strutting Tourette’s of repeated station idents; and that
it produces news with all the energy, purpose and fluency of a constipated
whippet; or even that the nuggets of content are squidged in between the
garish furniture of braindead graphics and pointless graffiti. What was most
depressingly sad was the upbeat, vanilla content of its reporting and
investigation, as if it was all made by a committee from some timid,
people-pleasing global development agency.
There was a Middle Eastern strand that reported on how happy Saudi Arabian
women were with the great strides they had made in the workforce and being
given driving licences, nearly. I am not making that up. The overall effect
is of a news purveyor whose overriding concern is not to offend or spoil
anyone’s breakfast. It competes with other rolling news channels by being as
similar to the middle-of-the-road template as possible: all information is
relative, all stories have a heart-warming angle. It also has ugly gobbets
of advertising and commercial sponsorship.
At this point, I should remind you that the BBC is the biggest and richest
broadcaster in the world, far larger than any American network. It also has
the largest news-gathering organisation in the universe, with an un-
rivalled heritage and wealth of experience; and on top of all that, it has a
unique form of funding that allows it to be both secure and independent. At
a time when international news is being strong-armed and censored by
commercial, religious and political pressure, from Google in China to
fundamentalists everywhere else, there is a desperate need and desire for
authoritative, implacable, touchstone news and a forum for unguarded
comment, and the BBC is one of the few broadcasters — perhaps the only one —
with the tools, ability and respect to provide it. It should set the gold
standard other broadcasters aspire to. Instead, it seems to be aspiring to
catch up with the worst of the commercial newsmongers. BBC World News is
nationally and professionally deeply shaming.
I returned to one of the dullest weeks on television we have had for ages. It
will come as no surprise to you that critics watch most programmes on tapes
or discs, so I settled down to view The Apprentice
(Wednesday, BBC2), the new series of the franchise of Donald Trump’s
American original, with Alan Sugar — a small, frenetic, stubbly haemorrhoid,
who comes over as a plutocratic Abanazar — shouting at a covey of gelled and
power-suited young Aladdins, who imagine they are taking part in a
headhunting contest for a great job when in fact they are cheap victims for
a reality-TV game show. Which doesn’t say much for their nous right from the
start. In fact, they all appear to have been grabbed from the staff room of
PC World.
As I sat through it quite happily, and just before the denouement of the first
episode, the screen went blank. They had done it on purpose. We called the
production company and asked what they had done with my happy ending, and
why send a television critic a programme without one? They said they would
tell us what happened over the phone. Can you imagine a theatre critic
having to call the RSC to find out how the play turned out? Anyway, a nice
chap in our office got the lowdown and repeated it all back to me — and,
actually, listening to it was far more exciting than watching. So I suggest
you don’t bother: just find someone on the bus who has, and get them to tell
you what happened.
If you haven’t seen it already, stay in one afternoon to watch Deal
or No Deal (Mon-Sat, C4). This is a game show that demands the
mental skill and dexterity of a fridge magnet, that has contestants as plain
and unexciting as a chiropodist’s waiting room, and a studio audience who
would defy Tommy Cooper and Jessica Rabbit to warm them up. It also has zero
viewer participation or empathy. And if all that wasn’t enough, it’s got
Noel Edmonds as well. And the last thing it has is that it is utterly
compelling, the most brilliant format for a gameshow since Michael Miles’s
Take Your Pick.
It is based entirely on chance and choosing boxes in which there are printed
amounts of money. Periodically, an unseen adjudicator offers the contestant
some cash to stop playing. If that doesn’t sound utterly enticing, it’s
because I am describing it badly. I would defy anyone to make it sound
anything other than terminally dull. But the brilliance is that, though the
process is identical in every episode, the plot is quite different. Most
gameshows boil down to the binary excitement of winning or losing; this one
has an internal tempo that builds and twists like a Hitchcock plot. It’s
just that, instead of Anthony Perkins, we get Noel, with his mum’s hair on
his head and her bikini wax on his chin. I’ve had to forbid myself from
watching any more. It’s like putting heroin in the TV remote in the middle
of the afternoon.
Art from the Arctic (Tuesday, BBC4) was the most
unconsciously funny programme of the week. A group of artists were taken to
a Norwegian glacier to make art representing global warming. They included a
tongue-tied Ian McEwan, a tigerish Anthony Gormley, a perplexed Rachel
Whiteread and various other cool Late Review escapees. All they lacked was
Michael Frayn or David Hare — or, even better, Evelyn Waugh — to record with
malevolence the marvellously risible antics of liberal artists with a cause.
Gormley made a complicated and malformed snowman; Whiteread filled the Tate
with plastic cubes; others watched ice melt and made gnomic explanatory
truisms of blushing pseudery. All of it is the raw material for a most
brilliant comic movie, a novel or, at the very least, a Royal Court play.
Why is it that doing good with art is invariably screamingly ridiculous, but
artists behaving with selfish, destructive self-importance always seem
deeply and exclusively creative? Why is genius such a miserable, unpleasant,
cruel, sociophobic old bastard?
