The real thing
James Delingpole
You were probably expecting me to watch Celebrity Shark Bait (ITV1, Sunday) but I didn’t because I was feeling a bit ‘been there, done that’ and, short of filming the celebrities actually being eaten, I couldn’t see how they could possibly have made it exciting. I expect there was lots and lots of build-up as the celebrities (Ruby Wax, Richard E. Grant, a couple of others you’ve never heard of) confessed how scared of sharks they were, followed by shots of them looking at fins in the water going, ‘Ooh, er. No way am I going into the water with them,’ followed by scenes of them in the cage going, ‘Wow. This is amazing. I’m in a cage surrounded by actual Jaws-style sharks.’ Or was it even less interesting than I’ve just imagined?
What I have been watching a lot of is stuff about the hurricane because I love New Orleans, it’s my favourite American city and it was at one time my ambition to buy myself a colonial mansion in the Garden District. I expect now I could probably afford one.
Hotel on Sea (BBC1, Thursday) is a slyly funny new spoof, fly-on-the-wall comedy series in the manner of The Office about an ailing, joke hotel in Blackpool called The President, with acting so deadpan and perfectly observed you could almost believe it was the real thing. Except you know it’s not, obviously, because of characters like the duty manager who doubles up as a DJcum-transvestite entertainer in the basement bar (Kennedy’s) that is so spectacularly crap that guests virtually have to be paid before they think of visiting it. Such people and places could never exist.
But they do. Alerted by the fact that no writer or actors were credited at the end, I double-checked in the Radio Times and realised that Hotel on Sea is in fact TV’s first ever ‘comi-doc’. The scene where the coach party of old ladies arrives and they can’t get to their fourth-floor bedrooms because the light in the lift is broken and no one can fix it; the one where the Eastern European waitresses bitch — with English subtitles about the stupidity of the new bow-tie uniforms they’ve been asked to wear to give the place a bit of class. It’s all true.
Well, up to a point. The obvious question begged by this new genre is: how much of this stuff would have happened if there hadn’t been a team of comi-documentary makers willing incompetence, mayhem and chucklesome antics on the hotel and its staff at every turn? It was produced and directed by a friend of mine, Jonathan Hacker, so perhaps I should ask him some time.
Medium (BBC1, Tuesday) is a watchable new American series about a pretty wouldbe lawyer (Patricia Arquette) who happens to be the most brilliant spirit medium ever. All she needs to do to solve crimes is to have a dream or ask the dead people whodunit and where the bodies are buried: et voila. Which naturally poses a bit of a problem: how the hell do you sustain the mystery for more than ten minutes when you’ve got a detective who’s so ludicrously omniscient?
I can’t speak for the rest of the series, but the pilot episode got over it by having Arquette’s abilities continually doubted by angry rationalists like her hotshot black female colleague and the Stetsonned detective from the Texas Rangers. Then, just when the Texas Rangers were on the verge of discovering the efficacy of Patricia’s amazing powers by digging up the body whose whereabouts she had pinpointed with needle accuracy thanks to information provided by the perverted murderer’s abused dead sister, along came a massive storm and washed every last shred of evidence away. Normally, I would have written this off as a desperate plot device. But since the hurricane materialised over the Gulf of Mexico it all seemed spookily prescient.
Underground Britain (BBC2, Thursday), a new, quirky documentary strand, got off to a promising start with the tale of Jeff Ditchfield, a ruthless northern businessman who’d suddenly decided it was his life mission to provide the sick with free supplies of palliative cannabis from his new café headquarters in Rhyl. A group of activists led by local historian Colin Jones — ‘We do have in Rhyl a number of buildings of heritage interest, such as St David’s nursing home’ — was determined to stop him, arguing that Ditchfield’s supposed philanthropy was no more than a front to conceal his evil plan to infect a once-reas suringly-drab Welsh seaside town with reefer madness.
They were probably right. Despite the touching scenes of legless multiple sclerosis sufferers testifying to the joys their daily spliff had brought into their painful lives, even Ditchfield himself subsequently admitted that he was doing it with an eye to the main chance. The Welsh market alone, he reckoned, was worth half a billion quid and could sustain up to 200 cannabis cafés. If the Welsh Assembly ever decided to legalise pot independently of the British government, he said, then he wanted to be in there first. Up until that point I’d been admiring his chutzpah and business acumen. Finally, I twigged: he’s been smoking too much dope.
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