Family fortunes
James Delingpole
Ihate the modern world so much at the moment that all I want to do is retire to the Welsh Borders, listen to classical music and go on long walks. Unfortunately, as you may have inferred from my hysterical dirty bomb review the other week, I'm now trapped in London by the plummeting property market, so unless one of the two books I'm working on — one is on commandos, the other is on being right-wing — comes good, I fear I'm stuck with this poxy 20-articles-a-day-but-nowhere-nearas-many-as-Boris-Johnson-or-Rod-Liddle journo gig for a good while yet.
You needed that autobiographical intro, I think, because you've been rather deprived on that front of late. I was going to give you even more. This week, I'd chosen to review the BBC's new genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC2, Tuesdays) expressly so that I could spend the first half talking about my interesting surname, speculating on its origins and telling you amusing stories about my abject failure to discover that I am in fact the long-lost heir to a vast dukedom. Instead, though, I'm saving it for the slot I've just been given in the Times on Saturday standing in for Giles Coren while he goes off to the Lake District to finish his novel, and, I'm sorry, but it pays much more than the Speccie does.
So, the TV programme. The first one starred former-Goodie-turned-mildly tedious-birdwatcher Bill Oddie, which I wasn't looking forward to nearly as much as the Jeremy Clarkson one and which I nearly didn't watch at all when I discovered it was about depressing things like mentally ill mothers and the decline of the northern cotton industry.
But you can tell from the way it has been advertised that, like British Isles: a Natural History, this is going to be one of those megabuck flagship series that the BBC will not allow to fail. Even if Oddie had traced his ancestry to a man called Mr Boring, the Greyest Man of Basingstoke, you can bet that the specially commissioned theme music would have been so alluring, the photography so sumptuous, the direction SO zappily post-modern that we would have been gripped by Mr Boring's life from first to last. (Mind you, now I think about it, he does sound quite interesting.) Anyway, Oddie's episode was tastily prurient. Apart from gleaning the useful flello!-style snippet that he has a home overlooking the ponds on Hampstead Heath, we learnt that he hardly knew his mother, whom he had always resented for having abandoned him as a child; that he was manic-depressive and that four years ago he'd had a nervous breakdown probably induced by the death of his father. Not surprisingly, it was all connected.
It turned out that Oddie's mother hadn't really abandoned him but that she, too, had had a breakdown, probably caused by the premature death (after just five days) during the war of the sister Oddie never knew he had, The baby had been crying constantly before she died, but his mother's stern mother-in-law had refused to let her go upstairs to comfort it, which — Oddie speculated — made his mother feel eternally guilty that she hadn't done enough.
The second half of the programme examined what had made that mother-inlaw so tough. Quite possibly, it was because she'd worked since childhood in extremely noisy, dangerous cotton mills. just like her husband the overseer. The tour this prompted round an old cotton mill was more interesting than a tour round a cotton mill has any right to be. And before the programme was over, it managed to pull yet more rabbits out of the hat, like the distant Oddie cousin and mad keen genealogist who took part in the programme as a result of a newspaper advert, knew everything there was to know about the Oddie family history, and turned out to be a dead ringer for Bill — fuzzy beard, glasses, gnomish stature and all. If this is the sort of thing you can unearth. this series is going to make genealogists of us all.
Tirnewatch (BBC2, Fridays) was about the Black Death, a subject very dear to my morbid disposition. Unfortunately, like so much TV history these days, the series is predicated on the facile notion that history can only possibly be interesting and worthwhile if it's shockingly revisionist and counter-intuitive. This week's episode set out to prove, not all that convincingly, that the Black Death wasn't caused by bubonicplague rats or fleas. In subsequent weeks, I look forward to the episodes demonstrating that the Titanic was sunk by a giant lump of molten sun, that it was William, not Harold, who got hit in the eye (or possibly not) by the arrow and that the Pope is in fact the Dalai Lama.
Finally, the Green Wing (Channel 4, Fridays): unfunny? Very unfunny? Or very, very, very unfunny?
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