Television
Take two Martins
Simon Hoggart
Sex 'n' Death (BBC 2), Guy Jenkin's satire on the television industry, seemed an excellent programme to mark the end of the year. The Martins Clunes and Jarvis played two loathsome presenters, Clunes fronting the eponymous Sex 'n Death, Jarvis hosting a grisly, industrial-strength Candid Camera called It's a Laff. Together the pair resembled an awful, clanking con- catenation of Noel Edmonds, Chris Tar- rant, Jeremy Beadle, Terry Christian, Johnny Vaughan, Chris Evans (of course) and, while we're at it, Denise Van Outen, a women with no discernible personality but who has big breasts and runs around a lot, laughing at nothing much. In the past, such people would have been locked away in Bedlam, and the gentry would have filed past to watch them gibber and abuse them- selves. Now they do it for us in the comfort of our sitting-rooms.
The Radio Times said rather snappily: 'Some might say that this satire exploits what it purports to condemn.' Hmnun. Some might also say that Match of the Day is just an excuse to show shots of men play- ing football. Of course it went too far; it wouldn't be satire if it didn't. Swift's Mod- est Proposal was a bit iffy in that way too.
Someone offered to put live crabs down their underpants if their social worker promised to take her top off. A young researcher with frightened deer eyes (there are 17,578 of these employed to my certain knowledge by the BBC alone) had spent ages finding a woman who would allow her dead husband to decompose on-screen in return for two weeks in the Bahamas.
Jarvis had an old girlfriend of Clunes tempt him in front of the hidden cameras with a promise of sex; Clunes got his own back by filming him tell two young proati- 'Look Mummy! a I3-year-old unmarried Father Christmas!' lutes that what really turned him on was for one to pretend that sex with him had restored her sight, and the other to allege that it had brought her back to life. Cor- nered, he told Clunes: 'You show this, and I'll kill ... myself.'
'Could you do it before the repeat? It'll do wonders for our figures.'
The final show ended with Clunes apolo- gising for a bad taste religious joke the pre- vious week; the lights went up to reveal him naked on a cross with a crown of thorns. In the end he shoots himself. The nervous breakdown as plot resolution is an ancient, much loved device (see Peter Finch in Network) but it still serves. And since the alternative would be to have Clunes offering real adulterous women being stoned live on air — so join us after the break — it's more or less the only way to finish things off.
But there is good news. Just as dinosaurs' brains were too small to manage their mighty bodies, these tiny minds can- not exercise motor control over their vast and horrible egos. These are people who probably believe that their penises really can restore sight to the blind and life to the dead. But now they are beginning to crash down, shaking the earth, sending other less maniacal presenters scurrying for the safety of the forest. Noel's House Party has self- destructed. TFI Friday, Chris Evans's embarrassing exercise in sustained sole- cism, has its ratings in free fall. The Big Breakfast is fighting to keep more than an emaciated half-million viewers. Perhaps in a few years programmes in which we are invited to admire a single gigantic ego will be as quaint and dated as Muffin the Mule and the Toddler's Truce, and Guy Jenkin's script will seem as pointless as a satire on the Anti-Corn Law League. Perhaps, but sadly not quite yet.
Delia Smith's last series has just ended its re-run, and they finished it off with some jokey out-takes showing Delia getting things wrong. Unfortunately, what she regards as a disaster is what the rest of us do all the time. So it was rather annoying; if you had a friend who was always perfect and they said, 'You'll never guess what I did this morning. Yes, I put a pillow case on inside out!' you'd want to hit them.
Another Norwich cook who is less suc- cessful than Delia, the owner of Adlard's restaurant, was in the last If You Can't Stand the Heat (Channel 4). In this series Pat McDonald tells restaurateurs how to get the customers in, with the right ambi- ence, the right food and the right prices. Adlard's had sacrificed all three to keep its prized Michelin star, and the customers were flocking elsewhere. It was a perfect illustration of the culinary blight caused by the Michelin system, and fun to see a TV chef getting it wrong, but sadly the pro- gramme was really rather dull. And depressing. If people can't be bothered to eat food as elaborate as that, why should they pay any attention to Delia?
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