Television
A promise of resignation
Martyn Harris
The series Middlemarch (BBC2, Wednesday, 9 p.m.) got off to a fine start with an opening crowd shot of the market place as Dr Lydgate arrives in town, which showed a man with a sandwich board whisking across the foreground. In stop- frame it became clear he was carrying a playbill headlined `Middlemarch', and I was able to relax. The worst thing about costume drama is the way it drives me against my will to monitor the props and costumes for authenticity, and the speech for anachronism. With a single admission of artifice like the above — just a droop of an eyelid from director or writer — and the tyranny of verisimilitude is lifted. Thank you, Andrew Davies, who adapted the novel.
Rather than wallowing in 'period feel' the most striking thing about the produc- tion was how modern a world it seemed, and of course the 1840s are not really so remote: within the lifetime of my own great grandfather for instance. Many of the char- acters are immediately recognisable: Lydgate, the flawed idealist, trying to set up a prototype health service; Casaubon the academic prig writing some kind of Golden Bough; Dorothea the intelligent woman in a stifling provincial town; and Vincy as what Davies calls 'the boy with the clapped out Ford Capri who wants some- thing faster'. Without straining after rele- vance the central argument between idealism and commercialism is as meaning- ful now as then. Apart from carriages for cars and oil lamps for electricity the only really disorienting difference is in attitudes to marriage. Dorothea's disastrous match with Casaubon is only moving because in
1840 the state of matrimony was made of boiler plate. In an updated Middlemarch Dorothea would have read Eng. Lit. at Warwick, and dumped Casaubon (a pre- tentious sociology lecturer) the day she left university, but where's your drama then?
Question Time (BBC1, Thursday, 10.25) came back greatly improved with David Dimbleby in charge, transformed from his rather doughy Panorama persona into something quite mischievous. By the end of Robin Day's reign the show had become little more than a display of Great Man mannerisms, while the lugubrious Peter Sissons turned it into an extended wake for his predecessor. Why did anyone care about Question Time? as Paxman and Dim- bleby went through their absurd auditions for a programme that was barely pulling five million viewers. The answer, as Dim- bleby showed, is that it's still the only slot on television where people can directly question a Chancellor of the Exchequer. A simple enough idea, but one which can raise the tempo of argument to a degree where that same Chancellor will actually promise to resign if the Scott inquiry finds he has acted incorrectly. He would never have done the same in Parliament.
Dimbleby missed his beat at this point at his sharpest he would have made Clarke repeat the promise — and his timing was slightly out on a couple of other occasions. He interrupted Paddy Ashdown in the mid- dle of an eloquent little speech about uni- versal moral frailty and he allowed Clarke to get too technical about the Scott inquiry, but these are quibbles. Dimbleby's tactic of moving between panel and audience was a little awkward but effective, and one senses he has discovered a new role for himself as
people's champion, just as Day once relaunched his own career as fading warhorse of current affairs.
The Unpleasant World Of Penn and Teller (Channel Four, Friday, 10.30pm) is a relaunching of the TV magic show as post- punk spectacular. They demonstrate how their tricks are done (the whole audience make their handkerchieves disappear at once), and instead of pulling rabits out of hats they produce rats, maggots and cock- roaches. It is unpleasant but also funny, and it does carry its own health warning.
'It's the film on the other side!'
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