Television
Fast forward
Wendy Cope
t has been one of those weeks when there's no time to watch anything until the last minute. A lot of stuff gets recorded and the pile of inadequately labelled videotapes on the mantelpiece grows larger and more depressing every day. While I was rewinding one of the tapes, I happened to see a few minutes of The Late Late Show, an Irish programme., which is broad- cast on Channel 4 late, late on Monday afternoon. The host, Gay Byrne, was asking Joan Collins about her eating habits. She doesn't weigh herself every day, she said, and no, she doesn't live on lettuce leaves. What had she had for lunch that day? Onion soup, risotto and mushrooms, coffee. And bread and butter pudding. Fair enough. If I were Joan Collins, I'd say I lived on fish and chips and treacle pudding and never went to the
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hairdresser because I believed in looking natural.
The programme on the tape was Alexei Sayle's Stuff (BBC 2), recorded because I had seen Sayle at the Old Vic earlier in the week, playing Trinculo in The Tempest. At the theatre he made me laugh and the television show, too, demonstrated that alternative comedians can sometimes be funny. Furthermore I approved of the choice of targets. In his introductory monologue he had a go at pretentious television presenters, announcing his in- tention of 'stripping away the meanings and metaphors of everything in the world and reconstructing them into an ultimate theory of the universe, while dancing around in a series of tight suits'. Then there was a sketch about self-righteous journal- ists hounding social workers. Why had Lambeth Social Services done nothing about the terrible deeds committed by Vlad the Impaler in Transylvania in 1306? How could Haringey Child Care Unit sit back and let Herod massacre the Inno- cents? Nervous women protested that these events took place outside their juris- diction but such pathetic excuses cut no ice with Sayle's crusading reporter.
In the last sketch a consumer program- me investigated God, following complaints from a meek person that he hadn't inher- ited the earth. The Almighty looked shifty as he emerged from his seedy office pre- mises and said he couldn't talk because he had to meet his accountant. As he pro- ceeded down the street, he began to perform a strange dance. 'What's that?' enquired one passer-by of another. 'Oh, that's just God moving in a mysterious way.'
From another of the week's tapes, I learned something really useful, i.e. how to remember how to spell 'separate' without looking it up in the dictionary every time. Now all I have to do is say to myself `separate para'. Spelling It Out (BBC 1) concentrated on this kind of mnemonic last week and will look at other ways of learning spellings in subsequent program- mes. My spelling isn't that bad but it's funny how certain words refuse to stick in the mind. Until I was about 30, I had problems with 'necessary'. This one was covered in the programme. Necessary: one collar, two socks. But such devices are probably quite unnecessary for most Spec- tator readers. Unnecessary: new necktie, one collar, two socks.
Someone told me that Blind Justice (BBC 2), the new series about radical lawyers, is very gripping. This is true up to a point, the point coming about halfway through the programme, when one realises there are still another 45 minutes to go. If it were shorter, I might recommend it, though the heroine — Jane Lapotaire as a tired, tearful barrister — is a bit depress- ing. In the first episode she had an Italian- ate toy-boy lover, whom she ignored ex- cept when she suddenly felt sexy or wanted someone to make her a cup of coffee. I think this is the sort of thing people mean when they complain about negative images of career women — a worthy left-wing series might have been expected to know better.
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