Screen savers
Simon Hoggart
One of the most annoying lines you can hear is, ‘I don’t watch television myself.’ It’s usually said with a small, indulgent smile, as if to imply that, unlike you, the speaker spends the time saved working for charity, or growing organic parsnips, or rereading Elizabeth Bowen, or learning Chinese with their children so they can immerse themselves in the culture of the world’s next superpower.
There is a temptation to reply: ‘Well, we have 129 cable channels, and so we keep the telly on all the time, from GMTV, through the property programmes, those cookery shows, Countdown, Richard and Judy, then we can really settle down in front of the soaps and after that a good three-hour police drama in which a female pathologist solves a crime by analysing a missing eyelash.’ In fact, when you ask the ‘we never watch television’ brigade if they ever watch any television, you can usually tease out an answer like this: ‘Of course, we do try to catch the news, and some of the wildlife programmes are wonderful, and Tim likes the Antiques Road Show, and we shout the answers out at University Challenge, and hasn’t Bleak House been marvellous, and Tamsin enjoys those ghastly so-called reality shows, and Josh seemed to have the Ashes on all last summer ... ’ The fact is that while most television is dross, especially on most of those 129 cable channels, there is some stuff which is quite breathtakingly good, and unavailable in any other medium. Take David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth (BBC1, Wednesday). Anyone who thinks they are establishing some kind of moral superiority by not watching this astounding new series is simply out of their mind.
Attenborough may look as if he’s in his 50s, but in fact he is 79, and spends much less time filming these days, turning up on location mainly to get his face into a few shots. And what shots! Scorpions mating with their stings held high, ready to strike, a metaphor for human mating, perhaps. Ants marching in interminable lines, like worshippers heading for Mecca. Minuscule insects the size of half a pinhead, washing themselves like humans in a shower. On the other hand, a millipede as broad and as long as Attenborough’s arm. A velvet worm, with its scarlet studded skin and little white feet, looking, we were told, almost exactly as it did when its ancestors lived in the sea. The kit these guys now have is astonishing: cameras that can fill a screen with some beast we could not see without a microscope. Others that can slow a beating wing 4,000 times. Attenborough’s commentary, as measured and riveting as ever, not once becomes winsome or anthropomorphic and equally is never dry and pedantic. He is as enthralled as we are.
The whole hour-long show is captivating, and only television can do this. No book or magazine could convey the wonder of such astounding moving pictures; yet no cinema would ever show them. Who says, ‘We thought we’d go to the Odeon and catch that hour-long film about insects, then go for a curry, if you’d like to join us ... ’ Worth the licence fee alone.
As, almost, was Imagine (BBC1, Wednesday), which this week was Alan Yentob’s film about Elgar’s unfinished piano concerto. You might think this could have been done in satisfactory fashion on the radio, but it, too, had unmissable images, such as the great composer, looking startlingly like Colonel Blimp, conducting an orchestra in ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’ (‘gentlemen, will you try to play this tune as if you had never heard it before?’) The finished concerto — Elgar wrote in bits and snatches, before stringing them together — sound ed a little like a pastiche of Elgar. But so what? Nobody could have done this a few decades ago. We have television to thank.
Though not, perhaps, for Man Stroke Woman (BBC3, Tuesday), a sketch show full of ideas, none of which quite worked. Chap who has just slept with a woman, not wanting to give his phone number: ‘It’s 4. Er. Yes, 444, um, 44 44 4... ’ and a wan smile comes to your face while the word ‘Next!’ comes to mind. I quite liked the woman who dresses in increasingly outlandish clothes — a hat on a wire a foot above her head, in a dress with a pink neon ‘Whore’ on the front — telling her partner, ‘You can never just say I look nice, can you?’ But those were the few mediumlights. As Little Britain heads into decline, this, I fear, will not replace it.
The rejigged, modernised Shakespeare had a blip last week with Macbeth (no, a chef in a starred restaurant who feels his boss gets all the credit is unlikely to murder him, whatever his wife suggests. Instead he will open a new restaurant. That’s what they do.) But The Taming Of The Shrew this week (BBC1, Monday) was funny and silly and utterly bonkers. As soon as you realised that it was not remotely realistic, you could sit back and enjoy Shirley Henderson’s and Rufus Sewell’s majestically barking performances.
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