Television
Sundays in Arcadia
Ian Hislop
Gussie Fink-Nottle was out for a gold- en duck on Sunday. So was Cedric Charl- ton. In each case the unsuccessful batsman came off the field to find that the beautiful girl watching his performance was even more in love with him than before. This must finally condemn both The Darling Buds of May (ITV, 7.45 p.m., Sunday) and leaves and Wooster (ITV, 9.05 p.m., Sun- day) as pure escapism. In village cricket as played on television it does not seem to matter whether it is the Thirties or the Fifties. Not only do the wimps get the girls but everyone else gets wonderfully slow bowling to hit round the ground. It is all complete fantasy.
And very welcome too, particularly on a Sunday evening. The ITV schedulers have obviously noticed that this is a pretty low time of the week with the reality of Monday morning looming ahead and they have decided to put on two hours of idyllic comedy to tide the country over. The rat- ings indicate that they have been successful in treating a traditional English gloom with some traditional English remedies — H.E. Bates and P.G. Wodehouse.
The News comes in between the two pro- grammes as a short burst of the harsh pre- sent and ensures that the appetite for an Arcadian past is not sated. Last week one went from cricket and country houses to the Kurds and then back to cricket and country houses. After the antics of Pinky and Sunbeam it was over to the antics of the Iraqi police and then back to Stiffy and Gussie. There are two ways of looking at this pattern. Either it is television reflecting a national weakness for wallowing in a nos- talgic past. Or it is television attempting to `create a world for us to live in and delight in' (Waugh on Wodehouse) that is deliber- ately not the world that has Saddam Hussein in it.
The dictator in Jeeves and Wooster is an absurd Mosleyite figure called Spode who leads a group of Blackshorts round the countryside and makes speeches about the importance of English knees and English vegetables. He is totally defeated by Jeeves's secret weapon which is the knowl- edge that Spode is also the proprietor of a lingerie shop called Eulalia Soeurs. As Bertie Wooster says: 'You can't be a suc- cessful dictator and design women's under- clothing'. He adds: 'One or the other but not both'. At the end of The Code of the Wooster s, the novel from which Clive Exton adapted the current stories, Jeeves quotes Robert Browning to Wooster: 'God's in his heaven. All's right with the world'. There are times when one wants to believe that and Sunday evening is one of them. In The Darling Buds of May Cedric Charlton, the former employee of the tax office, achieves the same sort of effect by quoting Milton's Lycidas at his aunt: 'At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue/Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new'.
In the end I prefer the former idyll. Despite the casting of David Jason as Pa Larkin, Pam Ferris as Ma and the amazing Catherine Zeta Jones as their daughter, the H.E. Bates Eden in Kent cannot quite match the world of Wodehouse. Moreover The Darling Buds of May is occasionally tinged with a melancholy and a sense of loss from which the more upbeat Jeeves and Wooster is free. However, expressing a pref- erence is not in any sense necessary. Next Sunday I shall be watching both.
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