Too much information
James Delingpole
When I was younger and prettier and looked more like a girl, I used to have a prominent gay section on my bookshelves (The Swimming Pool Library; A Boy’s Own Story; My Brother, My Self by Phil Andros ... ) to annoy my homophobic friends, confuse my gay ones and generally show what a groovy, open-minded guy I was. But I’m afraid that after watching the first part of The Line of Beauty (BBC2, Wednesday) I’ve gone off homosexuality completely.
Maybe it got better in part two, but I certainly wasn’t going to watch to find out. Squirming through the hour of the first episode was punishment enough for one lifetime. ‘Will he or won’t he get caught with his black boyfriend in the Notting Hill garden square?’ ‘Will he or will he not stay awake long enough to have meaningless sex with the dark Italian waiter he’s eyed up in that sharky way gay men do at the posho, country house weekend?’ ‘Will he or won’t he, oh please, God, no, end up doing it when Margaret Thatcher comes to stay?’ Sorry, but I’d really rather not know.
Meanwhile, I think I may have worked out what’s wrong with the new Doctor Whos. Nothing wrong with the new Doctors — both Christopher Eccleston (virile, bolshie, good haircut and leather jacket) and David Tennant (cheeky, sprightly, capable) have been great; nor with Billie Piper (brilliant — the best thing in it); nor with the monsters and sets and production wizardry (it’s a myth that Doctor Who fans actually prefer their sets to wobble); and there’s an awful lot that’s right with Russell T. Davies’s characteristically ambitious, witty, zany, playful scripts.
But still there’s one major flaw and the flaw is that some bright spark (Davies, I would imagine) has asked himself: ‘What was it that was missing from the early Doctor Who series?’ and come up with the answer: ‘Heart.’ Rather as with The Line of Beauty, this has led to all sorts of grisly insertions we could well have done without. I mentioned how annoying it was at the end of the last series when the Doctor came over all PC and got on his high horse about the Prime Minister’s (perfectly reasonable) decision to nuke the departing baddie aliens rather than take it on trust that they would never return.
We saw this tendency again at the beginning of the new one. The Doctor found himself on a planet with a superhospital run by cat-faced creatures in nuns’ outfits, which could cure every disease including incurable ones. Its dark secret, the Doctor discovered, was that cloned humans were being kept in special holding tanks purely so as to have their bodies used for medical purposes. At the end we were invited to applaud as the Doctor released them and they wreaked havoc in the hospital and killed all the patients and wimpled cats. But I thought it outrageous: a) Davies cheated with his argument by investing these zombie-creatures with a sympathetic semi-human warmth they just wouldn’t have had if they’d been kept since birth in storage tanks and b) the hospital worked really well and was curing lots of people, so why spoil the arrangement?
More annoying still, this unnecessary ‘heart’ insertion has led to attempts to invest the Doctor (the daleks and Cybermen, too, come to think of it) with one of those ‘inner lives’ modern scriptwriters find so necessary. It has been hinted that he might have a sex drive (in one episode, one of his old assistants appeared and we were invited to believe that she’d once had a thing for him; plus there’s been an awful lot of worrying flirtation between the [Tennant] Doctor and Rose). This is a cruel thing to inflict on children (who find grown-up kissing and suchlike utterly yuck) and completely at odds with the whole point of the Doctor, namely: he’s not human; he’s a Time Lord; he saves Earth in a disinterested way, not an emotional one, and the reason he fights monsters, aliens and suchlike is that that’s what he does, not that his parents were killed by Autons or his first wife was murdered on their wedding day by Sea Devils or any such nonsense.
Aagh. No. I have hardly left any space to talk about Funland (BBC2, Sunday), which is the best thing on TV. It’s a bit like The League of Gentlemen (whose Jeremy Dyson co-wrote the script with EastEnders writer Simon Ashdown) transplanted from Royston Vasey to Blackpool with slightly less cross-dressing or out-and-out grotesquery, but the same mood of sleaze, bitterness, simmering desire, despair, jealousy, hatred and fear handled in a such a way as to leave you unsure whether to laugh or be deeply disturbed.
The MacGuffin is the clever openingcredit sequence, which shows a man in a very realistic gorilla costume climbing to the top of Blackpool tower and then either falling or jumping. This enables the series to go on as many digressions as it likes because none of us is going to leave now till we’ve found out who’s inside and why he’s there.
Our representatives in this bizarre and pervy world are the hapless Dudley and Lola Sutton (Kris Marshall and Sarah Smart), who’ve come to Brighton to try to rekindle their love life, but soon get sucked into a terrible ‘You’re my wife now’ scenario where Lola has to pay off Dudley’s gambling debts by working as a pole dancer. The scene this week where Smart suddenly transformed herself from prim young wife cowering before the predatory stag parties into foxy, up-for-anything pole-dance queen ought to have won her a Bafta.
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