Perfect happiness.
James Delmgpole
Afew months ago, our friends Dan and Nic moved from their home just down the road from us in Camberwell to a remote farm in Cumbria. To help them cope, they bought an obscenely enormous TV set with a DVD player and Sky Digital attached. The problem with owning equipment like that is that you tend to use it. Whenever we stayed with them in their crappy-TV-owning days we used to do fun things like play Pictionary, Pass the Pigs and Switch. Now all we do is flop in front of the box, flicking through the zillion and one channels you get with your digital package until we find something that vaguely suits.
My personal favourite is this channel whose name I forget, but it's MTV something. MTV itself is a very useless channel, with gauche, stupid Europresenters, obtrusive bits of animation called `idents', rubbishy videos of chart bands you hate and far, far too many adverts. But the MTV something one I'm thinking of is ace. It just plays wall-to-wall videos of really cool music, with no adverts. If I didn't have a family, I think my idea of perfect happiness would be to lie on a beanie bag watching this station while my private nurse injected me with medical-grade heroin.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that these multi-channel digital packages are very very bad for you. And I had long held out against getting one until Channel 4 went and ruined it by launching this digital offshoot called E4, which shows lots of programmes you no longer get on terrestrial TV such as All G and The Adam & Joe Show.
The clever thing about Adam (Buxton) and Joe (Cornish), as I've probably said before, is that even though they pretend to be inane and talentless, they are among the most astute commentators on popular culture on TV. They're also very talented — good at accents and very good at using Star Wars figurines to make animated pastiches of popular films and programmes — as you'll have been reminded if you caught last week's spookily accurate Jedi version of The Boyle Family.
Sometimes I look at them enviously and think 'Wish I could just muck around in front of a camera and get paid for it!' but I soon change my mind when I see the hideous public embarrassment they sometimes have to endure — prancing about shopping malls and pretending to be enthusiastic presenters of awful daytime TV shows, and so on.
The other big star of their show, of course, is Adam's crusty old man, Nigel (aka Bad Daaad). His exposé of the agonisingly crass parties for toff teenagers organised by a creepy-looking character called Justin Etzin was investigative journalism worthy of the best of Panorama, but done with twice the wit and in a sixth of the time.
In case you're not aware of these parties, they're the ones where jail-bait nymphets of good family are encouraged to lick icecream from the bare chests of predatory adolescent males and so forth. What horrifies me most, I think, is that there are parents out there who actually let their vulnerable young daughters attend such events. But perhaps that's the sort of pompous thing you start saying when you've recently acquired a baby girl of your own.
Another dread side effect of having children, I notice, is that you find all programmes about family relationships quite ridiculously fascinating. Hence, no doubt, my enthusiasm for Living By The Book (Channel 4, Wednesday) — in which sundry folk try to improve their lives by following the advice in a given self-help book. This week's episode, which dealt with a quite complicated, touchy-feely book by some bald, very rich American who sounded a bit like Daniel Benzali from Murder One,
afforded many scary insights into just how truculent and manipulative teenaged daughters can be. But — because the subject's closer to home, I suppose — the episode I liked best was last week's, which was based on a book by an Australian expert about how to tame tantrum toddlers.
In a Guardian preview I read about the toddler programme, the journalist was slightly sniffy about this book, complaining that it seemed to treat children as if they were wild animals. Only a Guardian dad could be so naive. Children are wild animals. All this stuff about our having more to learn from their unfettered innocence than they do from us is just so much hippy rubbish. As, indeed, was borne out by the programme. After a couple of months reluctantly applying the book's rules — e.g. when your toddler has a tantrum, ignore it — a young, single council-estate mum's relationship with her two-year-old daughter was transformed utterly. It made me so happy I wanted to cry.
Just a quick word about Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (BBC 1, Friday). This is miles better than the book, which isn't saying an awful lot because the book's terrible: mawkish, uneven, unconvincing. What saves the TV series, I think, is the casting. Stephen Mangan, Alun Armstrong, Helen Baxendale . they turn cardboard cutouts into (almost) plausible human beings.
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