Television
Impossibly amiable
James Delingpole
bviously I like being me best of all but I think if I could choose to be anyone else it would probably be John Peel. I wor- ship the man and so does Tiffany. 'Oh, we do love him so,' she sighed as we sat together watching the 60th birthday tribute to him, John Peel Night (BBC2, Sunday). `But he must have a dark side. I wonder what it is?'
But I've a nasty suspicion that John Peel doesn't have a dark side. On the occasions I've bumped into him at Glastonbury or phoned him at 'Peel Acres' for a trenchant quote on the latest pop trend, he has always come across exactly as he does on television or radio: sardonic, self-deprecat- ing, generous, slyly witty and impossibly amiable.
And he really doesn't need to behave that way. For one thing he's way too busy to waste time on niceness, what with umpteen radio programmes to record (Radio One, Home Truths on Radio Four, dozens of others for obscure European sta- tions), mountains of correspondence to deal with (just opening his mail takes him an hour each day), and so many demo tapes to hear that even if he listened to them round the clock, he'd still never get through them all. And for another, he has achieved so much in his long and marvel- lous career that he has every right to act like a ghastly prima donna.
Name almost any pop music genre of the last four decades and you can be fairly sure that it was John Peel who discovered, nay, almost invented it. In the Sixties, it was psychedelia (Jimi Hendrix did one of the first 'Peel Sessions' — in which artists were given free BBC studio time to make what- ever sounds they wanted); in the Seventies it was glam (David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Roxy Music) and then punk; in the Eight- ies, he was one of the first to champion The Smiths and later the Happy Mondays; and in the Nineties, though he rather over- looked Brit Pop (too obvious, probably), he has remained at the forefront of drum 'n' bass and dance.
It's this catholic breadth of taste which makes Peel so different from any other DJ before or since. Usual DJ practice is to nail your colours to a particular mast and then fade away (i.e. move to Radio Two) when your favoured genre goes out of fashion. John Peel, however, will never be out of fashion because he has never been in fash- ion. As soon as the latest style he has championed becomes remotely popular, he moves swiftly on to the next nascent trend. Which is one of the qualities in him that I most admire. This perpetual neophilia, I'm sure, is what's kept him so young and open- minded. My own reactionary instincts per- mitting, it's an example I hope to follow. The day I turn on Radio One and say: `Goodness what is that awful racket?' is the day it will be time to turn off my life- support machine.
The latest Peel documentary, by the by, was the best of the many I've seen. It con- tained more weird facts (when the young John Ravenscroft was asked to find himself a nom de DJ, his original suggestion was `Helen Llewellyn Product 19') and more extensive archive footage, enabling us to follow the progress of Peel's extraordinary fake Liverpool accent from his early career in Oklahoma through to his current nasal growl. You'd never guess he was educated at Shrewsbury. But then — as the docu- mentary amusingly suggested — if Peel hadn't been born posh, his snooty BBC bosses might have felt more inclined to ful- fil their constant urge to give the bolshie, bearded weirdo the boot.
Bugger, I've hardly talked about myself at all this week and I've left hardly any space to praise two other very good things on TV. The first is Alistair McGowan's Big Impression (BBC1, Thursday) which, though patchy as all impression shows are, included several inspired, topical and hilar- iously well-observed send-ups of everything from Jonathan Creek (in which the murder turned out to have been committed by an ant wielding a lightweight laser) to the Posh Spice/David Beckham marriage (Posh, this bacon's raw.' It's parma ham, David').
My favourite bits were McGowan's killingly vicious impersonation of Elvis Costello (so realistic that I almost changed channels until I realised that this wasn't one of those boring musical interludes fea- turing the genuine article) and his explana- tion of how to do a Tony Blair impression: whatever you say, just imagine that your next lines are going to be 'Can't you see what I'm trying to tell you? I love you!! Try it. It really works.
The other thing I wanted to praise was the woefully underrated The Armstrong and Miller Show (Channel 4, Friday) and, more particularly, Ben Miller's splendid penis. He clearly likes to get it out at every oppor- tunity, notably during one of the series' key sketches, 'Nude Practice'. This is a depress- ingly accurate spoof of those cosy Sunday night TV dramas involving vets, only this time the vets are all naked. It's funny; Armstrong, Miller and his penis are all very talented; and you should watch it.
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