Television
Ripping yarn
James Delingpole
There's a teacher at my stepson James's school who gives the boys lines whenever they use the word goo'. The desired term, apparently, is 'toilet'. So there's another of my campaigns to turn the Rat into a civilised human being gone out of the win- dow. It's the same with computers: I main- tain that books will always be best; the Rat's teachers encourage him to download drivel (and illustrations — gone are the days, apparently, when you drew your own pictures for your projects) from the Inter- net. And I've a nasty suspicion that once he gets a bit older, the Rat will be telling me that animals have rights, that meat-eating's wrong, that Europe's the best way forward; that all the values I hold dear, in short, are ignorant, antediluvian and evil.
Which is one of the reasons I was so keen for the Rat to watch Children of the New Forest (BBC 1), one of those wonder- ful Sunday afternoon children's television dramas that I thought they didn't make any more. It celebrates the monarchy, the class system, gender stereotyping, deer-hunting, landowners' rights, fruity accents and all the other splendid things that the govern- ment — and, indeed, organisations like the BBC — are so determined to stamp out.
In fact, if it hadn't been written at the height of our imperial glory by the great Captain Marryat, I might well have sus- pected that it was a thinly veiled satire on the horrors of the current regime. The chief hate figure, for example, is a grim Leveller called Abel Corbould (Craig Kelly) who combines the sinister mien of a Peter Mandelson with the weaselly ways of a Tony Blair, insisting that he is doing no more than the people want even as he rav- ishes and destroys their beloved nation.
The toff contingent, meanwhile, is led by the hunky young heir-to-the-manor Edward (Tom Wisdom), whom my wife would rather like as a toy boy, my gay friends think is the best thing since Keanu Reeves lost his ephebic charm, and whom I think of as a sort of James Delingpole char- acter, brandishing the sword of truth, jus- tice and general coolness and smiting the Roundhead legions until such time as he is restored to the handsome estate in the country which he lost in his father's era.
Anyway, it's a ripping yarn. I could scarcely breathe during the week that fol- lowed the cliffhanger when Edward and his little bro were stuck up the chimney while the Roundheads were cooking venison stew. And I very nearly shed a manly tear in episode one when the nobel chatelaine chose to be burned alive rather than kow- tow to the Blairite forces of evil.
My ecclesiastical advisors tell me, howev- er, that a priest would never have been addressed as 'Reverend' in the 17th centu- ry; the Rat got terribly annoyed that you could hear drums playing when the Lev- ellers were shown singing hymns as they rode: no drum was visible; and I got a bit peeved with the scriptwriters for having the children say things like 'Don't be so pathet- ic!' In the 1640s? Dot Wordsworth would have had them for breakfast.
Another Sunday programme you might not have seen is Cold Feet (ITV) because it's on at the same time as the ever-won- drous Vanity Fair (BBC1). (Incidentally, that Omnibus the other day which had everyone from Taki to Max Clifford bur- bling irrelevantly about the book and series must surely have been one of the laziest, trashiest BBC documentaries ever.) Any- way, I got a few Cold Feet videos mainly because I was hoping that any ITV comedy drama about thirtysomething couples was bound to be toe-curlingly dreadful. But it isn't. It's actually quite watchable in an intelligence-insulting, if-there's-nothing- better-to-do way.
Where it falls down, I think, is in its ten- dency to go for the obvious joke. There was, for example, a scene where the chap who has been temporarily chucked by his girlfriend moves in with the stereotypical couple-with-endlessly-crying-baby and acci- dentally puts mum's breast milk on his cornflakes. Well, I'm sorry, but it just wouldn't happen. I know about these things. You store your extracted breast milk either in little plastic bags in the freez- er or — if you're going to use it soon — in the fridge in a baby bottle with a teat on it. So there's no way anyone could ever con- fuse it with cow's milk.
This might seem like tedious nitpicking but my point is that cruderies like that tend to undermine the moments of genuine observational comedy, such as the bit about the vexed 'is the baby smiling or is it wind?' question, or the one where, having at last heard their baby settle, the couple can't resist a self-defeating journey to check whether the baby's all right. Another annoying thing is that the scriptwriter falls into the tedious, knee-jerk PC trap of por- traying the blokes as silly little boys but all his women as incredibly competent when, as we know, most chicks — bless 'em — are irrational, hormonal nutters.
A couple more things before I go. 1. I was wrong about Big Train. Four brilliant sketches in three whole episodes do not a classic comedy show make. 2. Jonathan Meades is God as he proved yet again on his funny, clever, thuggish, strangely mov- ing depiction of his home county and mine — Worcestershire — on the excellent Trav- els With Pevsner (BBC 2).
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