Television
Losing my rag
James Delingpole
It doesn't take much to drive me into a state of apoplexy. Take last Sunday night. I had spent all day in Epping Forest collect- ing ceps and oyster mushrooms which I decided to turn into a dish of tagliatelle con funghi. All that was lacking was some crème fraiche (preferable, I think, to dou- ble cream), so I popped down the road to the newly opened 24-hour Tesco. The experience quite ruined my evening.
What infuriated me was this: instead of proper full-fat crème fraiche, all they stocked was hideous, inedible, health-fas- cist, half-fat rubbish. Had they run out of the real thing? Why no! I checked. It appeared that some imbecilic manager had decided that his particular branch of Tesco would stock only the ersatz, weight-watch- ers' version, the sort that goes all nasty and curdly when you try to cook with it!
Can you imagine my fury? Of course you can't. There are, as far as I know, only two people so precious as to lose their rag over something as trivial as a pot of creme fraiche. One is me. Thg other, as my broth- er and sister never tire of reminding me, is a character on Frazier (Channel 4, Friday) called Niles Crane.
I was aware of Niles's existence long before I Saw him. There was the time, for example, when I was telling my siblings of my interior decoration plans and they sug- gested that, rather than employ someone to do it for me, I should opt for a spot of DIY. 'Can one paint one's home?' I gasped. This, apparently, was a very Niles moment.
Intrigued though I was, I resisted watch- ing Frazier for quite some time, partly because I hate coming late to programmes everyone else has discovered before me and partly because, once you start getting into American television series, they tend to ruin your social life. Also, I was worried that Frazier wouldn't be as funny as every- one claimed. This was my problem with Cheers, the series in which the neurotic shrink Frazier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) first appeared. I used to laugh, but never so loudly or frequently as those who had been watching it for years, understood all the in- jokes, and knew the characters' every foible. Similar rules apply to Friends (Channel 4, Friday), of which more later. Though I've come to appreciate Frazier as the sharpest, cleverest comedy on televi- sion, I initially found it quite irritating. It was easy enough to identify with Frazier (now a psychiatric agony uncle on a Seattle radio show) and his brother and fellow shrink Niles — hypersensitive, blustering aesthetes whose only defences against a brutal, vulgar world are irony and wit. (In the last episode, for example, Frazier was caught trying to buy his son an educational toy for Christmas. 'The living brain? What kind of dork wants that?' asked a passing brat. 'With any luck the kind of dork who'll operate on your prostate one day,' Frazier replied.) But I had difficulty coping with Frazier's flatmates — his brash, wheelchair-bound father and his lubricious Northern English nurse. Pop sounds as if he's strayed in from a comedy show designed for thick people; nurse seems too stagy — an American's idea of a Northerner, rather than the real thing.
After a while, though, you begin to accept nurse and Pop as useful foils to the Crane brothers' prissiness. One of the best running jokes concerns Niles's secret pas- sion for the nurse (even though he's mar- ried to an invisible bitch called Maris, and is so camp he's probably gay and in denial); another is the horrendous Dralon armchair with which Pop insists on disfiguring his son's minimalist penthouse apartment. In one memorable episode, Frazier asks his brother to help him move the armchair, lest it be noticed by visiting members of the
wine-tasting society. Niles looks at him aghast: 'You know I don't lift!'
I've described the premise; I've given you a couple of one-liners; but I'm nowhere nearer to encapsulating Frazier's appeal. I'm afraid that, as with so many cults, the only way to understand it is to risk being initiated yourself. And so it is with Friends, a series I'm beginning to like but, as a seven-episode novice, have yet to compre- hend.
The series, in which six unfeasibly good- looking flatmates exchange one-liners for half an hour each week, has grown so oblique and self-congratulatory (it is now capable of securing celebrity guests as big as Julia Roberts and Jean-Claude Van Damme) that it's virtually impossible to watch unaided by expert advisers.
This week's special double bill, for exam- ple, saw the return of Marcel, a monkey which had once belonged to the goofy Ross and which had gone on to become a movie star. To you and me (I'm assuming you're not a regular viewer), it looked very much like a monkey which had been wheeled on to provide gratuitous animal cuteness. But, to Friends aficionados (like my sister, who explained all this), the monkey's reappear- ance will have been cause for wild celebra- tions. 'Marcel's back! Marcel's back!' aficionados will have been screaming across the land.
And why, pray, is it so funny when the hippy, dippy chick Phoebe picks up her gui- tar and starts singing about a 'smelly cat'? 'It just is,' explained my sister. 'She's always singing about the smelly cat.'
See what I mean?
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