It's grim up north
Simon Hoggart
Retro television is suddenly popular, at least with television executives, We have had The Forsyte Saga, University Challenge, Bill & Ben, Paul Merton as Tony Hancock, Ant and Dec returning as The Likely Lads and now Auf Wiedersehn, Pet has been resuscitated, and switched from ITV to a new home on BBC.
I suppose this is the people who run television getting nostalgic about their own viewing past. More old material will have to be flung into the hopper. Are You Being Served? will return with a cameo role for Mick Jagger as Young Mister Grace. Men Behaving Badly will star Ant and Dec, since everything does these days. There is no reason why the tribute show should wait till the original is over. Remakes of cult shows such as Black Books and The Office could overlap with the first versions, giving us the chance to compare the two directly.
Which I couldn't do with Auf Wiedersehn, Pet (BBC 1) because I never followed the original. So I watched with great interest. By golly, it's grim up north. Everything on Teesside looks awful. Everybody is awful. They're loathsome, odious, vile, demonstrating terminal viciousness tempered only by stupidity. The lads themselves are for the most part hideously ugly — think Jimmy Nail, Timothy Spall — though they are meant to be lovable scamps as well. This is not a term you would apply to the mobsters, human traffickers and crooked businessmen they encounter along life's journey. One hitman excuses his homicidal tendencies by saying he was a Tranmere Rovers supporter, always feeling overshadowed by Liverpool and Everton. (Zo, I can understand ziss sense of impotence you are feeling ... ') Kevin Whateley's character is indeed impotent, at least with his wife. And Timothy Spall, who has made it financially and so lives in a house even uglier than everyone else's, has a wife who has sex with a man who at least claims to be her brother.
spend much time with. The first episode of Auf Wiedersehn hammered The Forsyte Saga in the ratings, getting twice as many viewers as episode three of the costume drama. I'll be interested to learn if people switch back from the unremitting bleakness, the unrelenting misery of television drama compared to the comparative blandness of the real world.
Clement and La Fresnais always knew that the yucks had to be tempered by yocks, which they did masterfully in The Likely Lads, Porridge and their brilliant script for The Commitments. Not here.
Mo Mowlam: Inside New Labour (Channel 4) was the kind of engaging, insider, personalised political documentary the BBC used to do but has more or less abandoned. It shows you what politics is really like, not the silly brawling of the Commons, nor the pre-planned sound bites of Question Time. I like Mo very much. Once, when still in opposition, she broke off a conversation with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to tell me she had a new joke, and to meet her later. (It was the one she told later on So Graham Norton: 'What do birthdays, lavatory seats and clitorises have in common? Men always miss them.')
No wonder they mistrusted her. The point about Mo was that she saw politics as an extension of daily life, which involved hugging people, occasionally swearing at them and telling risque jokes even when your party leader was present. Politicians hate that. Imagine a professional rugby player who refused to hit people on the other team simply because you wouldn't hit them in the supermarket queue. They like people who play the game according to the recognised rules: public obsequiousness blended with private excoriation.
The programme slightly lost me towards the end of the second episode, when Mo was presented as a latter-day Sybil, warning of the petrol crisis and the row over the 75p rise in pensions. She had predicted that New Labour would prove to be a rotten hulk and would soon sink in the mire of popular hatred. Oddly enough there was no mention of last year's election result, I suppose because it rather spoiled the case.
The programme had a villain and his name was Mandelson. How a man who is supposed to be a political genius managed to get himself sacked from the Cabinet not once but twice, I do not know. As always the master-manipulator of public opinion made himself look as nasty as anything out of Auf Wiedersehn, Pet. At one point, refusing to talk about something, lit as if emerging from ghostly shadows, he pointed in sinister fashion at the camera and demanded: Are you on or off?' It was a grisly moment. Peter, old chap, you were trained in television. You should never let people who don't like you fix the lighting.
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