Television
Tabloid crudity
James Delingpole
There are few things more pathetic than chippy proles whingeing about the iniquities of the class system. It's there to be exploited, not to make your life miser- able, and anyone who doesn't realise this deserves all the low self-esteem problems they get.
Take John Humphreys, one of several supposed humble folk who could be heard on Class (ITV, Tuesday) complaining how much harder life is if you're not born a toff. Well, excuse me, John, but if you had a title and a fruity voice, I very much doubt that you'd still be presenting the Today programme. It's mellifluous regional accents like yours they want at the BBC these days, not pukka drawls — as poor old Frank Muir discovered re Book at Bedtime.
And Melvyn Bragg, really! Pull yourself together, man! You've made an absolute fortune playing the honest Cumbrian boy turned gritty arts-guru. If that's not class exploitation, I don't know what is. How can you possibly condemn all those aristocrats who, you claim, have cleaned up since 1979 by selling off all their ancestral art trea- sures? They had no option: they weren't common enough to get cushy jobs in broadcasting. I suppose there'd be a stronger case for detesting the upper classes if they had much more fun than us ordinary working folk. Quite clearly they don't, though there was a time, I admit, when I subscribed to this myth. I used to leaf through the `Bystander' pages of Tatler and think, `Gosh. I hope, when I grow up, I too can be photographed at these lavish parties where everyone dresses like Restoration fops and where nubile aristocratic breasts keep pop- ping out of corsets . . . '
Then, one day, I turned to a section that had hitherto made me extremely envious. The one marked 'Parties of the Year'. Prominent on the list was the launch for Opera Now magazine. All at once the scales fell from my eyes, for, in the course of my duties as a party correspondent, I had attended this particular bash. And been bored rigid.
So, really, people like the noisome wretch from Class War, who proclaimed that he liked nothing better than throwing excrement at posh people, are wasting their time. The upper classes have a grim enough time of it already. The good-uns have to put up with living in huge, draughty, uncomfortable houses which they can maintain only by throwing them open to dreary men-in-suits for conferences; and the bad-uns invariably succumb to heroin. Do they really deserve to be covered in poo as well?
If you took the first episode of Class at face value, I suppose the answer would be yes. We saw braying yotties exposing their botties at Cowes, pubescent public school boys being vilely arrogant on the way to one of those snog'n'throw-up teenage balls; and, more incriminatingly yet, Tamara Beckwith. My personal favourite squirm scene was the one where some old Stoic, hamming it up royally, went into Locks to buy a silk topper for Ascot. 'Will sir be going to the Royal Enclosure this year?' smarmed a hatter.
Almost certainly a put-up job, I'd say: no one in Locks would dream of saying any- thing so downright tacky. But, then, the whole programme had this stagey, Sun's- eye-view-of-toffdom quality. I mean, of course, if you keep the cameras rolling long enough, your subjects are drunk enough, and if you're selective with the editing, you're bound to secure ample, schlocky footage of toffs behaving badly. And if you choose people like Michael Winner, Cyn- thia Payne, Eric Bristow and Kelvin McKenzie as your expert witnesses, you're sure to garner plenty of fatuous quotes to match. As you'd expect from the makers of Hollywood Pets, Class was tabloid television at its crudest and most exploitative. Per- haps even worth a bit of punitive action from the man from Class War.
I'm not going to launch into a why-oh- why on the rise of programmes like Class and the demise of venerable classics like Mastermind (BBC 1, Mondays), but it's jolly sad, isn't it, that this series is the last we'll be seeing of Magnus and his sinister black chair?
Having been one of those precocious brats who was always quite good at general knowledge — 'Stiff exam,' my father used to say to me. 'What's the capital of Outer Mongolia?' And every parent within hear- ing distance would reach for their sick bags as I chirruped the answer — I was glued to Mastermind from an early age. Later this came in handy for sucking up to my Latin master, Tom Pom' Hart, who won it once.
Winning it seems a bit of a lottery, though I think it helps if you try to make your specialist subject as narrow as possi- ble. This week's winner, for example, chose the 'Life and Works of Roald Dahl' which I'm sure would have a been a sight easier to mug up on than Grand Prix racing since 1970. Still, on those grounds it should have gone to the woman who chose anorexia nervosa. I am surprised there are more than ten questions you could possibly ask on the subject.
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