Television
On the wrong foot
Clive Gammon
I had an uneasy feeling that things were going to go ludicrously wrong when I heard they had cast Harry Worth as William Boot in BBC2's adaptation of Scoop, a seven-parter which began on Sunday evening. And my unease grew even stronger when I realised later that it wasn't the Drama department at all but the department of Light Entertainment which was putting it out. How absolutely right my unease was.
I think the NUJ should down tools until this travesty is taken off the air. It is their sacred text, after all, which is being tampered with, a weak expression to describe the cack-handed, unfunny, slowwitted, doughy mess that was made of the first episode, there being no evidence Whatsoever to suggest that any of the succeeding parts will show improvement,
Harry Worth, let's start with him, I have always found Worth less than hilarious, watching his sketches, when I had to, in embarrassment at his elephantine progression towards trying to raise a laugh, William Boot he now presents as an illpreserved sixty-year-old who writes his nature column in situ, actually, God help 05, standing in his welly-boots and seeing the questing vole go feather-footed through the plashy fen then, mouthing the phrases aloud, writing them in his notebook. The Whole Crested Grebe joke was painfully Prolonged for almost half the episode, though since Patricia was left out altogether it became difficult to explain how the mistake crept into his copy.
If the latter half of the last paragraph fails to make sense, then you shouldn't be reading this at all. Put down this paper at once and go out and buy a copy of the novel. Literate readers please continue. For some reason, Lord Copper was Portrayed as a close imitation of Sir e.
Oswald Mosley. In the Daily Beast offices, some halting attempts were made at period flavour by introducing references to Tommy Farr and Alex James, and only at the very end of the episode, in the scene at Harrods where Boot buys his vast heap of absurd equipment for his trip to Ismailia, did the wretched adaptation begin to sound a little like the novel and that was because for almost the first time in thirty minutes it began to use the dialogue of the original. And blessings here, for creating a small oasis in a desert of sludge, on the lady who played the assistant who sold Boot his cleft-sticks. Shamefully, for I have mislaid my Radio Times, I cannot name her here. But her cameo characterisation was astringently delightful. "I will have them sent 'down to our cleaver at once," she said, without the flicker of an eyebrow, as Boot thrust forward what looked like a bundle of hockey sticks to be converted into dispatch-carrying sticks.
I wonder how the BBC will manage the visa-application bit in the next episode, when Boot (if they follow the novel) will have to apply at the two rival Ismailian embassies. I am particularly interested since I once had an experience at the Senegalese Embassy comically close to what happens in Scoop. On this form they are bound to foul it up. • Meanwhile, whatever else happens, Worth himself is a sure guarantee of the leaden progress of the remaining episodes. Someone should have told him that William is not stupid but diffident. And the most willing suspension of disbelief in the world won't be able to breathe life into the prospect of this Boot's affair with delicious Sinead Cusack, promised for later on.
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