Television
Final demand
James Delingpole
Ido so hate those must-see Sunday/Monday TV dramas. You can't not watch the first part because what if it turns out to be really good and you're unable to join in when everyone raves about it on Monday? And you can't not watch the second part because by then you've invested so much time you have to stick with it to see how it ends, even if as usual it's crap.
So I was dreading Russell T. Davies's The Second Coming (ITV, Saturday and Sunday). I quite liked his Queer As Folk in its saucy 'let's wind up the straights by showing a pretty blond schoolboy enjoying anal sex with a bitchy, predatory, older man' way, but I feared that, like the tedious Bob And Rose (gay man falls in love with a woman), The Second Coming (video-shop assistant discovers he's the son of God) was going to be another of those concept-dramas that sounds great at the commissioning phase, but then collapses under the weight of its ambitions.
But no. Once you'd got over your initial resistance to the idea that God would choose Manchester as the venue for the second coming and to the hackneyed Omen-esque sequences involving handsome young Vatican emissaries spouting numerological revelations amid racy camerawork and urgent background music, it all got terribly compelling.
Christopher Eccleston, who always comes across as so terribly intense and pleased with himself, was obviously made for the part of the Christ-like Steve. But what impressed me most was the confidence with which it cut to the chase. There was none of the pointless is he or isn't he the Son of God?' shilly-shallying you might have expected. Vv'ithin 20 minutes Steve had performed his first miracle — bringing daylight to Manchester City stadium when all around was night — so from right near the start we knew exactly where we stood. At this point a less brassy writer might have got a bit nervous. How exactly would the Son of God behave on his second trip to earth? Davies decided he'd do a lot of swearing and boozing, suddenly discover how brilliant tabs are, and really get off on the way everyone thinks he's great. And every now and then he'd do something totally, amazingly cool, like in the scene when he's sitting in a pub with his disciples and the whole building is blown apart by a massive bomb planted by the agents of Satan (who all look like refugees from that New Labour New Danger poster), and the goodies all emerge completely unscathed.
This is one of the great things about Davies: you can tell he's watched at least as much Tarantino as he has Dennis Potter. But just because he can be playful and knowing doesn't mean he's afraid of the serious issues. God has sent his son to earth a second time, we learn from Steve, to give mankind an ultimatum: unless it can mend its ways and produce a Third Testament governing its future behaviour, He will be forced to destroy it.
Now how on earth is Davies going to resolve this one, I wondered. If you don't know yet, look away now. Right. First, he confused us by having lots of draft testaments from all over the world piling up, with Steve and his disciples going 'But we'll never get through this lot before Armageddon. Then he made use of Steve's sceptical. semi-girlfriend Judith (Lesley Sharp), who'd been threatening for the last hour and a half to perform some pivotal plot function and now, here at last, was her chance.
Judith had the blinding insight that the only possible way to avert Armageddon was by persuading Steve to eat a lovingly homemade pasta dish laced with rat poison. Man had been given two millennia to follow Christ's example but had failed dismally. Killing God's son a second time would signal that from henceforth, rather than defer to the Almighty, man would be at last taking responsibility for his own actions.
If I've made the ending sound a bit silly, that wasn't how it came across. It was actually very touching — particularly the way Steve, who really didn't want to die just as he was getting it together with the woman he'd always fancied, reluctantly recognised that his death was mankind's only hope. But I did think the programme made a huge mistake by giving us a glimpse at the end of the new post-religion world. It looked as if it had been designed and run by a committee of social workers.
And before we all bid a welcome farewell to Living With Jackson (repeated this week ITV2) may I too say how utterly shocked and appalled I was by this sinister, ugly, graceless man who pretends to befriend the innocent, the naive and the gullible and then abuses that trust for his warped and noisome ends. Really, it's about time that Martin Bashir was locked up for good.
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