The squirm factor
Simon Hoggart
lack in the Ordovician period, we learnt Lion Sea Monsters (BBC1), the earth spun so fast that days were only 21 hours long. What would you drop from your life if you had three hours less each day? Television, I expect, starting with all those programmes in which bossy women tell you how to clean your house or what to wear. Anything in which an ordinary middle-class family decides to sell up to buy a home in Tuscany or Portugal, or — and this would be really interesting — northern Uganda, where they have a hilarious time with recalcitrant plumbers and whingeing teenagers. All life-exchange shows, which used to be fun hut are now just squirm-making.
The latest is Celebrity Wife Swap (Channel 4), featuring — and this stretches the term 'celebrity' as thin as it will go — Jade Goody of Big Brother and Major Charles Ingram, who won on 14420 Wants To Be A Millionaire? by having a friend cough the right answers. How does this crime, for which he was convicted on overwhelming evidence, make him a celebrity? Obviously he wouldn't have acquired the same status by nicking car radios. Would he be on an agency's books if he had tried to steal the million quid from the company accounts? Or is it because he tried it on television? In which case, everyone on Police, Camera, Action! would be a star.
There were two mildly amusing moments. One came when Mrs Ingram, speaking as if she were picking up a small corpse the cat had just dragged in, enunciated: 'The word "minging" is used a lot in this house. I don't know what it means, but it is clearly derogatory.' Yes, Diana, it is. And [liked it when her opposite number, Jade, announced that 'If you don't cook the eggs, you'll get semolina.'
Louis and the Brothel (BBC 2) had Louis Theroux visiting a luxurious new knocking shop, a sort of resort bordello near Reno, Nevada. All Theroux's shows are about him, or rather about how a handsome, faintly eccentric and utterly self-deprecating young man gets along with truly strange people. It usually works well, though this time he was upstaged by Hayley, one of the prostitutes, who easily commandeered the programme until she was fired for drunkenness.
As Theroux told her, she was weird, to which she spat in reply: 'I'm weird? Foreigner!' Endearingly, she thought that by taking her top off she could make the footage unusable. How little she knew about British television! She spent ages trying to get him into bed, which I assumed was designed to make us realise what a stud Theroux is (and not the nervous geography teacher he appears to be) until she charged him $200 for a massage. Then she disappeared. It was sad and inexplicable, as if a slightly titillating documentary had got confused with one of the bleaker Steinbeck novels.
Absolute Power (BBC 2) comes to television from Radio Four. Ifs a sitcom about a public relations agency which handles celebrities, some even more famous than Jade Goody and Major Ingram. If you closed your eyes you would miss nothing at all, except for a mildly amusing scene in which a lot of improbable young women, one of them black, pretended to be Anneka Rice. Instead there are lines which would work well on the radio. 'It's Cancer Ward without the rip-roaring laughs"; 'We're speaking Mary Archer — without the crazy sense of fun!'; 'He's buggered, Martin, and I don't mean that in a nice way.'
It was amiable radio, but not good enough television, except perhaps for Stephen Fry, who must play Michael Fawcett when they make a film about the Prince of Wales's tribulations.
And why does no television show understand what newspapers are like? I won't trouble you with the plot, except that it involved getting a popular TV historian to snog Anneka Rice. The resulting picture on the front page was headlined: 'NIGEL ANNEKA — A SECRET HISTORY?' No newspaper front page has ever looked remotely like that. In the same way, in detective stories, Inspector Briskett is forever reading articles which begin: 'Reginald Chauncy, the head butler at Loughton Grange, in Hertfordshire, made a most grim discovery yesterday evening when he entered the conservatory carrying his master's bedtime drink, only to find Lord Farnsbarns lying dead upon the floor, seemingly the victim of a most bloodthirsty attack. .."
I think there's a fortune to be made telling novelists and TV producers alike how newspapers actually report things, and it certainty doesn't include headlines such as 'Nigel and Anneka — A Secret History?' I know its only a joke, but comedy depends on getting the unfunny details right.
By contrast, Sea Monsters was terrific. The conceit is that a zoologist, Nigel Marvell, is swimming through prehistoric oceans, where he encounters gigantic and hideous fish and jabs them with an electric prod. Nigel has the boyish enthusiasm of a Jamie Oliver, cheerily leaping overboard to find more terrifying computer simulations. He may well be a computer simulation himself: it would be easier to create than a 30 ft-long squid. The drawback is a drippy, drivelling voice-over: 'The Ordovician, then, isn't exactly a picnic .. . anywhere you can't go swimming without a chainmail suit probably isn't going to take off as a holiday destination,' Oh, please.
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