Under the spotlight
James Delmgpole
The other day I took our cat Beetle to the vet's to get him treated for one of those mega-expensive urinary tract infections that no one warns you about when they're kittens. Soon I was joined in the waitingroom by three other cat-owners, all of whom began exchanging cat talk, admiring each other's pussies, and fussing over two tabby cats that happened to live in the surgery.
Personally, I didn't want anything to do with this. I mean I like cats but I don't consider them particularly central to my universe. What I soon realised, however, was that this was not the correct attitude to strike in a vet's surgery. If I didn't find it impossible to look at a flea-ridden tabby without wanting to scratch it behind the ear, if I didn't make out that Beetle was as important to me as my children, if I didn't come up with a few choice anecdotes about his hilarious ways, then I would reveal myself — or so I was made to feel — as a closet, feline-fur-wearing, puppy-farming, hamster-torturing, badger-baiter. So. reluctantly, I gave up and joined in.
There's something similarly oppressive, I fear, in the atmosphere surrounding Red Nose Day. To resist its dubious comic charms or, worse still, to venture the slightest criticism is tantamount to saying, 'I'm a heartless, cynical bastard and I like nothing more than watching flyblown African babies, their bellies swollen with malnutrition, slowly dying before my eyes on camera.'
It's a shame that a cause so good and noble should have a side effect so creepy and unpleasant, but it's true. You see it in the stick that hapless couple received for daring to complain when the manager of a nearby wine bar laser-projected an image of a giant pair of Comic Relief underpants onto the walls of their Georgian house. You see it, too, in the queasy subtext of those TV sketches where the likes of Martin Clunes and Dom Joly are seen on the phone telling their agents, 'They want me to work for how much? Tell them I don't do charity.'
I say 'queasy' because, of course, such a response is a luxury that they could never in a million years have afforded for real, no matter how great the conflict of interest between comedy and charity. One is about laughing when a man slips on a banana skin. The other is about rushing up to console him and pay his medical bills.
Perhaps this stops being an issue when, like Lenny Henry or Billy Connolly, you've reached that stage in your career where mirth is a distant memory; but for the younger, hipper comics whose humour relies on subversion, acid observation and unflinching honesty, it must be quite hard taking part in just the sort of Butlins-style. enforced jollity-fest that you'd spend the other 364 days in the year reviling. You can see it in their rictus grins and in the way that suddenly all their jokes stop being funny.
At this stage, unfortunately, I'm going to have to undermine my argument by admitting that, for all its ghastliness, Comic Relief has provided us with some of the most addictive TV in ages. Like most peo
ple I imagine. I was terribly sneery when I saw the list of nonentities who were to take part in Celebrity Big Brother (BBC 1, Channel 4 all week). But in fact the show has worked quite brilliantly.
The reason for this, I suppose, is that because celebrities are so painfully imageconscious and have such fragile egos, they start cracking up much more quickly and dramatically in a Big-Brother-type situation than lumpen, ordinary members of the public do. Hence, within just two days, Anthea Turner's tears and Vanessa Feltz's silent rage on being nominated for eviction: what could possibly be worse for any celeb than having all your secret fears about not being truly beloved by your public confirmed by a sudden, brutal poll?
Some viewers seem to think that all this weird behaviour — Jack Dee's escape attempt, Chris Eubank's obsessive preening — has been staged for our benefit. But none of them — not even the Scouse actress I'd never heard of before — ever normally has to sustain their public face for more than a few hours each day. Pretending to be something you're not for a whole week under the camera's unflinching gaze would surely be beyond their acting abilities.
This is why Celebrity Big Brother is such an ideal Comic Relief programme. Because its victims remain under the spotlight for so long, they soon lose that grinning 'I'm doing all this for charidee' artificiality that tends to afflict most Red Nose participants. To appreciate this, you only have to compare the integrity and humanity of those inside the Big Brother house, with the vapidity of the mugging celebrities who appear outside. Even presenter Davina McCall, whose professionalism I used to admire and whom I used rather to fancy in a 'bet she's rude and dirty' kind of way, has been transformed by the Red Nose curse into an overexcited oaf.
Bugger. I meant to rave about what unalloyed genius the new series of Spaced (Channel 4, Friday) is proving to be. It will have to wait till next time.
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