Murder most foul
Simon Hoggart
Dead Ringers (BBC2) was on sparkling form this week, champagne laced with strychnine: 'On Channel 4 on Tuesday, it's Big Brother, followed by Sex with Strangers and then Eurotrash. You'll need a shower afterwards, but you still won't feel clean.'
I have to declare an interest in True Crime: Who Killed the Pageant Queen? (ITV) since it was made by a friend of mine, Mike Tracey, who runs the department of journalism at the University of Colorado. This is based in Boulder, the town where the murder took place. To recap: JonBenet Ramsey was a little girl whose wealthy parents entered her in child beauty competitions. She was horribly murdered at home on Christmas night 1996. The police didn't find any evidence of a break-in, so concluded, on the basis of no positive evidence, that someone in the family had killed the girl. The Ramseys, who do seem slightly cold fish, hid behind lawyers rather than doing the anguished breast-baring expected on American television, and the public quickly agreed with the police. (There may also be an element of snobbery here: Boulder is a wealthy, sophisticated place: they think child beauty contests are vulgar and hick, which of course they are.) Anyhow, Tracey was so appalled by the American media treatment of the case, which consisted largely of hounding the already desperate Ramseys, that he decided to hire detectives and investigate the killing himself. The story has been told in a short series of documentaries of which this is the latest. It turns out that there is ample evidence of a break-in, and a number of very obvious suspects, all of whom were ignored by police. A new team of detectives is on the case, and this week Tracey asserted, rather convincingly I thought, that there had been two men involved in the murder. One has been shot dead by the other, who is now on the run.
But the film isn't merely a Police Gazette, penny-dreadful shocker. It is an implied reproach to the American media, particularly to shock television, which finds its victims and squeezes them like a particularly malign boa constrictor. The Ramseys, having lost their cherished daughter, are now suffering a second assassination by TV: they have moved to the frozen wastes of Michigan, where they are almost destitute.
Who's this? 'He would come up and say, "Well done, boys, you did really well," after every gig. You got the impression he sort of meant it. He was slightly sleazy. At the same time he seemed very genuine as well, you know .. . '
Unmistakably Tony Blair, and my favourite part of In Search of Tony Blair (Channel 4), when members of Jaded, a rock group he briefly managed in Richmond, Surrey, were brought together to remember him. One of them demonstrated the way our Prime Minister walked at the time, arms swinging, legs flailing, like a goose-step performed by a marionette.
To be sure, there wasn't an awful lot new here, though it was painted in a more lurid light than we are used to. He isn't just religious; if this programme is right, he's something of a nut. The relationship with Gordon Brown is far worse than anyone imagined. Blair was a mother's boy (`She wrapped him in an emotional blanket, and when she died the blanket was suddenly whipped away'). Mother has been replaced by Cherie. (He's never been able to free himself from the Cherie web.') The other day I bumped into a Labour MP who assured me that the Prime Minister had gone 'mad, barking mad'. And this seems to be the new revisionist approach to Blair: that he is in the grip of forces — mainly religion and unrequited mother love — which he can barely control. Or as the presenter, the biographer Anthony Seldon, put it, 'He is left with just two core relationships — one with Cherie, his wife, and one with God, his maker.' Scary if true, huh?
But it was a curious programme. It was presented as if it were not a documentary about Blair, but about Seldon's search for Blair, so the camera followed him as if recording the quest rather than the man. Seldon sat in one corner of the screen, rather toad-like, speaking to an unseen interviewer. It was rather distracting, especially as we are interested in Blair, but not particularly interested in Seldon.
The original American version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Channel 4) has started here. A clutch of very camp gay men provided a life makeover for a very straight straight man, called, aptly enough, Butch.
I suppose we straights should get used to seeing our way of life, speech and mannerisms pilloried in this stereotypical way. Not all straights live in total squalor or buy their clothes from Oxfam or have fridges containing only canned beer and mould. Nor is it just about sexuality; we have our own straight culture, involving more than just the barbecues and football of popular myth. I thought that QEFTSG was quite interesting, but not very interesting. Programmes about releasing your inner gay are probably more fascinating for already out gays.
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