Television
Lonely hearts
Martyn Harris
Aidrew Davies has been around for donkey's years. He was writing for televi- sion in the days when Dame Edna was still funny and Sir Robin Day still mortal. To Serve Them All My Days, Davies's plodding adaptation of the R.F. Delderfield novel, was broadcast back in the 1970s. But though Davies is pushing 60 now, he has hit a remarkable streak in the last few years.
His campus doctor series, A Very Peculiar Practice, won both Bafta and Royal Televi- sion Society writers' awards in 1989. His stage play Prin, with Sheila Hancock, was a big success in the same year, followed by a fine novel, Getting Hurt, and the short story collection Dirty Faxes.
The typical playwright's career starts in his early twenties with a burst of icono- clasm and generally descends by way of booze and bouquets into the torpid reac- tion of a John Osborne or the self- indulgent obscurantism of a Dennis Potter. Davies's career is an inversion of the usual trajectory and with his Screen One drama, Filipina Dream Girls (BBC 1, 9.20 p.m., Sunday), seems to be climbing still.
A tale of five unattractive Welshmen in search of nubile Filipina wives, it opened with smeary video-box clips of the suitors: Gareth the clumsy gorilla; Tim the carbun- cular crane driver; Preston the prissy DVLC clerk, and Carwyn the wounded car- penter from Caerphilly. It was the crispest, most economical series of character sketch- es I can recall in a TV drama and typical of Davies in its simplicity and technical bold- ness. Just plonk the cast in front of a cam- era, make them describe themselves and in three minutes flat, without a single stage set, location shot or action sequence, your characters are established and your lonely- hearts plot is rolling.
In another sequence, the suitors are embarked on a real Philippine Airlines flight, with its cramped gangways and swamped lavatories and brusque hostesses, but are swept up gently by their dreams into the TV advertising version of the same flight, with serene and glowing girls waiting pliantly upon their every whim.
These are clever, even tricksy manoevres, but Davies always seems able to keep his balance between real and surreal. It is probably the meticulous selection of detail and accurate reproduction of speech which saves him. The way the Filipina girls glimpsed in the background are always leafing through the over-55 album of potential husbands. Or the way he captures the manic repetitiveness of goofy Gareth: 'I never wear a shirt. T-shirt and jumper, but never a shirt. Can't see the point see. I never wear a shirt. . . . ' Filipina Dream Girls was an unsentimental stare at a fraught subject but it managed to deal with the issues, to marry off most of the men and to end on a note of sweetness and opti- mism without being sickly in the least.
The South Bank Show on Private Eye (LWT, 10.20 p.m., Sunday) left a sourer taste, not because I dislike the Eye — I go along with Paul Foot who called it the nearest thing we have to a free press — but because it has achieved such a near- invulnerable status. If you think its politics are sometimes disgusting then Bron Waugh pops up to say it for you; think it reckless and Richard Ingrams chimes in to agree; believe it has been homophobic and anti- Semitic and Ian Hislop puts it better him- self. It is not that the Eye is immaculate, just nimbly pre-emptive. But it does mean there are very few platforms to attack it from, apart from the near-illiterate plat- form of a competitor like Viz, and all they can manage is a raspberry. The Eye has attained the same stature that Punch had achieved by 1914. It is acquiring the same smell, of leather and brandy. It will die of the same disease, which is terminal smug- ness — but not, I hope, before I do.
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