Television
Terrible talent
Ian Hislop
Most television turns out to be disap- pointing but Eldorado (BBC 1, 7 p.m., Mon, Wed, Fri) is a welcome exception. It Is just as bad as everyone says it is. Having previously been left on the fringe of con- versations about the awesome uselessness of everyone involved in the programme, I can now join in.
On Friday I watched one episode, no doubt boosting the ratings up to the level of the Test Card, and have to say that I enjoyed it immensely. An elderly woman pranced about in her lingerie singing 'Life is a Cabaret', a fat man with a beard got drunk, a young man in silly dark glasses was questioned by the police, and a middle- aged homosexual had his Judy Garland record collection stolen. What more could you want? The doctor's wife cut her hand, someone's mother went back to Britain and a rather sulky-looking girl in shorts bent over a carpet and beat it. Those were the main plot points but it would be very unfair just to list them without giving some idea of the dialogue that accompanied them. The Doctor was a bit of a character and said things to his wife like 'Jest madam jest upon mine honour as an Englishman?' The gay man with the moustache said, 'All my lovely Judy collection, do you think I can replace those?' The northern mother said to her sons, 'They've been right kind to me.' The ageing cabaret singer said, 'He's all appetite dear and no use to anyone.' The teenage girl in a wheelchair said, `Knowledge is power Mum, that's what I think.' And then there were some young foreigners who said things that you couldn't really hear properly. A Spanish girl demon- strated that her Spanish is very fluent but then had to cope with the English line `Lots of leisure. I think it is not so easy doing nothing all day.' A German boy asked, 'Hey Trish what do you mean?' and managed to make it sound as if he didn't know what his line meant, let alone hers.
I fail to understand what I think was the show's only deliberate joke until I played it back on the video. Someone in the bar says `Pass on my compliments' and the gay man, who has replaced the dressing-gown which he wore to the supermarket with a smart blazer, deliberately confuses compliments with condiments and asks who has pinched his cruet. Perhaps it was the delivery. The real strength of the dialogue, however, lay in the unintentional jokes where the writers displayed an uncanny knack of anticipating the general reaction to the programme in the programme itself. The Spanish girl had a conversation with the older woman in which she asked, 'You are bored?' and received the reply, 'Climbing walls, dar- ling.' Later on the same character declared to the confused-looking German boy, 'I'm bored and I want out.' The man who was meant to be smooth told the man who was meant to be drunk, 'You're a sad act. A very -sad act.' The irony reached a high- point with the arrival of the German boy in the bar with a new girlfriend. 'Ey oop,' said one of the northern lads, 'here's talent.'
No, Eldorado has none of that, unless you count a certain kind of talent to create something so consistent in every depart- ment. It's not just that the writing, acting and direction are terrible. Even the weath- er is hopeless. Everyone looked cold in their shorts and T-shirts and a strong wind kept flapping at the deckchairs. When the man in the silly glasses described a picnic on a boat (`liam sandwiches, curried eggs, champagne'), I started shivering.
I hope they don't change it. It is a unique example of underestimating the British viewing public, something recently believed impossible. Success would spoil it. And that would be disappointing.
Marlyn Harris is on holiday.
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