Transfixing battle-axe
Simon Hoggart
rrhe sleep of reason brings forth mon sters,' Goya wrote, and the sleep of reason that is summer television has just brought forth a cracking monster. Christine Rose was the indisputable star of this week's Masters and Servants (Channel 4). A hard-wired termagant, a snob, a roaring battle-axe, a Scouse Hyacinth Bucket, a woman who made Margaret Thatcher seem emollient and indecisive; Boadicea without the elfin charm, Delilah with added venom, she bestrode the show like — if you can imagine such a thing — a diminutive colossus. Medusa would have turned to stone at a shake of Christine's locks. Goliath would have fled at one glimpse of her mouth, set in its permanent pout of rage and contempt. She was hypnotic, transfixing and traumatising.
All the other characters, including her husband, seemed wan shadows, drifting black and white phantoms, bland chunks of potato occasionally thrown up in the boiling, roiling stew of Christine's hate and fury. You can imagine the way the production team must have hugged themselves with joy at the end of each day. 'She's fantastic! Absolutely perfect!' they would have said as the first bottle of Pinot Grigio slid down. The researcher who found the Rose family would have been traced back at the office and rewarded with champagne, bonuses, promotion, holidays in the Maldives, including first-class travel and accommodation at a luxury resort.
In Channel 4's earlier Wife Swap — in which women exchanged households — some standards of courtesy were maintained. Clearly this had not been enough, so they decided this time to put people into the most humiliating position imaginable. None of us would be at our best, forced to skivvy for complete strangers in front of a television crew, and perhaps there is, at home, a softer, gentler, more tolerant Christine. But I doubt it. For her, every line was a shout of triumph. One of the hapless Mills family, forced to work for her, asked what there was to eat. 'Beans on toast!' she declared.
'But we've got no toaster,' they replied. 'Well, what's wrong with beans on bread?' she demanded.
The plan was that the servant family in each case (the two families swapped places halfway through the programme) would be meek and deferential, saving their spleen for their time as the masters. Christine was having none of that. Occasionally the Millses would try to get a word in, leading to this exchange: 'Stuck-up cow!'
'You're a stuck-up bitch!'
But it didn't last long. The Millses fell like dry wheat under a combine.
My usual complaint about 'reality' television is that it is so unreal, placing people in positions they would never encounter in 'real' real life. Yet sometimes a format will offer us, through a Mobius strip effect, an extra, heightened reality, a reality more vivid, more exciting, far worse than anything we could have imagined. In short, Christine. I hope she gets her own series.
The concept does creep in everywhere. Take Restoration (BBC2). Each show (there were two this week) selects three fine old buildings that are in danger of falling down. This, of course, would be far too dull on its own. So we have Griff Rhys Jones introducing each building in a hail of humorous clichés. 'Cholera was no laughing matter ... To enter this Gothic treasure is to step back in time ...But can a phoenix arise from these ashes?' Then on come Marianne and Ptolemy, the 'building detectives': experts who express surprise and delight at their discoveries. 'Look, Marianne, an oriel window!' Ptolemy says On turning a corner, when what he really should be saying is: 'Look, Marianne, the same camera crew standing in front of the oriel window as we met the previous three times we did this shot!'
They seem nice people, though even when giving us the bad news Ptolemy has the fixed smile of a man who has, over the years, learned to live with his Christian name. But even having affable young people standing in front of buildings ('Look at this! Real rococo plasterwork!') is not enough, so we have to vote by phone for which building we want to save. I presume that if you vote for, say, the old chapel and it loses anyway, your 30p will go to Amos Vale cemetery, or whichever near-ruin does win, rather in the way that would-be contestants pay for the prizes for the people who actually make it on to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
Yet this is not enough, so each programme ends with three celebrities, such as Lady Lucinda Lambton, doing her familiar impression of a woman at the edge of her reason, like a slightly cheerier Virginia Woolf, each begging us to vote for whichever favourite building was allocated to them by the BBC. I enjoyed it, but there was something quite neurotic in the way that nothing was allowed to speak for itself, nothing could be deemed interesting in itself, but had to be tarted up and tweaked to within an inch of its life.
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