Television
Mertonisms for Mertonists
Nigella Lawson
We don't need Danny Baker to tell us nostalgia is cool. In fact, having seen his new show last Saturday, I'm not sure we need Danny Baker full stop. His charm is beginning to pall. Even nostalgia has a lim- ited allure. We can all go on about Span- gles and loon pants and Randall and Hopkirk deceased for as long as we, and the television executives, like, but if you make the mistake of thinking - which is what these very executives appear to have done - that any of these have an appeal other than the purely nostalgic, then some- one somewhere is going to come a cropper.
Item: Paul Merton's Palladium (BBCI Sunday, 8 p.m.). What goes around comes around and the class of comics which alter- native comedians used to sneer at are now the hippest things in town. Bob Monkhouse rubs shoulders with Frank Skinner, and I haven' t heard an ideologically sound joke about even Bernard Manning for ages. Time to cash in the nostalgic ticket. So Paul Merton is the man to front the Palla- dium show. Of course it should have been someone who's actually part of the story beong told, like Bruce Forsyth, but even he hasn't quite made it to the kingdom of cool yet. 'The young' like Paul Merton, you see, so getting him is a sharp, audience-boost- ing move. Then you can pretend the show is in some way about Merton and not about an institution which most Merton fans won't understand to be an institution. And once you've got all those viewers who are interested in Merton but not particularly interested in the Palladium you have to give them Mertonisms - Merton mistaking a kebab stall for the Palladium; Merton wondering how to get to the theatre from Oxford Circus; Merton asking Blue Peteresque questions of comedians who could chew him up and spit out the pieces over the Friday night first house audience at the Glasgow Empire and get a laugh for it.
Nostalgia must be recognised for what it is. When, some 18 months ago, BBC paid its tribute to 'Granadaland" and put out a special, celebratory and celebrity round of University Challenge, how we all raved. How good it was. Simple television, cheap television, but the magic was still there. Bamber twinkled and the contestants sparkled. Of course the special one-off edi- tion of University Challenge was a glorified version of the real thing, which anyway we remember only in its heyday, and choose to forget why we stopped watching. To be fair, one of the reasons it was eventually dropped was because television had changed. It was mass culture or it was nothing. Executives got ever more obsessed not with ratings exactly, but with percent- age of total audience. Programmes such as University Challenge were not going to stick around in such an atmosphere, such a market.
But for all that, and just because we are wowed for a night, doesn't mean it's right to bring it back. No one is going to be drawn to watch University Challenge who isn't motivated by nostalgia-induced curios- ity, and for all Jeremy Paxman's accom- plishment, that's not going to last for more than a couple of shows, tops. But never mind about University Challenge - and let's face it, who's going to? - it's what the BBC is doing messing around with Jeremy Pax- man that is slightly more troubling. Univer- sity Challenge is not much in the way of a consolation prize for Question Time. (It's the same with Paul Merton: he's good at what he does, so why do TV execs think he'll be even better doing what he doesn't?) Television, even British televi- sion, is not rich enough in talent to go about wasting it.
`It's the latest Carry on film.'
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