Television
A toast for tea
James Delingpole
Because I like my weekend TV viewing to be as intellectually undemanding as pos- sible, I can't pretend I was delighted when my father-in-law rang up on Sunday and suggested I watch some boring new series about the Industrial Revolution.
I suppose I could have ignored him, especially since I had loads of preview tapes to catch up on, but unfortunately he played the Rat card. 'I think if you watch it with Jim, it might help him with his history studies,' he said. And, feeling all step- 'I do like talking to you. I feel we've so much in common.' parentally responsible, I grudgingly agreed. And I'm jolly glad I did too because The Day The World Took Off (Channel 4, Sun- day) was about the only thing I saw all weekend that wasn't a total waste of life. Did you know, for example, that one of the reasons the Industrial Revolution hap- pened first in Britain rather than anywhere else was because of our national love of a nice cuppa? Well, I didn't and just in case you missed the opening episode of what promises to be a gripping, revelatory series I'll explain. It all has to do with population density. To start an industrial revolution you need a massed urban supply of cheap labour — something few countries were capable of providing in the early 19th century because whenever too many poor, malnourished people gathered in one city they all started dying of disease. The only exceptions to this rule were Japan and Great Britain, Why? No one knew until one bright spark had the cunning idea that it might have something to do with their shared enthusi- asm for tea.
At first, he suspected the secret lay in the boiling of the water. But, in order to kill off the bacteria in polluted water, you need to boil it for at least five minutes — which, obviously, hardly anyone ever does. So then he moved on to the alternative theory that the tea itself had magical restorative and anti-bacterial properties. And, safe enough, it does, as you can tell if you trY dropping one pair of frogs legs into ordi- nary water and another one into a solution of tea. In the first case, the legs rot, in the second, they're preserved. Hence Britain's vast economic superiority throughout most of the 19th century. Hurrah! Of course, when I subsequently tried, coaxing the Rat into recalling any one °J. the plethora of similarly fascinating facts which emerged from the programme, be, stared at me gormlessly and then asked whether we could turn over to Sky One- Instead, I forced him to watch flour, Treatment (ITV, Sunday), that two-pal` drama starring Daniela Nardini out of This Life. As usual, Nardini played a feisty, 11°- nonsense Scottish girl who's tough on tb,e outside but quite sensitive and vulnerable, underneath. This time, she was a talented army officer who was raped by a pair oef Ruperts on an advanced training coolrs causing her to lose her job and her father to die of a heart attack. So far so promising. But what started °lit as a plausible, nicely observed, wellresearched exploration of the problenf, women face when serving in the new' army suddenly cleciet., in the second part to throw character, stlud tlety and credibility out of the window an mutate into a shrill, histrionic revenge f3..'"c, tasy full of twists and inconsistencies f,t ludicrous I kept groaning, 'No! No! I can take it any more.' In the end, it all came together eltlitiet cleverly but I still couldn't help feeling a insulted and cheated — rather as you would if you'd got half-way through War and Peace only to discover that the rest had been penned by Jeffrey Archer. Since this is far from the first Sunday/Bank Holiday Monday drama series where this has hap- PeneTV d, I can only assume it is deliberate I policy. Perhaps some market researcher has told them that, while view- ers are just about capable of intelligent thought on Sunday, they're so pissed, depressed and brain-dead come Bank Holi- day Monday that you have to treat them like morons or they'll switch over to some- thing like Lock Stock . . . (Channel 4, Mon- day) instead.
Quite the biggest disappointment of the weekend — impressive given the strong competition offered by Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned (ITV, Sunday) in which two blokes sat in front of a studio audience and sPent half an hour dying live on TV — was 11,_Brief History Of the F-Word (Channel 4, m onday). No doubt it sounded like a bril- liant idea at commissioning stage — 'And the best thing is, we can say "fuck" as many tunes as we like and no one can complain because, hey, that's what the programme's all about' — but it was so inanely done bosoms Eurotrash, only without the giant little and poo museums) and it had so little of interest to say that I can't even be bothered to give it serious analysis. It was Just fucking bollocks, basically.
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