Lives to thrill
Simon Hoggart
Eotballers' Wives (ITV) bowed out with final episode that made Grand Guignol look like The Magic Roundabout. We had a bare-knuckle punch-up, violent homophobia plus attempted suicide — and that was before the credits in the 'previously' section. They should have a 'subsequently' segment to let us decide whether we can bear to go on watching.
Anyhow, the titles finally came up and we got adultery, drugs, mother-beating, lunacy, vicious debt-collectors, lesbian sex, rent boys, alcoholism, a bloke lying in his own blood after being kicked by a gang of thugs because he was gay — oh, with insurance fraud and wasting police time. So it wasn't all exciting.
In fact, if you read the tabloids these days, the fictional Footballers' Wives has been a tidied-up version of what goes on in real footballers' lives. They've never had a roasting on ITV. Why, they were so short of plotlines that they almost showed us the Earls Park team playing football, though you'll be relieved to learn it didn't happen. They just ran towards what might have been a pitch.
There's a certain relentlessness to the show. Nobody ever drinks beer — always champagne. Everyone drives a Ferrari. You just know the players wear Prada jockstraps. It's unremitting. If one character is pregnant, then the next one has to be too. Why not a pregnant man? I offer that for the next series; after all, they did have a hermaphrodite baby. And what other show would have a final series cliffhanger in which a desperate woman fills condoms with water purely in order to learn that they had been deliberately punctured? You don't get that on Heartbeat.
The kitsch charm of the show naturally includes the acting, for which the word 'wooden' fails to do justice in the way that 'rich' doesn't begin to describe Bill Gates. Tanya, the villainess, beside whom Lady Macbeth was a bubble-headed flibbertigibbet, has two expressions: eye-bulging rage and low cunning. Given that she is either plotting someone's downfall or else very, very cross, these are perfectly adequate. The chap who scored two goals in the most important victory his team had ever won looked as if he'd just found a tenner in the street. The thespian limitations are important. If they could act (and maybe they're just pretending they can't) we would feel their pain, and it would be unbearable. As it is, Footballers' Wives is risible.
It's still what we term 'cult' viewing: by the penultimate episode ratings had crept up to 5.8 million on what is a bad night for the BBC anyway (whoever becomes the next D-G will have to do something about BBC1) — though it's still 1.4 million below The Bill.
I always take a look at shows which are heavily promoted, and there have been billboards all over the place for Bloody Britain on the Discovery Channel. I suspect they must be paying a few quid for each new viewer. In the event, it was resoundingly OK, thunderously not bad, majestically adequate. Episode one was about life in Nelson's navy. It was pretty rough — dreary, monotonous, lousy pay, inedible food, terrifying discipline; it must have been like working in a call centre, with the difference that nowadays you are unlikely to be flogged with a cat-o'ninetails. We saw this demonstrated, first on puppets (these look like Mr Potato Head stuck on bits of plasticine, so they must save the production company a lot of money), then on half a dead pig. The bit with the pig was scarier.
Rory McGrath (you have to have celebrity presenters on modern historical shows, because otherwise who would watch? Well, I would for one, but people like us don't count in the advertisers' demographics) was a lot less silly than he might have been, though there was one moment when he was inquiring about life on the gun deck, and the expert commentator mentioned `balls', meaning, quite obviously, cannon balls, and I waited for all of half a nanosecond before Rory said, 'We're talking balls here?' and I thought, depressingly, that's why they're paying him many thousands of pounds per episode. Then, more depressingly, some executive in a cramped smelly Soho studio must have sat in front of an AVID machine, which is a computerised editor, and decided to leave the line in. Episode two, about Mary, Queen of Scots, is rather better, if you can stand seeing plasticine men horribly tortured.
Secrets and Spies — In the Iraq War (BBC2) was compulsive. The Americans' hi-tech capabilities were awe-inspiring. They could hack into Iraqi military computers and leave false information. They could drop bombs within 2.3 metres of their target. Drones flying overhead provided images as clear as your garden is from the kitchen window. 'It was a war that began, not with a gun or a bullet, but the click of a mouse,' said a commentator.
For the foreseeable future nobody will be able to win a military campaign against the United States. On the one hand, thank goodness it's them and not China. On the other hand, that's why we have al-Qa'eda. And why are the Americans so good at winning a war from the air, while having no idea at all of what's happening on the ground?
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