Television
Too clever by half
Martyn Harris
The Guardian TV listings this week described John Sessions as 'over-talented', which sounds absurd amid the deserts of the August television schedules, but one knew immediately what was meant. Ses- sions is one of the most able, creative and intelligent of the new wave comics, who seems infallibly to muck it all up by being too fast, too allusive, too pleased with him- self and generally too clever by half. The repeat series of Sessions's Tall Tales (BBC 2, 9 p.m., Sunday) began with a very smart sketch of the American couple flying into England for the Shakespeare Experi- ence. 'A green and pleasant land,' says Jack approvingly from the airliner window. `America may be God's Own Country, but this sure must be His golf course.'
Wife Lillian is 'a fierce old mollusc, whose eyes suggested a talent for domestic budgeting'. She sees right through England `in all its raspberry-nostrilled, pub grub- tolerating awfulness', and she knows the only important distinction already, which is that 'Buckingham Palace looks like a chest freezer and Windsor Castle like a cookie jar'. But Jack is crazy for Culture and bats about the Bard, and drags his grudging spouse to Stratford where geriatric good- timers spill from their coaches 'like multi- coloured amphetamines'. They endure three hours of Hamlet and RSC sound effects; then, wandering about the car park afterwards in search of their coach, they bump into Shakespeare's ghost, who addresses them in laid-back West Coast style. `How come if you're Shakespeare you speak with an American accent?' demands Lillian.
`I adapt,' he tells them cheerfully. Shake thinks that Jack should bring his ideas up to date, quit Hying on nostalgia: `There are more things on heaven and earth than . . . whatever, I can never remember my own shit, y'know?'
`They don't dislike you for your money, George. They dislike you for yourself.' It is a delicious perception: that the clever, slapdash, half-educated chancer from Stratford would be the last person to care a hoot for Heritage, or even the pedantically accurate quotation of his own plays — and there is an idea like this thrown away every few seconds in a Ses- sions production. All he needs to do now is to dispel the impression that he is patronis- ing the rest of us — and perhaps by patron- ising a pair of bumbling Americans he has discovered the trick.
In Sex Now (ITV, 10.25 p.m., Sunday) it was the entire male sex which was being patronised, for its failure to live up to the demands of the New Woman. 'Jim', for instance, was castigated for thinking about sex nearly all the time and for holding the mistaken belief that it was possible to have sex without emotional involvement. The actor who portrayed Jim was given a snig- gering, nudge-nudge voice to indicate his immaturity and was scolded by presenter Yvonne Roberts for 'an approach to sex that Women Today find increasingly unac- ceptable'.
One obvious logical problem was how, if Jim's approach was so unacceptable, he seemed to be getting his leg over on such a regular basis with such a wide cross-section of Women Today. But this programme was less to do with sympathetic investigation than with delivering ex-cathedra pro- nouncements based on the current fads of sexual politics. Men want sex more than women; women must always have emotion- al involvement; women are more sensitive than men.
Why are men so cowed by this tosh? One 50-year-old confessed to a kind of New Accelerator fantasy, where he is on a beach crowded with nubile women and has man- aged to make time stop and himself invisi- ble, so that he is able to take his pleasure where he pleases. 'I am a mental rapist,' he confessed sadly, as if his pleasant daydream was conceivably a threat to anyone. I thought he deserved points for originality.
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