Television
No more Mr Nice Guy
James Delingpole The other day I discovered I have a famous fan. I'd gone to interview Andrew Davies about his upcoming adaptations of Emma and Moll Flanders and he said to me, 'I like your reviews. You're one of those nice critics, aren't you?'
At first I was delighted: the genius who had scripted two of my favourite recent television dramas, Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch, had actually wasted a tiny bit of his life reading my humble jottings. But then I thought, 'Hang on a minute. If I'm known for being nice, I can't be doing my job properly.' So this week, I thought I would kick off by savaging a few of the pro- grammes about which I have been unduly kind.
First, American Gothic (Channel 4), a series I praised for its wit and pace but which has since proved so short of ideas that it has to re-hash the same plot line every week: someone upsets the evil Sheriff Lucas Buck; Buck kills them horribly; Buck then makes another attempt to possess the soul of young Caleb; but Caleb, thanks to the timely advice of his sister's annoying ghost and the kindly doctor, frustrates his evil mentor by Doing The Right Thing. Material that might have worked in a fea- ture-length movie looks insultingly thin when stretched to fill 20-odd, hour-long episodes.
Second, Men Behaving Badly (BBC 1, until it ended last week). I said it was every bit as good as the previous series. Not true. Author Simon Nye has attempted to flesh out the ill-drawn female characters by giv- ing them more lines. But we don't care about the ill-drawn female characters. Their only proper function is as butts for the jokes of the infinitely more amusing males. It's no coincidence that the funniest episode was the last one, when the girls spent most of the time away on holiday. Let's hope they've gone for good by the next series. Either that or Nye needs to take a crash course in female psychology: at the moment, his women are really just men with breasts.
Third, Dancing in the Street (BBC 2, Sat- urday). I stand by my praise of the early episodes, but I find it impossible to forgive
its cursory treatment of Led Zeppelin and Roxy Music. The former, arguably the most successful British band ever, were glibly dismissed as 'the acceptable face of heavy metal'. The latter, the cleverest, most inno- vative group of the Glam era, were con- fined to a 30-second burst of footage which also included Slade and Gary Glitter. This is the musical equivalent of bracketing Martin Amis with Jeffrey Archer. Not des- perately instructive.
Fourth, Murder One (BBC 2, Tuesday) ... No. I'm kidding. Though I suppose, at a push, you could quibble that the female leads looked more like Baywatch babes than plausible Los Angeles lawyers, and that the subplot involving Ted Hoffman's whiney-voiced wife and cute little daughter was unnecessarily saccharine, this was still one of the most brilliant drama series I have seen on television.
High praise, indeed, but I doubt any of the 3.5 million other addicts who stuck loy- ally through all 23 episodes would disagree. The BBC scheduler who decided to post- pone the final chapters so that he could broadcast tedious pictures of British ath- letes being trounced by drugged-up for- eigners was lucky to escape a lynching.
After all that waiting, the conclusion could so easily have been an anti-climax. I'm sure we all had our own cunning theo- ries as to who had killed 15-year-old Jessica Costello (mine involved a gay crime-of-pas- sion involving sinister millionaire Richard Cross and pretty boy actor Neil Avedon) and I'm equally sure that we were all suit- ably astonished when the real murderer (an incidental character, but not so incidental that we felt cheated) was unmasked.
We would have felt pretty dreadful if, in a shock twist, feckless but likeable Neil had turned out to have been guilty — especially when we learned that, in prison, his teeth would probably be knocked out in order to facilitate oral rape by his fellow inmates. Fortunately, it turned out that the Colom- bian drug baron dunit. What an inspired stroke! It tied up all those loose plot threads (the ,kidnapping of Hoffman's daughter; the killing of the detective; Cross's motivation for framing and simulta- neously bankrolling Avecion); and it gave us a killer we could happily see rot in jail for the rest of his miserable life.
I must admit, I was close to tears when I heard Murder One's insistent, harpsichord theme tune playing for the last time over the closing credits. Tuesday nights just won't be the same without the bald pate and gravelly whisper of the majestic Ted Hoffman (Daniel Benzali), the slippery, unsettling charm of Richard Cross (Stanley Tucci), or indeed any of that cast of exquisitely drawn and impeccably acted characters (the gay secretary, the feisty prosecution attorney, the slimeball doctor) we have grown to love or hate in the last five months. Murder One is over. My life is empty and meaningless. Roll on the next series.
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