Television
Hooked from the start
Simon Hoggart
VS. Pritchett famously said that he had travelled all over the world and had discovered that humankind's greatest yearning was not for money, power or sex, but to be thought respectable. That's difficult if you are living in a madhouse, or the world inhabited by the girls of Love in a Cold Climate (BBC 1, Sunday). Uncle Matthew hunts his own children with packs of dogs, yet when one of them pays an innocent call on a male friend at Oxford, he declares her unmarriageable and threatens to cancel her coming-out season. He also loathes all foreigners (he never says a word against Jews, for today that would turn him from a lovable ogre into a monster) but is undiscriminating about their geographical origin.
Lady Mountdore, by contrast, is precise as a postcode. 'She's gone off with some chinless little wonder from — Cadogan Square!' she barks, revealing unknown layers of snobbery, as baffling to the rest of us as the ways of the Trobriand islanders.
Television loves people who are wildly over the top. Look at Patrick Moore and Peter Snow. The same can apply to actors (though not the resonant bombast of an Olivier or even a Sinden). Michael Caine could not have made his name on the box because he is too dry, too understated. So Alan Bates as Uncle Matthew has to convert himself into a pop-eyed lunatic, and Anthony Andrews plays Boy as a character so louche and so slimy that if a door was locked he would simply ooze under it. Celia Imrie as Aunt Sadie is so vague you wouldn't be at all surprised if she did, in the old saying, forget her own head next. This frenzied desire to appear rational, to be respectable within an inbred and insane society provides the background for the three attractive, agreeable and comparatively normal young women. So we are allowed to identify with them, rather than seeing a bunch of overprivileged, selfindulgent little madams. They are what we think we might be like if we were pitched into the world of unreason inhabited by the older generation.
The one-liners, picked almost at random from Nancy Mitford's two books ('Love? Whoever invented that should be shot!' says Lady Mountdore) add a dash of lemon juice to what might otherwise be another sickly sweet costumed confection. We're hooked, of course, from the first Roller driving up the crunchy gravel, the first silk chemise, the first old fool in white-tie and tails at a ball. There's no reason why, like M*A*S*H , it shouldn't be turned into a comical soap opera, using the same characters and unused bits left over from the books. Greg Dyke is about to put another £131 million into television, which ought to cover it. (Greg might also think of buying the wonderful North Square which, bafflingly, Channel 4 have not recommissioned.)
One slight anachronism was the shape of the frocks. The girls were, in the modern fashion, much more bosomy than they would have been then. This was the opposite of the problem faced by Fiona, one of the women in Boy Meets Girl (Channel 4, Sunday) who had to turn herself into a man. Since she is only 5'3" tall and has a 32DD bust, this proved both difficult and painful. It was fascinating to watch the group of men who converted themselves into women (helped by a real woman who 'runs an image consultancy for transvestites' — and they say we need to be worried about the loss of jobs in manufacturing industry!). The men clearly loved every moment of the transformation, learning how to tuck their testicles back inside their bodies, making up their faces, pulling on their new underwear (just the idea of encasing your body in something lacy', one of them said happily.)
The girls were not so happy. 'I feel unsexy, flat-chested, not very attractive,' one of them complained. Both sexes turned themselves not into their ideals of the other side, but into caricatures. The women were laddish and loutish. Stan did not like whom he'd turned into, and said, 'I see that the woman I'm becoming is a lot of work.' Next week they are sent out into the world. Frankly, I wouldn't fancy any of the girls the men have created from themselves, but we know there are a lot of desperate people out there.
Though not as desperate as Diverse Productions, who made Position Impossible, (Channel 4, Wednesday) about the Kama Sutra. This was presented by Sanjeer Bhaskar, a comedian who recounted his experiences making the programme in stand-up fashion, to a loyal, laughing audience. Usually this technique is employed to sugar the pill of learning for what is assumed to be our ignorant, inattentive youth ('so you see, Will Shakespeare was quite a raver. Liked to go clubbing with his mates from the Globe!'). Here it seemed, rather prissily, to cover the makers' embarrassment about depicting sex in any form that wasn't a statue or a 7th-century miniature. For that reason it had a rather 1970s feel involving forced hilarity and occasional sombre commentary. Surely a programme about a sex guide should be both informative and sexy? They could always have put it on later.
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