Television

Absolute bottom

Martyn Harris

It is hard to see the Carlton takeover of Central TV as anything but deeply depress- ing in a week when Carlton's most presti- gious programme is A Woman's Guide To Adultery (ITV, Monday, 9 p.m.).

I didn't review it last week because I can't stand Sean Bean at the best of times (his snarling vacancy, his mini-cab driver's haircut, the fact that my wife likes his bot- tom). As the gamekeeper in Lady Chatter- ley he was passable and could always fall back on his bottom, but as an intellectual photography lecturer in AWGTA, as we shall now call it, he is simply laughable no matter how much bottom he displays, and there was quite a lot of it here, as Bean tumbled about a Parisian hotel bedroom with Theresa Russell.

You knew it was Paris because outside the picturesquely faded wooden shutters there was a man on the accordion and peo- ple playing petanque. You knew when the action moved to a high-powered business office because there were charcoal venetian blinds and chrome chairs. You recognised the rich bastard when he arrived because he drove a Rolls Royce, and the market researcher because he had a ponytail, and the artist because she lived in a garret, and you knew Jo was a Labour Parliamentary candidate because she was called Jo and had a Clare Short hairdo and a Midlands accent.

Everything, but everything in this lamentable series is a. cliché. The charac- ters are stereotyped, from the sensitive aca- demic to the two-faced Labour MP to the duplicitous ad man. The assumptions that men are all calculating and women all fools of the heart — are hackneyed and patronising. Every situation — from the man impulsively buying the armful of flow- ers at a street market to the hurling of a stereo through a window by the scorned woman — is lazily recycled from an advert which borrowed it from a soap opera,

which pinched it from a movie. Even when they import reality, in the shape of Ken Livingstone MP, to vet Jo as a Labour can- didate, it is in support of the idiot proposi- tion that Walworth Road would ever use Ken to vet the reliability of anyone.

The dialogue is unspeakable, so the actors simply pass it disgustedly to and fro between them like a tray of reheated hors d'oeuvres. When Jennifer wants to entrap Dave she says: 'Here's your own key. Now you can come and go as you please.'

`Are you sure?' says Dave.

`I've never been more sure of anything in my life,' says Jen.

When Mike finds Sandra has been hav- ing an affair he tells Ray: 'Helen has been having an affair.'

`Are you sure?' says Ray.

`Absolutely sure,' says Mike. 'She told me so herself.'

`I don't know what to say,' says Ray.

He doesn't know what to say because the writer doesn't know what to say. The spo- ken lines are reduced to noises people must make to move the non-events along their predictable rails from one worn-out dramatic convention to the next. There were speeches which should have made me laugh out loud, as when Jennifer (Fiona Gillies) lectures David (Neil Morrissey) on what she is pleased to call Love: `Love is hard. It only gives you one chance. That's why if you find your perfect match you mustn't take no for an answer.'

I didn't laugh because it makes me angry to think that people have spent money (lots of money, my money indirectly) and wasted the talents of competent actors like There- sa Russell and Amanda Donohoe on this trash. Carlton may not know the difference between contemptuous prolefeed like AWGTA and a decent piece of romantic hokum like Love Hurts, but I do believe everyone else does. If I'm wrong and they don't then all TV will be like AWGTA in five years' time, and this reviewer will be long gone.