Television
Loving the Dome
James Delingpole
Just in case you didn't know this already, the Millennium Dome is going to be a huge success. This I find rather depressing, first because if I'd said as much two years ago I could have got a nice, well-paid, controver- sial article out of it and, second, because it will give Peter Mandelson and our wretched government yet another excuse to crow how brilliant they are, even though it's no thanks to them really, because the Conservatives would have done exactly the same if they'd been in power.
Anyway, the reason I know that the Dome is going to be great and well worth a visit has less to do with the new BBC Dome-related docusoap Trouble at the Big Top (BBC 2, Thursday) than it does with instinct and common sense. No govern- ment, however loathsome and incompe- tent, is going to spend umpteen millions on such a project only to let it fail. And, besides, it has the weight of history on its side. Everyone predicted that the Great Exhibition and the Festival of Britain were going to be crap too, and look what hap- pened to them.
Mind you, if you based your opinions on the first episode of Trouble at the Big Top, I doubt you'd feel terribly optimistic. You'd sort of imagine, wouldn't you, that a pro- ject this big would have been put in the hands of our greatest artists, architects and thinkers. But instead it seems to have been thrown together almost by accident by a succession of bickering committees, civil servants, egoists and bow-tied chancers who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Or was I naive to have expected otherwise?
I can't say my heart warmed to Eva .firic- na, the Czech-born architect who had land- ed the job of designing the Spirit Zone. Being a humanist, she kept whingeing about having to include crosses and other Christian paraphernalia, apparently unaware that the whole point of being an architect is to follow your client's brief rather than your personal political agenda.
And she might have got away with it too had it not been for the steely authority of the Dome's splendid chief executive Jennie Page, who had the good sense to slap her down, despite the petulant objections of fellow committee members like Michael Grade. Page, clearly, is going to emerge as one of the Dome's true saviours, alongside stalwarts like the rugged Oklahoman ex- rodeo rider Ronnie 'Mac' Macfarlane who supervised the Dome's construction (on time and against insuperable odds), and also, strange to say, Mandy himself.
Though I'm not quite convinced that Mandy is really human (he has plasticky skin and acts like one of the replicants out of Blade Runner), he emerged from the first series as a weirdly engaging figure. He was good with the schoolkids, he kept his head in a crisis, and I found his confidences about what it was like having to weather the same media storm his grandfather Her- bert Morrison had faced when organising the Festival of Britain awfully touching.
What really puzzles me about Mandy is what on earth he's doing supporting New Labour. I'm sure he'd make a far more nat- ural Conservative, as he demonstrated in his rousing aside that 'there are too many people in Britain who have forgotten what it is to be great as a country'. Yeah, right, I thought. And one of them's your old muck- er Tony Blair, who thinks that `no one cares about the past any more except for nostalgia'.
Blair's poisonous remark has been much on my mind as I have watched Finest Hour (BBC 1, Wednesday), enthralled by the extraordinary personal testimonies of tank commanders at Arras, bombed seamen and wounded soldiers at Dunkirk, RAF plotters and anxious wives on the home front. Did they really make so many sacrifices only to have their personal freedoms and tradi- tions crushed 60 years later by Hitler Tone and his panzer-like nanny state? (And, by the by, couldn't the series producer have got someone authoritative like Sam West to do the voice-over rather than that woman with the distracting accent?) A couple more recommendations before I go. Ray Mear's latest series Extreme Sur- vival (BBC 2, Thursday) is proving immensely watchable. He's much less wooden than he used to be and his pro- gramme's far more gripping now that it's concentrating on raw survival skills rather than anthropology. If my boat sank and my family and I had to eke out an existence for a month in the Alaskan wastes, I now think we'd have a pretty good chance of making it through.
Also, if only once, you must have a look at Fort Boyard (Channel 5, Friday), amus- ingly presented by jolly Melinda Messenger and sneering Leslie 'Dirty Den' Grantham. It's another of those team challenge series like the Crystal Maze except this time the challenges are genuinely challenging. The worst one calls for a contestant (usually female) to crawl through a cage of giant, venomous bird-eating spiders, remove a clue which has been strapped to their bel- lies, and then — get this — remove anoth- er clue which has been concealed in a box writhing with huge black scorpions. Hey, I'm at home with snakes and I've dived with great white sharks but even I wouldn't mess with scorpions, My brother got stung by one once. They don't generally kill you but that's not the point. They're evil!
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