Television
A bit of a whinge
James Delingpole
God, you have no idea how little I wanted to do any TV reviewing this week. I've just moved house, you see. It's quite enormous with five bedrooms and a huge sitting-room and a self-contained basement flat which I'm going to have to rent out if I'm to have the slightest chance of paying off the unfeasibly vast mortgage I've taken on. And though I know I should be really happy about all this — have I not been hankering after just such a gaff ever since I started writing this column? — I'm not enjoying it one bit.
Which will no doubt sound like an utterly pathetic whinge to those of you who haven't moved house recently. But I'll bet those of you who have will totally sympa- thise because moving house is total hell, isn't it? You've got new nannies to find, builders to supervise, hideous paper work to deal with, horrid cardboard boxes to live out of, and so on.
The last thing you need in these circum- stances is to have to find a gap in your non- existent time to trawl through the Radio Times in search of some vaguely interesting programme, order up the videotape, find the missing lead for the video player, dis- cover there's only one plug socket by the TV, rifle through all those boxes to find a two-plug adapter, realise you actually need a three-plug adapter because you've forgot- ten you need another socket for the cable- TV box you've had installed, though heaven knows why because satellite's even worse than terrestrial, etc. etc.
And when you do get round to finding snatches of TV to watch, you discover to no surprise whatsoever that it's all a load of rubbish and really you're in the wrong job, this is no life, and what you ought to do instead is become a day trader or an Inter- net millionaire because then at least you'll stand a halfway decent chance of not get-
ting your house repossessed or dying in penury and misery.
So if I sound unduly harsh about any- thing I review this week, it may be my fault rather than the programmes'. Goodness Gracious Me, for example. I would appear to be the only critic on earth who doesn't think it's the funniest sketch comedy series ever. Now this could, of course, be because I have no sense of humour. But I rather suspect that the real reason is that, because it's made, written and performed by Anglo- Asians, the white middle-class critical fra- ternity feels compelled to overegg the praise in order to demonstrate its impecca- ble liberal credentials.
I mean, sure, Goodness Gracious Me is a lot less lame than 99.9 per cent of TV com- edy. Most of the sketches you watch with a benevolent smile rather than an agonised rictus: the running gag about the man who thinks anything good in Western culture is Indian in origin, say, or the mock-Bolly- wood reworkings of Seventies soft porn movies like Confessions of a Milkman. And, given the size of our Asian population, it does make you feel warm and gooey and right-on knowing they've finally got a com- edy series they can call their own. But let's get a sense of perspective here: Goodness Gracious Me is not up there with The Fast Show or Harry Enfield. So why kid our- selves otherwise?
The Wyvern Mystery (BBC 1, Sunday) turned out to be an even bigger waste of life. This was a pity, since you could see that this adaptation of J.S. Le Fanu's hor- ror novel had gone to enormous trouble with its recreation of 19th-century England. Unfortunately, the authenticity of the look served only to emphasise the utter silliness of the plot. The scene where the heroine opens the cupboard and all the cockroach- es tumble on top of her, for example. Cockroaches just don't do that sort of thing, so it wasn't scary. Also, at the risk of sounding bufferish, I was deeply uncon- vinced by some of the accents. Jack Daven- port's, for example. For God's sake, estuary English hadn't been invented in Victorian Britain, and if actors don't get taught to talk posh convincingly at drama school any- more then the nation's stuffed and Tony Blair will truly have won.
By the way, I wasn't wholly unserious about that day trader/Internet millionaire business, so I've been spending a lot more time reading the financial pages and watch- ing businessy programmes like Trou- bleshooter (BBC 2, Thursday). This made an awfully big thing of Sir John Harvey- Jones going back to the Morgan car com- pany which he'd famously told ten years ago was doomed unless it increased its prices and productivity rate. It would have made a much better story if, as was disin- genuously implied, the company had com- pletely ignored him and gone on to do awfully well. But it hadn't really ignored him. It had simply modernised itself more subtly and slowly than Harvey-Jones might have liked. So, by the end, we were left lit- tle the wiser as to who had been right: con- servative Morgan or change-everything Harvey-Jones. The only useful conclusions I reached after the programme were a) no one in business knows anything about any- thing and b) both Harvey-Jones and Charles Morgan should sack their hair- dressers.
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