Television
Deeply shocked
James Delingpole
The other day, eminent left-wing histo- rian Andrew Roberts came bounding up to me at a party and said, 'Look. There's something really important I've got to talk to you about. You've got to the review The Bill!' Oh please,' I replied. 'Can't we find something more fun to talk about, like how much we hate Tony Blair?'
Unfortunately, though, our conversation had been overheard by authors Philip Kerr and Jane Thynne, who both started chirruping, 'Yes, yes. It's so good, you've got to watch it. Everyone does, you know. A.S. Byatt's a huge fan too!'
There were two things that bothered me here. First, I was deeply shocked and disil- lusioned to discover that people whose rich, varied social lives I had long envied turned out to be sad, stay-at-home dweebs just like me. Second, the last thing I need is an excuse to watch more TV than I do already. I'm sure that there's loads and loads of stuff on television that I'd become completely hooked on if only I gave it a chance, from Casualty and The Bill to re- runs of Seinfeld and The Larry Saunders Show. But that's precisely why, wherever possible, I try sticking to mindless dross I can take or leave, like Family Fortunes or Gimme Gimme Gimme: programmes that won't give you a coronary if you forget to video them.
The big danger here, of course, is that if you watch rubbish for too long you can start becoming just as badly addicted. Gimme Gimme Gimme (BBC 2, Friday), for example. When it first appeared, I remember being absolutely appalled by how low Kathy Burke had fallen, by, the relentless crudely and the road-accident- subtlety of the jokes.
But guess what? Channel-hopping, acci- dentally-on-purpose, onto Gimme Gimme Gimme once again the other night, I found myself laughing uproariously at a sketch so pathetically lame I can hardly bring myself to describe it. Oh, all right then. The slag- gish Kathy Burke character and the two straight neighbours are performing a stupid dance routine dressed as Eurovision Song Contest winners. And James Dreyfus's supremely un-PC stereotypical gay flatmate says something like: 'When I said I wanted to wake up to a Buck's Fizz, I meant cham- pagne and orange juice . . . ' There's a very fine line between so-bad-it's-bad and so- bad-it's-good status, but I think Jonathan Harvey's sublimely awful sitcom may have crossed it.
I was all ready to give a similar accolade to the terrible-sounding Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BBC 2, Thursday) until I watched a few episodes and realised, no, it isn't so bad it's good, it's so good it's essential viewing. Mind you, it probably won't sound that way when I describe it.
Basically it's about this sweet blonde American girl called Buffy who's a vampire slayer. But no one knows this apart from a few chums like dippy but cute Hazel and fey but dashing High School librarian Giles who, despite his stuttering, feckless manner (and the fact that he's played by Anthony Head — last seen as the love interest in those dreadful Gold Blend adverts) is the repository of all knowledge about the occult. And slay vampires is just what they all do, week after week, because for some reason their otherwise idyllic town of Sun- nydale is chock full of them.
What's clever about the series is that it has found a near-perfect balance between tongue-in-cheek flippancy (cod-earnest dis- cussion about the ethics of killing were- wolves for their fur; the comically implausible failure of Sunnydale's police and media to twig that there's something a mite odd about the vast number of bodies regu- larly found with fang marks in their necks) and genuinely scary horror: unusually for a programme broadcast at the kiddie-friendly hour of 6.45 p.m., the goodies frequently die, which means that the vampires are a real threat rather than just a wussie joke.
The plotting's good too. It's currently in the middle of a rather exciting scenario in which Buffy's former lover, a friendly vam- pire called Angel, has been killing loads of pretty girls because of a curse which dictated that the moment he found true happiness (i.e. when he got to shag Buffy) he would turn evil. Personally, I wish Buffy would get on and kill him because, though we're meant to like him, I think he's an ugly toss- er. Still, it's gripping stuff and I only wish I'd started watching it earlier in the run.
On, briefly, to Muscle (BBC 1, Saturday), `Trust me, I'm not a doctor.' which you might be tempted to avoid because it's yet another docu-soap, this time about a £2 million business supplying bouncers to Bristol's pubs and clubs. It's well worth catching, though, because it's stylishly and interestingly shot and because its subjects are so grimly fascinating. They think they're robust but honest citizens per- forming a valuable service for the citizens of the South West; we suspect that they're a bunch of pumped-up, neanderthal paramilitaries who invariably seem to cre- ate more problems than they solve. The gap between their lofty self-perception and the squalid reality is quite hilarious to behold.
Oh, and I do watch The Bill sometimes. Great, isn't it?
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