Television
Favourite fillers
Simon Hoggart
At home we get 46 channels on cable television, with others on the way. Many of them transmit around the clock. It's not surprising that more and more stuff has to be fed into the hopper to keep the mills grinding. Modern television is the equiva- lent of deregulated cattle feed: anything goes in, including chicken manure and the brains of diseased sheep. Metaphorically, and, in some cases, no doubt, literally.
The current favourite bulk filler is the week's news. At the television stockyards, this is stripped, flayed, sliced deboned, turned into comedy and distributed around the networks. I must declare an interest here, as the current chairman of Radio Four's The News Quiz, in which journalists, politicians and comedians are asked moder- ately cryptic questions about the week's news and are then extremely funny about it.
For years television tried to find an equivalent. The problem they faced was that editing television is more difficult than radio, and it's much harder to carve half an hour's show out of, say, 55 minutes raw material. BBC Bristol tried a television ver- sion in which the panel sat on stools and, rather woodenly, said, 'No, I'm afraid that means nothing to me. I'll pass the question over to Sue ...' Quiz of the Week was more successful, and got around the editing problem by having Ned Sherrin throw out each question to everyone at once. This required some pretty nifty work in the con- trol room, but it did give the show — usual- ly part of Friday Night, Saturday Morning a sort of amateur night for chat show hosts — considerable pace.
Finally, Hat Trick Productions got it right with Have I Got News For You, which returned on BBC 2 last weekend. Just say- ing you enjoy the programme to News Quiz regulars can cause a certain froideur, since, unlike the players on HIGNFY, they do not get the questions in advance, and, while any experienced guest can work out half a dozen likely topics in advance, we go to some lengths to stop them knowing what they'll get.
But in fact HIGNFY works precisely because they do know the questions (all film clips are shown in a 'rehearsal' an hour or so before the show is taped). This makes it easier for the director to predict when a gag is coming, and helps cut out difficult longeurs. On radio, we simply slice out the pauses; on television they would present an alternative between an embarrassing silence and an obvious jump cut.
Only an idiot would not prepare their jokes on HIGNFY. I was such an idiot, the one time I appeared. This was during the first series, before they got the formula perfected. I was in the seat now reserved for 'the bloke who sits next to Paul Merton, saying nothing, but grinning foolishly when- ever the camera is on him'. The only joke I managed came during a now forgotten round concerning news of the past. Some- one else was asked, 'What was the name of the man who shocked and horrified the Queen by coming into her bedroom?' My contribution, 'The Duke of Edinburgh', got a mild laugh, but the camera wasn't on me at the time, and it was downgraded to a sotto voce aside on transmission.
The show is now as much about the interplay between the regulars (Merton, Ian Hislop and Angus Deayton), and between them and their guests (Paula Yates, the tub of lard which stood in for Roy Hattersley) as it is about the news. Indeed, many news stories are by now as traditional as jokes about British Rail sand- wiches. Mention Fergie, Prince Charles or David Mellor and the audience are laugh- ing happily before they've even heard the joke. Few nations are more conservative than the British, and feeding in the week's news is an opportunity for us to rehash the old favourites in a new way.
Drop the Dead Donkey is back, cunningly blending current stories in with the charac- ter conflict which is essential to a sitcom. (I finally caught Friends the other night. It's often praised in comparison to British sit- coms, largely because it employs a large squadron of script-writers. I thought the characters were both glutinous and unbe- lievable. The guys-sharing-an-apartment scenes were mawkish; in Men Behaving Badly, Simon Nye creates far more sympa- thetic and realistic characters all on his own.) 110. Now current news can be incorporated in full-length dramas, thanks to computerised editing suites (these are miraculous places in which chunks of video can be thrown arourid and re-assembled at will, instanta- neously; quarter-seconds can be shaved off, then put back on; special effects created at the touch of 87 buttons. Like all technology this saves nothing if you use the extra time for endless fiddling, but when necessary it can turn a show round in half a day. In the past, editing involved hanging endless bits of film from clips, so the suite looked like the bathroom in a girls' dormitory).
Crossing the Floor (also from Hat Trick) was a fine satire, quite as rude about New Labour as about that well-loved old target, the Conservative Government. Of the many excellent lines, I loved the creepy New Labour fixer (who could they have in mind?) caught on the lavatory by a fero- cious Ulster MP who tells him that nothing will buy his vote 'except a gang-bang with the Nolan Sisters'. Creepy aide opens his mobile: 'Are the Nolan Sisters on our list of supporters?'
My only anxiety is that political dramas, such as this, House of Cards and The Politi- cian's Wife, have now raised the stakes so much with their murders, blackmail and impossibly hectic bonking that it won't be possible to do a slyer, more downbeat satire which bears some resemblance to politics as it actually is.
Previous page
