Moving off-side

Simon Hoggart

AtF the start of the new series of ootballers' Wives (ITV), Chardonnay was buried with her name spelled out on the ground in front of the coffin, so the aerial shot looked like a bottle of cheap Australian wine. Her funeral oration was the lyric of Robbie Williams's 'Angels'. When a show is so camp — throwing in everything but the kitsch sink — it walks a thin and perilous line. Footballers' Wives is produced not for football fans (they're careful never to show a ball being kicked) but for the sneering middle classes, such as myself. This is why the ratings have never been as good as you might expect, and they could evaporate if the show crashes down on the wrong side of the wire.

For example, cynic that I am, I really doubt that the captain of the England team would get involved in throwing games for the Chinese Triad. At one point they cut between phone conversations held in Thailand at sunset and during an evening drinks reception in Britain — magically simultaneous in spite of the eight-hour time difference. This kind of fiction depends on keeping one foot firmly on the ground, or else the whole thing falls on its backside.

Now the nice characters, such as Chardonnay and the lass who looked like a hamster with her cheeks full of hamster pellets, have gone, and the interesting bastard, Jason, has been pushed off a roof (we found out who killed him, but we didn't care), only the boring bastards are left. Sadly, I fear that this sneering metropolitan probably won't bother with the later episodes. Which is a pity; it used to be a lot of fun.

Last Saturday Armando Iannucci argued on BBC 2 that Yes, Minister had been Britain's best-ever sitcom. Of course sane people don't care whether it's the best, or number 7, or comes in at 623rd; they just relish every line.

Once, in the late 1980s, I found myself on a glorious day in Santa Barbara, California. We needed a bottle of Pimm's to drink by the pool. The elderly check-out clerk at Safeway looked at our bottle and launched into a scene-by-scene description of the Yes, Minister repeat he'd seen on cable that morning, the one where they're in a dry Arab country and have to use code: 'Mr Pym's on the line, minister. .. Mr Walker wants to see you. Mr Johnny Walker.' If the programme could keep American supermarket clerks indoors in lovely weather in a gorgeous town, it must have amazing powers. The brilliance came from the fact that it had, in effect, only three characters — or two, since Bernard existed

mainly as a plot device for Hacker and Sir Humphrey to talk about each other.

We learned something new, to me at any rate, which was that two people close to

Harold Wilson. Marcia Falkender and Bernard Donoghue, were the main advisers to the scriptwriters. But I was sent back to Richard Crossman's The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, the real origin of the series. Here you can see the whole thing

laid out from his first entry: 'My minister's room is like a padded cell . cut off from real life, surrounded by male and female nurses . . "Yes, minister! No, minister! If you wish it, minister!"' Crossman's private secretary talked so much like Sir Humphrey that whole episodes could have been lifted verbatim from the book.

Is it just me, or is television getting more nervous and twitchy? Take Terry Jones's

Mediaeval Lives (BBC 2), which started

with the generic Peasant, who appeared in cartoon form and played by Terry Jones.

He had an interesting thesis, basically that the Dark Ages weren't so dark after all, and there really was some interesting stuff to be learned here, but oh dear: someone, somewhere was terrified that one viewer might be bored for one minute, so we hopped around here, and we had gags, and bits of silliness, and camera tricks — none of which helped at all.

Similarly. ITV seems to have lost its nerve with Love on a Saturday Night, their attempt to replace Blind Date. But the point about Blind Date was one that would be lost on any modern television executive: it worked

because Cilia Black played the cackling pro curess, a mythic figure familiar from painting, literature, opera and drama, driving young couples into bed. Not very successful ly in her case, though a friend of mine who researched the programme told me about a couple who were caught bonking in the Green Room just before going onstage to tell the world how badly they'd got on.

The new show is a febrile mess. One particularly stupid idea was having a young woman date three men in masks, so she'd choose them for their personalities rather than their looks. She might have been choosing a vacuum cleaner. The whole process was tedious beyond belief. Bring back the cackling Cilia.

I'm A Celebrity. . Get Me Out Of Here! (ITV) ended this week, and I expect you've forgotten it already. Well, not for long.

Granada have to recoup the cost (£10 million) of their jungle clearing, the one so handily near the resort hotels, and they're talking about another series this autumn. With viewing figures peaking at over 15 mil lion, they can't afford not to. I see a perma

nent Celebrity, on every night, with more and more decreasingly famous celebrities being

fed into the maw. You could have several different shows running simultaneously, like Center Parcs, which the clearing closely resembles. BBC4 could rent it out for an intellectuals' version, with David Starkey, Heather Cooper and Antonia Fraser,