Television
A bit orf
Martyn Harris
M__ my Wesley is famous for revealing that old ladies once had sex lives, and has become rich by writing about it. A Wesley heroine is a pretty, unshockable gel of good stock who works as a Whitehall cipher clerk in 1942 and has it orf with lots of men. She is one in the eye for all the sillies who thought that sexual intercourse began in 1963.
In Harnessing Peacocks (ITV, Sunday, 9 p.m.), Hebe was a pretty, unshockable gel of good stock who worked as a cook for a series of rich old ladies and had it orf with lots of men. The chief variations on the theme were that she had it orf for money, to keep love-child Silas at his good prep school, and that it was set in the 1990s, which made the whole thing frankly incred- ible. We believe Wesley on the 1940s, because she was there, but if she asks us to believe a modern gel can have it orf with a syndicate of sugar daddies while remaining cool, amused and unscarred, then she is not all here.
The casting was wildly askew, with Sere- na Scott Thomas playing Hebe with a nailed-on simper, while stolid Peter Davi- son struggled to look like the mystery lover who once impregnated her at an Italian fiesta. John Mills played old rake Bernard Quigley with his foot hard down on the roguishness pedal, while Nicholas Le Pre- vost mugged madly as the priapic Mungo Duff.
The script, by the usually excellent Andrew Davies, was thin and littered with clichés. 'Abortions are expensive,' says a blazered boor, when Hebe gets pregnant, `but this place is absolutely reliable. Chap in the Whips' Office recommended it.' Ho- hum. People keep giving other people rolls of banknotes, which they never count, only saying, 'But this is far too much'. When people break down, other people say, `Come into the kitchen and tell me all about it.'
The main problem was length — nearly two hours of screen time, which could have eaten up twice the amount of plot, incident and worthwhile jokes. When Davison final- ly makes the heavily signposted discovery that Scott Thomas is in fact the girl he had it orf with in Italy and that Silas is in fact his 12-year-old son, the figurative wedding bells have been ringing for a good 90 min- utes. 'Marry John Mills,' we urged Davison from the Harris sofa, but of course he had to propose to Scott Thomas. 'I wish I could think of something witty and original to say,' she simpered, as if the scriptwriter was washing his hands of the whole business. As the first 'prestige' drama from new franchise-holder Meridian, it wasn't nearly good enough.
Peak Practice (ITV, Monday, 8.30 p.m.) has fewer pretensions — it is a formula soap combining elements of Emmerdale, All Creatures Great and Small and Inspector Morse — but is far better value. It has scenery (the Derbyshire Peak District), the rural underclass and nice young doctors, in particular Kevin Whately, who played Sergeant Lewis to John Thaw's Morse.
In this series, with longer hair and no more polyester trousers, he is Dr Jack Ker- ruish, a bouncy, mouthy medic just back from Africa. After the routine opening rejection he is hired by Beth Glover (Amanda Burton, late of Brookside) to help save her ailing Derbyshire practice, which is threatened by the flash new health centre down the road. It was well acted and tightly written, but I wondered if the Peaks will provide enough medical drama before the writers are resorting to visitors who choke on souvenir fudge.
In the commercial break I watched Stephen Hawking advertising British Tele- com, in a portentous 'Dawn of Time'-style commercial. 'Use BT,'was the subtext. 'All us theoretical physicists do.' Somebody joked once that Norman Mailer had become so besotted with publicity that he would end up advertising shampoo on the box — which just goes to show that in tele- vision, if you wait long enough, everything comes true.
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