Television
Shudders of recognition
James Delingpole
Is it really crap of me to admit to liking The Six Wives Of Henry VIII (Channel 4, Monday)? I just have this suspicion that somewhere out there is the orthodoxy that David Starkey is a media creature, not a credible historian, and that if I really want a grown-up take on the period, then I should read so-and-so's wonderful book, blah di blah di blah.
But I'm not sure that I care. Starkey's approach might not be as nuanced as, say, Simon Schama's, and it's almost comically hammy, the way he bears down on you like a ravenous shark, eyes bursting with excitement, spitting out the facts as if they were the most juicy gossip he'd been wait
ing to tell you for weeks and weeks. But so what? For one thing, unlike with Scharna, you don't have to worry about any insidious lefty spin being put on things. And for another, Starkey's intensity and narrative skill cannot help but carry you with him.
How else, when he described how as a 16-year-old Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon was transplanted from the sunkissed Alhambra to live with a 14-yearold prince in a cold, damp, gloomy English castle, could I have experienced such a deep shudder of recognition? It's not, after all, as if that sort of thing has happened very often to me.
What makes Starkey's new series so much better, of course, is that it has a decent budget to play with. Since discovering that his Elizabeth series was a bigger crowd-puller than Ali G, Channel 4 has grown much less reluctant to stump up the cash needed for jollies like location shots in Navarre and actual Spanish actresses talking actual Spanish for the numerous historical re-enactment sequences. This means we no longer have to endure horrors like those in Starkey's cheapo first series about Henry VIII, where at the mention of a Tudor warship we'd see a shot of HMS Belfast, and where, to illustrate a battle, the camera would focus on a 16th-century picture and then wobble a bit. It also means that Starkey can go much easier on the strained 'then and now' comparisons, because he no longer has to prove to commissioning editors or audience that his material is 'relevant'.
Right, done that. Now on to this week's other big opener, David Attenborough's The Blue Planet (BBC 1, Monday), about which I'm going controversially to suggest that the camerawork is quite 'stunning' and that it will surely open its audiences' eyes as never before to the wonders of the deep.
Do you know, though — it's a terrible thing to confess but it happened with his series about birds and I don't imagine this one will be much different — I just can't see myself hacking it to the end. The problem is that, however attractive and soothing that narrative voice, however enthralling or hitherto undiscovered the lives of those strange, luminous, deep-sea wormy things or whatever, however groovy the 'how did they get that shot?' photography, I fear that there is only so much Wondrousness of the Animal Kingdom that a man can take.
Mind you, I was very impressed by the footage of those blue whales (blood vessels so big you could swim through them; tongue the size of an elephant, etc.). And I was terribly upset by the plight of that darling, baby grey whale cruelly separated from his mummy, then half drowned, and finally eaten by a horrid pod of killer whales. Until, that is, I thought of all those animal sentimentalists who are inspired by exactly such scenes into giving up meat or trying to ban hunting. At which point I thought: 'Huh! Serves you right for being a whale.'
One thing I haven't yet written about but ought to because they've become such an integral part of Saturday night viewing and, indeed, popular culture are those compilation-type programmes such as I Love 1993, Top Ten Death Metal Hits and so on. They're horribly addictive in a tasty-but-completely-un-nutritious-cheeseburger-mad e-of -m ech anica llyrecoveredmeat kind of way, but there is at least one thing I find incredibly bothersome about them: the talking heads.
Perhaps it's just sour grapes that, unlike Stuart Maconie, Miranda Sawyer, Jenny Eclair and all the other usual suspects. I'm not considered a sufficiently famous media commentator ever to have been invited on. But I do think it's a bit rum the way these people — many of whom surely passed through the era they described in a haze of drugs and alcohol — are shown fondly reminiscing about every minuscule detail of, say, Mr Blobby's costume or the Shamen's 'Ebenezer Goode' video.
It's this that I hate more than anything about TV: the way everything has to be faked and tweaked to make reality better and smoother and easier than it really is. It's evil and when I'm in charge I shall have it banned. Then we can all go back to reading books and listening to the wireless.
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