Television
Tea lives
Martyn Harris
hat would the world do without tea?' asked the Reverend Sydney Smith in 1810. 'How did it exist?' The answer of course was that it drank beer (three quarts a day for a Shugborough housemaid in 1800), so that it was just as incontinent but a good deal more intoxicated. In 'A Cup of Tea', one of the Little Eng- land series (BBC 2, 10.05 p.m., Sunday), it was revealed that Sheffield lorry driver Brian Noble drank ten mugs a day, which I thought an amazing fact until I reflected that I probably drink only slightly less, and that unlike Brian I do not drive a heavy goods lorry 350 miles a day, or load and unload it with sacks of cement.
As a teenage James Bond fan I affected to despise tea and when I worked as a tea- boy on a building site tried to tempt my fel- lows with coffee, and one day even with Bovril, whereupon they rose up in rage and cast me out. My pose put aside, I liked tea as much as Dr Johnson. 'Its proper use is to amuse the idle, relax the studious and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise and will not use abstinence.' I liked it every bit as much as Brian Noble, who measures out his life in perforated plastic stirrers, since the teaspoon is always chained to the counter of the transport café and shapeless under crystalline deposits of sugar-crud. A cup of tea in a transport caff costs half the price of a Happy Eater cuppa and is twice the size, but a fastidious man such as Brian takes along his own cutlery.
'I live for tea and tea lives for me,' said Brian. 'End of story.' His wife never drank the stuff at all, couldn't even stand the smell, and one gathered that tea had 'I suppose you get a refund if it grows up gay.' become symbol of deeper domestic divides. 'She can't abide it and I can,' said Brian. 'Ifs as simple as that.' He had leg-of- mutton forearms and a powerful white belly that peeked coyly from beneath his tee-shirt. He was noble in name, in stoicism and in singlemindedness. He was Tea Trucker of the Year: 'Tea for me is the main thing in life,' he said. 'End of story.'
If he had lived in California, of course, such negative notions would have been banned under Santa Monica by-laws and Brian would have been drinking Lemon Zinger from Celestial Seasonings and sav- ing up for his apronectomy. This was the disgusting operation performed by plastic surgeon Dr Kurt Wagner on his mother-in- law in Whicker Way Out West (Channel 4, 8 p.m., Sunday). 'You cut here', she explained, drawing a line above her pubis, 'and slice away the fat and then pull down the skin, so. And of course he had to make me a new navel.'
'Did he throw the old one away?' asked Whicker.
He has a brilliant knack for asking the rudest questions without making his respondents either clam up or slap his face. When this series was first made in the 1970s Monty Python used to tease Whicker for his oleaginous lounge-lizard delivery and the golf-club bore uniform of 'tache and blazer and sideburns. But as years have gone by they make more sense: his self- caricature is so extreme that it allows peo- ple instantly to place him as harmless wally — and then relax into self-revelation.
As Dr Wagner, dressed in a Mickey Mouse theatre cap, carved up perfectly decent-looking 45-year-olds to look like Barbie dolls, Whicker fired questions through the whine of bone saws and the snick of chisel through nasal septum, and Dr Wagner answered everything with the indecent candour of a man on a million dollars a year. 'Is there anything I can't do? I can't make anyone taller and I can't increase the size of the male organ.'
'You can't do that yet?' said Whicker, a touch eagerly, I thought.
'The day will come,' said Dr Wagner.
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