Television
Prehistoric piffle
James Delingpole
If this column is slightly more rubbishy than usual this week, it's really not my fault. I have just broken my ankle and everything has become a huge chore. Mak- ing cups of tea for example. Just to do that I have to hobble from my office to the kitchen, make the tea and then — since you can't carry anything when you're on crutches — crawl on all fours back to my office, pushing the cup of tea in front of me until I'm able to haul myself on to my chair like a dinosaur emerging from the primor- dial slime. It's all so complicated I can't even be arsed to make proper second-flush Darjeeling leaf tea at the moment. I'm stuck on ghastly Twinings Earl Grey teabags. Yes, it's really that bad.
In the meantime, we've got some TV reviewing to do, haven't we? Since I'm on such reptilian form, let's start with that 'We've done for the BBC what Roland Rat did for TVAM.' programme about dinosaurs (Walking with Dinosaurs, BBC 1, Tuesday) which I have to say is one of the silliest things I've ever seen on TV. I know all that computer-gen- erated animation looks awfully impressive but if this programme has any serious edu- cational or scientific validity, then I'm a diplodocus. It's basically an up-market video game whose primary intention is to make the young and the brain-dead go 'Wow'.
Kenneth Branagh's hammy script is just a litany of superlatives: 'This dinosaur is TOTALLY ENORMOUS! Five billion times the
size of a bull elephant! Six hundred zillion times larger than a baby flea! And he's incredibly deadly! Just look at his horrid, swishy, spiky tail. He's deadlier than the deadliest thing you could ever imagine, times ten. No. Times twenty! Even though he only eats grass.' It's these sort of mean- ingless factoids, unfortunately, that chil- dren love to quote ad nauseam to bored parents.
But the really stupid thing is that it's all made up. Most of it anyway. You can only deduce so much from a few bones and some piles of fossilised dinosaur poo. The rest is pure speculation. Yet it's presented to you as if it all actually happened. You're invited to weep for the fate of all those cute little plant-eating thingies you saw being born and then getting eaten or spiked or burned to death. But this is just cheaply sentimental anthropomorphisation of creatures that for all we know might never even have existed. All those bones were probably just planted there by time travellers from the future, having a laugh.
Now for some hero worship. You may remember how, many columns ago, I paid homage to the Godlike genius of Jeremy Clarkson. And I must confess that when — no doubt as a result of my paean — he sub- sequently landed his first chat show I rather regretted it. He wasn't funny, he wasn't clever and he certainly wasn't subtle. He was just a lout with a poodle haircut.
So much for his first chat-show series. But when I caught his second by accident one Sunday night (BBC 2), mine eyes were opened. Clarkson has improved beyond all measure. He's grown more relaxed and much wittier; he asks his guests all those questions we'd really like to hear answered but no other chat-show host would dare to pose; and he's a more articulate exponent of sound right-wing politics than the whole of the Conservative party put together.
His finest hour for me was his devastat- ing critique of John Prescott's transport policy. No, we don't want to travel around id smelly, slow, cramped public transport, he observed. We want to travel around in our cars and, however hard the government strives to punish us for this terrible vice, we're going to go on doing so, so Prescott might as well start rethinking his appalling- ly muddle-headed policies now.
Clarkson's lecture was accompanied by damning footage of near-empty buses cruising up their private lane on the M4. If we banned buses, he suggested, there'd be no congestion. And as anyone who recalls how empty the roads were in London dur- ing the last bus strike will realise, our Jezza is absolutely right. I can't think of any other public figure in Britain who can utter such reactionary views and still get a hearty round of applause. And though my opinion of William Hague has risen enormously since his closing conference speech, I still have my doubts whether he's the right man for the job. Only Clarkson, I fear, has suffi- cient balls to lead us upwards from the Blairite abyss of nanny stateism and politi- cal correctness.
Just space for a quick mention of The Cops (BBC 2, Sunday/Monday), back to remind us — not that we needed reminding — of the chaos and incompetence of Blair's crime-friendly Britain. The acting's dead-on naturalistic and the script is beau- tifully observed, I loved the battered house- wife's explanation as to why her husband had attacked her with a knife: 'I set the video for Countdown but the tape ran out'; and I loved the way a 14-year-old female shoplifter deviously exploited society's ram- pant PC tendencies by shrieking that her arresting officer was a 'pervert' and that he'd touched her bum. It's depressing and the camerawork makes you sick, but it's still quite funny if you view it as a black comedy.
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