Television
Switching off
Ian Hislop
Being in Spain for a lot of this week rather restricted my viewing of English television. The IRA bomb at Canary Wharf was promptly covered by Sky News but I had to give up with Sky after a while because I could not bear the amount of coverage the satellite channel devoted to detailing the injuries sustained by the vic- tims. At this point, the morning after the explosion, the reporters were probably just filling in time, but it began to look as if 'Could I prevail upon you to take something with a fairly high insurance potential?' they were merely waiting for casualties to turn into fatalities. (They did, of course.) CNN was no better than Sky, continuous news channels being ravenous for raw footage but weak at analysis, and I really missed a BBC, ITN or Channel 4 news but- ton on the hotel room television.
Instead I opted for flippancy and watched some very fat Spanish men lifting large concrete balls in a sort of game show. The weightlifting was punctuated by attrac- tive women jumping off the top of vans into the arms of more fat Spanish men. Neither sport was exactly thrilling though I expect Rupert Murdoch will soon have bought world rights to both of them. The programme looked and sounded exactly like the parody of Euro-television that they do on the BBC's Fast Show and I was con- stantly expecting the commentator to say `Scorchio !' or sign off with the words `Boutros Boutros-Ghali!' In fact, once the thought was in my head, nearly all Spanish television made me think only of Paul Whitehouse talking Esperanto-gibberish.
I was pleased to find on my return that The Fast Show was back for another series (BBC 2, Friday) and there was a new vari- ant on the idea called `Mundo Tedios'. In this programme an earnest discussion pro- gramme about economics suddenly turned into a game show on the mention of the word Inflaycion'. The set collapsed, on came the girls in leotards and the surprised financial expert got a custard pie in the face. Everyone then waved at the camera for a very long time during the credits and someone said, `Boutros Boutros-Ghali!'
One of the things that The Fast Show is not afraid to do is to keep repeating long- running jokes like this one. The first episode had plenty of the old favourites in it and the crude tailors, the off-roaders, the football pundits and even the fat sweaty coppers were brought on again. But the team always manage to find some reward- ing new targets as well. There was an inter- view with an intensely dull Plasticene animator who explained how you do stop- frame animation and end up with only half a second of film in a day. He moved the hands of a model dog, that looked suspi- ciously like Gromit, with such meticulous caution that the bored presented went off to the pub. Very unfair on Nick Park but very funny. The other sketch that made me laugh was a hilarious attack on pretentious jazz.
There is nothing as funny though as pre- tentious opera. The House (BBC 2, Tues- day) continued with another unmissable episode, this time about the tyranny of design over music. There was a marvellous scene of the conductor Bernard Haitink being shown the silly designs for a silly new production of The Ring. His weary face told the familiar story of first-class music losing out to a third-rate concept of how to visu- alise it. 'Perhaps I am just old fashioned,' said Haitink, but he knew, and we knew, that he was right. In another new produc- tion, Massenet's Cherubin, the women cooks in the chorus had to paint their faces pink and wear moustaches. 'Why?' some- one asked. 'Oh, because they always do,' giggled the male designer.
The singers were remarkably good- humoured about this extravagant feeble- ness in contrast to the orchestra who were clearly angry when the lost the Russian conductor whom they respected. He walked out because the producer was rude to him and would not apologise. After watching The House it is surprising to find that any opera ever gets put on at Covent Garden at all. And unsurprising to find that many of them are so bad.
I will apologise meanwhile for writing about foreign television and The Fast Show again. After a couple of years in this job you start putting on repeats and then it seems like a good idea to switch yourself off for a while.
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