Television
Bad night in
James Delingpole
Frida; night is sacred in our house as the night we like to have a really proper veg in front of the box. Sometimes I even cook supper in advance, so as not to waste valuable gawping time on food preparation. So you'll understand how seriously the Fawn and I took it when deliberating over the preview tapes before us. Should we watch Messiah 2 (BBC2); Taken (BBC2); The Fall Of Milosevic (BBC2); Empire (Channel 4); or the second episode of last week's Hornhlower (ITV)?
The Fawn was all for Horn blower because it was a known quantity and we'd loved the first episode, particularly the way the Irish were shown as baddies for a change. But I had to veto this on the critical grounds that I ought to try something new. I suggested Taken, because it's going to become a major Saturday night fixture for the next nine weeks, because it was a
huge hit in America and because it was produced by Steven Spielberg. This turned out to be a very had suggestion indeed.
It started OK-ishly with a scene of US bombers being attacked by ME109s — rather like the airborne landing scene in Band of Brothers, only let down by the silliness of having flying saucers whizzing by. Then it went quickly downhill. I suppose I should have been able to predict this because it's about alien abduction, an issue they take far more seriously in America, where something like one in three people claims to have experienced it, anal probe and all. But I quite wanted to know what flying saucers really look like inside and though he never showed us this in ET or Close Encounters, I thought Spielberg might, now that SFX technology has improved enough for everything not to look too &tikes 7.
If he did show us, however, I never found out, because though I got as far as the bit where you saw a crashed alien hiding up a tree, the Fawn and I both gave up halfway through out of boredom and saccharine fatigue.
Next we tried Messiah 2, which everyone had been raving about in advance. 'Oh Ken Stott, he's brilliant,' etc. We lasted about half an hour, up to the scene where the pathologist is describing in salivating detail how the latest victim died. He was buried alive with clingfilm taped over his face so he could see it all happening; roped to a
plank and with cheesewire round his hands so he couldn't kick or claw his way out; then a breathing straw was inserted precariously up one nostril so that if he moved even slightly he'd suffocate. The pathologist was asked how long it had been before he had died. 'If he had a panic attack, almost immediately. But my estimate is he lasted around five hours.'
`Ooh, five hours, like that. Imaginer, I suppose we were supposed to go. I'm afraid I just got rather cross. It seems to me that this sort of exploitative, prurient rot appeals to an audience's basest instincts, which I wouldn't at all mind if this were a ratingsgrabbing TV drama like ITV's Wire In The Blood. Where we should worry, I think, is when it starts being put out by our publicly funded state broadcaster. Either the BBC should accept the responsibilities which accompany its privileged status or it should be forced to compete on the same terms as the commercial channels. Not both.
Mind you, the second part of ITV's generally splendid Hornblower got on my tits too. It has been a while since I read Hornblower and the Hotspur, but I refuse to believe that Forester's storyline was quite as clunky and implausible as the TV version's. There was the scene, for example, where the Hotspur anchored off the French coast and, having already been spotted the day before, sent in two small boats packed with marines. And we were expected to believe that the French, knowing of their existence, wouldn't have posted a picket to observe their movements. It's just silly. that's what it is. Bloody, annoyingly silly. And I love Joan Gruffudd's Hornblower. and I love PeHew and Bonden and the rest of the gang and the ships are great and it wonderful all the effort the series makers have put in to make it just so. So why, on occasions like this, do they feel compelled to treat us fans as if we're halfwits?
When the BBC loses its licence fee, which it must of course — and preferably before it uses its propaganda muscle to push us into the euro — there will be those who fear for the future of quality documentary series like Brook Lapping's The Fall Of Milosevic (BBC2). Me, I can't see it happening, not least because for programmes in this class I and anyone with any brains would happily pay on a subscription channel.
Did anyone else share my shocking experience in Part Two, where I found myself identifying most strongly not with the allied military's scary commander Wesley Clarke (who wanted to bomb everything), but with, of all people, Jacques Chirac and the French (who — correctly — argued that indiscriminate bombing would only stiffen Serb support for Milosevic)? I mean. I'm usually about as hawkish as you can get. but really, I think this series has done an absolutely first-rate job in showing what a cock-up our military adventurism in Kosovo was.
As for Empire, sorry, Niall — never saw it.
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