Treading carefully
James Delingpole
The problem with this wretched crisis is that it infects even TV. There I was on Sunday night, trying to enjoy some soothing, mellow quality time with dear Stephen Fry — or ‘Steve’ as he now styles himself in his six-part travelogue Stephen Fry in America (BBC1) — and the whole experience was filtered through a prism of economic misery.
At one point he trundled in his black cab to the vast, ugly hotel where the Bretton Woods trade and monetary system was agreed in 1944. ‘Eek!’ I went. ‘That was designed to stop the second Great Depression like the one we’re about to have now!’ But even the bits which must have seemed so innocuous when he filmed them earlier this year were suddenly filled with foreboding.
A jolly outing with Maine lobster fishermen: yeah, but who’s going to be able to afford their catch for the next 20 years? A visit to a gorgeously sumptuous Adirondacks log cabin built in the 19th-century American millionaire vernacular: God, how distant seem the days when America had a future! A trip to an Atlantic City casino: ah, yes, losing money, lots of money, and having your life completely ruined — that sounds familiar.
I suppose this can’t go on for ever. Well, the economic slide might, but not the pall of unrelieved misery. One of my favourite Nam stories concerns the newcomer to Saigon who, on seeing the anti-grenade mesh on the buses, spent his every journey in a state of sphincter-clenching terror. After a few weeks the fear evaporated not because the threat had diminished but because after a time the brain, exhausted by the non-stop worry, surrenders to the inevitable.
How is it going to affect TV programming, I wonder? Actually, I don’t wonder, I know. It will just be a more extreme version of what we have already, no factual series commissioned unless it’s fronted by Jamie, Hugh, Stephen, Griff or Tony Robinson; no drama unless it has David Jason or someone from Spooks in it. No one will take any risks any more. Everything will be terrible. Perhaps it would be better if we all killed ourselves now. Not, you understand, that I have anything against Stephen Fry. I love Stephen Fry. Everyone loves Stephen Fry, from New York mafiosi to black, gay Republican baptist theology professors at Harvard to grizzled hunters rank with the smell of deer poo who don’t mind one bit when Stephen says, ‘Actually, do you mind awfully if we justshoot the deer with a camera rather than a rifle. Otherwise I might cry.’ If you or I had tried that, we would have been tied to a tree, ordered to squeal like a pig, and summarily raped. Steve gets away with it because he’s just so damned nice you couldn’t wish him harm.
Mind you, Harry Enfield did do a pretty wicked spoof of cosy Fryworld when he parodied Kingdom — ‘Sunday night on British television. Let’s sit back and pretend England’s all lovely and wibbly’ — on Harry & Paul (BBC2, Monday). Why hasn’t more praise been heaped on their marvellous series? Sure some of their stuff does go on a bit — I always fast forward through the insufferable, self-regarding surgeons and the ageing DJs — but such is the way with broken-sketch comedy. But when it works it’s genius.
Quite my favourite — even better than the Polish girls in the café — is Harry Enfield’s louche ‘I saw you coming’ character, who makes a fortune ripping off rich, brainless yummy mummies — and telling them as much — by selling them complete tat in his Notting Hill store. He knows what they like: distressed, ethnic, authentic, organic and, of course, anything by Banksy.
This week he opened a deli. Harry: ‘Try some of our soups. Basically, this is just a boiled beetroot, but you can see I’ve written some philosophical s*** on the back [curls lip contemptuously as he reads]. “Let the natural root that grows from the earth nourish your soul.” ’ Yummy mummy: ‘That’s so profound!’ Harry: ‘Which is why I can charge you eight quid for it.’ Alan Yentob’s a good thing, too, I think. His three-part series The Story of the Guitar (BBC1, Sunday) has had me gripped — and it can’t just be a boys-spanking-their-axes thing because my wife was equally enthused (but then it did have David Gilmour in it and we do like a bit of Floyd, us).
Not knowing a Gibson from a Fender, it was all a complete eye-opener for me. Did you know, for example, that the reason guitars were electrified was to make them more audible during the massive Hawaiian dance-music craze that swept the US in the 1920s? They were shaped like frying pans and played on their backs.
Finally, memo to the BBC. I caught Meebox (BBC4) the other day, a hotchpotch collection of brilliantly funny, clever shorts devised mainly for the internet by Adam Buxton (one half of Adam and Joe). If you don’t give him the money to make some more, you don’t deserve the licence fee. ❑
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