Television
Gothic folly
Martyn Harris
Nigel Williams is a decent novelist and a BBC commissioning editor, which has nothing to do with the fact that his two- part drama, Witchcraft (BBC 1, Monday and Tuesday), was the most expensive piece of embarrassment on TV this season.
Peter McEnety was James, the creative writing prof in charge of an improbably lav- ish film school production of the life of Ezekiel Oliphant, a Civil War witch-burner. In search of the real Oliphant, James visits his potty old soak of an Oxford professor (Alan Howard), who believes that Oli- phant's evil still haunts the earth. He lives with James's old flame Meg (who has the same name as Oliphant's wife) in a Ham- mer Horror mansion tricked out with faces at the windows, cowled figures in the shrubbery and a gothic folly for Howard to burn himself to death in — or does he?
Is Oliphant being reborn as McEnery or Howard? Is Judy really Anna, is Meg really Meg, and are these plodding questions really worth three hours of screen time? By the time windows had blown open in the gale, cats had hissed at invisible ghosts, electricity fused, wolves howled, owls hoot- ed and mysterious documents vanished, this viewer could not have cared if Howard was daft, dead, or drying out in the Betty Ford clinic. There was the lurking possibili- ty that Williams was constructing a clever- clogs genre parody here, which is always a handy escape clause in the post-modern world, but even genre parodies are not allowed to be this boring, are they?
For some real nastiness this week you had to watch The Sex Hunters (Channel 4, Friday, 10.30 p.m.), which visited six sexual psychopaths on their annual caravan holi- day in Newquay. 'We come here for the surfing, for the sun if we're lucky, but most of all for the top-level shagging.'
They were Matt, Billy, Tony, Lee, David and Bob, I think, though they were pretty well interchangeable lumps of boastful beefcake, dressed in bandannas, baggies and Ponds cold cream. This last was loving- ly rubbed on, for muscle definition, in front of the open curtains of the caravan — a narcissistic display that was supposed to bring the girls flocking. Depressingly it often did, giving the lucky lad a further point in the holiday Grand Prix, which tot- ted up the girls laid over a one-month peri- od. About 40 was reckoned to be a good score. 'But of course I always use a con- dom,' one of them piously remarked.
'Why's that?' said the interviewer, since it was the first sign of consideration for the opposite sex so far evinced. 'Because I don't want to get my willy all smelly.' But do you like women?' the interviewer per- sisted. 'Of course we do. It's our reason for living. That and Newcastle United.' They surfed all day and worked all night in a bar, where they pitied the poor incompetents who went without sex for the whole of their fortnight's holiday: 'They stand there look- ing over their drinks night after night and saying nowt. It's a good thing we are here' — and as the camera panned around the bar at the tongue-tied and paralysed I could swear I spotted my 19-year-old self in a corner.
They were despicable but funny, and if half of their bragging was true you couldn't help being jealous — and resentful at the female sex, which always claims to hate this sort of toilet-trained gorilla. The most unpleasant scene came at breakfast, where the lads read out each other's letters from lovelorn girls. One, to Billy, told how her weekend with him had changed her life, because he had been her 'first' — but on no account to tell the other boys. They laughed like drains at that one.
Previous page
