Time to buy
Simon Hoggart
THE best sitcom on television at the moment (I think even better than Will & Grace on Channel 4, a formula which works perfectly because Will is clearly not gay, and Eric McCormack, who plays him, is a family man in real life) is Curb Your Enthusiasm on BBC 4. This is unfair. Most of us can't get BBC 4, but of course the BBC wants us to want it, so they put some of their best material on the channel in the hope that we'll buy it. Sky did the same with football.
Curb Your Enthusiasm is from HBO's original programming branch, the people who made The Sopranos. It stars Larry David, a writer and stand-up comedian who works for HBO. Real life and fiction get muddled up here. Larry is a balding, middle-aged guy who means well but who gets things wrong: a stock comic figure, except that in modern America he isn't just misunderstood, he's becomes a monster in the eyes of all around him. Trying to be friendly, he yells at a woman neighbour out jogging: 'I'd know that tush anywhere!' It's just inept jocularity, but the neighbour and his own wife regard it as the sign of a loathsome deviant, and nothing he can say will deflect them; certainly not the brilliant sight gag which ended this week's show.
They say that the purest form of practical joking is to leave the scene without even seeing the result of the prank. You relish it only in the imagination. In the same way, Curb Your Enthusiasm often sets up a joke, then walks away. Driving along, Larry sees three young boys in the back of a station wagon. They're making faces at him, so he pretends to shoot back with his fingers. But their father, a massive wrestler called Thor, decides this is threatening mindless violence against his boys, and threatens, in the interests of non-violence, to 'body slam your butt so hard you will poop your pants'. Larry cowers silently while the wrestler slashes his tyre. Later he persuades his epicine manager to let down one of Thor's tyres. As he completes this task, the wrestler's boots come into shot. That's all. We hear nothing more about it — no cries of `Ooffl', no onlookers turning away in comical distress, no shots of him waving feebly from a hospital gurney. The event is not mentioned again.
But the whole show is about non-communication; how we fail to tell each other what is going on in our heads and our lives. The priapic manager has left his wife but can't face a divorce court since she'll bring up his demands for kinky sex. He's surprised to hear that Larry has never discussed his own urges with his wife. 'I don't tell my wife anything!' Larry replies, as if it's the most natural thing in the world. 'I treat her just like an acquaintance.' Unable to change his own slashed tyre, he phones the AAA (the American AA), but his wife has cancelled their membership without telling him. He offers passersby $35 to help. They walk silently by. He offers people $10 just to give him an answer, even if it's 'No.' If there's one thing worse than not communicating, it's trying to communicate. Whenever Larry does he gets into more and more trouble, until you want to yell at the screen 'Stop digging!' I think it's wonderful. Of course, if you do have BBC 4 you may watch next week and think it's terrible; that can happen with comedies I recommend. But do give it a try.
The Greatest Storm (BBC 2), part of the Timewatch series, was one of those pieces of near-perfect television that crop up now and again. The 1953 storm killed nearly 2,000 people, 500 more than died on the Titanic. Yet it seems to have been swiped off our national consciousness. Here were astonishingly moving accounts of the storm from survivors: the story of David Broadbent, the radio operator on the mailship Princess Victoria, heading for Lame, who kept on transmitting for help even as the ship went down. Most harrowing of all was the Manser family, perched on the rafters of their house as one brother fell off into the swirling waters, and their mother rocked two little boys in their pram, unaware, or perhaps oblivious, of the fact that they had already drowned. An old woman wept as she remembered losing her little girl to the flood waters — the child would have been 54 now.
Given that the makers had little more than talking heads, weather charts and library footage of churning waves, they did a superb job, evoking not just the event itself but the Britain of the time. Nobody would use the phone just to warn a village of its coming devastation; instead the task was left up to bobbies on bicycles. Few victims were insured because most couldn't afford it. The programme's conclusion was that we had collectively forgotten the storm because it didn't fit the notion of a country pressing onwards and upwards after the war — the preview audiences had rejected the plot, so to speak. I wondered if it was because most of the victims were the poor: farm workers, prefab dwellers, fishermen and so on. Nowadays television crews would be fighting for places along the storm coast; in those days nobody did and not many people cared.
Much of the second part of Looking for Victoria (BBC 1) was devoted to asking whether the old Queen had sex with John Brown. Lucinda Lambton even came up with evidence that they might have been married, but the Queen Mum had burned the papers. How very different from the home life of our own dear royal family, when every snog, every shag, every stained pyjama trouser is lovingly detailed in the public prints.
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