Television
Viewing for the weary
Simon Hoggart
went to the preview of Gormenghast I (BBC 2) at the huge Imax cinema in Lon- don, and it made me buy a new television. The phosphors which provide the colour on our ancient set were dying, so it looked as if someone had washed it with mushroom soup. By contrast, the new 28-inch widescreen makes our sitting room resem- ble Screen 7 in a multiplex. All it lacks is the smell of popcorn and two young men in lime-green uniforms at the back, talking loudly about football. But James Deling- pole wrote an excellent review of the pro- gramme last week and I shall return to the series nearer to the end.
If Gormenghast is wide-eyed as well as wide-screened, being made by fans for fans, The Mrs Bradley Mysteries (BBC 1) are more knowing. They are old-fashioned whodunits with a top dressing of anachro- nistic modernity. So this week's plot involved suspicious varnish under finger- nails, a lost adopted son, rare Madagascan spiders, but also lesbianism, a nude chauf- feur, and Diana Rigg saying things like `hogwash!' and `Sayonara, Miss Ferris', a line which I doubt was ever uttered in the setting, a pre-war finishing school. Ms Rigg, who acts everyone else off screen, also spends much time talking ironically to the camera. It's television for people who are weary of television: 'Look,' it says, `everything is fake, it's all just electron beams hitting phosphors, let's not bother pretending ... '
Delia's How To Cook is back. Part two was about fish. Delia seems to think that we all live in terror of our fumy friends. `One of the most fearful 'fish is skate,' she said. 'Perhaps the most frightening fish of all — the herring,' she added. What about the tiger shark? It was like The Exorcist. `Four minutes on each side, and just four minutes more to make the sauce,' she trilled, once the piscaphobia had been laid to rest. And a couple of hours clearing up, I muttered to myself. Oliver Pritchett once invented a programme called Wash Up With Pritchett! (`Here's one I washed up earlier.') It would make a good antidote.
It Shouldn't Happen to a Newsreader (ITV) was yet another television bloopers show, the effect highlighted by the fact that newsreaders are rather priestly figures in our lives. (Do you recall when Angela Rip- pon danced on Morecombe & Wise? It was as if the Queen had joined a conga line.) The trouble is that we all make mistakes and sometimes look silly. I'm glad they haven't made one about journalists. 'Hey, look, Simon's just about to spell embarrass- ing with only one "s", and how embarrasing can that be!'
This programme was helped by a certain slyness in the editing. Several newsreaders one after the other compared themselves to swans gliding on the surface, their legs paddling frantically under the water. Apart from the laid-back Jon Snow, they seemed desperate for us to realise it was a really difficult job they were paid so much to do. Which it is; almost as hard as, say, nursing.
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has at last got a half-millionaire, and were so thrilled they told the papers beforehand, so rather 'spoiling the tension. Their difficulty has always been that the kind of people who fund the programme by ringing premi- um-rate phone lines trying to get on, are unlikely to know the answers to anything much more taxing than, 'In which Italian city would you find the Leaning Tower of Pisa?' But at last they've managed it. Or almost.
I like to think I first called attention to possible racism in Ali G some months ago in this column. He had asked J.K. Gal- braith whether someone with £17,000 could be a millionaire, and when Galbraith told him 'no', he inquired, 'ain't that racist?', a remark which by its utter stupidity was per- haps racist itself.
At the time of writing, Ali G's creator, the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, has been wisely silent, refusing all interviews. This makes it possible for columnists to speculate endlessly — and for him, I sup- pose, very profitably — about his motives. I suspect that the generally agreed line, that he isn't poking fun at black people but at white wannabes, is sophistry. Of course he's mocking black street culture. The more interesting question is whether come- dians haven't got a perfect right to mock black street culture just as they mock chin- less wonders, stroppy teenagers, Scottish drunks, Greek kebab sellers, Hampstead liberals and everyone else.
But of course Ali G is most merciless towards his interviewees who, bamboozled by the cult of `yoof, imagine that he is in some way typical of the new generation and must therefore be treated as carefully as a dowager duchess with a heart condition. When he said to Teddy Taylor (who wrote an interesting 'How I was conned by Ali G' piece a week ago) 'Why isn't Jamaica in Europe? Ain't that racist?' the only correct answer is, 'You must be a blithering idiot, as well as being white as blancmange,' but nobody dares. Now his cover has been blown, he may risk becoming as bland as his own complexion.
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