Television
Crazy name!
Crazy guy!
Nigella Lawson
It wasn't just the provocation of having someone say to me how curious it must be to be a television critic who wasn't watch- ing the one thing the rest of the country would be watching which made me decide to watch the England All Blacks semi final (Rugby World Cup, ITV Sunday 11.30 p.m.). I have to admit, there was another reason: Jonah Lomu.
My interlocutor was correct in his assumption that I was not a keen follower of rugby. I am not by nature sportive. It's not just boys' stuff like rugby and football; I was no better with lacrosse and netball, rather worse if anything. I once had a games report at school which read Nigella has no inclination to move whatsoever.' True, one doesn't have to be the energetic type to watch television, but I've always found watching people run about tiring enough as it is.
Jonah Lomu, of course, is another mat- ter. The difference is purely aesthetic. I can't pretend to understand anything about the game, and if anything could be said to have marred my enjoyment of the match on Sunday it was having the rules thought- fully explained during it. The point is, no elucidation is necessary to appreciate Jonah Lomu. Beauty has its own logic.
This was quite missed by the pundits, who operate at a lower sphere. For them he's 'a freak' or — sports commentators are scarcely Wildean wits — 'the Whale'. But how could anyone really think of describing him as 'the human rhinoceros'? It seems so very lacking in acuity, because as even those whose appreciation is sport- ing rather than ogling can see, the point about him is the grace with which he moves, not merely the bulk he carries with him. At the risk of sounding like Glenda Slagg, the man's a God. He looks like a fluid, moving bronze.
My eye was still on the game enough to see that the commentators were having a hard time pretending there was much of a match going on. But I enjoyed the chat afterwards with a huge fat man with a high voice called Gareth and someone called Geoff, who both agreed that England had allowed themselves to be frightened of the All Blacks' aura. Sports talk, I've found, is peculiarly comforting. It's like the circular conversation of saloon-bar drunks only without the threat of tearful aggression. Everyone just says the same thing at regu- lar intervals, and as if a platitude gently delivered were the highest courtesy. And, strange thing for sporting types — and indeed for men — this is conversation of an entirely uncompetitive nature.
The trouble is, although I do rather like the idea enough of being someone who says, to obvious surprise, 'Oh, no, I'm afraid I can't go out on Sunday, I'm watch- ing the rugby' I'm not sure my heart's really in it. While I'm watching I can understand why I'm doing it, but when I'm not I can't see why I might.
I feel the same only the other way around about The Governor (ITV, Sunday 9 p.m.). I look forward to watching it, but feel grim all the way through it. Last Sun- day was the last episode in the first series and I don't think I've missed any of them, but in a way I'm grateful that's it for a while. The problem is, it's very good, but not what you'd call enjoyable.
I presume that little dilemma is because Lynda LaPlante's depiction of life in a heavy-duty male prison is all-too-life-like, and thus couldn't be anything other than, at best, depressing. But then what do I know? I imagine Theodore Dalrymple would be better equipped to judge that one.
Still, a drama does not need to be realis- tic, it is required merely to be convincing. That The Governor, despite the central premise of the series which places a 33- year-old woman in the title role (brilliantly played by Janet McTeer), managed to be. But it is still a bit of a downer for Sunday night, when one needs all the help one can get. May I suggest, for the second series, that it be moved to Monday and that we are given something a little gentler to take us to bed at the end of the weekend.
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