Television
Voices fr©m the past
Simon Hoggart
This week I went to the annual tug-of- war between the Lords and the Commons, won for the 13th time in a row by the peers, The commentator was David Cole- man. His first appearance, wearing a sort of straw pork-pie hat, was charming enough. But the voice! What an intense mood of nostalgia it evoked, of flickering black-and-white cup finals, of impenetrable and interminable show-jumping, of 1,500- metre races on Tyneside, with Britain's finest being watched in the rain by a crowd of, ooh, dozens.
Commentators then didn't feel the need to be informative, enlightening or even interesting. '1Z/oh, that is truly magnificent!' Alan Weekes would say of some gymnast, and you realised that knowing anything about gymnastics was very low on the BBC's list of priorities. And not much has changed. As Mr Coleman described the obvious (`Lords doing well . . . oh, the Commons are fighting back . . . it's a close one!'), Melvyn Bragg told me that the high spot of his Euro 2000 viewing had come at the end of the England v. Germany match. Ron Atkinson had clearly felt that a remark of thunderous historic gravitas was required for this occasion. Finally he found it. 'We've beat the Germans! Them three words says it all!' The match commentator on the BBC was John Motson, to whom I find it hard to listen now that it's dawned on me that his is precisely the voice of Alan Partridge adopt- ed by Steve Coogan, though Partridge's wide-eyed astonishment at the most trivial occurrence is slightly more engaging than Motty's determination to describe and put on the record every single thing that hap- pens in front of our eyes. 'Ooh, nice run by Scholes there! . . . Shearer did well to get back in position!' Outside, Charleroi was being demolished brick by brick. Inside the stadium, in the closed world which Motty inhabits, he finally noticed some of the excitement. 'The fans are making quite an occasion of it,' he mused, perhaps 20 min- utes after Alan Partridge would have spot- ted the same thing. At the end, he too had a historic announcement: 'Thirty years of hurt, well,, it's certainly put an Elastoplast over the wound.'
Motty's own published work reveals how hard he prepares for a match. He cannot only recognise but pronounce all those puz- zling foreign names with their umlauts, cedillas, — signs and their absence of vow- els. But these days it's not enough any more. I just have a feeling that the new ITV Match Of The Day won't be snapping Motty up. I predict a long and well-paid career doing after-dinner speeches for cor- porate sponsors.
Simpsons Night (BBC 2) illustrated again what a dazzlingly clever show it is. British commentators are often snippy about the hundreds of people required to make each 22-minute episode (the ones who do the painstaking work are all in Korea, we learned) but that's fine. You wouldn't buy a car just because it was assembled by a lone genius. George Bush once said he wished that American families could be 'more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons', so missing the point yet again. The Simpson family is loving and close knit and, in spite of the show's mad surreal invention, con- sists of five highly realistic and convincing characters. I'd rather have Bart as my son (he turns out to be voiced by a young, buxom, blonde woman) than George W. Bush. For one thing, Bart has never had anyone executed for political advantage.
There was a revelatory moment about political correctness in the US. Apu, the devious and cowardly convenience-store owner is Indian, and has a shrine featuring an elephant-god. 'No offence, Apu,' says Homer, tut when they were handing out religions, you must have been taking a wizz.' The joke is about Homer's boorish- ness, of course, but I wonder what will hap- pen to Apu once the Real Indian- American Anti-Defamation League is founded and gets to work.
By contrast, Wallace and Gromit, fea- tured in an Omnibus (BBC 2) about their makers, Aardman films, seem rather plod- ding. Claymation was once devastatingly satirised on The Fast Show (`then we move the arm, just a little bit . . . just a little bit' and so on, for ever and ever) and I suspect that the boredom of making each film is reflected in the finished product, I know their new movie, which I haven't seen, is an enormous hit in the States and I know that it's quintessentially British humour, because everyone told us. But Nick Parks's previous work doesn't offer much encour- agement. Celebrating life's minor pleasures is fine, but it's not enough for a feature film, and, winsome though Wallace and Gromit are, the actual plots tend to be meandering and vague. Hugh Laurie was obliged to read a script which consisted of endless congratulatory clichés, so that the end result was a cross between a corporate video and an old Look At Life.
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