Television
Toodle-pip, old things
Martyn Harris
AI the good series are winding up at present, in line with the broadcasters' belief that like P.G. Wodehouse clubmen we are on holiday from May to September.
Jeeves and Wooster (ITV) ran into the buffers on Sunday night in the tale where Bingo Little is entangled with the tea-shop waitress, Tuppy Glossop with the spaniel- loving Daisy and Jeeves himself with Lord Bittlesham's cook, Miss Watson. All three were as efficiently and enjoyably disentan- gled as usual, though I do miss those spe- cial Wodehouse nuggets, which can never quite work in dialogue. The way that Bertie's aunt would 'heave gently, like a Welsh rarebit at the height of its fever', or the man with the laugh like 'a charge of cavalry over a tin bridge'.
Stephen Fry is the best Jeeves I have seen, with just the right air of genial men- ace, but Hugh Laurie is too energetic as Bertie. Like another Wodehouse character he is forever 'starting from his seat like a rocketing pheasant', and, for all the atten- tions of Jeeves, rather resembles that 'tall thin man who looked as though he had been stuffed in a hurry by an incompetent taxidermist'.
The last episode of Spitting Image (ITV, 10.05 p.m., Sunday) carried sketches on Gazza in hospital, Edwina Currie in court, and the Queen knighting General Schwarz- kopf (which had taken place the same day). All of this went to confirm the show's posi- tion as a real current affairs programme as against leaky 'flagships' like Panorama (BBC 1, 9.30 p.m., Monday), which revealed the stunning fact that a perfectly good shipyard in Sunderland had been given away for nothing years ago, and all because of narrow Thatcherite ideology. Spitting Image signed off with a Country and Western serenade to the new Prime Minister, which was also an elegy to the death of ideology — and perhaps of satiri- cal ferocity too:
Oh I hated Harold Wilson, he was power mad, Then I hated old Jim Callaghan instead.
They should never have exhumed Sir Alec Douglas Home, And I wished that Edward Heath would just drop dead.
I detested Mrs Thatcher more than anyone, I laughed my head off when I saw her cry.
But I'd rather one of them than our current PM And here's the very simple reason why: Oh you just can't hate John Major, You just can't hate John Major.
An accountant from Cheam, an insomniac's dream, But you just can't hate John Major.
Which leaves us with nothing but adverts to deconstruct for the next four months, beginning with an hypnotic campaign for the National Westminster hank, entitled 'The Greengrocer's Son' and directed by the BBC's Giles Foster, who also did Northanger Abbey and Talking Heads.
His ad is a dense collage of suggestive images spun around an 'interview' with a young Nat West executive and eponymous greengrocer's son. The camera picks out misty dales; red pillar-boxes; scarlet pop- pies on a war memorial — and intercuts them with the honest, ruddy face of the exec. 'Me, I started behind the counter here ... took the right exams . . . now I'm a small business adviser.. . . ' Sexy female clerks beam supportively from behind his shoulder; he tosses an apple in the air to demonstrate his safe pair of hands.
There is a complex of subliminal mes- sages jostling for attention, but the funda- mental one is of modernity and progress, rooted in tradition. Trust us, and give us your money, it says. And though I normally scoff at the persuasive power of advertise- ments, I must admit that the power and eloquence and brute cost of this one did have me pondering whether I had better switch my account to the Co-op.
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