What a cop-out
James Delingpole
T ast week I was on breakfast TV. When L.4he man from the BBC rang the night before I was unenthusiastic, but after I realised that the taxi wouldn't have to come till 7.20 a.m. and that the subject — Why TV is really had for children — was one I could do with my eyes shut, I said yes.
Annoyingly, apart from the Rat who said I smiled an awful lot, no one saw me. The closest were some golfing friends of mother's who said that they liked my hair but not my scruffy trainers. This was all mother cared about, she wasn't interested in whether or not I'd been any good. Afterwards. I wandered up and down Baker Street, hoping people might say: I saw you on breakfast TV this morning and I totally agree with you.' No one did, though.
In the green room — and I think this may possibly be the point of the story — I met a man in a loud shirt, which I was worried, in my new-found TV professional's way, might do strange things to the cam
era. He said he was on to plug the BBC's new series about Leonardo and I said, `Oh. I've heard it's really good. I'm going to be reviewing it this week,' and he said, 'Oh, that's nice. I'll bet it was good too, but I didn't see it. Quite craply, the BBC didn't have any preview tapes. And when I tried watching it in real time on Sunday night, I discovered it had already finished because it was broadcast at 7 p.m., when I'm putting the children to bed.
That's OK, though, because I think what I should really be doing is Ali G in Da USA (Channel 4, Friday) and the 300th episode of The Simpsons. All G had to go to America, of course. because he was so widely recognised over here that no public figure, however crusty and out of touch, could any longer be persuaded that they were talking to a dim-witted representative of the nation's vibrant ethnic culture who needed to be indulged. His absolute nadir — I've mentioned this before but it can't he mentioned often enough because it was such a serious error of judgment — was when an in-on-the-joke Mohammed Fayed was allowed to present himself as a reasonable, cuddly, unfoulmouthed, self-deprecating gentleman with a warm sense of humour.
My big disappointment with America (apart from its litigation culture) is that even after 9/11 and with George W. Bush in charge, it still seems to remain quite astonishingly in thrall to the dumbest sort of Michael Moore-ish cant. I mean, am I not correct in thinking, for example, that it would still rather take the risk of passengers being blown up on aeroplanes than offend minority groups by targeting them (e.g. young men with Saudi passports) for closer scrutiny than, say, white nuns? Ali G. I'd hoped, might provide the perfect ruse to expose the culture's PC idiocies.
But neither of the two episodes I've seen so far had me gasping at the acuity of Ali G's satire. Rather, they're mainly just an excuse for another round of schoolboyish gags and the occasional moment of sublime chuzpah like the one where he asks Brent Scowcroft whether he thinks Canada wouldn't make a good target for nuclear attack.
I suppose I shouldn't complain. When it's funny, it's very funny. I loved his camp Austrian Nazi fashion journalist. Bruno, coaxing one designer into agreeing that fashion designers save more lives than doctors. I had to cover my eyes groaning, 'No! N000!' until it was all over during the agonisingly funny scene where Borat treats a US baseball stadium to a faltering, extended version of the Kazakh national anthem. And you do come away from these scenes overwhelmed by what a marvellous actor he is and agog that anyone should have quite such balls of brass. It's just a pity that his satire doesn't have quite the ambition and scope of Chris Morris's.
With the 300th episode of The Simpsons (Sky One, Sunday) I enjoyed a rare privilege: it was the first time I'd ever sat down with the Rat and watched an episode he hadn't seen already. The Rat is such a Simpsons junkie that he can recognise each episode merely by the tiny changes of detail in the title sequence (which I always tend to fast-forward through because I can't bear the busy, annoying theme tune you're supposed to admire because it was written by a famous composer). But he's still definitely a junkie, not a connoisseur. I don't get the impression he truly savours the great one-liners, like: I call him Gamblor.'
I doubt episode 300 will join many people's all-time favourites. It wasn't bad, but I think its main distinction was to have been the first to include the word 'penis'. Personally, I preferred the one they showed recently where Homer starts smoking dope for medicinal purposes, and the one where Mr Burns gets a gorgeous young girlfriend. Both are examples of what The Simpsons does particularly well, which is to devise labyrinthine, comically implausible plotlines as a pathetically thin pretext to liven things up by making its cast behave completely out of character. So, for example, the reason the 103-year-old Mr Burns can perform like a lurve machine is because he just happens to have a syringe containing the glandular extract of a creature that died out in the 16th century. There were some great lines, too, but unfortunately my memory's useless and taking notes is boring.
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