Television
Should he go?
James Delingpole
In this week's Frazier (Channel 4, Friday) Niles landed a job as critic for a posh mag- azine. `Aha,' I thought, when I read this in the Radio Times. 'The perfect opportunity to fill many amusing column inches on what it's like being a critic for a posh maga- zine.' Annoyingly, though, the preview tape Channel 4 sent me was all manky and warped, so I've missed my chance. Anyway, unlike my colleague Simon Hoggart, whom I'm very fond of at the moment because he wrote nice things about me in his last column, I'm still not convinced that Frazier doesn't deserve the chop. Though it hasn't yet got quite so nau- seatingly pleased with itself and predictable as Friends, it has definitely begun to show signs of laziness and desperation. You could see this last week in the episode where Frazier got tormented repeatedly on air by his radio station's new 'shock-jock' presenters. Eventually, Frazier could take it no more and burst in on them, mid-show, for a confrontation. The problem was that the scriptwriters clearly didn't have a clue how to resolve it. They ended up with a feeble cop-out in which the shock-jocks had a huge row over which one was the funnier and stormed out. Well, I'm sorry but even for a hundreth of the scriptwriters' salary I could have come up with a pay-off more credible than that.
Apparently, the show's producers have been getting so worried about falling American audience figures that they're planning to jazz things up by making Fra- zier have a gay love affair. Now that, it seems to me, makes a lot of sense. After all, both Frazier and his brother have always been the world's least convincing heterosexuals since Rock Hudson.
One programme that has improved enor- mously of late is Who Wants To Be A Mil- lionaire? (ITV). Since the format has remained unchanged, I can only put this down to a lucky run of contestants. First, it got a much needed boost from that man Who won £500,000. Then, better still, there was that pretty young space cadet from Dorset — one of those types you're quite Convinced is never going to get past the thousand quid mark. Somehow, though, she managed to fluke her way to £32,000. Astonished by her outrageous good for- tune, she was all ready to take the money and run. But she had nothing to lose by try- mg for the £64,000 question: Which profes- sional body would you find in Crocicford's Directory? 'I don't know and I don't care,' said the girl. 'But I'll go for clergy.' It was the best Millionaire moment since the show began.
Now onto a programme so absurdly Spectator-ish that I scarcely dare review it since most of my readers are bound to know more about the subject than me. But speaking as a total ignoramus whose knowledge of the second world war derives mainly from movies and War Picture Library comics, I found Churchill's Secret Army (Channel 4, Thursday) — a history of the Special Operations Executive — provocative and illuminating.
Having been reared on films like Carve Her Name With Pride, I had never really thought of the SOE as anything other than a brave and wonderful thing. Yet, as the programme made clear, there were strong ethical arguments against a government- sanctioned organisation which employed terror tactics learned partly from the IRA. Was the assassination of Heydrich by SOE- trained operatives in Prague really worth the lives of the 5,000 Czechs executed by the Nazis in revenge? And was it really cricket to plan to blow up in cold blood a bus carrying German pathfinder crews to their bombers?
In the early days, almost everyone but Churchill — who'd acquired a soft spot for cloak and dagger work in Cuba and South Africa — and the SOE itself, appeared to think it wasn't. The RAF very nearly refused to allow one of its aircraft to be used in the (botched) kill-the-pathfinders operation. And the Secret Intelligence Ser- vice hated the 'amateurish' SOE because it feared its own intelligence-gathering opera- tions would be jeopardised by lots of angry Germans hell bent on avenging the SOE's latest stunt.
Only after two spectacular SOE coups — the sneaky capture of an Italian freighter being used as a mother ship for U-Boats off Fernando Po; and the destruction of a plant producing heavy water for atomic weapons in Norway (as seen in the film Heroes of Telemark) — did official opinion begin to shift.
What happened next I look forward to learning in the two ensuing episodes. It's proving to be so interesting and well done, you'd almost never guess it was a Canton production. Almost. The dead giveaway is that they had to get a big name like Sebas- tian Faulks to present it, so that everyone could go 'Ooh, it's that nice man who did Birdsong, this must be worth watching.' And it's not that he's doing a bad job or anything — his script is first rate — but I have to say that I prefer my documentaries served straight, without the distracting presence of an on-screen narrator.
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