Television
Good in bed
Martyn Harris
In the long watches of the night, as the parade of generals, defence analysts and professors of Middle Eastern studies becomes unendurably dull, we play a silly game in our house called 'good in bed'. Francine Stock of Newsnight, for instance, is held to be good in bed, as is John Snow of Channel Four News, though his name- sake Peter Snow is not (too jumpy). Nicholas Witchell is bad in bed, and so is Kate Adie. We only differ seriously over John Simpson, who my wife thinks would be bad, and Ian McCaskill, who she inexpli- cably thinks might be good. On Tuesday night of this week Gavin Esler in Washington told us that the Iraqi army, which had been the fourth largest in the world on Monday, was now the sixth or seventh, 'and dropping fast'. By the time you read this it may be the 107th, so I shall say no more about the Gulf war, except to mention that years ago at university, Gavin Esler and I had the same girlfriend who, oddly enough, was Iranian. Gavin, appar- ently, was very good in bed. I often hitch-hiked from university in Canterbury to home in Swansea, which could take up to two days, but even a few hours stuck at the side of a motorway induced strange compulsions. You start believing that you are only ever picked up by red cars, for instance, or every 66th car, or that you can send telepathic messages to the drivers. Hitch-hiking is such a power- less activity that you are forced to believe in forms of sympathetic magic. In 'Itch (Channel 4, 10 p.m., Saturday) Alexei Sayle, as a stranded hitchhiker, had yielded to the balletic compulsion, which made him swoop his thumb through a complex series of French curves while balanced on a single porky leg.
It made no difference. He was stuck on his roundabout for a whole year, because it was in a fragment of an unfinished and now forgotten housing estate. The roads peter- ed out into a littered heath; the bin men hadn't been for ten years; the residents were paralysed by fear of mysterious 'plan- ners'. On television and radio all news was of war, or of a sick goat called Gillian. But Jimmy Nail, as paterfamilias of a catatonic council-house family, was optimistic: 'Soon things will be different. We'll be given full New Town status, and work will commence on a central shopping module.' A brain-dead couple watched television between unsuccessful attempts to 'make a baby'.
`Is that 25 to?' asked the wife.
`Yes,' said the husband.
`Has that ice pack on your scrotum melt- ed yet?'
`Ages ago.'
`Come on then.'
The barmaid of the hideous formica boozer wept constantly over a lost lover, while Stratford John as the pub landlord schemed hopelessly to turn it into a coun- try house hotel: 'We have roulade of spinach and cream cheese; tartlet of chopped liver; wild mushrooms stuffed with smoked salmon mousse. . . . '
`I'll have a packet of nuts,' said Nail.
All was sterility and decline until Sayle, the hitch-hiker cum rain-god, began to exert a curious magic. He built a but and a little fence. 'Without planning permission,' Nail marvelled. Vegetables were planted; rubbish was cleared; the barmaid fell in love with the breadman.
The budding idyll was threatened by the return of the planners: 'Due to a technical oversight there has been a mistake about you being here and we are going to have to fill your toilets with concrete.' The planner was killed by Gillian the goat, flung from a helicopter, apparently by the Duchess of York — and even then I did not switch off in disgust. Sayle's dialogue is sharp enough and his invention wild enough to be good even without self-control. With a tiny bit of discipline he would be astonishing.
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