Television
Why I'm really cross
James Delingpole
Afew weeks ago I heard a BBC programme director being interviewed about the type of things she considered appropriate for the BBC to commission. Would she have gone for Big Brother? Oh no, she said primly. What about I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here? Ah, now that might have been a possibility, she said, because it raised a significant amount of money for charity.
At first, I assumed that the reason this made me so cross was because I'm an evil bastard who would happily machine-gun the Children In Need teddy-bear until he's a pile of shredded fluff. Then I realised that the problem was more serious than that. Yes, this brandishing of 'charidee' as a beyond-criticism justification for whatever tosh the BBC chooses to inflict on the public is indeed a sick-making thing. But worse, far worse, is the notion this idiot woman seems to have that the output of a national, publicly funded broadcasting company should be governed by any other consideration than programme quality.
And I don't necessarily mean quality in the narrow sense understood by some of the BBC's fogier critics — i.e. black tie for newsreaders, the return of Play for Today and everything else in black and white presented either by the ghost of Lord Clark or A.J.P. Taylor. I mean quality in the more modern sense of 'stuff that isn't totally shit'.
By this criterion, rni A Celebrity might well have qualified. Sure, it was dumb, but it was well-made, intelligent dumb and will one day be recognised as the programme that took the whole reality TV genre to its logical extreme. What definitely wouldn't qualify, though, is Shame Academy — a programme so dismal, as Popbitch put it, that the only way it's ever going to pick up ratings now is if they start pumping Legionnaire's Disease through the Fame Academy ventilation shafts. The two bits of it I saw were the meet-the-characters beginning, which made me vow never to let my children have singing or music lessons lest one day I have to stand in a studio with lots of grinning prole-parents, wearing a name badge and handclapping in time to my offsprings' lamely choreographed cover version, And the one where one of the Shame Academicians staggered back to the dorm in the middle of the night having attended a cheesy awards ceremony.
It was had enough having to watch a revoltingly drunk teenager being antisocial and waking up all his room-mates and everyone having to pretend like they cared and he was a mate when I'm sure all they really wanted to do was twat him. What was most scary, though, was one's dawning suspicion that about 50 per cent of this obnoxiousness was being performed purely for the benefit of the camera. It was what the poor deluded creature thought his public wanted, you see. And, unfortunately, this is how all reality-TV participants think
nowadays, which is why the formula no longer works. But, hey, what did we expect? Like those terrible broadsheet newspaper leader columns where the writers try to be funny about popular culture, the BBC always gets it slightly wrong. It tries to copy Popstars and Big Brother just when everyone's bored with them. It tries to be simultaneously educational and entertaining with multi-million stunts like Pyramid (BBC 1, Monday) only to undermine the first aim by relying far too much on vague speculation (cf. Walking With Dinosaurs) and the second by choosing a magisterially dull central character and by not having a single scene where anyone gets fed to the crocodiles. It nods towards its Reithian heritage by commissioning a series on Great Britons, only to end up — thanks to a top 100 list including Robbie Williams, and a top ten including John Lennon and Princess Di — looking like Official Guardian of the Nation's Stupidity.
Mind you, I've been enjoying it. Sure, the intro where smiling, typical Britons of every ethnic hue joyfully compete to name their national role model is a deeply horrible thing. And it is pretty depressing that the only way we can learn about the achievements of, say, I.K. Brunel is by turning his life into a balloon debate presented by the bloke from Top Gear. But by golly was Clarkson's funny, impassioned, brave (well I wouldn't have travelled in a little bucket over the Avon Gorge), lucid, moving (what a total hero Isambard was!), nicely soundtracked programme a cracker. It might even have persuaded me to vote for Brunel instead of my instinctive choice Lady Di.
Naah, just kidding. But I did think her defender Rosie Boycott made a pretty good hash of a well-nigh impossible brief. How — I'm sure you're all wondering because I bet none of you watched — did she go about arguing that Diana was a greater Briton than Shakespeare, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin? By taking the line that she taught the royal family and a buttoned-up nation that love and feelings are more important than the gewgaws of material success. Problem was, she did kind of destroy her whole argument right from the start by showing that footage of Tone doing his 'People's Princess' turn. My God, I thought, Rosie Boycott must truly truly hate Diana if she's really suggesting she was responsible for all that.
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