Television
Toasted cockles
Simon Hoggart
Forget the battle for viewers on Saturday night; the fierce hand-to-hand struggle is now on Sunday nights when the nation, battered by the news and gloomily pondering work next day, curls up on the sofa to have its cockles warmed. (That sounds like Jamie Oliver: 'Whop the tray of cockles in the oven. You only wanna warm them, ger
rem hot and they'll go yuck — all tough an"orrible. Now throw over loads of parmesan and garlic . ..') In this sense, 'cockles' seems to mean 'a blister or puckering on an otherwise smooth surface'. I suppose, by extension, something which warms the cockles of your heart creates that effect on your emotions, rather like roasting a bell pepper. It seems a rather far-fetched metaphor, but then nothing could be as far-fetched as My Uncle Silas (ITV) which has the slot straight after Heartbeat, now back for its 11th cockle-toasting series. In Silas Albert Finney plays the title role in full heartattack mode, wheezing, gasping and permanently red in the face. Perhaps the most improbable aspect of the series is that his rural idyll includes lots of fornication. Since Silas wheezes like a traction engine while he's fishing or just sitting down, the chances of him surviving sexual congress seem remote. In an episode to be shown this week, Charlotte Rampling plays the lady of the manor. She is mortally ill, but before she goes, she naturally wants to he shagged by Silas. It isn't shown, but I can imagine the servants coming in next morning to discover a double tragedy ...
On a cockle-rating (out of five) I would award My Uncle Silas only three, mainly because it is so terribly bland. Almost nothing happens, and such plots as exist are as flimsy as Kleenex. As soon as you meet the pretty but put-upon wife in the temperance hotel, you know that Silas is going to make her happy with a trip to the seaside and a shag on the dunes. And the notion that we're going to see him as an iconoclastic scapegrace merely because he likes sex, booze and laughter is absurd; instead the message is that all those strait-laced Edwardians really wanted to act like us, but only a few had the courage to be like us. In the end, I felt as if my cockles had been microwaved on full power.
Monarch of the Glen (BBC 1) gets four cockles, if only because 1 watched it with my family, all of us sprawled all over each
other in a very cockle-friendly fashion. What the writers have discovered is that you don't need different plots. Every week the story is exactly the same. Hector, the father, gets up to some schoolboy prank, involving whisky or kidnapping old men in wheelchairs, while Archie, his son, fends off attractive women while struggling to keep Glenbogle in the family. This week he had to deal with a beautiful but hard-headed female banker. At the end, she was seen gazing longingly into the middle distance, so I expect she's going to fall in love with both him and the estate next week. I hope so. Our family would hate it if anything different were to happen in Monarch.
Oddly enough, I would also award four cockles to Linda Green (BBC 1), which might be just another sitcom, except that it's written by Paul Abbott of Clocking Off, which means that the dialogue actually sounds as if real people might utter it, and stars Liza Tarbuck, daughter of Jimmy, who turns out to be a very fine comic actress. She's in a long line of tough, independent northern women (Shirley Valentine, just about any female in Coronation Street) but she's sweet-natured and vulnerable and confused as well. She does even more shagging than Uncle Silas, but she's a more interesting and complicated person. Linda has the vital, indeed the only important quality in a sitcom character — we're interested in her, what she thinks and what she does. My only quibble is that there aren't quite enough jokes, but they can always be written in.
Omnibus: Empire of the Nude (BBC 2) was yet another attempt to rehabilitate the Victorians by proving they were, at heart, just like us. They liked naked women, but needed an artistic excuse, unlike us. A Page 3 girl was compared with a nude painting, and of course they did have the same look — alluring, yet basically asexual. Maybe all these series could be roped together under the title What We Did For The Victorians.
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