Television
Bucolically incorrect
Simon Hoggart
For years I have wanted to write as our annual community show Macbeth — the Panto, mainly for one scene in which a young man in a double-breasted suit, carry- ing a briefcase, says, `Hi, my name's Bir- nam Wood, and I've come to Dunsinane today to see how you folks are fixed for life insurance.' Macbeth then reels backwards.
Anyhow, it's too late. Situation tragedy has already taken over the airwaves. Roger, Roger combined yocks and tears in equal measure. Simon Nye's How Do You Want Me? (BBC 2), which ended this week, was a riotous blend of misery and mirth. A young photographer, Ian Lyons, has allowed his wife to persuade him they should live in her home village. This turns out to be pop- ulated by evil, snivelling, covetous, pruri- ent, cruel, small-minded, jealous, drunken oafs whose IQs are all roughly the same as the temperature on a dank summer morn- ing, in centigrade. Almost worst of all are her odious, snobbish parents, and worse than them is her brother, without doubt the vilest character ever to appear in any British comedy I have seen. For some rea- son, Ian's wife Lisa treats this monster with amused indulgence.
The show has worked mainly through the extraordinary performance of Dylan Moran, an Irish stand-up comic, who plays Ian with a self-contained dry wit and impermeable sense of self-esteem which survives each privation wished upon him by his brother-in-law and other mentally spavined yokels. He never says it, but you can see him thinking, 'It doesn't matter what they do to me, because I'm a townie, and therefore always superior to a bunch of ignorant rustics.'
At the time of the Countryside March I felt that it was probably a mistake for coun- try people — with their different and often contradictory concerns — to set themselves up as a distinct group in society. You help create a them-and-us mentality. Hunting?
Beef on the bone? Set aside? Housing developments? Oh, it's just the rustics whining again. How Do You Want Me? will have done nothing to make townies more sympathetic to country people. If the same sustained assault had been launched on, say, black people or homosexuals, it would never have been allowed. Soon politically correct action groups will have such pro- grammes banned on the grounds that they are bucolistic. Enjoy it while you still can.
BBC 2 ran what they called Evolution Weekend. I caught two programmes, includ- ing The Extinction Files which used comput- er animation to show us beasts which have died out m previous mass extinctions.
Made in co-operation with the Discovery Channel, which will be the BBC's cable partner in the United States, it was an excellent example of popular science, being informative but not condescending, clear without being simplistic. It lasted a good 50 minutes, which is roughly the time most of us are prepared to give the last 3.9 billion years.
My only slight niggles were Bob Peck's voice-overs, which were fruitier than a Christmas pudding, the silly time-machine device which separated each geological aeon, and the rather engaging fact that some of the computer animations looked like cuddly toys. The 40-ft-long armoured fish resembled something plastic we used to keep in our bath, and the gigantic terra bird, a sort of 10-ft ostrich with a mammal- crushing beak, reminded me of the Road Runner cartoons.
The Fossil Roadshow was a nice idea; people brought their fossils to the Natural History Museum where experts told them what they were. It's odd, though, that someone at the BBC thinks the best way to bring the past alive is to compare it to a modern television programme. (Dealer friends of mine tell me that, when the Antiques Roadshow comes on, they settle down with drinks and snacks to hoot at the prices the 'experts' quote to the gobs- macked punters. They attribute these to a wish to talk up the market in each dealer's field. 'Oh, yes, two grand?' my friends shout at the screen. 'And what would you give her if she brought it into your shop? Eh?') Using the AR format is part of a neurotic belief that we must do something, anything, to hold the viewer's attention. Mere inter- esting information is not enough. And it is an absolute, inflexible rule than any pro- gramme which even mentions palaeontolo- gy must have Dem Bones' somewhere on the soundtrack. One of these days a young, naive producer will say, 'I know, let's not play "Dem Bones" while they're sifting through the mammoth parts!"Sony, old boy, no can oblige — 'fraid it's here in the BBC Charter.'
The last word in sneering at the past came in Before They Were Famous, repeat- ed on BBC 1 at the weekend. Angus Deay- ton introduced umpteen clips of celebrities (some of whom I'd never heard of) appear- ing on screen in their youth. And, yes, in the 1970s lots of us had embarrassingly long sideburns! A few were mildly amusing — I liked Roger Moore in a non-speaking role lifting his left eyebrow with perfect timing. But the show is based on the idea that even to have appeared on the televi- sion of the past is to make you an object of scorn and derision. 'Here's Nick "I wish I was dead" Hancock,' said Deayton of some old beer ads. 'This is Spice Girl Geri Halli- well, and what she really, really wants is for the ground to open up and swallow her!'
Why? We all had to start somewhere. It's as if they did it for journalists: 'Here's "political writer" Simon Hoggart perform- ing in 1969 with "Council chooses new parks committee chairman". I'll bet Simon wishes that paid assassins would put him out of his misery now!'
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