Television
A streetwise approach
James Delmgpole
You don't need to be working class, Scouse, Cockney or Mancunian to appreci- ate British soap opera but it certainly helps. I know it's fashionable among smart, edu- cated types to affect an addiction to Brook- ie, Stenders or Corrie. But I'm sure that to extract maximum enjoyment from, say, Coronation Street, you really need to wear a hairnet, spend a lot of time in pubs and live in a cobbled street with a cat on your roof. If you're one of those bourgeois southern- ers who watches it all in inverted commas, on the other hand, you're surely going to be denied that delicious frisson of recogni- tion which comes from seeing your milieu depicted on television.
Quite how delicious this frisson can be I only appreciated when I started watching This Life (BBC 2, Mondays). It may not be the first soap expressly aimed at the bal- samic vinegar-using classes (think, if you can bear, of Howards Way or Castles) but, as far as I can recall, it is the first to depict a world which vaguely approximates to the one I inhabit.
Hardly ever do I meet glossy, bourgeois prats like the yachties in Howards Way, let alone the rogues gallery you see in Brook- side, but I encounter characters like the young lawyers in This Life almost every day. They are more interested in their careers and personal lives than in politics or saving the world; they worry about Aids and whether to give up smoking; they dab- ble with therapy; they listen to Tricky, Radiohead and Portishead; they swear, drink and take drugs as a matter of course; they obsess about footie; they talk about sex rather more often than they get it. They are typical of a segment of society which is hardly ever represented in television drama: the middle-class twentysomething.
It would be easy to pick holes in This Life, starting with its rather implausible premise that five lawyers would choose to share a house in their late twenties. Its por- trait of the legal world — despite the fact that the series creator, Amy Jenkins, spent a year as a trainee solicitor — is sketchy and unconvincing. And though the acting is superb, the characterisation is somewhat schematic — one's Asian, one's gay, one's ex-public school etc. But its flaws are more than offset by its honesty and originality.
I was particularly impressed by the episode which showed, without undue sen- sationalism, the gay Welshman (Jason Hughes), cruising for casual sex in a London park. In most soaps — where Ishoos are paramount — this would have been used as an excuse for something horribly dramatic like a gay-bashing sequence or a rape. Here it was just presented matter-of-factly as a perfectly normal homosexual pastime.
This Life has a similarly streetwise approach to drugs. To watch the average British soap, you might imagine that the mere act of attending a rave is akin to sell- ing your soul to Satan, that to smoke mari- juana is to ally yourself with Charles Manson, and that Ecstasy is only marginal- ly less dangerous than cyanide. In This Life — as indeed, in this life for the majority of under 35s — drugs are about as controver- sial as bacon and eggs.
And how good it is to see a programme brave enough to risk a titter about that unaccountable taboo, masturbation. I squirmed with embarrassment and delight at the hilarious scene where Egg (Andrew Lin- coln) attempted to have a furtive 'Jodrell' beneath the sheets, only to be caught out by his sex-starved girlfriend Milly (Amita Dhiri). Egg blushingly claimed he was trying to sweep away biscuit crumbs. I suppose there will be those who find such scenes gra- tuitously prurient. But I prefer to think that this reflects the series' admirable attention to verisimilitude rather than its desire to pull in more viewers. And, hey, why shouldn't one be allowed to enjoy a little soft porn for the price of one's licence fee?
Just to show that my tastes are not purely confined to sleeze, I hope you'll forgive me if I join my colleague Harry Eyres in praise of Andrew Graham-Dixon's truly wondrous A History of British Art (BBC 2, Sunday). There may be odd moments when Gra- ham-Dixon's arguments — e.g. that the Puritans invented white space art; that the reason for Britain's literary pre-eminence is that Henry VIII stopped us painting pretty pictures in churches — stretch the bounds of credibility, but he carries it all off with such authority, enthusiasm and conviction that, by the end, you can't help thinking he's got it absolutely right.
I love his standing-stiffly-to-camera delivery (shades of Jonathan Meades, per- haps), his occasional bouts of solemn irrev- erence (e.g. pulling a funny gargoyle face, again very Meades), the way that he always manages to come up with a different superlative for whatever artist/artwork he's describing, his ability to explain so lucidly precisely what's so special about the work of, say, Hilliard, Holbein or Van Dyck, and, above all, I love his nationalistic tri- umphalism. Forget all that overrated rub- bish in the Uffizi or those hideously overpriced daubs by de Kooning, he seems to be saying, there's nothing in the world of visual arts that we British haven't done bet- ter. 'Which is nice.
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