It’ll end in tears
James Delingpole
According to a recently divorced friend of mine, the sex opportunities when you’re a single man in your forties are fantastic. Apparently, you don’t even need to bother with chat-up lines. You’ll be hanging about at the bus stop, or wherever, and, bang!, a flash of meaningful eye contact then back to her place for brilliant, uncomplicated sex miles better than you ever had in your teens or twenties because at this age you know what you’re doing.
I’d like to be able to try out my friend’s theory but I’m afeared there might be opposition from the Fawn. Plus, this friend is a very rich banker, whereas I’m not. Plus, also, he told me a French saying which sums up a chap’s dilemma in this respect rather well: ‘A married man lives like a dog but dies like a king; a bachelor lives like a king but dies like a dog.’ The latter was certainly true of Hughie Green, the priapic Canadian wisecracker who spent a good 20 or 30 years cavalierly rogering the contestants on the game and talent shows he presented (Double Your Money; Opportunity Knocks) and chalking up an impressive tally of over a thousand on the side of his Spitfire.
‘Oh, that I should have such a career!’ many men may have thought yearningly as they watched Trevor Eve’s scarily realistic impersonation of the man — right down to that weird fluttery thing he used to do with his tongue — on Hughie Green, Most Sincerely (BBC4, Wednesday). But not for long. By the end, we saw, Green’s wife had long since left him, his kids wouldn’t speak to him, he’d betrayed his best friend, and he spent his last days yearning pathetically to see the beguiling illegitimate daughter who didn’t even know he was her father — the doomed Paula Yates.
Like the equally wonderful programme about Stepoe and Son the other week, the Green drama was part of BBC4’s Curse of Comedy season, which is proving to be such a resounding success that it almost restores one’s faith in the future of television. Last week we had the tragedy of Tony Hancock (or Tony Blackburn as my father-in-law accidentally referred to him: now there’s a drama I’d love to watch one day), next week I think it’s David Walliams doing Kenneth Williams. ‘Kids,’ the general message seems to be, ‘whatever you do, don’t become a celebrity comedian. It’ll only end in tears.’ As modern TV drama goes, these programmes are heroically old-fashioned affairs: wordy and literate (they’d work just as well as stage plays) with proper acting and scenes that aren’t afraid to linger. Most TV commissioning editors will tell you that this is the sort of thing that doesn’t work on TV any more. They have this obsessive received idea — as unquestioned as their off-the-shelf left-liberal politics — that TV is a kinetic, visual and democratic medium and that any programme which diverges from these principles must perforce be a failure. We need to remind these brainless trendies — weirdly, it still really matters to them what critics think — that excellence is not about ticking boxes.
Clay (BBC1, Sunday) was another of those things all too rare these days — the English, made-for-TV family drama. I forced my kids to watch it as a sort of social experiment: can children whose synapses have been fried by constant exposure to hyperactive, Japaneseanimated cartoons cope with any film where very little happens for long periods?
Even I found it a bit turgid. Set in Northumberland in 1965, it was about a strange, sinister, apparently religious boy (Ben-Ryan Davies) who believes he has the power to breathe life into a creature he has built from clay. The clay monster only came alive in the last half-hour — and was quite nice, really; he didn’t even kill anybody — which left a full hour at the beginning for a glacially slow build-up. I was quite amazed the kids didn’t walk out.
That they didn’t was testament partly to the quality of the acting — with winning, thoroughly convincing performances from all the teen actors involved, and a bravura turn by Imelda Staunton as a mad old Catholic bint — and partly to the brooding atmosphere. Kids really like having their young minds messed with weird things they don’t understand and, so long as it’s done convincingly, are quite prepared to put up with a few longueurs. It’s why they can still cope with books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, despite the fact that they come from eras of much longer attention spans.
It’s examples like this that make me suspicious of the way ‘the public’ is always blamed for the relentless dumbing-down of our media. We’re told that cheap snacks and stupidity are what the viewers/listeners/ readers want, when more often it’s a case of morally and intellectually bankrupt producers/publishers/editors acclerating the slide in standards by pre-empting trends which don’t yet exist.
Did I ever tell you how much I hate this modern world?
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