Television
Easy money
Simon Hoggart
The other day in these pages I quoted a British council official who told Ground Force Goes East that £50,000 went a long way at an Indian orphanage. The day after I wrote, we learned that the BBC was paying exactly that sum for Angus Deayton to host the Bafta awards this year. Why, I thought, should the Corporation expect us to go dewy-eyed at this amount being spent on some of the poorest children in the world, while coughing up the same to someone who can't conceivably need the money? (Though it does include writers' fees and the cost of those unspeakable suits, which Deayton himself mocks in a credit card ad running now.) I suppose the real reason is that the pissed Bafta audience might boo and heckle. This will make humiliating headlines, and teach him the first lesson of public speaking: never get up in front of people who all think they could do the job better than you. Unless you're getting 50 grand for it.
Television's obsession with itself was well displayed this week. 0oh Aah Delia (ITV) was about Delia's Smith's involvement with Norwich City football club, in which she and her husband have invested £4 million, almost enough to buy Angus Deayton for two months. 'Being with Delia Smith,' her husband said, 'I have to tell you, you're never bored!' But of course being bored is the whole point. Whereas other TV chefs go to demented lengths to be fascinating, Delia wafts you into a torpor with her slow, meticulous, soporific talk of cranberries, capers and omelette pans. The others talk fast so that if you want to follow the recipes you have buy their book. With Delia you can write it down, and still have time for a nap between courses. And of course only boring people, people who need artificial drama injected into their lives, are obsessed with football. The message of the programme was supposed to be, 'in spite of what you think, Delia is a fascinating character'. What we actually learned was, 'no she isn't'.
Everyone agrees that Alistair McGowan's Big Impression (BBC 1) is very funny and brilliantly observed. The scripts are sometimes surrealist. It's become a saloon bar cliché to say that his female partner, Ronnie Ancona, is even cleverer than McGowan himself. I suppose I agree. I certainly make a point of watching it each week. I just wish he could find some targets outside the world of television. I get claustrophobic seeing Richard and Judy, Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen, the Match of the Day team and, this week, the stars of Cold Feet. It's slightly nightmarish. We not only have to see them, we have to watch them being lampooned as well. Of course, if we didn't observe people on television we wouldn't know how they looked and sounded, so we couldn't appreciate the pastiche. But McGowan is imitating folk who have no existence outside television. You suspect that when the likes of Carol Smillie, Charlie Dimmock and Kilroy are not on air, someone packs them into crates until the next programme. The effect is of being in a sealed hall of mirrors, from which we can find no escape.
Rather like the whole world, as viewed by the loonies in The Secret Rulers Of The World: The Legend of Ruby Ridge (Channel 4). This documentary, narrated and directed by Jon Ronson, concerned people who believe that the entire planet is run by a shadowy conspiracy, the One World Order, alternatively known as Zog — Zionist Occupational Government. Timothy McVeigh believes all this stuff. 'Every evil thing that happens is Jewish,' some crazy with a long beard told Ronson, who didn't appear in shot at all, but who actually looks Jewish in the way that Renee Zellweger looks female. I thought he was very brave.
The programme was about the Weaver family who went to live on a mountain top in Idaho in order to flee world government and its wicked agents, the federal government of the United States. Curious how gun-toting freedom nuts in America always flee to America, never to somewhere like Iraq, or China, or even the EU, where they might learn how much freedom they already have. Randy Weaver's wife and son were both shot by the feds, who had hugely over-reacted to his failure to help them nail other screwballs. He now makes a living off other loonies, appearing at gun shows and being photographed for $5 a pop. The film was neatly understated, and even evinced some sympathy for the family, bewildered, dysfunctional, desperate for a single encompassing explanation for their problems and regrets.
Hitler & Eva (ITV) was fascinating, not least for its colour footage of the pair before and during the war. Like most people, I suppose I had only the vaguest idea of what Eva Braun was actually like. She turned out to be a pretty shop girl, interested in clothes and gossip, who liked sex and wished she got more of it. She gave the impression of having not the faintest idea of, or interest in, events in the world around her. This is no reflection at all on the Duke of York, but she rather reminded me of Fergie.
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