Television
Mistral made for mockery
Martyn Harris
The main reason critics have been so savage about A Year In Provence (BBC1, Sunday, 8.30 p.m.) is jealousy. Peter Mayle, the author of the original book, has won the pot of gold at the end of every hack's rainbow, which is to write a best- selling pot-boiler and retire to the south of France. There are plenty of other reasons — it's a rotten piece of television for instance — but that is the main one.
In fact the television version has done us a service by exposing how empty is the dream of idleness. A good stylist like Mayle can make it seem attractive, even amusing, to spend your retirement in a for- eign country, eating, drinking and patronis- ing the natives. But the grey rectangle of a TV screen reduces the opulent landscapes of imagination to fields and trees. The book's sonorous invocations of food become orgies of greed and torments of indigestion when you actually have to watch them being eaten. The obligations of dramatic dialogue shrink Mayle's comic set-pieces to leaden slapstick. The nervous awareness of a mass audience makes it necessary for Mayle (John Thaw) and Annie (Lindsay Duncan) to drop a cultural notch, symbolised by speaking a silly Franglais. 'Les pipes sont burstay' they explain to their plumber. 'Ma femme est narked — narquay,' says Thaw to a neigh- bour when the electricity fails.
The dramatic structure seems set to fol- low the Postman Pat format, which begins with the idyllic promise of a typical day in Provence/Greendale, established with accordion music, shots of thyme fields, market stalls, boules playing etc. This is then threatened by some mildly comic meteorological mishap (the Mistral, frozen pipes) and eventually resolved by good neighbours, good humour and a slap-up meal. It might even work, for there have been less explicable successes on television — The Darling Buds of May is one — but they'll have to improve the weather effects. Chucking leaves about off-camera, and pulling trees to and fro on bits of rope doth not a Mistral make.
For an accurate picture of idleness in retirement you have to turn to One Foot In The Grave (Sunday, BBCI, 9.00 p.m.) which grows more ambitious with every episode. In this week's programme Victor Meldrew (Richard Wilson) played a 30- minute one-han der, A la Tony Hancock, about doing nothing at all as he waits to be called for jury service. He picks at a scab Call dried up and brown. . . like a Kellogg's Bran Flake'). He worries about his health, browsing in the Home Doctor (`My God. Colon Tumour. "Often no symptoms in the early stages." That's exactly what I've got'). He chases a daddy longlegs from the bath (`I slowed it down with hair lacquer. Just a quirk of mine but I never like sharing my bath with anything with six legs. Spiders, bumble-bees, the Dudley Moore Trio.. .'.) Trapped indoors by rain and distracted by boredom he rages at God: 'I'd swear there's somebody up there watching. Yes, I can see Meldrew unwinding the flex on his lawnmower. Let's piss it down.'
Comfortable, lonely, angry, Godless and bored; assailed by an arbitrary outside world, which plants a yucca in his lavatory pan and a toupee in his loaf of bread, Vic- tor Meldrew is becoming an emblematic figure of the Nineties, as was Hancock for the Fifties. Like Hancock he is eloquent enough to express his discontent but too idle and uncultivated to resolve it, and too intelligent to imagine he can ever escape from it, certainly not in some middle-class never-never land like Provence.
'Apparently he wore a clip-on bow tie.'
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