Television
Secrets and lies
Simon Hoggart
Why didn't Jeffi-ey Archer — The Truth (BBC 1) quite work? For one thing, it was too long. The core joke, that Jeffrey is dictating his autobiography to a ghost-writer who will claim it as her own since no one would believe him, and because it allows him to crank up the boasting several more notches, was a good one. But they couldn't let it lie. At the start, it was promising, as he gave the Beatles the best ideas for their song titles, pranced round a dance floor like John Travolta, while clutching a device the size of a toaster that he claimed was the first mobile phone — which he, of course, had invented. But then, after we'd had him helping the 1966 England World Cup to victory, ending the Iranian embassy siege, and having affairs with Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana, I felt 'enough, already'.
When we were told that he was the premarital love-child of the Queen and Prince Philip, I felt faintly nauseous, as if I had eaten a pound of fudge just before supper. (And the last idea was a creepy cop-out, too. If we were getting a no-holds-barred, anything-goes satirical fantasy, shouldn't his father have been Churchill, or one of the ICray twins?) Maybe you can cope with only so many layers of illusion. If you have a body double for Greta Scacchi writhing naked on the floor, while an actor playing Jeffrey Archer lies on top of her pretending to have sex with a woman who, you might have noticed, bears not the faintest resemblance to Margaret Thatcher, you aren't merely calling for a suspension of disbelief. You need your disbelief hung from the highest tree, like the victim of an Old West lynching.
And if you end the programme, after 90 not altogether satisfactory minutes, with the revelation that Jeffrey has become prime minister, then you realise that you have entered a thicket of lies, untruths and fiction which it may not be worth hacking through. My sense was that Guy Jenkin, who wrote and directed, needed his old collaborator Andy Hamilton, whose particular genius is keeping the wildest fantasies anchored to reality. Jokes need to be tethered to the ground if they aren't to soar away out of sight. And how about a play which depicts Jeffrey Archer as a man who tells nothing but the sober truth? That would be hilarious.
Actually the best comic turn I saw all week was at the very end of I'm Alan Partridge (BBC 2). This series has been criticised for losing the plot, literally and figuratively, and I did wonder why they decided to introduce a homoerotic scenario in this one. Are they implying Alan is gay, but can't admit it to himself? Or was it just a passing gag? It matters. In sitcom, there are three important elements — character, character and character — and if we feel the writers are fooling around with the characters, keeping something hidden from us, we feel cheated and the laughter dies away. But I would forgive almost anything for the finale, in which Alan, his festival of James Bond videos ruined when his PA, the wretched Lynn, upsets a gallon of Sunny Delight into the box, performs with anguished passion the start of a James Bond film, complete with music, dialogue, action and sound effects, to his audience of loners and losers, horror-struck or embarrassed, as they sit in line on his caravan sofa bed. It was a superb comic tour de force, and, while we're at it, entirely in character.
Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English (ITV) was extremely well made, in the long tradition of this kind of sweeping documentary series. Actually. I've seen three of these by now (one in the United States, where they are equally proud of their language) and there is a certain element of Destined For Glory — The Legend of Our Native Tongue braggadocio about them. 'Little did these foreigners realise that the simple peasants they were massacring round their turf fires would one day give the world the language used on the Singapore stock exchange, and to talk aircraft down in Tierra del Fuego!' you imagine them saying.
But it remains fascinating stuff, and well told. The TV weatherman in Friesland, for example, who uses the closest remaining language to Old English, was hypnotic. (Do you think The Adventure Of Friesian would feature Michael Fish? Of course not; they all speak English anyway.) There was one serious problem: Melvyn's clobber. Now, the convention in these documentaries is that the audience knows you are criss-crossing the world, and that all the bits filmed in Friesland were shot at one time, and the interview in Glasgow at another. So you dress differently for each location. No one says, 'That's weird! Melvyn was on Lindisfarne a minute ago wearing a blue blazer; now he's in Pevensey Castle in an Arran sweater. I can't work it out!'
Instead they had decided to put him in uniform. A camel-coloured jacket, pink shirt, blue patterned tie, maroon V-neck, and paisley pocket hankie. Except — and here's the cunning bit — he altered it subtly. So for the interview with Spurs fans in a London pub, he ditched pullover, tie and handkerchief. For his stroll through the woods of the Somerset Levels, he ditched the tie but kept the hankie.
You couldn't tear your eyes away. It was so distracting. And is he going to wear this kit for the rest of the series?
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