Essential cutting
James Delingpole
Now that my insomnia has reached such epic proportions that sometimes I can lie there for a whole night without getting any sleep at all, I have become a lot more picky about the TV I watch. I've got it into my head that the only way I can possibly work off the approximately 150 hours of sleep deficit I've accumulated is to go to bed earlier. This means cutting out most compulsive-while-they're-on -but-essentially-pointless-and-life-wasting programmes such as Property Ladder and Faking It, and sticking only to absolutely-indispensables (watched on the video before 10 p.m., obviously) like University Challenge, documentaries about the second world war and The Sopranos.
You'll understand my concern, then, when my wife told me that my fairy godfather Graham at the Telegraph had nominated Nip/Tuck (Sky One, Tuesday) for the absolutely-indispensable category. If it really did turn out to be up there with The Sopranos and Six Feet Under', then, clearly, this would be yet one more programme to set the video for, one more programme to make me feel bad when I miss an episode, one more programme to keep my mind racing at night, one more programme to tip me even further over the edge than I am already.
The good news is, though, that my fairy godfather is wrong. Nip/Tuck is a wellacted, pacily scripted, nice-to-look-at series about two plastic-surgeon brothers sharing a practice in Miami. Christian is handsome, charismatic but unprincipled; dogged. earnest Sean wishes he could use his surgical skills for something more noble than boob jobs on porn starlets. It also has Joely Richardson sounding impressively American and looking pretty shaggable as Sean's wife; a doe-eyed teenage son with massive gay/female cradle-snatcher appeal; a credible soundtrack (booming hip-hop to Radiohead); lots of surgical-atrocity shock-horror scenes, like the one where Sean and his anaesthetist end up sprayed with the freshly liposuctioned belly-fat of a dying paedophile; and a few great gags, like the one (you almost wonder whether the whole series was created purely in order to set this one up) where Sean rearranges the buttockenhancing plate which feckless Christian has put in the wrong way round, allowing Christian to say; 'Yet again you've saved my ass.'
But it's still not worth losing any sleep over. One of its big problems I think is that Six Feet Under did most of the things it does, more interestingly, first. Both introduce you to strange, slightly sicko niche professions (plastic surgery, undertaking) and show you rather more grisly detail than sits easily with a TV dinner; both are about working brothers (one groovy, one uptight); in both, the family business is under constant threat from glitzier rivals and from embarrassing, if unlikely, accidents (missing feet; assassination under anaesthetic); both have needy teenagers; in both, despite the upsets and chaos, they all love each other really because, hey, that's what family is for. First time round, you accept it; second time round, you think: 'Hang on. Isn't this all getting a bit schematic?'
For a TV drama to be excellent rather than just very good, you have never to be able to see the joins. This is why The Sopranos is king: everything springs from character; never once do you feel a line of dialogue has been inserted for crude expository purposes, a confrontation scene because there's an ad-break coming up and you need a tense bit, a gay disabled Haitian refugee with Aids because the director wants to deal with another Issue.
Nip! Tuck, unfortunately, isn't quite so subtle. In the middle of the first episode, there was a huge row between husband
and wife that I just didn't buy — not because it wasn't well acted but because it was so obviously checking off the box marked 'character in crisis'. Nor was I terribly convinced this week when they wheeled on the sweet Hispanic transsexual. Maybe it really was just about sweet Hispanic transsexuals. But for me it seemed a lot more about tugging cheaply at the heartstrings while simultaneously inducing in the audience a warm, self-congratulatory glow at their breadth-of-sympathy and their open-mindedness.
Obviously I've been watching Spitfire Pilot (Channel 4, Tuesday), though its unique selling point — marvel as, over four episodes, we train a fresh-faced modern youth up to the same basic combat standard as Battle of Britain pilots on their first posting — has proved the least interesting thing about it. First, the boy, sweet though he is, doesn't have an awful lot to say for himself. He just goes: 'Ooh. That were amazing. You barely had to touch the controls . and [fill in sensitivity-ofSpitfire clichés here].' Second, watching incockpit footage of a young man looking back and forth, then interminable shots of a twin-seater Spitfire flying over modern Britain and not being attacked by 109s, is actually deathly dull. Third, though we kept being assured that he would be given dogfight training in which he pushed the plane to its limits, there didn't seem to be much visual evidence of this. Maybe the insurance people wouldn't allow it.
Not that any of this mattered, though. The main thing was that it gave us an excuse to hear what it was really like from such splendid characters as Bob Doe and Geoffrey Wellum; plus some forthright history from the engaging Dr Stephen Bungay, of whom I hope we'll see more. Really. though. These old boys aren't going to remain in such fettle for an awful lot longer. Isn't it about time we had a proper programme about the Battle of Britain: no gimmicks, just vets, historians and archive footage?
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