Reptilian reverie
James Delingpole
When I was a boy my father and I used to spend our summer holidays collecting lizards. We’d prop a large bucket at an angle in a suitable spot, grease the rim with butter, put some rotting fruit at the bottom and wait for the lizards to get trapped. It’s the best way, otherwise they panic and shed their tails. Then we’d bring them back in our hand luggage in linen bags, which worked fine till the unfortunate occasion when a stewardess wanted to look inside and they escaped on the plane.
We kept our lizards (and snakes and crocodiles) in a shed in our garden — called the Lizard House — and they gave us many adventures. Once, on holiday in Menorca, we discovered that there lived on one tiny, uninhabited island about a mile offshore a melanistic (i.e., black) form of wall lizard found nowhere else in the world. The pedalo journey there against buffeting winds was horribly knackering. But oh the joy of discovering lizards so unscared of humans that they’d crawl all over you.
This all came back to me when I saw David Attenborough on Life in Cold Blood (BBC1, Monday) visiting the same place and being nibbled. Apparently 20 years ago, one of the lizards developed a taste for the orange fruit of the foul-smelling dead horse arum lily (which previously they’d only considered useful for attracting flies) and now, unlike any other lizards anywhere in the Mediterranean, they all eat it.
Earlier Attenborough visited a colony of African lizards where the sturdiest male with territorial rights to the hottest rock pulls the most females. But which is more important: looks or property? By way of experiment, Attenborough rearranged the rocks so that one of the scrawnier male specimens ended up with the best pile. Within moments he was besieged. I was reminded of Mrs Merton’s question to Debbie McGee: ‘So what first attracted you to millionaire Paul Daniels?’ Ashes to Ashes (BBC1, Thursday) is the sequel to Life on Mars and I can’t quite decide how much of a let-down it is. Because it is set in the Eighties, a decade one is currently required by statute to find risible and shallow, they have decided to play it mostly for laughs which I think may be a mistake. Comedy action is the feeblest of genres because the former always ends up undermining the latter, removing much of the threat and tension that is necessary if action is to be exciting.
Of course Life on Mars had its comic moments too, but these were much more sly and unforced — largely, I suspect, because the makers didn’t realise quite how funny Philip Glenister’s DCI Gene Hunt was until the series had got going. The series’ driving force was supposed to be the bafflement of a politically correct Noughties police officer who finds himself mysteriously travelled back in time to 1973 Manchester, not the antics of a foul-mouthed, beery chauvinist pig who could even — eek! — be a bit racist.
With Ashes to Ashes the tone is more tongue-in-cheek. The original Gene Hunt you could more or less imagine running a real police station; the new one, you can’t. He’s a gun-toting fantasy figure in a bright red Audi Quattro, so Miami Vice he makes The Professionals look like Dixon of Dock Green. I particularly hated the shoot-out at the end which did that annoying A-Team thing where everything is riddled with machine-gun bullets and no one gets hurt.
I suppose the makers’ excuse for this is that Gene Hunt is now the projection of a female fantasy. This time, Hunt and co. are a figment of the imagination of a sexy police therapist/doting mother/whizzo hostage negotiator played by Keeley Hawes who in the real world has been shot in the head.
This new series has a lot going for it: the casting and acting, of course; the soundtrack; the loving recreation of Eighties style; the spooky guest appearances by Zippy and George the puppets from Rainbow and the clown from the Ashes to Ashes video; and the period-send-up jokes, which are often very funny. (I particularly liked the one where Hunt, as yet unfamiliar with the slang term for cocaine, thinks Charlie refers to a consignment of perfume; and his response to hearing that the suspect has made numerous calls using a phone card: ‘flash bastard!’). But it could have kept all these ingredients without descending into self-parody. What has happened, I’m guessing, is that the excellent creative team Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham were given a steer in the wrong direction by some high-up idiot who wanted more female viewers and didn’t really understand the product. Please tell me, someone, if my hunch is right.
Finally, can I take back what I said last week about Ross Kemp in Afghanistan (Sky One, Monday)? It’s really very exciting and gives you a much better sense of what it’s like to be out there than any programme that has been on before. That’ll teach me not to review programmes on the basis of a tiny sliver glimpsed on the internet.
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