Farewell, Ricky
Simon Hoggart
In The Office (BBC 2) last week David Brent was fired sitting at his desk while, we learned when he stood up, wearing a yellow ostrich costume. This week, in the final episode, he was so humiliated that even he knew what had happened and those eyes, usually beady with optimism and selfregard, finally filled with tears. Can it ever come back? Or, like Fawlty Towers, will the 12 episodes be endlessly repeated? They shouldn't make any more. Ricky Gervais ought to copy John Cleese and find fresh worlds to conquer, leaving behind a dozen near-perfect little comedies, and our memory of Gareth, his haircut a pudding bowl mounted on a bog brush.
Monarch Of The Glen (BBC 1) also ended its series, a much darker, and, as it happens, more popular show than it was when Richard Briers played Hector, the lovable, childlike laird. Mr Briers had himself written out at the end of the last series, having realised he did not want to spend half his year in Scotland any more, Given that it's set in the endless acres of the Highlands, Monarch is surprisingly claustrophobic. No one who lives there can escape Glenbogle. They are bound to each other, yet everyone is alone. Now and again strangers arrive and offer some relief, but then they leave again. Golly, Molly, Duncan. Kilwillie and Kilwillie's wretched butler Badger all live in their own private world of frustration and disappointment. Even the only married couple, Archie and Lexie, are constantly at odds. Visitors bring bad news, of unwanted pregnancies and forgotten illegitimate children. Archie almost never smiles, and when he does it's the tight-lipped grimace of a man who has promised himself a breakdown but hasn't yet found the time. All this, and a light, frothy comedy too! No wonder it has shot up the ratings, Molly Dineen's latest hornet on the wall documentary (she's too intrusive to be a fly) was called The Lords' Tale (Channel 4). It covered the House of Lords over the period of semi-reform that ended with all but 100 hereditaries being sent packing. I had a minor brush with Ms Dineen during one of the events shown here, the 'school photo' of departing Tory hereditaries. I was taping something for BBC Radio; she seemed under the impression that the entire constitutional upheaval was being mounted for her benefit. Still, I didn't mind, since she has given us some of the finest and most revealing documentaries of the past ten years. Sadly, this wasn't one. It was much, much too long. Documentary makers, especially those who have spent three years with their subject, tend to fall in love and imagine that we feel the same. There are only so many handheld close-ups of people's jowls that you can take without yawning. Several of the peers — Strathclyde, Carrington — were TV-wise and weren't giving anything much away. There were innumerable shots of elderly chaps sitting in very wide deep armchairs, with their arms held out like the wings of flightless birds. Being a member of the landed gentry means less now, but it still provides a great big cushion everywhere you want to park your backside.
There were moments to enjoy, as there should be in a 105-minute programme. I liked the peer who came straight out with it and said that he disliked democracy, and I enjoyed the rehearsal for the State Opening with the royals being played by civilians in mufti. But by the end I wanted to shout: 'Miss Dineen, enough! I'm turning over to Bay City Rollers night on MTV!'
Panorama (BBC 1), now in its 'graveyard' slot on Sunday nights, ran a devastating profile of Saddam Hussein. No doubt people who doubt the wisdom of an invasion of Iraq will mark it down as propaganda, along the lines of Germansoldiers-raped-Belgian-nuns, a necessary lie to mobilise the population. But you can't really argue with much that John Simpson says — there is no foreign correspondent left on TV who has a fraction of his recognition and his credibility, a fact which may be unfair on the others, but happens to be true. Nor can you argue with the piteous shots of children gassed to death on Saddam's orders, or the long, slow, convincing testimony of men who had had the misfortune to work with him and had managed to get out.
Whether this justifies an invasion, I do not know, and the programme didn't try to instruct me in what to think — though, as someone put it, once he is cornered, Saddam will use everything he has. 'He will go down in history as the world's biggest suicide bomber.' So that's a thought for us to take into the festive season.
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