Adult viewing

How in God’s name did Jonathan Meades ever get a job presenting TV programmes? I ask in the spirit of surprised delight rather than disgust, for Meades is that rare almost to the point of nonexistent phenomenon: the presenter who doesn’t treat you like a subnormal child or so irritate you with his incredibly infuriating mannerisms that you want him immediately executed with one of those bolt guns they use on cattle.

Which isn’t to say Meades doesn’t have his drawbacks. His work reminds me a bit of my old tutor Peter Conrad’s: it’s so dense and intense and packed with ideas that one page of writing — or TV minute — is equivalent to about 30 of anyone else’s. So it’s not what you’d call relaxing. You can’t veg out in front of it, as most TV is designed for these days. It’s more like doing a fiendish crossword puzzle — best tackled in small bursts.

Worth it, though. His three-part BBC4 series on Wednesday, Jonathan Meades on France (where he now lives, apparently), promised from the start — ‘No Dordogne. No boules. No Piaf. No Gallic shrugs. No checked tablecloths...’ — that this wasn’t going to be another Peter Mayle-style romp through la France profonde of stripey-topped onion salesmen on bicycles, slugs of pastis and wily old peasants straight out of Jean de Florette. Instead, Meades’s series is going to tell it like it is: the French are a bunch of total basket cases.

This week’s episode focused on Lorraine which, despite being on the margins of the country, was successfully positioned in the French imagination — by a ‘clubbable bigot’ named Maurice Barrès — as the spiritual heartland of France. Hence the adoption of the cross of Lorraine by de Gaulle, for whom Meades understandably has little time. Meades cited, for example, his disgraceful treatment of the OAS leader Roger Degueldre, messily executed by firing squad in 1962 in order to ‘sate liberal bloodlust’, despite the fact that in the war he had been one of the very few genuine resistants.

Meades is at his best when being scathing about his pet subject, architecture. Here he is, for example, tearing into the Douaumont Ossuary, which houses the bones of the fallen at Verdun: ‘It lacks solemnity, it lacks gravity. It recalls the architecture of pleasure monstrously distended. It’s a 140-metre-long betrayal of the dead.’ (Though he’s not always this high-minded. Earlier, he couldn’t resist pointing out that ‘for a martially preening nation France’s record in the 20th century was dismal. Played 4, Lost 4.’)

I think the only reason he can get away with this stuff is that he says it in such a deadpan voice, using such clever words, that the right-on BBC types either don’t understand him or think he doesn’t really mean it. He does, though. There’s a lot of controlled rage there and it couldn’t be directed at more fitting targets. Visiting Strasbourg, for example, he pauses to sneer at that ‘dodgy institution’ the European Court of Human Rights. It ought to be called the ‘European Court of Special Pleading’, he says, where people go to ‘line the pockets of the pious shysters of the human rights industry’.

But Meades, as I say, is the exception. Far more typical of the BBC’s relentless dumbing down and unquestioning endorsement of every PC piety going is Monty Halls, presenter of a three-part series on the Great Barrier Reef (BBC2, Sunday). Halls really ought to know better: he is an ex-Royal Marine, after all. But then, I note from his Wikipedia entry, he went on to get a degree in Marine Biology from Plymouth University, where, no doubt, his pretty little shaven head was filled with all manner of right-on nonsense.

The shots of the marine life in the Barrier Reef are great — as they would be, it being the world’s greatest marine nature reserve and the BBC being good at filming that kind of thing. But as each new stunning image (turtles laying eggs; Minke whales being Minke whales) appears on your screen it’s probably best to watch with the sound off. Otherwise, the whole effect will be ruined by the leaden, lunkish scripts clearly written by someone with no imagination who was never taught grammar (e.g., ‘by hanging on to the ropes, my position is predictable by the whales...’) and spoken as if addressed to a class of morons — nay, worse, to a group of marine biology graduates from Plymouth University.

And always, but always, ‘climate change’ has to be shoehorned in with no regard to scientific actuality. Halls told us that global warming is ‘likely’ to make cyclones more frequent; that man-made CO2 is driving up temperatures and causing both coral bleaching and ocean acidification. All of this is, at best, heavily disputed; at worst, unutterable balls. Yet here is the BBC presenting this politicised, lobotomised drivel to our kids as if it were fact. End the licence fee now!

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colin powis

January 19th, 2012 10:19am Report this comment

Right on Del , I watched that show last night and was mightily impressed and more than a little surprised that the BBC is capable of producing such highbrow shows like this anymore ...it was a blast from the past from the ''golden age '' of british tv and a potent antidote to the regular PC drivel that seems to infect brit tv ....my only complaint is that it was so condensed that you would need to take notes or watch it a number of times to absorb it all .....BRAVO

Peter Treadwell

January 21st, 2012 10:45am Report this comment

Meades is insightful, articulate, and a merciless observer of mankind. Read everything he has written, and get someone to give you his box set ot TV programmes for your next birthday. You will not regret it.