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Tuesday 2 December 2008

In the doldrums

Hole in the Wall (BBC1, Saturday); American Future: A History (BBC2, Friday); John Adams (More 4, Saturday)

There’s something agreeably aimless, even melancholy, about late Saturday afternoons, after you’ve finished whatever you were doing in the day and before it’s time to go out. I found myself in a hotel room in Yorkshire last week at the crepuscular hour of 5.30, too lazy to do any work, too enervated to shower and change. So I flipped on the television, and caught a programme called Hole in the Wall.

It is an extraordinary confection. Two teams, each of three celebrities (of course), stand wearing wetsuits and crash helmets in front of a pool. At a signal a plastic wall, roughly eight-feet high, moves towards them. There is a cut-out in the wall of a human shape: crouching, spread-eagled, upside-down or whatever. The celebrity — former sportsman, soap star, ‘glamour’ model — has a few seconds to twist his or her body into the shape and so pass through it. If they fail, the wall pushes them into the pool. And that’s it.

Until they come up with Pro-Celebrity Pin the Tail on the Donkey this must be the most pointless, witless, and dreary show ever invented. The thought that someone sat down and invented it, and a commissioning editor agreed to pay for it, is grotesque. The fact that it is on BBC1 is bizarre. You will not be surprised to learn that it is presented by Dale Winton.

I agree completely that to justify the licence fee the BBC must be populist as well as popular, light-hearted as well as earnest, trivial as well as complex. You couldn’t put a programme about medieval life on Shetland, or the early Fellini, in that slot. But surely there can be good rubbish, lively rubbish, inventive rubbish, and not this demeaning nonsense.

What the BBC still does supremely well is the lavish, full-scale documentary series. The American Future: A History (BBC2, Friday) is presented in four parts by the historian Simon Schama, whose appearance I once compared to Mr Potato Head. Now the old spud has grown rather wrinkly, and you half expect to see little green sprouty things sticking out from his scalp. He was in solemn, even gloomy mood. ‘America has run out of infinity,’ he said, meaning that the sense of endless plenitude that founded the nation and made it great was now at an end. The good times are about to stop rolling.

More articles from: Simon Hoggart | this section

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