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Friday 9 January 2009

Treading carefully

Stephen Fry in America (BBC1); Harry & Paul (BBC2, Monday); The Story of the Guitar (BBC1, Sunday); Meebox (BBC4)

Quite my favourite — even better than the Polish girls in the café — is Harry Enfield’s louche ‘I saw you coming’ character, who makes a fortune ripping off rich, brainless yummy mummies — and telling them as much — by selling them complete tat in his Notting Hill store. He knows what they like: distressed, ethnic, authentic, organic and, of course, anything by Banksy.

This week he opened a deli. Harry: ‘Try some of our soups. Basically, this is just a boiled beetroot, but you can see I’ve written some philosophical s*** on the back [curls lip contemptuously as he reads]. “Let the natural root that grows from the earth nourish your soul.”’ Yummy mummy: ‘That’s so profound!’ Harry: ‘Which is why I can charge you eight quid for it.’

Alan Yentob’s a good thing, too, I think. His three-part series The Story of the Guitar (BBC1, Sunday) has had me gripped — and it can’t just be a boys-spanking-their-axes thing because my wife was equally enthused (but then it did have David Gilmour in it and we do like a bit of Floyd, us).

Not knowing a Gibson from a Fender, it was all a complete eye-opener for me. Did you know, for example, that the reason guitars were electrified was to make them more audible during the massive Hawaiian dance-music craze that swept the US in the 1920s? They were shaped like frying pans and played on their backs.

Finally, memo to the BBC. I caught Meebox (BBC4) the other day, a hotch-potch collection of brilliantly funny, clever shorts devised mainly for the internet by Adam Buxton (one half of Adam and Joe). If you don’t give him the money to make some more, you don’t deserve the licence fee.

More articles from: James Delingpole | this section

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