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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Television

True lies

Arrange Me a Marriage (BBC2), Cranford (BBC1), and The Blair Years (BBC1)

Also, there’s the menace of the narrative. Television people love narratives; a programme has to tell a story. But most people’s lives aren’t stories at all. One thing happens, then another, and at the end of one month things are much the same as they were. So the editing has to create the narrative. It also has to invent the characters. One of the saddest complaints is from people who feel they’ve been hard done by on, say, Wife Swap. ‘I’m not like that,’ they say, to which the programme-makers can reply that the scenes were genuine and they did say what they were shown saying. But if someone stitched together every time you or I had been bad-tempered, or grumpy, or mildly disobliging in the course of a few weeks, we would come across as monsters. Reality shows bear the same relationship to reality as sugar puffs do to wheat — the grain provides the raw material, but it has to be coated in honey, puffed full of air and put in a package before being served up.

Arrange Me a Marriage (BBC2, Thursday) was more engaging than most in the genre, mainly because nobody was strung out to dry. The notion is that arranged marriages often work in the subcontinent, so it was worth getting a marriage-fixer — a Scots–Indian woman called Aneela — to work her art on Westerners. She seemed a sensible person. Her subject, a 33-year-old unmarried executive called Lexi, insisted that she didn’t mind what social class her groom came from. Aneela quickly set her right on that — class background was vital. Most unwed people have a fantasy about the exact partner they want; she knew that nobody meets all our requirements, and if they did we’d be disappointed anyway. As my friend the Texan gossip columnist Betsy Parish said when a friend asked why she’d never married, ‘Because all the men here are married, gay, or pond scum.’

So we had all the usual reality trappings: the impromptu conversations, the relaxed family chat in the kitchen with the soundman trying to hide behind the dresser, and the fake tension: ‘Only two weeks left, and Lexi is no nearer making up her mind...’ In the end they found a chap, who seemed very pleasant, or at least had been edited to seem very pleasant, and the couple began an apparently satisfactory relationship. Has it lasted? It doesn’t matter. We had the result. We also don’t know if Elizabeth and Mr Darcy lived happily ever after, and Pride and Prejudice is no more fictional than reality TV.

More articles from: Simon Hoggart | this section

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