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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Seeking redemption

The Lady's Not For Spurning (BBC4); Happy Birthday, Brucie! (BBC1); Lewis (ITV)

Lady Thatcher endorses William Hague then chips away at him, too. But the real story remains The Agony of Portillo. He admits to having experimented with gay sex at university — ‘big mistake!’ He has become a reformer, but that only makes things worse and he loses to Iain Duncan Smith. ‘Too many MPs disliked me, and/or my uncompromising programme of modernisation.’ He’s not finished yet: the Tories are ‘loathed’ and this is largely due to ‘people like me’.

Will some kindly priest put an end to this man’s unhappiness, and tell him that there is forgiveness for us all? He could probably get 12.5 per cent of the fee for the next programme, too.

There was a classic 90 minutes of showbiz schmaltz in Happy Birthday, Brucie! (BBC1, Sunday). This was an 80th birthday tribute to Bruce Forsyth, and it was like eating a Nivea Cream sandwich with extra lard. I could stand it only in very small doses. I switched on to see Brucie telling Jools Holland, ‘We’ve never met before, and we’ve never worked before.’ So why, I inwardly screamed, have you got him at your birthday party?

Brucie reprised his famous gurning faces: the fake smile, the fake alarm, the fake affront. All those endlessly tedious catch-phrases reappeared, endlessly. I had to keep leaving the room. I returned to see a clip of him singing, 35 years ago. He didn’t appear any younger; the nose already looked as if you could shape roof timbers with it. He sang Barry Manilow’s ‘I Made It Through the Rain’, the ultimate self-congratulatory show-business anthem, which translates as ‘I Made It Through Some Bad Reviews’. He concluded, ‘It has been almost too much, almost too much!’, and I thought, ‘What’s this “almost”?’

Lewis (ITV, Sunday) was a very classic couple of hours — not surprisingly with a script written by a real playwright, Alan Plater. The plot was as full of holes as an ancient lace curtain, but that didn’t matter. The dialogue crackled (Lewis, on hearing good news: ‘So there is a God.’ Sidekick Hathaway: ‘If I’d been sure about that I’d never have joined the police.’)

Hathaway, played by Laurence Fox, is the true replacement for Morse — learned and sardonic, at home among all these dons-with-a-secret. (There’s never a ‘don-with-nothing-to-hide’.) And how many prime-time ITV dramas have quotes from Shelley in the first minute?

More articles from: Simon Hoggart | this section

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