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Friday 5 September 2008

Homer’s wisdom

The Simpsons (Channel 4); Midnight Man (ITV); World Snooker Championship (BBC2)

The Simpsons remains scathing about the whole of American popular culture; in this country perhaps we incorporate our satire on television within television. So there is a certain smugness about our view of the show — we may be awful but we’re not as awful as the Americans — which makes it all the more pleasurable. And the Simpsons are very loving with each other. When George Bush Sr said he wanted families to be less like the Simpsons and more like the Waltons, he got it precisely wrong.

But how to satirise Midnight Man (ITV, Thursday)? It’s a three-part thriller about how evil government forces try to destroy an unshaven, truth-seeking journalist, played by James Nesbitt. Someone was clearly terrified that this character might not be interesting enough. So he has a phobia for daylight, and can only go out at night. And he has a little daughter, to whom he reads books about the Kennedy assassinations. He eats Pot Noodle in the car. He steals famous people’s rubbish and invariably finds fascinating material: invoices for child porn, pregnancy testing kits. His enemies are evil American neocons and their British allies. A civil servant whose name he revealed committed suicide. Few of us have packed as much into a life as he fits into a week. He is utterly unlike any journalist I have ever met.

Nevertheless, I was drawn into the show, with its gorgeous mistresses and smooth-talking evil-doers, right until the very end when they kill James Nesbitt’s wife on her doorstep. I have known many investigative journalists, some of whom have written articles which were extremely discomfiting for the powers that be. Yet not one of them has come home to find their wife with a bullet through her forehead. Not one! The art of thriller writing is to keep one foot in the surreal, the unthinkable and the horrible, and the other firmly in reality. Skip to one side or another and you’ve lost. I’m afraid that as the wife hit the doormat, I laughed. I shan’t watch the last two episodes. I’m afraid the little girl is going to be next.

The world snooker championship (BBC2, passim) finished this week. Did you know that they sometimes put on plays at the Sheffield Crucible? Hard to see when they find the time. Snooker was the first great success of colour television (they actually tried to show it in black and white in the early 1960s — ‘He is aiming for the brown ball; that’s the green ball on the right...’). But it is like chess with movement; the fascinating moments often come at the end, when a frame can depend on a wonderful blend of mental strategy and physical skill. No wonder that, when it’s on, it occupies far more time than the soap operas.

More articles from: Simon Hoggart | this section

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