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Thursday 4 December 2008

Top women

Queen Victoria's Men (Channel 4); Florence Nightingale (BBC1); How TV Changed Britain (Channel 4)

The fourth Victoria, played by Zoe Street-Howe, popped up in Florence Nightingale (BBC1, Sunday). If Channel 4 had got its hands on the lady with the lamp, it would have turned her into a slovenly slattern, who raised money for gin by selling her body to officers. This was the precise opposite. She really was as wonderful and selfless and brave and determined as we’ve always been told. She even converted the Queen to her cause, though Victoria was at first unwilling to listen to the gory details of life and death in the Crimea — possibly because she was desperate to get away for a shag. (This was not a point made in the BBC film.)

Much stress was placed on the fact that she felt her work in the Crimea had been ordained by God. Her father was sceptical. He believed in her mission, but not in its divine providence. We were encouraged to take her side. I was puzzled why this cropped up so often — until the very end, when we learnt that the show had been made by a company called ‘Faith and Values’ and sponsored by the BBC’s religious affairs unit. In other words, it was less a biography than a Sunday school parable. I felt cheated — we were being fed a religious lecture disguised as a documentary. Members of ‘the faith community’ (BBC talk for anyone with any religion at all, whether Christianity, Islam or worship of the Duke of Edinburgh) are always complaining that they barely get a look-in these days. In fact they have a service on Radio Four every day, Thought for the Day, its equivalent on Radio Two, Songs of Praise and Sunday Life. I think they do quite well. Far more people watch or listen to BBC religious programmes than go to church. And they get this dramatised homily as well.

How TV Changed Britain (Channel 4, Sunday) is a promising new series. This was about police shows, and charted how we loved our coppers when they appeared as twinkle-eyed friends (Dixon of Dock Green, The Bill), or iconoclasts on our side (The Sweeney, Morse), and disliked them when they were rough, tough and corrupt (Z-Cars, Law and Order). As a political correspondent by trade, I know that reality is never a substitute for what we see on television.

More articles from: Simon Hoggart | this section

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