How in God’s name did Jonathan Meades ever get a job presenting TV programmes? I ask in the spirit of surprised delight rather than disgust, for Meades is that rare almost to the point of nonexistent phenomenon: the presenter who doesn’t treat you like a subnormal child or so irritate you with his incredibly infuriating mannerisms that you want him immediately executed with one of those bolt guns they use on cattle.
Which isn’t to say Meades doesn’t have his drawbacks. His work reminds me a bit of my old tutor Peter Conrad’s: it’s so dense and intense and packed with ideas that one page of writing — or TV minute — is equivalent to about 30 of anyone else’s. So it’s not what you’d call relaxing. You can’t veg out in front of it, as most TV is designed for these days. It’s more like doing a fiendish crossword puzzle — best tackled in small bursts.
Worth it, though. His three-part BBC4 series on Wednesday, Jonathan Meades on France (where he now lives, apparently), promised from the start — ‘No Dordogne. No boules. No Piaf. No Gallic shrugs. No checked tablecloths…’ — that this wasn’t going to be another Peter Mayle-style romp through la France profonde of stripey-topped onion salesmen on bicycles, slugs of pastis and wily old peasants straight out of Jean de Florette. Instead, Meades’s series is going to tell it like it is: the French are a bunch of total basket cases.
This week’s episode focused on Lorraine which, despite being on the margins of the country, was successfully positioned in the French imagination — by a ‘clubbable bigot’ named Maurice Barrès — as the spiritual heartland of France. Hence the adoption of the cross of Lorraine by de Gaulle, for whom Meades understandably has little time.
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