I often drone on about how there are television programmes made with love and there are those that are knocked out cynically, to win ratings and advertising, or because the programme makers are just too lazy to come up with anything new, challenging, informative or even entertaining. Hole in the Wall is obviously cynical, as is I’m a Celebrity. On the other hand, Strictly Come Dancing might be as camp as a drag act at Pontin’s, but it is at least made with craft and dedication. You may not care for the show, but somebody plainly cares about getting it right. A classic instance of getting it right is Iran and the West (BBC2), which has been running over three weeks on Saturdays.
And then there’s The Victorians on BBC1 (Sunday), presented by Jeremy Paxman, with, of course, an accompanying book. At first I was annoyed by the BBC’s timidity. You can imagine some programme controller saying, ‘Oh, gosh, a programme telling the story of the Victorians through their paintings. And you’re thinking of getting some art expert? Oh dear, I think we’d better play safe and get Paxman. Not too much arty talk.’
So Paxman it was and, while he is undoubtedly a superb television performer, I did feel somewhat cheated. Couldn’t they have got someone who knows a bit more than him? But then I read the howls of anguish from the art critics, who detest the notion of laymen clambering over their patch with their dirty hands and hob-nailed boots. Like rock music critics, who may be the worst critics in the country since they write principally to impress other rock critics, art critics exist in their own private world from which the rest of us are admitted only on their terms. So good luck to Paxman, who caught the ambiguity of our feelings about the Victorians — as well as giving us engineering achievements, they created the workhouse, an institution based on the notion that you can terrify people out of being poor. The sight of Paxman tucking into a bowl of gruel — ‘like porridge, without the porridge’ — was one I shall not quickly forget. (They should serve it at The Ivy; poverty chic could be big this year.) An amusing and informative programme, and Paxman was an excellent choice.
If journalism is the first draft of history, Norma Percy’s programmes are the second draft, or possibly the first rewrite. Actually, it’s sometimes hard to see how much more the historians will be able to find. She and Brook Lapping productions go back to find the people who were taking the decisions at the time and, since they are almost invariably now out of office, they are happy to talk, or in some cases confess. The star interviewees on Iran and the West this week were former Presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, which was quite a coup.
Now and again the programmes shock us with the sheer shamelessness of the characters. Take George Schulz, Reagan’s secretary of state, on the subject of the Iran–Iraq war. The Americans had just seen the effect of Saddam’s chemical weapons which fossilised their victims in the exact pose they were in when they took their last breath. Schulz: ‘We wanted them to stop using chemical weapons, but at the same time we didn’t want Iran to win the war.’
There are layers of irony here: for a start, they were uneasily willing for Saddam to employ the horrifying weapons he did have, but two decades later it was essential to invade Iraq because of the horrifying weapons he didn’t — as it happens — have. It’s not often you see realpolitik exposed so clearly. No other programme on television could bring you such information. It is an almost unique format.
Wine — The Firm (BBC4, Monday) was the exact and precise opposite of Oz and James’s jaunt through the vineyards. The first episode was about Berry Bros and Rudd, the St James’s wine merchants. These people take their wine very seriously; what was fascinating was the way that under the bonhomie and cheerful glugging was a tense game of chicken being played with the prices. Basically, the best-known red Bordeaux are ludicrously overpriced. BBR has to guess whether its cash-strapped customers will still accept these mad valuations and so pay the chateaux accordingly. It’s like watching TV poker, with posher players.
The Krypton Factor is back on ITV. It doesn’t really work this time. All game shows ultimately depend on us being interested in the contestants. Watching people about whom we know little and care less drearily trying to remember shapes and colours, and crawling round damp copses with ropes, doesn’t engage us at all.
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