Wonderland: The British in Bed (BBC2, Thursday) consists of long periods of boredom interrupted by moments of extreme embarrassment. The notion is to get couples — old, young, black, Sikh, gay — to sit up in bed next to each other, in nighties and jimjams, and talk about their lives as partners. Presumably, the notion is that in these relaxed circumstances, even with a camera crew at the foot of the bed, they will be inclined to tell us all.
But they don’t. For a start, they hardly talk about sex, except in the most general way. The fact that they’re in bed, accompanied only by a cameraman, a soundman, a director and a battery of lights, doesn’t lead them to say things like, ‘But what really gets me going is when he…’ There was a touching moment when the young Sikh man (his beard must get in the way a lot) says, ‘I don’t think we have as much sex as we’d like to,’ and his smiley young wife says, ‘We get as much as we need to.’
Then she feels this sounds too indifferent: ‘I’m embarrassed now, but I really enjoy it. It’s different from anything else we do.’
Him: ‘Apart from X-box.’ Revealing that, whatever Nick Griffin might think, immigrant cultures can assimilate British customs, notably the ability to change the subject swiftly whenever anything emotional crops up.
Now and again there is an excruciating moment when someone says something, on camera, that comes as news to the other. The wife of a physics lecturer: ‘We put the children first and our relationship has gone right down because of it…I have all my activities because I can’t sit around waiting for you to pay me attention.’
One real problem for me was that, while these people feel very real, wrinkles and all, they sound exactly like those plasticine animals in Nick Park’s ads.
Andrew Marr’s new series, The Making of Modern Britain (BBC2, Wednesday), was at its best looking at the forgotten corners of history. We know about the Boer War (though the horror of the concentration camps for Boer women and children may be new to some people) and we’ve read about free trade versus protectionism. But I didn’t know that Marie Lloyd booked her own theatre near the London Coliseum in revenge for not being invited to the first Royal Variety Performance, or that Lloyd George had to flee Birmingham Town Hall to escape pro-war rioters — don’t get many of them these days — while dressed as a policeman.
But there was a certain fusspottery to the production. Why did we have shots of Marr himself in black and white, flickering, with random streaks across the footage, as if it was a 100-year-old film of him? We’re not stupid. We know he wasn’t actually there. He’s far too young (50). He discussed Francis Galton, whose reading of the basset hound stud book suggested it was important to improve the human gene pool by any means necessary, an idea which didn’t catch on here but went down a storm in Germany. So shots of Marr playing with some cuddly basset hounds seemed footling.
The Restaurant (BBC2, Thursday) brought together contestants who want backing from Raymond Blanc to open their own eaterie. Many of them were very fat. Most of them made food that looked so ghastly that you would run a mile if you were invited to dine at their home, never mind be expected to pay for in a restaurant.
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