Jeremy Paxman has a dark secret: in real life he’s an absolute kitten.
Jeremy Paxman has a dark secret: in real life he’s an absolute kitten. He does continental, gay-enough double-cheek kisses, he doesn’t shout exasperatedly, ‘Come on!’ or pull appalled faces to indicate just how ignorant he finds you, and he has about him a general air of gentleness and kindness you just wouldn’t expect from the horrid interrogational techniques he uses on MPs.
Even so, for the first few seconds of his new documentary series The Victorians (BBC1, Sunday), I did worry that he might be pushing his Mister Nice act just a bit too far. He’d put on this piping, sensitive, frankly a bit girlie narrator’s voice, as if to say, ‘Look. I know it has been suggested that a political bruiser is the wrong chap to talk about pretty pictures, but actually I’m right cultured, me.’
Fairly shortly after that, though, I stopped noticing. It’s a lovely series, this, and absolutely perfect for Sunday nights. Though a lot of the territory it covers is quite familiar — Queen Victoria really was in love with Albert; Osborne House was a tranquil retreat from the affairs of state; the Victorians had double standards when it came to morality; here’s that famous Holman Hunt picture (‘The Awakening Conscience’) of the poor chap who isn’t after all going to get his oats because his fancy-woman has suddenly come over all religious — Paxo handles it in such an amused, charming way as to make it all seem fresh and intriguing.
I wasn’t convinced by the impromptu moose sequence, though. This was the brief shot where Paxo, exploring a typical Victorian house with the usual loads of stuff on the walls, glanced up briefly at a moose head and treated us to a flicker of a smile which said, ‘The Victorians: was there no end to their craziness?’ But you just know that the shot was very carefully preplanned. And that it took him about five takes probably. ‘No, a bit more wry, if you don’t mind, Jez, sweetie. And surprised. Remember, you’re seeing that moose’s head for the first time…’
Ross Kemp is back in Afghanistan — hence the title Ross Kemp: Return to Afghanistan (Sky One, Sunday) — and making us armchair soldiers more envious than ever of his mighty cojones and flukey good fortune. Helmand has got a great deal more dangerous than when Kemp last visited, now that the Taliban are avoiding set-piece engagements they know they’re going to lose, and concentrating instead on blowing our boys’ legs off with mines and obliterating them with the molten metal of IEDs. This week found Kemp on patrol in the Green Zone where the cover is so close you could be ambushed at almost any point. How our chaps retain their cool under such gnawing tension I can’t begin to imagine. But I do feel the very least we ought to do for them is to get them more helicopters.
Mad Men (BBC4, Tuesday) is back, too, and I’m most terribly grateful, not least because it makes the occasional, guilty roll-up I smoke at parties suddenly seem so very innocuous. On Mad Men, of course, everyone puffs away like cancer hadn’t been invented, to the point actually where you become so concerned about the fug that must be building up in their conference room you feel like breaking through the TV screen and trying to open a window for them. This is how culturally conditioned we’ve become, thanks to the ASH propagandists.
There’s something that bothers me about Mad Men, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it in the first series but my wife pointed it out to me at the beginning of this new one, and she’s quite right: there’s something a bit weird about Don Draper’s perfect blonde wife Betty (January Jones). I know she’s meant to be this Grace-Kelly-lookalike who’s growing dissatisfied with her life as the model Fifties-style homemaker, but I’m not sure I quite buy these porn-fantasy scenarios into which the script-team inserts her. In series one, there was that unlikely frotteurism moment with the washing machine after the visit from the travelling salesman. In series two, there was the scene where she seemed very nearly to offer herself up sexually in return for a cheaper fan-belt-changing deal from the hunky car mechanic. You mark my words, it’ll be the milkman next played by some cheeky Robin Askwith lookalike.
Finally, just a brief word on how utterly, incredibly, amazingly exciting the University Challenge (BBC2, Monday) final was. God, how I wanted Corpus Christi Oxford to beat Manchester, though it wasn’t until well into the second half that their star player Gail Trimble found her form. I’m so glad that she and her splendid team did. It’s very important, I think, that all those bien-pensant pillocks who ask, ‘Is it right in this day and age that Oxford and Cambridge still should be allowed so many more teams in the competition than the redbricks and polys?’ should have their noses rubbed in it good and proper.
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