I expected to dislike Walk on the Wild Side (BBC1, Saturday), fearing sub-Johnny Morris, anthropomorphic, animals-say-the-darndest-things whimsy. Instead it turned out to be funny, inventive and even acerbic. The notion is that comedians take genuine footage of animals from natural-history programmes, and voice-over short routines matched to the creatures’ movements, often with surreal effect. It’s hit and miss, but the hits compensate for the misses. The meerkat, for example, boasting to other meerkats about his success as an actor (they might have seen him, he says grandly, in the ‘compare the meerkat’ commercials, as his bored audience falls over). Sharks on the ocean floor sing Queen hits, and I loved the family of elephants being taken as a special treat to the ‘all-you-can-eat grass buffet’. ‘What’s for dessert, Dad?’ ‘Grass.’
There was a poignant marmot who thinks he’s seen his friend Alan, and keeps calling for him; the comic effect heightened by the fact that, from the front, the marmot looked amazingly like Timothy Spall, who had the principal role in the final episode of The Street (BBC1, Monday).
This is a show as different from Walk on the Wild Side as it could possibly be, since like all editions of The Street it was an hour of almost undiluted misery — if happiness does somehow creep under the door, it is thrown out by the scruff of its neck. In the penultimate episode, a wretched alcoholic discovers that he has a son, the result of a one-night stand with Maxine Peake (the show gets some fine actors). The lad has Down’s Syndrome, but their bonding brings real joy to both. Ha! The alkie lives in that Manchester street where nothing goes right for anyone. We wait tensely to see what disaster lies in wait. The boy finds the mixture of Coke and vodka his dad keeps in the fridge, drinks it thinking it’s just Coke, gets drunk, falls down, and ends up in A&E. So his mother whisks him away again. Nobody watched The Street to enjoy it; it’s the television equivalent of those crashes that bring motorways to a halt as everyone slows down to look. This is not the result of ghoulishness as the papers always claim; it’s the intense, cathartic relief that it isn’t us and ours in the wreckage.
This week Timothy Spall played a cab driver who, out of kindness and pity, spends the night with an ill-favoured colleague. Thanks to his inability to fib, his wife finds out, their already shaky marriage is threatened, though that doesn’t matter because she dies anyway, gasping for breath in a restaurant loo. Aaargh! But he makes a lovely speech at her funeral. It’s a measure of the prestige The Street has in the trade that the smallish part of the barman was played by Bob Hoskins, a man now more at home in Hollywood than in Manchester.
But The Street is probably not coming back. Too expensive. Not exactly suitable for a co-production either, unlike the glossy, money-soaked The Tudors (BBC2, Friday), which seems to have been made with money from more countries than are serving in Afghanistan. It is a bodice-ripper and bosom-stripper. Everything makes you want to shout at the screen. ‘Can we trust the word of the King?’ asks someone and you yell, ‘Of course not, can’t you hear that scary thunka-thunka music?’ It also features Max von Sydow, the great actor from Ingmar Bergman’s company. To come to this! Surely there could have been a part for him in The Street.
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