There is a word ‘deification’, but there ought to be a homophone, perhaps ‘dayification’, meaning the way daytime television spreads into the evenings.
There is a word ‘deification’, but there ought to be a homophone, perhaps ‘dayification’, meaning the way daytime television spreads into the evenings. There are now only five types of daytime programming apart from films and repeats: chat, quizzes and games, food, auctions and property. I plan to get rich by combining all of them into a daytime pentathlon show, in which contestants will have to confess to standing by their husbands even after they have had sex with goats, know in which Italian city you might find the Leaning Tower of Pisa, knock up saddle of rabbit in a blackcurrant jus with courgette flowers, sell a Victorian coal scuttle for 10 per cent above the reserve price, and finally examine a house on the Algarve, with 3 beds, 2 recep., wonderful views and a pool, at a very reasonable £240,000, then reject it on the grounds that there’s a cement factory next door.
Sometimes the process is a bounce-back. Antiques Roadshow was the grandad of all the ‘this is a beer mug my great-uncle brought back from China, do you think it might be T’ang dynasty?’ shows which fill the schedules after breakfast and before the 6 p.m. news. University Challenge started in 1962; Mastermind ten years later, and they always appeared in the evening. But others are essentially daytime shows, which are making their way into the evenings (Location, Location, Location; Come Dine With Me) not least because they are dirt-cheap. The presenters do all right, probably getting a four-figure sum per show, but the public appear for peanuts or nothing at all. Drama costs up to a million pounds per hour; Hunt That Slipper (actually Michael Frayn invented that; I think it would work rather well, with celebrities in a stately home) costs a small fraction.
Take Economy Gastronomy (BBC2, Wednesday), which must cost almost nothing at all. It was rather depressing, a sorry snapshot of modern British life. The first programme centred on a nice, decent, loving working-class family — far from Wayne and Waynetta Slob — who spend £11,500 a year on junk food. The kids eat microwaved ready meals, the parents takeaway, and a family night out is a trip to the kebab shop. And the mother is about to lose her job. The presenters descend on them with cheap nutritious food and jargon. ‘Bedrock ingredients’ are used to create ‘tumbledown meals’, so that cheap mince makes cottage pie, spag bol and chilli. I was put in mind of a modern Lady Bountiful appearing with scrag end and cabbage stalks. Faced with this perky condescension, I would almost rather have a kebab, even the kind that looks like tapeworms nestling in pitta bread.
Now that ITV can afford to make so little drama, apart from soaps, they have taken to buying them in. Single-Handed (Sunday) was made in Ireland for RTE, the Irish broadcaster, though written by a Brit, Barry Simner. It’s set in Connemara, and the idea is that the hero, Garda Jack Driscoll, polices a huge area on his own. The contrast is between the vast and gorgeous scenery and the secretive, claustrophobic world of corruption, incest, drugs, murder — the usual. Clearly someone wanted to get away from the loveable, be-dad and be-jasus Oirishry of Ballykissangel, though from my own limited experience that was rather closer to most real life in Ireland than incest, murder and so forth. And it is awfully slow.
No matter. Soon nobody will be able to afford any of this lavish film-making. Instead Sunday nights will be Hunt for a Celebrity Home Kitchen Makeover Auction.
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