‘The only way you can help us,’ said the young student on the archive recording, his voice thin and wavering through the ether, as if emasculated by the Soviet tanks that had just invaded his native city, Prague. ‘Don’t forget Czechoslovakia.’ The streets were filled with young people, who were bravely trying to talk with the soldiers, many of whom could not speak Russian but were brought in from the far reaches of the Soviet territories and had more in common with their Chinese neighbours than the Mittel Europeans. But active resistance, they knew, was pointless. ‘We are a small nation. What chances do we have against the Red Army?’
It was odd hearing this 40 years later when Russian tanks were once again doing the same thing, invading a much smaller neighbour. We like to think that the world has changed, has moved on, that we’re living in different times. But for any of us who remember 1968 (and we’re not that old, despite what you under-40s might think), the only difference is that we’re no longer so innocently hopeful. Realpolitik, or perhaps one should say a combination of geographical practicalities and the realities of human nature, has a nasty way of getting in the way of technological advance. We may have experienced a global internet revolution but the old dangers are still very much with us.
Last week in 1968: The Year of Revolutions, John Tusa (whose parents left Czechoslovakia in 1939 when he was three) took Radio Four to the studios of Radio Prague to bring together a group of Czechs who remembered the events of August 1968, when in the middle of the night they suddenly found themselves surrounded by troops from the Soviet Union. ‘Where were you on the night of 20/21 August?’ he asked. They all recalled in great detail how they had found out what was happening, whether they were woken by a knock on the door or by friends on the telephone who had heard the news on the radio.
Somehow it was very moving to hear these people talking about what had happened to them, rather than simply being given well-chosen clips from the sound archives, so that I was drawn in as if I had been overhearing a conversation in a café, one of those occasions when you know what’s being talked about over there is far more interesting than anything going on at your own table. ‘It was creepy,’ said Dora Slaba, who was working for Radio Prague, ‘to have these soldiers all over the place; weaving my way behind the tanks to find a loaf of bread.’ What had most concerned her, though, she realised now, was not the end of those dreams for a new kind of socialism, one that really did work for the people and not against them, but the fact that she could no longer buy birdseed for her daughters’ two budgerigars. ‘It was the little details that worried us.’
I’ve been a bit sceptical of the great Radio Four series on 1968, which has been running day-by-day, recreating the events of that year. Was it really such a momentous time? Do we need any more false nostalgia for a decade that was really not so very different from any other? But being reminded of the Prague Spring in this evocative programme (produced by Louise Adamson) just as Russian tanks are refusing to leave Georgia has been like being on the express train of change only to have the emergency cord pulled.
As if on cue, this week the Woman’s Hour drama on Radio Four has begun a ten-part adaptation of Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook. Ten episodes is nowhere near enough to make the most of this mind-changing book. It tells of Anna Wulf, a writer, and her actress friend Molly, free-living women in 1950s London whose feminism was closely tied up with their membership of the Communist party. ‘The Russian Revolution? The Chinese Revolution? They’re nothing at all,’ declares Anna’s lover Michael as he’s about to dump her. ‘The real revolution of our time is women against men.’
It’ll probably surprise many younger listeners to hear that Lessing wrote this book in 1962 before London became swinging, before the Pill and the new Abortion Bill. Women, as Lessing shows so brilliantly, have been struggling to assert the emotional honesty of their gender since time began, and, although at times they have succeeded, at others they’ve been pushed back into Pandora’s box.
This is an accomplished, compulsive adaptation by Sarah Daniels, although you need to go back to the book to appreciate the complexity of Lessing’s writing. The Nobel Prizewinning author does not like it to be described as ‘a feminist novel’ as she explained on Monday’s Woman’s Hour, disapproving of the way that fiction is now divided up into genres, as if life could ever be lived like that. But try telling that to any man who has braved Lessing’s withering insights into the war of the sexes.
Time to pay tribute to New Tricks, which ended its most recent run on BBC1 this Monday. The penultimate episode had 8.9 million viewers, which meant that more people watched it that night than Coronation Street. It has a good claim to be the most popular programme on television.
All of this brings much satisfaction. For one thing, New Tricks is everything a TV marketing man hates. It is about older people. It probably appeals to older people. Marketing men have a set of beliefs which are quite as irrational as any cult religion. One is that only young people are worth advertising to, since they are crazed neo-philiacs and can be persuaded to switch brands, whether of cars, cook-in sauce or toilet cleansers. By contrast, old people are set in their ways and no amount of advertising will shift their buying habits. This is piffle — the over-40s are every bit as likely to experiment as anyone else, and generally have more money too. But that is contrary to professional dogma and so is ignored.
You might wonder why BBC executives should worry so much about these matters when they carry no advertising. But the BBC is itself a brand, and we viewers are presumed to be too stupid to change channels once we have found the button marked ‘1’. The consultants’ mantras insist that the only worthwhile audience is a young audience, which can be tied to the Beeb by hoops of steel.
Then along comes New Tricks and proves them totally, joyfully wrong. It is not a great series, just a very good one. The plots are ludicrously complicated, so that by the end you are likely to be totally lost. Five minutes after it’s finished, you’ve forgotten whodunit. But you don’t watch detective series for the plot. ‘I thought it must be the vicar. Shall I put the kettle on?’ You watch for the characters, and New Tricks has them like sultanas in a fruit cake. If you don’t know, it’s about three coppers, near or past retirement, who belong to a unit that solves past crimes long abandoned by the Met. They may be crusty old curmudgeons, but they have guile, experience and some charm. Naturally they always succeed. They’re played by Alun Armstrong, an obsessive recovering alcoholic, James Bolam of The Likely Lads, whose wife was killed by a gangster, and Dennis Waterman, who plays Dennis Waterman with his usual flair. Their boss is Amanda Redman, whose father was a bent copper. You’ll have spotted that there is just a little bit too much back story here, which makes the script even harder to follow.
Still, it’s funny, it’s smart, it’s crisply scripted and it’s cheerful. It deserves to be number one, and for the first time (I believe) the BBC, having treated it with embarrassment and disdain, has announced that it will be back next year. Somewhere a marketing man is flouncing round in a huff.
The characters in Mutual Friends (BBC1, Tuesday) are probably a quarter century younger than New Tricks’ cops, but the elderly clichés are already in place. There’s The Big Chill-style funeral of an old friend at which things are said that would have been better left unsaid, the married couple in therapy cliché, and of course the scene where Dad misses the school play — cue close-up of little boy’s crumpled face. It works, I suspect, because the cast play it as a comedy rather than a drama: Andrew Alexander looks as if he is permanently about to announce that it’s Pimm’s O’Clock, and Marc Warren, who usually plays neurotic sleazeballs, shows real deftness as a neurotic almost honest lawyer. If it were an attempt to recreate Cold Feet it would be boring — as a series of set comic pieces, it works.
MasterChef: the Professionals (BBC2, Monday) is the third twist on the formula, this time featuring not amateurs, not celebs, but up-and-coming cooks who are already being paid. I found it hard to care very much. John Torode, one of the judges, has been replaced by Michel Roux Jr from Le Gavroche, who plays Mr Nasty to Gregg Wallace’s Mr Sometimes Quite Encouraging. They must be desperate for yet more new angles. Maybe MasterChef: the Ex-presenters, starring Torode and Loyd Grossman? Or Greasy Spoon: the MasterChefs in which Marco-Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal cook fried-egg sandwiches.
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