Will my friend, the writer and historian Tom Holland, get his head chopped off for the things he is saying on Islam: The Untold Story (Channel 4)? My guess is not. If I’d said them, I’m sure I would have done because I have the kind of manner which makes people want to punch my lights out even if all I’ve said is that their mum makes a really lovely apple crumble and by the way is it OK if I help with the dishes?
Holland, on the other hand, has such a fey, wispy, slightly geeky, quintessential English niceness about him that I’ll bet if he stood outside the Kaaba and declaimed to the crowds through a megaphone, ‘I say, you chaps. You do realise that your religion is a frightful farrago of nonsense? That most of it was made up on the hoof long after Mohammed,’ they’d all find it charming, droll and thoroughly unexceptionable.
But this is pure speculation. The fact is that I have not yet seen Holland’s programme because this is what happens when you move to the country. You wake up one morning and go: ‘Christ, it’s Tuesday! My TV copy was supposed to be in last Friday and I’ve seen no TV at all to speak of because Channel 4 couldn’t get the Holland DVD to me in time, my internet’s been on the blink, and anyway I’ve been too distracted with stuff like trying to kill wasps and mosquitos and coping with the fact that there’s no dishwasher and taking extra long showers to try to counteract any lurgy I might have picked up swimming in the lake with that dead sheep right next to where the water flows in…’
The other handicap at the moment is that we’re living temporarily in a cottage which, though exceedingly picturesque, is not much bigger than a well-proportioned doll’s house, so we’re all living like East Europeans and are having to share just the one TV set in a tiny living-room. This means that I have been more than usually exposed not just to the revoltingness of my children, but also to the unutterable crapness of the stuff they like to watch on TV.
Actually, that’s not quite fair. Some of the crap they watch on TV is good. For example, I have no objection whatsoever to their watching Oliver! on one of the repeat channels. I like Oliver! an awful lot, especially when Harry Secombe sings the definitive version of ‘Boy for Sale’ in that lovely warm tenor, and also the ‘Who Will Buy?’ scene where the wistful solo by the flower seller builds into this massive, gloriously uplifting song-and-dance chorus in the square. Every time I watch I marvel that one man could have written the music, lyrics and book to such a masterpiece. And then I reflect miserably on the pitilessness of a universe which could allow such a genius to spend his latter years in penury. Lionel, mate, we’ve all been there.
Another thing I really don’t mind watching with the kids is old game shows on the Challenge channel. The other day I found Girl being transfixed by the strangeness of Bullseye: the terrible Eighties clothes and haircuts; the white working-class echtness of the audience; the end-of-the-pier sincerity of Jim Bowen; the surprising uselessness of the celebrity guest darts players in attaining their treble twenties; the awfulness of the prizes. In my Oxford days, my housemates and I used to watch this programme religiously — that, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, in the days when Skeletor was still scary. But to my daughter it looks as weird and remote as footage of early BBC presenters wearing black tie to deliver the news in strained Harry Enfield-type fake-posh accents.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?: there’s another programme I rather miss, even though if they ran a new series I’m sure I wouldn’t bother to watch. I was just passing the TV as a couple (couple? This clearly was a format introduced after I stopped watching, along with everybody else) decided to gamble £25,000 on the question ‘Who wrote Notes on Nursing in 1860?’ I ran, screaming, into the garden when the answer they decided to go with was ‘Edith Cavell’.
Then, after the break, I came back in from the garden to scream at the couple some more. I mean, how stupid do you have to be to think that a nurse who was very famously shot dead by the Germans in 1915 could possibly have written a landmark medical textbook 55 years earlier?
Now the post has just arrived with a copy of the missing DVD of Tom Holland’s programme. Sorry, too late for this week’s review, mate. And now the editor himself is emailing, hoping that I’ll have something to say this week about Parade’s End. Erm… Let’s just say normal service will be resumed shortly, shall we, and leave it at that?
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