Was it just me, or did anyone else notice how uncannily, how puckishly like Springwatch the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury was? It was presented by some of those cougar DJ women doing off-the-cuff Kate Humble impressions, accompanied by a series of grumpy middle-aged men in embarrassing hats and down-with-the-wildlife stubble, wearing Barbours and gumboots, talking about what might be happening in the Pyramid nesting box; and it was filmed like wildlife, with excited presenters taking us to see strange and wonderful behaviour in distant fields, then talking about acts with colloquial names that were apparently endangered species. And it was all very cosy and bucolic. Who’d have thought that rock’n’roll would turn into the urban, middle-aged wing of the RSPB?
I must say that, like Countryfile, the women DJs age a whole lot better than the men, who tend to become know-all noise nerds. There’s a definite whiff of James May about them, of attic hobbies and things arranged in alphabetical order. Rock music is not a good look on any bloke over the age of 30. There were elements of Springwatch about Wimbledon, too. What is it that’s nesting up Nadal’s bottom?
A friend sent me a pilot for a programme he’s made. He calls it a comedy with heart. He’s having trouble with commissioning editors. Comedy departments say it has too much drama for them, and the drama bods say it should be sent back to comedy because it has too much humour to be a play. Apart from that, everyone thinks it’s terrific. I know that sounds like a comedy plot. Actually, it’s a constant frustration for writers. If you ever wonder why so much television looks like so much other television, the reason is that departments have strict criteria for what falls into their remit. There are more teeth-sucking jobsworths in trendy telly than there are in Network Rail.
Sirens happily plagiarises the organs of a lot of other TV shows, with little bits of House and quite a lot of ER
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What is particularly depressing about the inability of comedy and drama departments to get with the programme is that comic drama is one of the most popular genres in television and film, and all of it comes from America. It is no coincidence that home-grown comedy and drama are both at such pathetically low ebbs at the moment, stuck in their boxes, with repetitive, exhaustive and clichéridden formulas.
There was half an attempt last week to start a com-dram — not actually for them to cohabit, more of a blind date. Sirens is, sadly, not a telly adaptation of Hugh Grant’s down-under nudie movie, in which Tara Fitzgerald got to go to church naked, pubes out in the pews; it’s about three paramedics.
It happily plagiarises the organs of a lot of other television shows, with little bits of House, quite a lot of ER, a touch of Green Wing and an awful lot of the slapstick history of male comic trios, from the Three Stooges to The Hangover by way of the Marx Brothers, Ghostbusters and Last of the Summer Wine.
Comic threesomes are the classic playground gang. These three, on first meeting them, don’t look all that different. In fact, they are surprisingly similar. Of course, one of them is Asian and one of them is gay, and the odd one out is a heterosexual white bloke. These distinctions aren’t funny, because that would be sexist and racist. They are there so the comedy and the drama will be inclusive, unless, of course, you’re a woman. There are women featured, but they are just there to nag and be visual aids for masturbation jokes.
Sirens started well, the comedy rising naturally from the drama. The relationship between the men was promising, if a little forced and a bit fragile. But then the jokes just elbowed everything else aside. It was as if they simply didn’t trust the story or the characters to be interesting enough on their own. So we got an embarrassingly predictable selection of prudish English knob jokes and double entendres, as if the script had been inadvertently put in the washer with a whole lot of Carry On films and a handful of farces, and they’d dyed it purple. There is, somewhere in Sirens, a really entertaining and amusing human series, but not if it continues to do 30-year-old, leaning-on-a-mike-stand northern-club riffs at the expense of believability and interest.
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So, you’ve had two episodes now. Which do you prefer, the English or American version of Shameless? Here’s the thing. I admire the home-grown one: it’s tough, uncompromising but respectful, even loving, in the way it looks at the lives of people who rarely see themselves on television out of handcuffs. I admire it, but in truth I rarely watch. Its class-war anger and the Swiftian coolness of its observation are like sitting in a draught. It lacks a heart. It cares without warmth.
The American version isn’t as socially austere, or probably as honest, but it’s a lot more watchable. I don’t feel I’m being beaten over the head with my own conscience. That’s partly because it’s set in Chicago and doesn’t come with our class baggage, but also because it’s made with that ingredient all American drama has to have, has always had. They call it “heart”. I expect in Soho they sneeringly refer to it as “sentimentality”. It’s the bit that makes you care about the characters, allows you to identify with people who aren’t like yourself, to wish them well and get involved. It’s the thing Dickens and Victor Hugo had, and they wrote the original scripts for Shameless. Commissioning editors don’t like mixing laughs with tears, and they can’t abide the sugar lump of sentiment. They are much, much happier with irony and satire, tropes that allow you to feel smug but detached. The American Shameless may become just another drama about the innate godly goodness of families, but I’m more likely to go on watching it.
Hilfiger’s salesgirls flogged their perfume Loud claiming it got stronger the more you sweated
There are some subjects that don’t lend themselves to broadcasting. It was always a mystery how there could be a long-running radio show (Educating Archie) that starred a ventriloquist’s dummy, and I never really saw the point of close-up magic on telly. Just the technology of television is far more magic than anything Paul Daniels could pull out of his sleeve. I’ve always been rather surprised at the appetite for cookery on the box, too. It’s a tease that doesn’t deliver. And you might have thought a series on perfume would be a nonstarter. If we can’t smell it, what’s the point? It’s like Glastonbury with the sound turned down. Yet Perfume was the best programme of last week. The manufacturing of scent makes vast amounts of money.
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Everyone has something in the bathroom that they bought for silly cash just because it smells nice and might make them seem sexy or clever or sophisticated. We cover ourselves with scents we barely understand. The gulf in knowledge and expertise between the noses who create perfume and those who splash it on after shaving or down a cleavage on a Friday night is greater than any other aesthetic gulf in our culture.
The first episode followed very different scents. First, the old-school French parfumerie Guerlain and its tweaking of Shalimar, then Tommy Hilfiger packaging a new patchouli and rose unisex disco smell called Loud. It ended up with old Monsieur Guerlain going on television and saying he worked like a nègre. It was a word that finished his long patrician career and left a bad smell, a nose out of joint with the times. And Hilfiger’s salesgirls flogged Loud claiming it got stronger the more you sweated. Well, nobody ever sweated in Shalimar. This was a really well put-together, smartly written, nicely shot and edited, occasionally witty documentary.
Alan Yentob made a programme for his Imagine strand about Oliver Sacks, the head doctor who specialises in strange conditions, much loved by Channel 4 and the Daily Mail. He admitted that, all his life, he has been unable to identify faces. He couldn’t recognise Elvis or Oprah or, indeed, Alan Yentob. Apparently, 6m Americans have this condition. They don’t know who anyone is. Every television programme is performed by young unknowns for them. You could swap their kids and they’d never notice. Chuck Close, the portrait painter, is also a sufferer. He didn’t recognise Yentob.
This was all very amusing and interesting, but Yentob failed to mention or point out the most astonishing thing of all, which is that all three of them look exactly the same. They could have been separated at birth. Close and Yentob would have come first and second in a Sacks lookalike contest. Maybe everybody who can’t recognise anybody looks the same. It crossed my mind that these three might make a very good comedy drama with heart.