We got told good and proper last week. We got told big, complicated things, huge ideas that needed to be manoeuvred like grand pianos up a spiral staircase. Ideas that couldn’t support their own weight, that demanded a heavy-lifting soundtrack.
Let’s begin with Civilization — Is the West History? Niall Ferguson’s view! Of the triumph of Europe! Every sentence came with an exclamation mark. Watching Ferguson is like having a talking-book version of the Daily Mail. He displays the classic British middlebrow cocktail of being boastful and fearful simultaneously. So he told us we were the best, brightest, cleverest people who ever were, but the Chinese and Indians were going to take it all away from us. This first episode was a mess. It jumped around the world from one unexplained holiday location to the next, as if the crew had gap-year round-the-world tickets and didn’t want to waste an opportunity. It had masses of wallpaper shots of pretty and dramatic things, lots of helicopter panning, but it mostly amounted to screen-saving, accompanied by a grandiose soundtrack that was all pomp, bereft of circumstance.
As ever, Ferguson’s main problem is Ferguson. It is his monumental self-regard, his palpable and unconditional vanity. You have to fiddle with the brightness controls on the set to turn him down. His on-screen look is early David Attenborough: blue shirt with chinos and a little soft leather jacket that, up Bond Street, they call the midlife Friday-night-result blouson. But the oddest thing is his voice. The Scots accent has had transatlantic plastic voice surgery, and he now sounds like those promos for films: “In a time without underpants”; “Out of the darkest of ages emerged a man with a plan.” The script mostly sounded like emphatic B-movie teasers, with a lot of puns and dread pauses, but short on argument or explanation; most of it was a stream of pithy, emphatically empty statements. Ferguson seems reluctant to make a coherent argument, or possibly daunted by having to, which is a little odd, because a well-known and excellent book has already done the brainwork for him — Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, available in paperback. Civilization goes out opposite Top Gear, and, what with the expensive locations, the wine-bar jacket and the “appearing at a multiplex near you” voice, it has been noticed by many that Ferguson is aspiring to be the history boys’ Clarkson.
Then there was Wonders of the Universe, in which Professor Brian Cox, the Women’s Institute’s perfect son, gave us the infinite possibilities of string theory, parallel universes and black holes. Cox eschews the one-stop continuity outfit and goes for a whole catalogue of intergalactically trendy gear. Like Carl Sagan with his polo necks, Cox is a bit of a stellar dandy; and, like Ferguson, he can’t resist a gap-year location. This series is a coproduction between the BBC and the National Geographic and Science channels. I’ve asked before why the BBC doesn’t make these immensely successful and watchable big series itself, then sell them on to the cable channels, rather than make them as co-productions and suffer the editorialising and blanding that is an inevitable consequence.
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This programme started slowly. It was unusually shy and hesitant about getting to grips with the science, I suspect because it knew it had to keep the attention of 13-year-old Americans. So, Cox looked good, and handed out Guinness records and factoids and got himself filmed posing on all sorts of exotic locations in silhouette, with a great romantic bleeding sky behind him, looking uncannily like Peter Pan.
It all picked up when you got to the second law of thermodynamics, and entropy, in the Namib desert. This is the law that says life is like a birthday party — it starts with a bang and ends with a chaotic mess and blackout. The long and compellingly told story of how the universe and everything will end in eternal absence of light, time or change is as much philosophy as it is physics; and, rather like Ferguson with Diamond, this too has been done better or more revealingly before, not by a scientist, but by a playwright. It is the leitmotif of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Have you ever thought, as you stir the jam into your rice pudding, that you can never, ever stir it out? That heat travels from the greater to the lesser and never back again? That is time’s arrow, inexorably pointing to the cold, inert darkness. Cox is still the most personable, clear and humane explainer of science, happily devoid of the eccentricity that is usually de rigueur, whether affected or unnoticed.
Talking of which, it was the 700th broadcast of The Sky at Night, which is undoubtedly the barmiest programme of the year, possibly the age. It is certainly the longest-running television programme with the same presenter in the world, or any world, and frankly it has always been two planets short of a solar system. Patrick Moore is now fulfilling the role of a dying sun. He is a man who has achieved vastness as his central core collapses in explosions of gas. His waistband now starts just below his Adam’s apple. The jacket is a Milky Way.
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This universal celebration took place in his dining room, where various luminary and scientific moons from astrological circles dropped by to answer questions. They included an impressionist who did Patrick Moore impersonations at Patrick Moore, and Brian May, who was told by some passing boffin that he was the dead spit of Isaac Newton. May thanked him and said he would use that at dinner parties.
You can’t make up dialogue like that.
I am aware that I am not able to pass on the true, celestial, awe-struck weirdness of this programme, which ended up being about garden sheds. And that, I suspect, is how the world will end. Not with Armageddon, but in a garden shed.
The big one this week was Monroe, the name they give to Scots mountains over 3,000ft, but in this case it was the great Blarney Stone that is James Nesbitt, the naked and panting woman’s Clarkson. Monroe is a naked and shameless attempt to home-grow a House, which is odd, because we already have House, and he’s already English, although he pretends to be American. The twist here is that, instead of being unpleasant, rude and self-obsessed, Monroe is nice, witty, thoughtful and self-denigrating. Well, what else would the Irish George Clooney be?
The rest of it is pretty much pinched from the original. There is the covey of adoring, brilliant, but terrified pupils, and the nemesis of a cold, hard-bitch doctor woman to spar with — but we all know it is only a matter of a couple of sneers before she is wearing her knees as a stethoscope and gagging for it like everyone else. In place of House’s limp, Monroe has a dead daughter; and, instead of the drugs, he has cigarettes, which are now probably considered worse than narcotics. The script was better than average, though it still relied too heavily on genre clichés, and the plot followed predictable courses of least resistance.
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Ballet is like the pony club on tiptoes, a passion for prepubescent girls, with nice enough music I expect Monroe will do well, not least because Nesbitt is ridiculously watchable and his wounded, soft-hearted, flirtatious competence plays both to his strong suit as an actor and to the yearning of a female audience. He is their drug, and they’ll get it intravenously. It’s a producer’s truism of drama that when you make up a heroic character, they can have any number of faults — be liars, cheats, drunks, absent parents, lousy friends — as long as they are good at their jobs.
An audience will forgive or make no end of allowances for a bounder if they work brilliantly. Extreme competence is an odd trait for us to place so much value on. You might have thought that charity or generosity or constancy would be more winning than an impressive CV.
The best programme of the week was Agony & Ecstasy — A Year with English National Ballet, made in the now predictable classy fly-on-the-wall way of spending a year looking at a venerable institution. This started off better than most because ballet is so unexpectedly, horribly cruel. I have never really got the point of it. It’s like the pony club on tiptoes, a passion for prepubescent girls, with nice enough music and idiotic stories. I realise this is my loss, not ballet’s fault, but the desperate devotion and hideous pain involved in getting this thing to the stage give it a horrible majesty, as if the torture and discarding of youthful bodies and the phenomenal dedication to make a couple of hundred quid is the point.
I must say I was riveted by the imbalance between what was poured in and what was squeezed out. I have a suspicion that part of the pleasure in watching it may be a cultivated, epicurean sadism in knowing the agony that is the cost of this dreamily effortless and childish beauty.