Architects, politicians and prostitutes are not the only ones who become respectable with age. The gauze of time offers an invitation to the club of the Establishment to almost everyone in the end, even those who would rather keep their youthful disrespect: pop stars, eco-activists, bad-boy actors, disc jockeys. Finally, even Roy Strong has become respectable, if not actually respected.
The fairy of nominative determinism was having a little joke when she called Roy Strong Roy Strong. Nobody has ever been less roy or less strong. He arrived in the nation’s peripheral vision in the 1970s, looking like a moodboard for Mr Bean and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man: the first geek, the Ur-nerd, before we ever knew we’d need so many of them. At a young age, he was given the moribund, dusty corridors of the National Portrait Gallery to run, and set about turning it into a huge self-portrait.
He was the man who reinvented the curator. Instead of being an academic with a hook and a hammer, he became an arbiter of aesthetic taste and fashion, an ornament-arranging Peter Mandelson. Which was all fun and games: he was plainly a man on the self-make. And the chief joy was watching a bloke with such delicate sensibility about everything and everyone being so blissfully unaware of what a prat he looked. (I speak as one who knows.)
Here he is again in When Lucy Met Roy, now looking like Jeremy Corbyn’s maiden aunt with James May’s dress sense. He was being interviewed by Lucy Worsley — appropriately, as she has also been on something of a stylistic pentathlon while Tristrams gamely insist she must have a place on the nation’s mantelpiece, but haven’t quite found out where or what it is. Her many makeovers have finally arrived at 1950s TV presenter. I hope I can claim a little credit for this, by helpfully mentioning her costumes from time to time. Strong did what 80-year-olds who have settled into respectability do: point out that it was all better when they were young, and is so much more coarse and tasteless today. I’m not sure why anyone thought interviewing a retired curator who now does a bit of gardening was going to be interesting, but I suspect the point was to see whether Worsley might make a halfway decent interviewer.
The surprise is, she might. She’s on the way to being not bad, though she was too soft and chummy with Strong. Nothing excludes an audience more than the sense that the people on screen are colluding mates. But chat shows may be the place for her bluestocking flirtatiousness.
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Strong was last in the news when the National Trust declined the offer of his allotment. He might do better if he offered the V&A his wardrobe. Either them or Oxfam.
Pablo Escobar is credited with introducing cheap and plentiful cocaine to America. A Colombian smuggler, he controlled the most lucrative routes into Panama and Miami, and is said to have been the richest criminal in history (who wasn’t a head of state), worth an estimated $30bn. In the 1990s, his organisation was making £60m a day, spending thousands on rubber bands to keep the cash tidy; his accountant said they allowed for 10% wastage, for bills eaten by rats. He is a natural for a biopic, and there have been quite a lot.
Now Netflix has made Narcos, a 10-part series that is at heart an old-fashioned Jimmy Cagney/George Raft gangster movie, with National Geographic explanations. Drugs are a retro plot point now (bar Breaking Bad), mostly replaced by cybercrime and terrorism. The problem is, how do you make this watchable and interesting, in a contemporary way, without turning Escobar into a Scarface-style hero? Netflix has teamed him with an American DEA agent, who is presumably supposed to be the good guy, but in the first episode is restricted to a voiceover with the mildly risible job of explaining the absence of mobile phones, computers or electronic surveillance — for the benefit of the young, who can’t imagine such a thing.
In truth, neither lead is particularly sympathetic or attractive, and they don’t have much character one way or the other. The drugs business, in the end, is just a business, and there’s an awful lot of having to listen to people talk about export opportunities, logistic chains and staff problems. Escobar is in danger of becoming David Brent. The production values are high — it’s well made, with a lot of suitable TV cop-show shootouts. But considering the possibilities and the consequences, it’s all rather underpowered, not terribly exciting, sometimes boring. The script could do with a little something, a pick-me-up, a toot, a visit to the bathroom.
Two celebrity-on-holiday travel series this week, a genre so formulaically overworked, it is the visual version of health-spa Muzak. World’s Busiest Railway was a look at Mumbai’s main train station, so busy that it needed three presenters and an awkwardly tacked-on John Sergeant to cover it. In the spirit of railway journeys, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It was horrible to watch and worse to listen to, taking Countryfile as its template in a desperate pile-up of truisms: “Right at the heart of the railway system is this terminus.” Really? You mean there’s a station as well as rails?
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It had Dan Snow, Robert Llewellyn and Anita Rani breaking repeatedly, and competitively, the first rule of television commentary: don’t tell the audience what they can already see. “There are masses and masses of people! We’re surrounded by crowds! It’s all very crowded!” Someone even said railway trains couldn’t just go where they wanted, they had to follow the rails.
Worse was the unconscious entitled patronage that implied this rush hour was somehow more picaresque and amusing, and just plain exotically wonderful, because it was being done by Indians in India, and not at King’s Cross. Applying the Badgerwatch principle to humans is every sort of embarrassing — wrong. This has been stuck on during the emptiest weeks in August, in the hope that nobody would watch. Well, I was watching. And Dan Snow will have to trudge through an awful lot of battlefields to make up for this.
Then there was Stephen Fry’s Central America, following on from his not altogether successful jaunt in North America by taxi. This time, he was travelling through Mexico in a converted school bus — amusing modes of transport are an essential prop of the celebrity holiday, as is a jaunty travelling bag. I’ve no idea why they all carry bags. They go with film crews and fixers and assistants and runners and guides and translators: why do they pretend they are carrying their own bags?
Anyway, Fry now travels with the demeanour of a Victorian lady missionary. He is an ambulant breast, engorged with the milk of human kindness. I didn’t know it was possible for a person to lactate so much empathy. He anoints everyone with a beneficent creaminess, and not just mariachi bands, but salamanders, butterflies, rocks, views and, of course, us at home: we are drenched in the great warm slurps of mumsy sympathy.
Actually, I rather admire and love his feeling everyone’s joy and pain, all at once. Still, I am concerned that he might start developing humanist stigmata, or Munchausen’s mastitis.
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When Lucy Met Roy BBC4, Sun
Narcos Netflix, Fri
World’s Busiest Railway BBC2, Mon
Stephen Fry’s Central America ITV, Thu