Framed
BBC One
The BBC, currently under largely undeserved criticism for ignoring the arts, used the Bank Holiday to get in touch with its inner outreach worker. I, on the other hand, used it to get in touch with my inner plagiarist. In the one-off comedy-drama Framed, based on the bestselling book by Frank Cottrell Boyce, “I understand you’ve got in touch with your inner outreach worker,” was a line flung at Trevor Eve’s desiccated National Gallery curator after he had gone native in Snowdonia. It was the best joke in the drama and, as such, he should have suppressed it lest it be used against him, by people such as me. Cynicism can do terrible damage to a wholesome moral.
The conclusion of Framed was that art was good for ordinary Welsh people and bad for curators if it stopped them listening to their hearts. (Had it been instead that the village of Manod needed jobs rather than The Arnolfini Marriage hanging in its caff and that an art expert’s job was scholarship not populism, the BBC Charter would, presumably, be revoked quicker than you could say James Murdoch.) For all that, Framed was a cleverly worked out piece of middlebrow infotainment. I had not realised that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were still so big in Wales, but the confusion between the amphibians and their namesake Old Masters proved a neat plot point about the degree to which traditional and pop culture are on non-speaking terms.
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The story was inspired by the relocation of the National Gallery’s collection to a Welsh slate mine during the Second World War. Here, the paintings made the trip again after the gallery sprang a leak. The locals soon work this out, much to the dismay of the curator Quentin Lester, a misanthropist whose only jollies, judging by the sloppy grin he gives the Rokeby Venus, are obtained from fine art. Quentin needs to be healed, not by Art but by Woman. The attractive schoolteacher Angharad, played by Eve Myles (the age gap between Trevor Eve and her is the traditional 27 years), duly, yet inexplicably, throws herself at him, something he grasps only after she pokes him in the chest and tells him: “You wouldn’t recognise a thing of beauty if it was standing in front of you poking you in the chest.”
Deftly wooing him by telling him what a rubbish critic he is, Angharad ends up his lover. In a final tableau, they stand together before van Eyck’s portrait of the Arnolfinis, her stomach distended in sympathy with Mrs A’s (although, as Quentin would know, the Flemish wife is not actually with child). The community is healed by the transformative power of art: the garage owner returns to his family; the wannabe art student gets a bursary, inspired by Monet; the butcher reopens the boating lake closed after his son drowned. Sweet. It should have been on an hour earlier than 8.30pm, though.
Wuthering Heights
ITV1
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Against this good nature raged Peter Bowker’s hate-filled Wuthering Heights. One of Emily Bront?’s triumphs - and a source of wonderment to biographers of her quiet life - was the normalisation of evil. The second part of this adaptation reflected this by becoming a cruel, domestic psychodrama on which Henry James and Strindberg had nothing. Heathcliff competed in a private contest to say the meanest thing. A contender was his dismissal of Edgar as “this slavering thing you would prefer to me”, but the put-down was beaten by his dismissal of Edgar’s sister Isabella, whom he says he has spent four months trying to love but can’t. Bowker’s sure hand faltered, however, when the narrative leapt to the next generation. The transition was abrupt and the final half hour abbreviated almost to incomprehensibility. I wouldn’t have had Heathcliff shoot himself either. Bront?’s end for him, chilled to death by the elements that raged through a window left open for Cathy’s ghost, was better.
Hardcore Profits
BBC Two
In Hardcore Profits the reporter Tim Samuels hailed the growth of the pornography industry as a rare success story in hard economic times and welcomed the ease with which it could now be accessed guilt-free, and congratulated the industry for increasing masturbatory choice in the developing world. Oddly, actually, he didn’t. He tut-tutted instead at the profits being made through porn by hotel chains, mobile phone providers, Sky and Virgin.
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Few non-users wish to defend porn, but the best Samuels could do to build an objective case against was three Hollywood actresses who had contracted HIV, a handful of overseas anecdotes such as teenagers in New Guinea self-harming in attempts to make their penises porn-star long, and a visit to Ghanaian village where a wife claimed that her 30-year marriage was in trouble owing to her husband’s porn habit. The main accusation he levelled, however, was hypocrisy. In pressing it against big business, he was hindered by his own admission that he was a user, and, also, by his unhealthy, unshaven, panda-eyed countenance - the innocent result of jet lag, I am sure.
andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk