Ah, you’ve got to love the San Andreas Fault. “Two tectonic plates have been grinding against each other for FIFTY MILLION YEARS!,” the voiceover for The San Francisco Earthquake (Channel 4, Saturday) boomingly informed us. Seven miles long — “lying across the country LIKE A CURSE!” — and, in the event of plate-shift, capable of issuing the power of ten nuclear bombs in under 30 seconds, the San Andreas Fault was the star of The Earthquake. Not least because this was, to my knowledge, the first documentary that has created an anthropomorphised CGI Fault and then sat inside it, watching it peevishly rumble.
Obviously I’ve never been inside a tectonic fault-line, so I have no idea how accurate their depiction of it really was, but it was intriguing to note that Channel 4’s fault was unexpectedly blowsy and cloudlike in texture. It looked rather as if it had been made using expanding builders’ foam — raising the prospect of an earlier, resolutely practical but ultimately wholly useless attempt to mend the fault, which was mysteriously never referred to again.
The tragedy of The San Francisco Earthquake is that, over the course of its tedious hour, the only thing that we didn’t see falling into the Fault was The San Francisco Earthquake. Part of the modern breed of documentary, in which contemporary accounts, dramatic re-creations and talking heads unite in making almost any event look like less an act of God, more like an act of Channel Five, this was a fundamentally silly programme. Everything was so portentous.
We “met” the turn-of-the-century San Franciscan journalist James Hopper — an actor with a typewriter — who was chosen to embody the spirit of San Francisco. “Hopper loved the high brow and the low brow of his city. He loved the architecture. He loved the culture. He loved the people.”
Well, one could only conclude, he’s going to be really ticked off in a minute. And, sure enough, there followed a gleefully CGI razing of 1906 Frisco, including a shot where a sailor disappeared into a big crack — a fairly common occurrence in the modern-day city, too.
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It felt like another great crack in the ground had opened up on Sunday night with the pilot for a new series, Lewis (ITV1). This is, essentially, Not Morse, and therefore fairly pointless. We might as well call it Re:Morse. The presumption is that Morse is some manner of televisual monarchy, and the title can simply be handed down to Morse’s next of kin — in this case, Lewis — on the old king’s death. This ignores the fact, of course, that Lewis was and is quite one of the dullest characters ever to appear on television — scarcely tolerable as a sidekick to a charismatic maverick, let alone when given a whole show with his name on it. Quite what will happen if this does get commissioned to series I can’t imagine — presumably it will open up the possibility of a Happy Days spin-off called Potsy, a Doctor Who spin-off called Ace and a Blue Peter spin-off called Dead Tortoise.
Saturday brought the Boris-tastic Boris Johnson and the Philosopher’s Stone — er, I mean Boris Johnson and the Dream of Rome (BBC Two) — which brought us Boris in Paris, Boris in Istanbul and Boris in Rome. In every shot, the sun lit up Johnson’s blond pate into a cherubic halo — a sight so disarming that it almost disguised the fact that this was a former editor of The Spectator, looking at immigration and cultural integration into the modern European Union, in parallel with the fall of the Roman Empire. In other words, Nazi Time with Paddington Bear!
Thankfully — despite frazzling all Boris-lovers worried by the great time that he spent musing on the possibility — Johnson eventually concluded that immigration is actually a good thing, what, and that humanity is indeed, as Blue Mink posited in their 1979 hit single, a big, big melting pot. This then left Johnson free to sit in the Roman sunshine a bit more, looking like an albino Christ, and doling out gossipy tidbits on the Roman Empire.
Johnson proved both a superb host and a thorough researcher — he was the first presenter I’ve seen mentioning an African Emperor of Rome, Septimius Severus, who was buried in York, and surely destined to be played by Jamie Foxx in a movie very soon. And it was also of note that Johnson was able to conduct many of his interviews in fluent Italian and German — something that was not just surprising and arousing, and indeed surprisingly arousing, but intriguing, too. Because, from what the viewer could gather from these continental exchanges, there is no “Erm” or “Ah” or “Blimey!” in Boris’s second and third languages. These are conversational ticks he keeps just for the English, the wily old bear.