Imagine
BBC One
Alan Yentob’s Imagine has temporarily given up making art films in favour of films about almost anything else. It is a return to the great man’s early career, when his Arena made films on the Ford Cortina and the Chelsea Hotel. Last week it was Dr Oliver Sacks and visual disorder, last night Egypt and civil disorder. Yentob was in Cairo visiting the Pharaohs’ Museum on Liberation Square. A young activist told him that the museum, home of those treasures not ransacked by the newer empires from the Valley of the Kings, now first conjures up in many minds not antiquity but torture. During the revolution this spring, police beat up protesters inside.
Yet, though Yentob was on the side of the forces of youth and protest, I felt throughout that a reactionary inner Yentob was struggling to get out. The film posed the question of whether Egypt needs pharoahs. It hinted that the answer was “yes”. First there was the snow-job it performed on the old pharaohs. Their pyramids were not, it seems, vanity projects built by slaves, but job-creation schemes for flooded-out farmers who received food, housing and “medical care”. Then there was Yentob’s determination to seek out in the museum statues of a female pharaoh, a new-man pharaoh kissing his daughter, and a pharaoh goddess of “social justice”. But the clincher was the almost grovelling reverence he showed Zahi Hawass, the Egyptian Minister for Antiquities. Hawass showed Yentob round the museum in a proprietorial manner, telling anecdotes the gist of which was “we need strong kings”. In an Imagine first, Yentob addressed his host not chummily by his first name, but with a deferential “Mister”.
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The film ended whimsically after a visit to the brash new museum of antiquities being built, with Yentob mourning the coming loss of the old museum and its quaint rituals such as removing Tutankhamun’s head from its glass box, in order to replace the light bulb, in a crowd in the middle of the day. “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” quoth Yentob, from The Passing of Arthur. What is this? Is Pharoah Yentob, after a reign at the BBC rivalling Queen Hatshepsut’s of Egypt, considering hanging up his beard? Will it, too, end up in a glass case in the British Museum?
Luther
BBC One
Luther also ended whimsically. No it didn’t. It ended up only with a psycho-killer killed in a lorry by a hail of bullets none of which hit its sole other occupant, DCI John Luther. “Aim low,” he instructed his back-up team. The funny thing is that the BBC probably thinks it is aiming high with Luther, with its classy casting of Idris Elba, its high production values and “challenging” plots in which massacres occur for the sake of a match between twins. Frankly, I would prefer to see a dramatisation of the Random Thoughts of a Sussex Rambler, the encoded blog by which the loony tune twins communicated. It might, loosely, you understand, have some connection with reality.