Awww. Nostalgic tug. Jackanory is back on BBC One. Be just like the old days, yes? Funny actor, with fruity range, will deliver story while sitting in a chair to an audience of children who will be totally freaked out by a programme not full of whizz-bang CGI. But they’ll get used to it: the magic of storytelling will win through. Good old Jackanory.
Except, what’s this? John Sessions does appear to be reading from a book. But only as an aid to a CGI-tastic drama. What on earth have they done to Jackanory?
For one, the story is cobblers of the highest order. Muddle-Earth is a rip-off not only of The Lord of the Rings, but also The Wizard of Oz and Shrek, from which it has shamelessly plagiarised a lumbering, green, friendly monster. You felt embarrassed for Jackanory: why not relaunch with a wholly original tale rather than a plundering of old favourites?
The story is lame and thin: a young boy, Joe, with an impeccably middle class accent, and his dog end up going to Muddle-Earth and once there, well, don’t do that much. The point of The Lord of the Rings or The Wizard of Oz is that they are quests: the hero goes in search of not just an object, but something inside themselves too — inner strength perhaps. Joe just seems happy and assertive, and a little tetchy only about getting home to do his homework.
Sessions gurned and joked, and threw himself about a bit, but new Jackanory is more in thrall to techno-trickery than the rudiments of storytelling. The wonderful thing about being read a story is that you create the images according to the words being spoken; in the new Jackanory, the words struggle to keep pace with the frenetic action. Why bother calling it Jackanory when this is a drama with some reading bits tacked on? The BBC is keen to capitalise on a much-loved brand, but for some bizarre reason has stripped it bare of what made it so special.
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What distinguished Adam Wishart’s Monkeys, Rats and Me: Animal Testing (BBC Two) was the film-maker’s ambivalence, a refreshing grey area for a subject that normally polarises opinion. Wishart went to Oxford where the building of a new animal testing lab at the University had bought the antis, led by the frighteningly focused Mel Broughton, out in force. Broughton’s mob — there is no other word for them — chanted abuse at the builders working on the site (“Psychos”, “Animal murderers” “Go and get a job in McDonald’s”).
A scientist, Professor Tipu Aziz, who uses animals in research, bravely broke his cover to put the scientists’ case. Wishart’s scoop was to get inside the labs Oxford already has. He didn’t much like what he saw (a monkey imprisoned in a cage being trained to touch buttons on a screen). He also filmed a rat being experimented on and the softly spoken female scientist was just a little too smiley about sending the creature to sleep.
Wishart brilliantly caught the essence of his “characters”: Broughton’s unyielding activism, Professor Aziz’s innate eccentricity, and the spooky steeliness of Laurie Pycroft, a teenager incensed by the antis, who having started a pro-testing website, went on to lead a march, the first of its kind in more than 100 years, through the streets of Oxford in favour of the new lab. In a wonderful moment, Wishart captured Pycroft being primed by one of his spotty teenage cohorts turned spin doctor.
There was lots of sharp detail: when interviewing Sean, a boy with the movement disorder dystonia, Wishart asked whether Sean approved of testing on animals. Sean said no. Even if it might benefit you, Wishart persisted. No, said Sean, they should test on humans. But from evidence gained on testing rats, Dr Aziz started treating Sean. The improvement in the boy was “the clincher” for Wishart: he came down, very firmly, on the side of animal testing — as perhaps did many viewers, by now thoroughly turned off by the antis’ incessant, nasty braying.
Random Quest (BBC Four) was beautiful to look at, but so sloooow. Sam West played a bloke who thought he had slipped into another dimension. In fact he was in a coma. Or was he? The film hinted at the presence of parallel universes and West well conveyed the feeling of being utterly disorientated, and eventually seduced, by a life that wasn’t his own.
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The film, adapted from a John Wyndham short story, was set in a more technologically advanced world, signalled by sleek architecture and News 24 bulletins reporting on an evermore fractious society. West also had a very understanding, all-round-good-bloke best friend who worked, naturally, for The Times.