An old joke: a little boy in class is asked by the teacher why he was absent from school the day before. “Sorry, miss,” he explains, “but I had to stay at home because my dad got burnt.” The teacher puts her hand over her mouth and says: “Oh dear, Johnny — how awful. Not badly, I hope?” And Johnny replies: “Well, miss, they don’t mess around at the crematorium.”
I say an old joke, but it is modern enough in its implications. Dads have not been terribly highly regarded for a long time; at best wilful, selfish, strict and more often than not absent without leave. Or drunken and violent, remote from their children, forever down the boozer or ferreting their way up some neighbour’s skirt. You could not imagine that joke having as its punch line the mum being burnt at the crematorium: it wouldn’t be very funny. (Not that it was that funny anyway.) But dads are expendable. One minute they’re here, the next they’re gone — a day off school is about all that is required to get over dad being suddenly removed from the equation.
None of this is true, of course, but it has been somewhere or other at the heart of social and political propaganda for the past half-century or so. You can see echoes of this mind-set in our family courts, in the manner in which custody is decided upon, even in the law that allows women maternity leave of 52 weeks, much of it paid, while dads get two weeks. Dads — I mean, come on, who needs ’em?
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So there was a fine, and rather moving, corrective, loosely tagged to that unwelcome American import Father’s Day, on BBC4 last week, which suggested that fathers have, over the years, been treated less favourably than perhaps should have been the case. They are not all scumbags, after all, it seems. Some children even like them, these hangdog, vilified dads. A Century of Fatherhood kicked off by demolishing the notion that Victorian fathers were borderline psychopaths who could not see a child without striking it, sending it to its room, shoving it up a chimney or ordering it to do something it didn’t want to do, then say its prayers. That stuff was simply a confection of the literary world, we were told — in reality, Victorian dads were, uh, inclusive and loving and full of fun, a sort of heavily bearded version of the Chuckle Brothers.
Then, during the great war, dads were sent off to be gassed or maimed or killed at Ypres and Arras, but still continued to write letters home begging for news of how little Susan or Johnny was getting along at school. They returned psychologically or physically damaged, often unable to work and support their families, finding it difficult to adjust to life without shrapnel and cytotoxic chemical agents, and given no help by the state. The reminiscences of people — now themselves in their nineties — who had lost their dads in the first world war, or had seen them come home bereft and helpless, made for some of the most affecting television I have seen for a long time.
One man, from the Wye Valley, lived rough in a field with his demobbed dad after his mum had died, until he was at last taken away to an orphanage. A year or so later, a master at the orphanage approached him and said “Your father has died, apparently”, then turned on his heels and walked away, leaving the little boy sobbing on the floor. We returned with this man to the very field in which they had camped out, and — 85 years after he had last seen him — located his dad’s grave. A pauper’s grave, of course, the son standing before it unable to stop himself from crying. To be sure, a lot of this documentary was elderly people explaining how much they had loved their dads, how much fun they were to be around. But, as I say, a useful corrective nonetheless. And politically quite daring of the BBC — it’s sort of right-wing to stick up for dads, I suppose, and even if not quite that, then certainly unfashionable.
The same channel redressed the pro-dad balance on Wednesday evening with its John Lennon biopic, Lennon Naked. Whatever else Lennon was, he was a lousy father to Julian, the son he had with his first wife, Cynthia. To this little boy — six years old when his dad skedaddled — he appeared callous, neglectful and dismissive. We were enjoined to believe by the screenplay that this was a consequence of how John thought he had been mistreated by his own father, Freddie, an itinerant seaman he did not see for 17 years. Yet watching this fine, if occasionally overwrought, drama, you felt that the singer was perfectly capable of reaching out and blaming any number of other people for his own manifest failings. Self-obsessed and self-righteous, drug-addled and self-pitying — all of this you might have gleaned simply from listening to that hypocritical, lachrymose dirge Imagine; but Christopher Eccleston brought it out very nicely all the same.
The action centred on the time when Lennon hooked up with Yoko Ono (played by Naoko Mori) and began recording some of the most pretentious caterwauling ever committed to vinyl, but which was classed at the time as “avant-garde”. We saw Lennon posing naked with Ono for the press, doing their famous bed thing, living in squalor, shrieking at Paul McCartney and howling into a microphone, accompanied by his doolally missus. We even saw him attempt to walk on water, apparently still believing himself to be a notch or two above Jesus Christ in the eternal pantheon of historical celebrity.
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The fact that the excellent Eccleston is 20 years older than Lennon was at that time made these adolescent shenanigans seem all the more ludicrous and incongruous. Lennon was obviously a clever and talented man, and the film was as much as anything a terrible warning of the delusions imposed by celebritydom; the way it twists, then confines, the intellect. A biopic of McCartney would have less dramatic potential, I suppose, but he wrote better songs and was palpably the more decent individual.
A new series on BBC3, Mongrels, may also twist and confine your intellect, if you watch it all the way through. It is a half-hour animal puppet show, but not for children, the producers proclaim, because it is way too risky and edgy and rude for children. It’s out there, it’s pushing the envelope, it’s bloody cool. That’s why it’s on BBC3, I suppose. The main characters are an urbane fox called Nelson, who, in the first episode, fell in love with a chicken; a ditzy slapper of an afghan hound; a cat with an accent nicked from that ubiquitous bloody meerkat; and a pigeon that talks urban black English.
By edgy and risqué, it seems they mean jokes about urine, poo and death, which I suppose would be okay if they were funny jokes about urine, poo and death. But they’re not. They’re terribly laboured jokes, conceived by a halfwit who is trying way, way too hard to be clever and naughty. Someone who thinks it’s incredibly now, sort of very Frankie Boyle, to make a joke about Richard Whiteley dying and pussycats feeding on the corpses of their dead owners, as if these things were simply intrinsically funny, without the writer having anything to say about them.
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Worse than this, though, none of the characters is particularly likeable, not even the fox — and I adore foxes. You would imagine it would be hard to make animal puppets unlikeable, wouldn’t you? Well, BBC3 has pulled it off. I would guess this programme has cost quite a few quid to make, and the producers are proud of it. They are on record as saying they think it might emulate The Simpsons. I don’t remember urine, poo and death figuring too heavily in The Simpsons. The Simpsons relied on something else for comedic effect — a script. Hell, who knows, maybe it will get better.
That sometimes happens: take The IT Crowd, which is back for its fourth series on Channel 4. It was ropey as hell when it started off. In the first instalment of the new series, Jen (Katherine Parkinson) is made the company entertainments manager — an engagingly unlikely scenario, as she is repeatedly informed by her colleagues. It’s an odd sitcom: you wait through the longueurs for the one or two lines of genius, and you’re usually rewarded. “Women — can’t live with them... can’t find them, sometimes,” says the nerdy Moss (Richard Ayoade), forlornly. And the boss, Douglas Reynholm (Matt Berry), snapping at Jen after an unsuccessful night out entertaining businessmen at a showing of The Vagina Monologues: “The next time you take us to something about talking fannies, it had better be about talking fannies.”
AA Gill is away