One of the things that struck me as being different was the amount of time allotted to single shots and straight-to-camera dialogue. I think there’s a sort of universal directive today — after 20 seconds to camera, they start torturing the director’s children unless he cuts to something else, ideally moving and set to pop music. Cooke regularly talked to camera for a couple of minutes, but then that’s what he’s good at. And there were tracking shots on real rails. Today, cameras are so light and versatile, they swap a formal rhythm for intuition and immediacy. The size and technical limitations of equipment back in the 1970s meant that the look and pace of programmes had to be decided before the shot was made, by the lighting cameraman and director, not, as today, by an editor and a computer, and after every angle has been covered.
But the main reason Alistair Cooke’s America hasn’t dated is that the subject is as germane as it ever was; indeed, there’s an uncanny resonance with 1972. That was the time Nixon decided to wrap up the Vietnam war. Most of Europe was dramatically and implicitly anti-American. If the government and Conrad Black think the BBC is anti-American now, they obviously weren’t watching television in the early 1970s. But here we are again, another war, another bout of Yankophobia.
Cooke is the embodiment of the special relationship, and he made this series in part to show the endearing and more enduring side of the New World; to explain that countries and people are greater than the sum of their politics. The story of America is the great Iliad of the modern era, and it has never been told more winningly than by Cooke, or made more convincingly and elegiacally than by Michael Gill, who was, and is, my dad.
By complete coincidence, I was channel-surfing last week and caught my mother on an old black-and-white Heinz beans ad. Anyway, the other good news of last week was that Top Gear has finally finished, the programme that has driven Lady Tristrams with a full complement of body hair and a rucksack full of politics completely deranged. A couple of years ago, they thought they’d managed to shunt the whole sad, smelly, laddy, ecofascist car thing onto the dirt road of satellite, along with darts and Miss Wet T-Shirts in Miami. But no, Jeremy Clarkson, the small-screen Schwarzenegger, has brought it back, and what really incenses is that the new format is even more childishly willy-waggling and environment- and girlie-baiting than before, and it’s gone to the top of the ratings.
I sympathise with the Tristramettes. It’s made Clarkson insufferable.
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Having managed to avoid most of this series, I watched The Best of Top Gear (Sunday, BBC2) and, gallingly, it made me laugh out loud. Have you any idea how depressing that is? God knows what it must have been like for the women with moustaches and principles. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Sex and the City (Friday, C4) is back too — only just, though. The format is on double doses of Viagra to keep it up till the end. I imagine the make-up and wardrobe operatives who lurk just off screen must have quadrupled since these four friends sat down for their first lo-cal breakfast. They’re beginning to look like Joan Rivers’s bridesmaids. So many of the American shows that have been a staple of grown-up thirtysomething television, and have done so much to smother the indigenous British species, are now coming to the end — Friends, Frasier, The Sopranos, ER. They’re all in what must be seen as their benefit seasons, programmes whose bloated pay cheques are going to pay for the rest of the cast’s unemployable lives.
I’d never been much of a fan of Sex and the City. I always found it pretty unfanciable, but now I just feel sorry for it. It’s lost any internal dynamic and has become a caricature of itself. The girls go through their particularly defined motions without thought and with all the verve and commitment of street mimes. Nobody says a line that doesn’t sound as if they have said it a dozen times before. The costume changes now make Sarah Jessica Parker look like a pantomime dame, a sort of smartarse Christopher Biggins. When the “It” goes out of a situation, boy does it go, and how weird is it that they all have sex with only their bras on? Is this because American men have lost interest in bosoms, or are all allergic to plastic? I think we should be told; then again, perhaps not.
“Better than sex” is the most exhausted cliché — just how many things are supposed to be better than sex? When someone says “I think it’s better than sex”, they’re really telling us more about themselves than the thing. So, for instance, a Vladivostok docks prostitute might say Countdown was better than sex; and if John Redwood’s new mistress said that such and such was better than sex, then we’d know she was starting from a very low threshold. And when a programme begins with a bearded, middle-aged American who shrieks that driving a Ferrari is better than sex, it tells us very little about the Ferrari, only that the American probably watches Top Gear and comes from the Clarkson school of driving, sex and hyperbole.
The programme was called The Highest Bidder (Thursday, BBC2). It had a tortuous brief: to examine why people spend absurd amounts of money on inanimate things. Last week’s programme was on the most expensive motor car, the better-than-sex $6m Ferrari. This could have been an eye-rolling and judgmental show: you know how television always likes to pretend it lives on the minimum wage, and that spending more than a fiver is Eltonmania. Actually, it was rather well made and almost convincing, until you realised that the man who spent six mill on a second-hand Italian car drove it in America, where the speed limit is 55mph. If he thought that was better than sex, then it must have been pretty geriatric sex.
I really ought to tell you about The Real Richard Desmond (Thursday, C4), but you know the Desmond of your imagination — Desmond the publisher of Asian Babes, 40 Plus (I’ve never dared ask if that’s chest, age or cigarettes), Readers’ Wives & Mothers, Wet & Wonky, Stretchmark Sheilas, Up for It on Crutches, Bald as a Coot, Hairy & Scary and the Daily Express — is so much more exciting, so I won’t.