The Human Power Station
BBC One
Oh no, they’re going to use the KETTLE! The hysteria in The Human Power Station made it the loopiest TV programme of the week, if not the year. It made Hole in the Wall look like Horizon.
The idea was to take 80 cyclists and make them pedal for their lives to power a family home that had been constructed especially and inhabited by the supposedly typical Collins family — with the instruction to behave as if it were a typical day at the weekend. The family had no idea that their electricity was a result of pedal power and so the public service justification for the fun and japes was to show just how much power a typical family home used and wasted.
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Nonsense. This was an insane race against time, an endurance test with a big dial that showed when the cyclists were providing lots of power for the home (the needle was in the green zone), when the pedalling was not really meeting the family’s energy demands (the white zone), when the family were using way too much energy for the cyclists to keep pace with (the red zone) and when all was lost (black — which meant blackout).
Sure, of course, the producers littered this with bits of popular science about energy consumption, but showing us how light bulbs could heat a chicken or a stack of burning money (£875 million) to show what leaving the standby button on costs in terms of electricity every year didn’t take away from the cyclists and their mad pursuit. Periodically, the presenters — all exquisitely wide-eyed and over-excited — reaffirmed that the Collins family had no idea of the lunacy being executed in the cause of their energy needs. They also told us which were going to be the villains of the piece, the most greedy and all-consuming household electrical appliances: the shower, the washing machine, the dishwasher. Of course, we were at home literally begging the family to use everything, all at once, for ages. Watch those Lycra-clad dynamos go!
Actually, hear them groan, for that is what we did every time any member of the family went near a switch. The presenters and the apocalyptic music exacerbated the deliciously over-the-top melodramatics. “He’s toasting the bread FOR A SECOND TIME! He is fiddling with the browning knob.” This was said with sheer disgust as if fiddling with a browning knob were indeed, as it sounds, an arrestable offence. Shelley, the mum, heated up some milk in the microwave, the kids played on a Wii Fit. Then dad Andy took a shower. This almost provoked a sonic boom of foreboding from the cyclists, not least because we saw Andy get undressed for the shower and nearly got a full frontal shot (an image we won’t be able to forget, or recycle, for a while).
“This isn’t any old shower, it’s an electric shower,” we were reminded, and so for five minutes it was as if the cyclists were powering uphill against a force 10 gale. They grimaced, they huffed and puffed, then Andy got out and the family went for a walk. Then disaster, they got home and turned everything on. And the cyclists, who had been pedalling since 7am, lost it. The needle plunged into the black. But instead of the expected Armageddon, we got a black screen and a Collins family member noting: “Oh, everything’s gone off.”
One of the bug-eyed presenters collected the family up for the big reveal. When they saw the cyclists they were surprised, but not overwhelmed (that’s exposure to ever-crazier reality TV for you) and everyone politely applauded. There was obviously a serious purpose to this which was entirely lost, but so what? They’ve got to make this into a lights, lasers and music Saturday night entertainment show: Strictly Go Cycling.
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The Queen
Channel 4
In the final episode of the docudrama The Queen Her Majesty was up against Camilla Parker Bowles: as with Diana the night before, the underheated moments of drama intrigued more than the docu-bit. When the Queen met Camilla for the first time she complimented her on her gardening prowess; this after doing everything to pretend that she didn’t exist. Anthony Smee as Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s former private secretary, was wonderful as the courtier desperately trying, and succeeding, in making the Queen face the reality of changing times and the importance of accepting her son’s choice of partner — although the Queen had the last laugh, changing the royal orders so Camilla was not the leading royal female after her. Nifty.
Wonderland: The Trouble with Mother
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BBC Two
Daniel Vernon’s Wonderland film, The Trouble with Mother, was the evening’s pearl: a compressed, moving portrait of a son taking care of his elderly mother; he (Frederick, aka “Ticker”) eccentric and forbearing, she (Pauline) a sharp-tongued dragon with enough self-awareness to know her own shortcomings — all of their dysfunction, love and histrionics played out in a house overflowing with a lifetime of her clutter. “I love him ... as far as I can,” Pauline said. The house looked a little more orderly by the end.