MAKING UP daft titles for new television programmes has long been a favourite pastime of television critics and satirists alike. But you learn very quickly that if these ideas are not illegal, or at least way over the top, someone will make them. After “inventing” something called When Pets Turn Nasty, I was mortified to discover an American import called When Pets Attack, or some such, lurking on an extraterrestrial channel. Though no-one has yet taken up my Celebrity Cook Your Pet! format.
Several wits have come up with variants on the Reality Lavatory Show theme, blissfully unaware that Channel 5’s Celebrity Detox Camp would mine this seam so vigorously, though nobody, to my knowledge, has yet made Armando Ianucci’s suggestion When Royal Porn Barges Collide.
A good ploy is to stick the word “Extreme” on the front of something unlikely, and a few years ago I came up with Extreme Board Games, where people played Monopoly or Cluedo while dangling off cliff-faces etcetera. Since then some joker has started an Extreme Ironing club. An Eddie Izzard stand-up set includes a variant called Speed Archaeology with impatient beardies kicking skulls out of the way. Then last night we got Extreme Archaeology (Channel 4, Sunday), which wasn’t meant to be a joke at all. Except that it was.
I think the idea was to make a cross between Charlie’s Angels and Tomb Raider. Although it was presented with breathy urgency by a bloke called Dr Mark Davies, most of his “EXA” team — I guess, that’s short for “EX-treme A-rchaeology” team, by the way, “EARCH” team doesn’t sound so snappy. Anyway, most of them are fit archaeology-babes, who were constantly flashing their tight T-shirts as they changed in and out of their dry-suits.
The exciting, death-defying project was to saw a bit of wood off a stump that was sticking out of the mud in a tidal stretch of the River Wye. Wow! Extreme wood-in-mud action! I feel a computer game coming on! To be fair they had a perfectly valid archaeological reason for collecting the fragment. It was part of the foundations of an ancient bridge, and they wanted the geeks at the lab to date it to see if it was medieval or Roman.
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And there was a genuine element of danger in that the mud was very deep and cloying, and if you got stuck in it you could drown when the tide came in. On the other hand there were no concealed crossbows or man-eating mudpythons, so as long as you took sensible precautions nobody need suffer more than a muddy suck.
At first they tried walking in. That really sucked, and they had to pull them out. They considered diving from a boat at high tide, but the water was too, well, muddy. In the end a new extreme-activities-babe called Bean Sopwith (I bet she got teased at school) helped to set up a “zip-line” and they tried to lower someone down over the wood with a saw.
It was harder than it looked and took several attempts, including one at night. This put you in mind of Mission: Impossible in the sense that you thought, “This isn’t nearly as exciting as Mission: Impossible.” What it did remind me of was It’s a Knockout with Stuart Hall chortling “Ha-ha-ha! Another archaeologist has fallen in the mud! Ha ha!”
The wood was harder than it looked, too. They had to use a chain-saw to get a chunk. But they carbon-dated it to AD60-70, which meant the bridge was Roman. I suppose that means it might have dated back to the campaign to exterminate the Druids at the time of the Boadicean revolt, but they didn’t mention any of that. Who needs boring old history when you have got extreme-mud-death-peril?
Panorama (BBC One, Sunday) told a much more exciting story about Extreme Counterfeiters. The Superdollar Plot charted a police sting to arrest a ring of criminals importing incredibly sophisticated fake US currency. They even arrested them in the Birmingham pub where I used to have underage pints in my misspent youth.
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It was the broader picture that was startling. The dollars have been printed by the North Korean Government, using state-of-the-art printing technology in an attempt to undermine the US economy. Much of the currency is taken to the North Korean Embassy in Moscow and is then distributed by corrupt former KGB agents and Sean Garland, the “colonel-in-chief” of the old, Official IRA. The reporter Declan Lawn (walk on him at your peril) doorstepped Garland at his luxurious Irish home, but Garland just drove off.
If you made it up people would say it was too far-fetched. Perhaps not as far-fetched as seeing Ricky Gervais as a former IRA bomber, though. Gervais landed this role in the American spy drama Alias (Bravo, Sunday) after the series creator, a huge fan of The Office, invited him to join in.
Bravo followed this episode with Alias Ricky Gervais, a fly-on-the-wall film of his time on set. It was all rather sweet. The producer had made the entire cast watch The Office on DVD. They were in awe of Gervais, and he was in awe of them, reflecting on their professionalism and terrifying work ethic. As for his performance, he was very good as David Brent, terrorist bomb-maker. You can take the man out of The Office, but, like wood stuck in tidal mud, it ‘s not so easy to take The Office out of the man.