It has been the kind of week that the BBC was invented for. From Glastonbury to Wimbledon, the British public has been treated to the sort of coverage that other countries can only dream of. I don’t care how many White City apparatchiks were clogging up the VIP suite at Worthy Farm: the fact is, I was able to watch most of the mud and musical mayhem from the comfort of my sofa. The children joined in, too, arguing over the relative merits of Mumford & Sons: William, 6: “Very pro.” Beatrice, 8: “They would sing better without the beards.”
Being able to witness Roger Federer’s swansong against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga on Wednesday uninterrupted was worth the entire licence fee alone. This is the BBC at its best. If only all the organisation’s programming was so exemplary. Quite why Newsnight had to dedicate a large segment of Tuesday evening to a minor issue of journalistic incompetence (the Independent’s Johann Hari’s sloppy use of interview quotes) was beyond me. Talk about media navel-gazing.
Happily, there is one corner of the BBC that is uniformly and unfailingly excellent: BBC Four. That the suits at Television Centre are even contemplating axing this superlative channel is a spectacularly idiotic move, even for an organisation that once employed Jonathan Ross. If it really is true that by not renewing its contract to cover Formula One racing the BBC could preserve the entire channel’s output, then bring it on. Someone else can pay through the nose to watch men chasing other men in overpriced penis extensions. I’ll take an evening with the affable historian Michael Scott any day of the week.
His cheery presence greeted me as I tuned in early to watch the first part of Perfume, a new three-part series on the business of luxury fragrance. Very early — in fact a whole day early, as it turned out. No matter: I spent a happy evening wandering through Ancient Greece in a vaguely informative way, escorted by the charming Dr Scott in a fetching scarf.
There was nothing especially original or ground-breaking about the format, and Dr Scott, while a perfectly competent presenter, is no great magnetic figure; but that’s the beauty of BBC Four — unpretentious, unflashy, informative programming. It’s like BBC Two used to be before it started wearing Converse trainers and dropping its aitches in a desperate attempt to be down with the kids. It’s understated, well informed, gently educational and intellectually challenging.
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The following night I tuned in rather late to Perfume and missed the first ten minutes. No matter. It was absolutely fascinating, even to someone like me who knows a fair bit about the way the industry works. In particular, the access the programme-makers had gained to the notoriously cagey House of Guerlain gave a riveting behind-the-scenes glimpse of the surreal world of haute perfumery.
The tension between the old guard — exemplified by the reactionary Jean-Paul Guerlain himself, who left the company after making racist remarks on French television — and the new (his apprentice, the celebrated “nose” Thierry Wasser) was played out in a series of ever-more clipped polite insults. This elegant, aristocratic dance contrasted sharply with the steely-eyed commercialism of the team over at Estée Lauder, engaged in creating a mass-market fragrance for the fashion house Tommy Hilfiger.
The two contrasting approaches neatly expressed the polarities of the fragrance market as it stands. On the one hand a world where tradition, reputation and the actual liquid in the bottle is all; on the other a market in which the primary concern is the image projected. The understated opulence of Monsieur Guerlain’s French farmhouse jarred suitably with the grey corporate cubicles of Estée Lauder’s offices in New York.
I stayed with BBC Four for the rest of the evening, through the first part of Glamour’s Golden Age (a fascinating romp through the interwar design movement of Art Deco) and Stefan Gates’s Feasts, in which Gates visited Japan to take part in the Naked Man Festival and found himself carrying a float topped by a giant phallus. My aim was to get to the repeat of Perfume so that I could catch the beginning. I retired shortly after midnight, my brain sated.
Stimulation of a different sort was the order of the day in the first episode of Channel 4’s new series Sirens. Not the classical mermaids of yore, but three young paramedics and their female sidekick police officer. Stuart (Rhys Thomas, a dead ringer for Ewan McGregor if ever I saw one), Rachid (Kayvan Novak), Ashley (Richard Madden) and Maxine (the luminous Amy Beth Hayes, who needs to be cast in the BBC’s next period bodice-ripper immediately) are all characters loosely reminiscent of those in Being Human: young, faintly skint, confused, feeling their way in the world.
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Unlike Being Human, the characters in Sirens don’t have the benefit of supernatural metaphors. Instead, it’s the peculiarity and stress of their jobs that provide an ample supply of darkly comedic tension: the first episode opens with Stuart giving open-heart massage to a car-crash victim. The macabre circumstances of their employment is a useful dramatic tool: it allows the gruesome to become the mundane, a device that has long been the mainstay of this kind of show. I found it hugely enjoyable — the acting was good, the dialogue sharp, the delivery pacy. There were some wry touches, especially in the use of music. It is what it is: a youthful, edgy comedy drama. It is puerile in parts, and there is an inordinate amount of sex, especially in the first episode, which dealt with the euphoria after (almost) saving a life. But it’s not trashy like some of these things can be (Hollyoaks, Skins), and Thomas in particular plays it like he means it. One to watch.
Caitlin Moran is away