Culture

My third most fervent New Year wish — just after Litecoin goes to £20,000 and Jacob Rees-Mogg becomes PM — is for the BBC to retire to its study with its service pistol and a bottle of whisky and finally do the decent thing. After all, as lots of people are beginning to notice, when you spend 40 per cent of your viewing time watching your £79-a-year Amazon Prime, and another 40 per cent on £96-a-year Netflix, your compulsory £145.50 licence fee starts to look like a lot of money to pay for the remaining 20 per cent’s worth of diversity outreach, anti-Brexit whining and green propaganda. That’s why I was so very disappointed by the BBC’s first big New Year offering. McMafia (Tuesdays) is so brilliant that it almost disproves my point.

We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 3: John Hemming on why Percy Fawcett wasn't the great explorer of Hollywood myth: The new film The Lost City of Z is being advertised as based on the true story of one of Britain’s greatest explorers. It is about Lt-Col Percy Fawcett. Greatest explorer? Fawcett? He was a surveyor who never discovered anything, a nutter, a racist, and so incompetent that the only expedition he organised was a five-week disaster. Calling him one of our greatest explorers is like calling Eddie the Eagle one of our greatest sportsmen. It is an insult to the huge roster of true explorers. Had the advertisement been about a soap powder, it would fall foul of the Trade Descriptions Act.

A friend bought a new small terraced house of late Victorian origin in a northern city. She liked it; it had no bad vibes (and houses sometimes do) but she had to do work: knocking down a couple of walls, damp-proofing, rewiring and so on. She was tight on budget so decided to do as much of the work as possible herself. Nothing untoward was seen, heard or sensed… But she had a dog, a Jack Russell terrier. He spent weekdays with her brother and sister-in-law, who lived nearby, and Friday night to Monday morning with her. On the first weekend that she started work, she took Barney along. But Barney would not go near the house. He hesitated at the gate, had to be dragged up the front path, and refused absolutely to go inside.

If cinema is propaganda, Elizabeth II can be grateful to it. Film is a conservative art form, and almost nothing has attempted to thwart or mock her. (The Daily Star once printed that Princess Margaret would appear in Crossroads, but Crossroads was not cinema, and it was not true. Instead the award for tabloid lie of the year was named the Princess Margaret Award.) I could not find an art film with the Queen weeping under a table in her nightgown, although she did appear in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), and was mounted by Leslie Nielsen. She also appeared in the disaster film 2012 (2009), attempting to flee a tsunami in an ark built by China, with the dogs. This is less preposterous than the Leslie Nielsen scene. She would not go to China to die. But that is it.

There are times when our national passion for cutting people down to size is a little tiring. I left Brett Morgen’s new documentary about Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee expert, in a rare flush of excited enthusiasm. ‘You’ve got to see it!’ I said to everyone. Most replied along these lines: ‘Goodall, didn’t she turn out to be a fraud?’ Or: ‘Wasn’t it all Leakey’s work she took credit for?’ ‘Yeah, what’s with that?’ says Brett Morgen hunched over his toast in a very hipster Soho hotel. ‘In the Times of London today, in the review, it says Jane can’t hold a candle to David Attenborough. I’m like, he’s a fucking TV presenter!