Culture

My favourite moment in The Scandalous Lady W (BBC2, Monday) was when the heroine played by Natalie Dormer was shown being taken vigorously from behind by one of her 27 lovers. It wasn’t the sex that did it for me but the appalled expression on the face of Girl, who, with perfect timing, had just poked her head round the TV room door to see what the grown-ups were watching. She let out a little yelp of horror — and ran. Which was rather how I felt during a lot of the sex scenes. ‘Do you think they put in this stuff for us? Or the women?’ I said to the Rat (over on a flying visit from Hong Kong, where he’s doing very nicely as an interior designer, thanks for asking). ‘Oh, the women, definitely. We’re much more Games of Thrones. Straight in there.

When the link between tobacco and lung cancer was first established in the early 1950s, one obvious question arose: should doctors tell people not to smoke? These days, of course, the answer seems equally obvious — but at the time, medical opinion was divided. According to the highly distinguished Dr Erich Geiringer in a letter to the Lancet, ‘the best advice a doctor can give ...to many non-smokers’ was that ‘they should get a pipe and dissolve their ...body-destroying frustrations into blue smoke’.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being eaten by a Jaws-like great white shark; being vaporised by a nuclear bomb. I expect it was the same for most kids of my generation. The first two, obviously, were a function of the Birmingham bombings (et al.) and the Peter Benchley/Steven Spielberg axis of shark terror. And the third was the product of the relentless propagandising of CND as rehearsed faithfully on pretty much every BBC programme going from John Craven’s Newsround to The Archers, Animal Magic and Roobarb and Custard.

On all those comic lists of the world’s shortest books (Great Italian War Heroes, My Hunt for the Real Killers, by O.J. Simpson etc.), the best title I ever came across was Bloomsbury: the Untold Story. Now, though, BBC2’s new drama, Life in Squares, is giving us yet another chance to marvel at how many sexual permutations one small group of people can achieve. But before all that began, Monday’s first episode was at some pains to show us the forces of Victorian stuffiness against which the Bloomsbury group rebelled. In the first scene, a suitor tried to woo Vanessa Stephen with the chat-up line, ‘Only two more days, Miss Stephen, to the opening of the trout-fishing season.

Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles and TV programmes over the years which have ‘revealed’ that the Victorians weren’t, after all, mad sexual repressives who had a fit of the vapours at the sight of an uncovered table-leg; or that the 1950s were a lot more fun than the drab conformist decade of popular imagination. Or that Rudyard Kipling was by no means a straightforward imperialist. (Feel free to add examples of your own.) And yet, no matter how many times these things are pointed out, it’s always with a proud flourish — as if what’s being said stands in fearless contradiction to everything we’ve previously heard.

For keen students of China, this week’s television provided yet more proof that Deng Xiaoping’s decision to open the country to the West has had consequences that he’s unlikely to have foreseen. He probably couldn’t have predicted, for example, that one day a former Bond girl would travel the country finding almost everything ‘thrilling’. Or that a bloke who made his name in a British makeover show would proudly explain to a group of Chinese journalists that ‘I’ve got the sunglasses, I’ve got the big hair — all [sic] of these things are what you’d expect from a celebrity.

So you’ve just popped out of town for the day on an errand. And when you get back, everyone has gone. Your wife, your kids, your nephews and nieces, your friends, your customers: they’ve all been kidnapped and dragged off to a place so barbarically horrible that really they’d be better off dead. Your daughter, for example. If she’s nine or over then she’s considered fair game. She’ll be sold as a slave in the market to the highest bidder — as ever, there’s a premium for blonde hair or blue eyes— after which her new owner can use her as she wishes. The very least she can expect is to have to spend her every day in the most restrictive clothing anywhere in the Muslim world.

‘Cringe!’ said Boy, after I’d exposed him to a few seconds of last week’s special nostalgia edition of TFI Friday. And he did have a point. From its once almost-daring name to its zany title graphics to its whatever-happened-to guest list (Shaun Ryder, Blur, Ewan McGregor), Chris Evans’s irredeemably Nineties game show now looks so dated and impossibly remote you might as well be looking at an early episode of Face to Face with John Freeman, or The Black and White Minstrel Show or Muffin the Mule. Gosh, time is cruel. But it was great at the time, right? No, it wasn’t, actually. I watched this one-off revival mainly to remind myself why I almost never watched it when it was on originally. Very quickly I remembered. Because it was shit.

I adore Andrew Roberts. We go back a long way. Once, on a boating expedition gone wrong in the south of France, we had a bonding moment almost Brokeback Mountain-esque in its bromantic intensity. Roberts had hired an expensive speedboat for the day (as Andrew Roberts would) and we’d left very little time to get it back to harbour and avoid being stung for a massive surcharge. Problem was, the seas had got very rough and our anchor was stuck fast. We manoeuvred the boat this way and that to no avail. There was nothing for it. Someone would have to dive down to free it. It wasn’t easy. The water was cold and dark, visibility near-zero, and the anchor was way below comfortable free-diving distance. Various, increasingly desperate efforts were made by our party.

Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are You Being Served? had starred Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Janet Suzman, and you might get some idea of what ITV’s Vicious is like. Alternatively, I suppose, you could just watch the thing and realise that no, you’re not drunk — you really are seeing Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Frances de la Tour acting their socks off in a sitcom that would have been considered rather creaky in 1975. Jacobi and McKellen play Stuart and Freddie: a pair of gay actors who’ve been living together for decades despite the fact that their main mode of communication is to trade personal insults while the studio audience laughs dutifully.

It has been a while since the BBC really pushed the boat out on the epic history documentary front. Perhaps to make amends it is treating us to possibly the most historian-studded, blue-screen-special-effects-enhanced, rare-documentastic, no-hyperbole-knowingly-under-employed series ever shown on television. Armada: 12 Days to Save England (Sundays, BBC2). Having clearly spent a lot of money here, the BBC is taking no chances with its demographic spread. For the laydeez, in the Ross Poldark role it has Dan Snow, captured somewhat gratuitously piloting his handsome yacht into the choppy waters of the English Channel. (Just like in 1588! Sort of.

BBC One’s 2015 choice of Sunday-night drama series is beginning to resemble the career of the kind of Hollywood actor who alternates between reliable crowd-pleasers and more eccentric personal projects. The year started with the return of the much-loved Last Tango in Halifax, followed by the distinctly peculiar A Casual Vacancy. Now, after the mainstream triumph of Poldark, we get Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — which, whatever else you might think about it, definitely can’t be accused of feeling like drama by committee.

My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated to a housing estate in the north-east, but otherwise pretty much unchanged — was the one where the street’s resident stoner and low-level crim Maxwell has to attend a court summons. Really, if the whole thing had been scripted and faked by the film-makers (as I’m sure it wasn’t: no need), it couldn’t have worked out better. With just 15 minutes to go before Maxwell’s court hearing seven miles away, his brother turns up to give him a lift on his motorbike. But there’s one small problem. Maxwell’s brother is still under the influence of the vast quantities of diazepam he’s carrying with him in his bag.

With Clocking Off, Shameless and State of Play among his credits, Paul Abbott is undoubtedly one of the most respected TV writers in Britain. Not even his biggest fans, though, could argue that he’s one of the subtlest. On the whole, whatever his characters are thinking, they’ll also be saying — and generally in a way that proves what no-nonsense salt-of-the-earth types they are. Nor do his dramas ever suffer from a shortage of incident, much of it pitched somewhere between the bracing and the lurid. It’s an approach that Abbott evidently felt no need to change now that he’s writing a cop series. No Offence (Channel 4, Tuesday) began with DC Dinah Kowalska coming back in a taxi from a disappointing evening out with her boyfriend, who was on crutches.

Some years ago I paid a visit to the site of the Gallipoli landings because I was mildly obsessed with the Peter Weir movie and wanted to gauge for myself how horrible it must have been. En route I met up with a young Australian who was training to be an actor (in my false memory it was the unknown Russell Crowe) and together we clambered up the near-cliff-like slopes in the blazing sun, imagining the Turks sniping and rolling grenades at us from the trenches on top. That anyone could have survived at all, we agreed, was a miracle.

Ever since the days of Tony Hancock, many of the best British sitcoms — from Dad’s Army to Fawlty Towers, Rising Damp to The Royle Family — have featured a middle-aged man convinced that he’s the only sane person left in an increasingly mad world. The frankly subversive twist in W1A (BBC2, Thursday) is that the middle-aged man in question might well be right. As the BBC’s Head of Values, Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) is surrounded by any number of jargon-spouting younger colleagues whose apparent aim is not to let anybody realise how stupid they are — or at least it would be if they realised it themselves.

Blimey, there has been so much good stuff to watch on telly of late: the Grand National, the Boat Race and the Masters; The Island with Bear Grylls; the final of University Challenge (bravura performance from Caius’s Loveday, though how the winning Cambridge team’s hearts must have sunk when they realised that the public intellectual chosen to present this year’s prize was that literary equivalent of a Dalí melting clock poster on a pretentious fifth former’s bedroom wall — Will Self); and, of course, the first episode of the new season’s Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic, Monday). I’m assuming you’re all on board with Thrones, now, and that it doesn’t need any introduction.

Who says British television lacks imagination? You might have thought, for example, that every possible combination of comedian and travel programme had been exhausted long ago. After all, it’s now 26 years since Michael Palin set the trend by following in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps (sort of). In more recent times, we’ve had Stephen Fry going round America in a London taxi, Billy Connolly going round Australia on a Harley-Davidson trike and — perhaps drawing the short straw — Ade Edmondson going round Britain in a caravan. There’s also been Paul Merton in India, Sue Perkins in China, Sean Lock and Jon Richardson in the Deep South and... well, you get the idea.

Ever since Boy got back from school my work schedule has fallen to pieces. Every few minutes, just when I’ve got my concentration back after the last interruption, Boy will burst into the office and say, ‘Dad, Dad. How good are you on obscure New Zealanders?’ Or, ‘Quick, Dad, it’s your subject: reptiles!’ Or, ‘Dad, this is ridiculous. Only four people recognised Johnny Marr.’ And so on and on it goes. If I were a stricter parent or a more self-disciplined worker, I wouldn’t let this happen. Problem is, the programme we’re talking about here is Pointless (BBC1, Mondays) and I’m afraid I’m just as addicted as Boy is.

In a late schedule change, Channel 4’s Coalition was shifted from Thursday to Saturday to make room for Jeremy Paxman interviewing the party leaders. With most dramas, that would mean I’d have to issue the sternest of spoiler alerts for anybody reading before the programme goes out. In this case, though, you know the story already — because Coalition was a dramatisation of what happened in Westminster in the days after the last general election. Fortunately, one of the programme’s many qualities was its Day of the Jackal ability to keep us gripped even though we were always aware of the outcome — largely by reminding us that the characters weren’t.

Journalist, novelist, broadcaster and figurehead of British feminism Caitlin Moran, who writes most of the Times and even had her Twitter feed included on a list of A-Level set texts, is now bidding to break into the sitcom business. Can one woman shoulder this ever-increasing multimedia load, along with the fawning tide of adulation that follows her everywhere? Wisely, she enlisted the help of her sister Caroline to create Raised By Wolves (Channel 4, Monday), a wily reimagining of their home-schooled childhood (alongside six siblings) on a Wolverhampton council estate. After a 2013 pilot, it’s back for a six-part series, with the hyperactive, motormouthed Germaine (the fictionalised Caitlin) played by Helen Monks and her caustic, intellectual sister Aretha by Alexa Davies.

By my calculations, the remake of Poldark (BBC1, Sunday) is the first time BBC drama has returned to Cornwall since that famously mumbling Jamaica Inn — which may explain why even the lowliest yokel here tends to project from the diaphragm. Leading both the cast and the diaphragm-projection is Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark, initially seen as a British Redcoat in a wood rather unconvincingly captioned ‘Virginia, America, 1781’. The short scene that followed efficiently established that he had a rackety past and some politically radical ideas, before the American rebels attacked, leaving several extras dead.

My favourite bit of The Great European Disaster (BBC4, Sunday) was the lingering shot that showed golden heads of corn stirring gently in the breeze. It was captioned ‘Europe’. I cannot even begin to describe what a powerful effect this had on my subconscious. It was worthy of Leni Riefenstahl. Indeed, when I experimentally turned off the colour, it was Leni Riefenstahl. ‘Bloody hell!’ I thought to myself. ‘Suddenly it all makes sense.’ But my journey of discovery and enlightenment was only just beginning. I haven’t yet told you what the Ukrainian peasant said.

Sky1’s new hospital drama Critical (Tuesday) can’t be accused of making a timid start. Within seconds, an urgent request had come over the loudspeaker system for ‘the trauma corps’ to head to the emergency department, causing the main members of the cast to sprint down various corridors at impressive speed. Meanwhile, a patient was briskly wheeled to the same department from a helicopter on the roof, pausing only to cough up blood all over the lift. Moments after that, the trauma corps were already exchanging the kind of rapid-fire medical speak — ‘Dullness to percussion on the left side!’— that most viewers mightn’t entirely comprehend but that clearly translates as variations on the phrase, ‘Uh-oh’.

Just three months into Ukip’s shock victory as the party of government and already Nigel Farage’s mob are starting to show their true colours: morris dancing has been made compulsory for every able-bodied male between the age of 30 and 85; in ruthlessly enforced union flag street parties, brown-skinned people are made to show their loyalty by eating red-, white- and blue-coloured Battenberg cakes until they explode. And what is that acrid smell of burnt fur now polluting Britain’s hitherto gloriously carbon-free air? Why it is all the kittens that Nigel Farage and his evil henchmen are tossing on to beacons from John O’Groats to Land’s End in order to demonstrate that Ukip are the masters now.

I lost count long ago of the number of dinner parties and pub conversations where I’ve had to utter the humiliating words, ‘Actually I haven’t seen Breaking Bad.’ The social isolation became even more shaming when my 81-year-old mother rang to ask me if I’d heard of the show and to explain how much she loved it. (‘But isn’t it very violent, Mum?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she replied.) All of which means that I can approach Better Call Saul (Netflix) with what I like to think of as stern critical neutrality — rather than, say, ignorance.

There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling to join in this one.(Thucydides, 5th century BC) I love that quote, inscribed on the walls of the Imperial War Museum, because it tells you so much both about the reason wars happen and about the nature of men. Most of us go through a phase where we think it would be terribly exciting to ‘see the elephant’. And for a lucky few, it’s everything they hoped it would be and more. One of those lucky few is an extraordinarily jammy sod called Matthew VanDyke. By rights this young American filmmaker from Baltimore ought to be dead a thousand times over.