Culture

What would you do if you had a quite extraordinary talent in impersonating everyone, from Al Pacino to Barack Obama to just any random Irish bloke? In TV land, you are probably rather baffled by it all, and unsure what to do about it as you languish in an unfulfilling half-life, until a Series of Events comes along to show you what a gift you have. This is what happens to The Mimic’s Martin Hurdle, whom we first encounter in his car stuck in traffic, entertaining himself by putting on the voice of Terry Wogan, true to it in texture and timbre, if not in spirit (‘It’s mornings like this, that I wish I was back in Phuket, bouncing a ladyboy on each knee!’).

The thing that always used to bother me about M*A*S*H as a child was the lack of combat. You’d see the realistic film of choppers at the beginning and, obviously, the plotline would quite often include casualties coming in from recent scenes of action. But the exciting stuff always seemed to happen offstage, a bit like in Shakespeare where some character strides on and tells you what a terrible battle there’s just been and you’re going, ‘Wait a second. Did we just skip past the most exciting bit?’ This clearly isn’t going to be a problem, though, with BBC3’s new sitcom about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, Bluestone 42 (Tuesday).

I sometimes worry that ITV — the middle child — doesn’t get enough of my attention and so this week I have decided to redress the balance: I devoted myself to episode one of Food Glorious Food (Wednesday, ITV). It’s a nine-part quest, hosted by Carol Vorderman, which aims to discover ‘Britain’s best-loved recipe’. O jubilate deo! This is how it goes: treasured family recipes are cooked up at regional events and tasted by one of four judges who choose a favourite and submit it to be tasted by the other three. The judges are Loyd Grossman (smooth), Anne Harrison (stern), Stacie Stewart (bubbly) or Tom Parker Bowles (apologetic).

‘Don’t be evil.’ Google’s unofficial motto. ‘Evil men don’t get up in the morning saying, “I’m going to do evil.” They say, “I’m going to make the world a better place.”’ Christopher Booker. Meanwhile — while you were distracted by other things like tax bills and school fees and somehow scraping by — Google and Amazon and Apple took over the world. This, of course, is what novels by the likes of William Gibson, films such as Blade Runner and comic strips like Judge Dredd have been telling us for some time: that one day, the world will be ruled not by governments but by giant corporations.

There was little reason to be curious about David or Jackie Siegel at the beginning of Queen of Versailles (Monday, BBC4): he is the King of Timeshare and she is his Beauty Queen; they are building a palace in Florida, and modelling it on Versailles; it will be the biggest private home in America, when it is finished, and the Siegels will squeeze into it with their colossal fortune, their fleet of staff, their eight children and their bouquet of powder-puff dogs. ‘My husband deserves this house,’ says Jackie. ‘It’ll be like a lifetime achievement.’ There didn’t seem a whole lot more to find out. But then, after 30 minutes of screen time, came the crash: September 2008.

`The older I get, the less tolerant I become of being treated by television like a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. No offence meant to Dr Jago Cooper but, if I’m going to consider spending a valuable hour of my fast-diminishing lifespan watching a documentary about Lost Kingdoms of South America, the very last thing that’s going to persuade me is being importuned in the manner of those men with microphones at street markets trying to persuade me to buy an amazing labour-saving device I never knew I needed, the Radish-o-Chop.

I knew this would happen: I’ve been watching season five of Mad Men on DVD and it’s spoiled me for normal telly. If you notice increased levels of toxicity — dissatisfaction and disgruntlement — in the following grumblings, then Mad Men is the reason.  Nothing pleases me so much, you see, and I am likely to remain crabby and sniffy until the effects of that 13-episode pleasure-binge wear off. Where to go from Madison Avenue in 1966? Which to choose of these bracing alternatives: the cuckoo-land of Mr Selfridge (Sunday, ITV), the dismal wastes of Utopia (Wednesday, Channel 4) or the company of those dashing, anxious, well-dressed Spies of Warsaw (Wednesday, BBC4)?

Some people say TV is a bad thing for families but I say don’t knock it. It was thanks to TV this school holidays that I almost got vaguely, slightly, accepted by Boy. Fathers of young teenage males will know exactly what I’m on about here. There comes a point — quite often bang on your son’s 13th birthday — when he suddenly decides that you’re the lamest, dumbest, uncoolest Dad in the entire history of fatherhood. And you spend many anxious months wondering how on earth you’re ever going to win him back. Well, in my case TV has been the answer.

I don’t know whose idea it was to put New Year at the beginning of January, but it seems like an odd one. Why not begin each new year on, let’s say, the first of April or May? It might bring at least a dash of new dawn-ishness — a flicker of sunlight, scampering clouds, hello birds and a hey nonny no — to New Year’s Day. There’s no spring in the step of 1 January. She has neither the time nor the inclination for good cheer. She is as tired, headachey and whey-faced as if she had stayed up half the night dancing to ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ with 31 December and had woken to find him — Oh God! Not again! — snoring in her bed.

Despite a wet summer, the recent crop of food programmes has been prodigious: six episodes of Nigellissima, eight of Nigel Slater’s Dish Of The Day, six of Lorraine Pascale’s Fast, Fresh and Easy Food, 40 of Jamie’s 15-Minute Meals and 25 of Hugh’s Three Good Things — truly a basket of plenty. Two cooking competitions (The Great British Bake Off and Masterchef: The Professionals) have dished up a total of 34 episodes; Heston Blumenthal has hand-reared seven bloated and inedible turkeys (Heston’s Fantastical Food), and Yotam Ottolenghi (Ottolenghi’s Mediterranean Feast) has concocted, in the kitchens of Morocco, Istanbul, Tunisia and Israel, four unexpectedly delicious treats.

For the past month I have been glued to the BBC’s Why Poverty? season — ‘part of an unprecedented collaboration between public service media in which 37 EBU members have been dedicating multiplatform programming on the theme of poverty’. No, I jest. What I’ve actually been watching is MasterChef. Served with a MasterChef reduction, a smear of MasterChef purée, MasterChef shavings, MasterChef pickles and MasterChef tapenade and pommes, style Masterchef. With more MasterChef for pud, obviously. Does this make me a bad person? Well, possibly. But it also makes me a normal person.

Having planned to devote every one of this week’s 800 words to Sir David Attenborough’s 60 Years in the Wild (Friday, BBC2), I was distracted by fame, fortune and the politics of influence: Give Us the Money (Sunday, BBC4) and Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream (Tuesday, BBC4). Both these programmes I watched with interest but absolutely no enjoyment whatsoever; their combined effect was a feeling of overall grubbiness, as if I had sat too close to a wrestling match on a wet afternoon in a swamp. ‘Give us the money!’ was the instruction given by Bob Geldof to the public at Live Aid in 1985. The public reached into their pockets and did as he asked, and a new kind of charity was born.

God, I’m jealous of Michael Gove. Not for being a cabinet minister in the same coalition as Nick Clegg and Vince Cable, obviously, but for being outed as a queer in the new series of Harry & Paul (BBC2, Sunday). Now that’s what I call fame. Harry & Paul has had mixed reviews. Some of the sketches — the ‘I’m a cop’ one; the US car salesmen — simply aren’t funny. But so what? Even at its best The Fast Show, arguably the funniest-ever broken-sketch comedy series, contained some sketches that weren’t funny. It goes with the territory. Unfunny sketches are the equivalent of the ‘darlings’ that William Faulkner advised authors they should kill.

It’s amazing what can be squeezed into an hour of The Hour (Wednesday, BBC2): smutty photos, gang violence, bent coppers, illegal gambling, fascism, racism, a political cover-up, a media exposé, leaked documents, seduction, abuse, neglect, the corrupting temptations of celebrity, the corrupting temptations of complicated dessert recipes, a dog in space, the threat to the nation of nuclear war, the threat to the BBC of commercial television and the threat to an English bluestocking of a sexy, bare-legged French girl with a carving knife, a wedding ring and a gamine haircut. The poor old kitchen sink, left out like Cinderella, must have had a dull time sitting at home by itself.

Derren Brown is a great big cheating liar. Or so my old mucker Rod Liddle reckoned last week in his Spectator blog. Derren Brown’s Apocalypse was ‘clearly, demonstrably, faked’, declared Rod. Well, I guess that settles it then. Or does it? First some background for those of you who missed it. (Though my advice for those of you who did is: stop reading now and watch both episodes immediately on Channel 4’s 4oD catch-up site.) Derren Brown’s Apocalypse (Channel 4, last Friday) was — or, pace Rod, purported to be — an extraordinarily bold TV experiment.

Which is the worse crime, would you say: eavesdropping on celebrities’ answerphones? Or hosting and covering up for a ruthless predatory paedophile ring — led by your biggest, most heavily promoted star — over a period of four decades? Mm, me too. In fact, I’d say the Savile affair is as close as we’ll ever get to proving that God really hates the BBC. I mean, the timing is far too perfect to be coincidental, isn’t it? First we get Leveson — essentially a stitch-up by the BBC and the Guardian to entrench the power of the bien-pensant establishment, increase regulation and destroy the free market (especially Rupert Murdoch). Then, just when the tofu-eating turbine-huggers think they’ve won — zing!

The greatest moment in the history of television — and one which will surely remain unsurpassed for ever — was the final episode of The Sopranos. Part of its genius was to reward all of us who had stuck with it so loyally for the previous 85 episodes by allowing us to make up our own minds how it ended. Did Tony get wasted by those hitmen-like figures we saw entering the restaurant where he was having the rapprochement dinner with Carmela? Well, maybe. Or did the Feds finally get their wiretaps and informants properly organised and put Tony away for ever? Or did he — as I prefer not to stop believing — waste all the people who’d come to kill him and then get off, on a technicality, whatever charges the Feds threw at him.