Culture

One of the many pleasures of television is that it allows us to forget our manners: we can treat it with an impolite offhandedness that would not be considered sociable — or sensible — in the run of everyday life. This isn’t a vicarious enjoyment of bad behaviour that we see on screen, but an actual enjoyment in loosening our own collars: when I watch television I can be fickle (a one-night stand with Downton Abbey), greedy (a Simpsons triple-bill), blunt (‘That sweater is repulsive’), or lazy (Nigel Slater’s Dish of the Day instead of the real thing) without guilt or consequence.

Hunted (Thursday, BBC1) made a terrific start, but whether the first episode has set the standard for the next seven is another matter — a thriller, after all, has a duty to overwhelm, seduce and deceive with its opening gambit. This series was not conceived by fluke: anyone with half an eye on Bond, Bourne, Spooks or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo can see its pedigree, but that is no bad thing, and if its look reminds us of last year’s Scandinavian hits then so much the better. The territory is familiar — international espionage — but we never tire of spies, and these are not the double ‘O’ kind (who save the world every week) but private intelligence ‘operatives’ (who choose which side to play for).

I was that desperate for something to watch on TV the other night that I actually sat through half an episode of Outnumbered. This is the highly rated comedy series, now in its umpteenth season, in which children say implausibly clever, sassy things much to the bemusement of their hard-pressed parents. Why do I not share in the general adulation of this comedy? First, to misquote Homer Simpson, it isn’t funny because it isn’t true. I say this with confidence having personally bred and raised two of the most brilliant, witty and incisive children ever created. Maybe once or twice in their entire lives have they said anything as clever as the kind of one-liners those smartarse — and supposedly typical — brats on Outnumbered come up with every two seconds.

Comparisons may be odious but sometimes they are irresistible — and, frankly, more fool the BBC for screening Treasures of Ancient Rome on the same night as The Shock of the New (Monday, BBC4). Here is Alastair Sooke on the spread of the Roman Empire: ‘Rome’s generals romped around the Med, sacking cities willy-nilly...

I am writing this at teatime on Sunday — day nine of the Olympics. So far: 34 medals, we’ve all gone completely bananas, and the Great British mood has improved by what commentators call 110 per cent. Andy Murray has just won gold, beating Roger Federer in straight sets, and by the time I finish writing he may have won another gold in the mixed doubles’ final. To write about this week’s television and not mention the Olympics would be peculiar, but to write about nothing but the Olympics would be foolish because what I write today will be old hat by the time you read it. Today the Games are the most important thing on television; by the end of the week they might not be — they might have turned from buttered crumpets to stale buns.

Almost the best thing about Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony was the running Twitter commentary. From Marcus Stead: ‘Ah, here we go, NHS worship. One of the most overrated things about Britain. Expensive, unreliable, regularly lets patients down.’ From Miss Annesley: ‘I think “Voldemort runs the NHS” is the moral of this story.’ And from Mr Ranty: ‘Stafford Hospital is second from the left, the one with 450 dead patients.’ Not getting into the spirit of things is something we British do well. It’s instilled in us from an early age — usually during our first visit to the pantomime where the nasty, scary bully man on stage insists we join in with cries of ‘Behind you!’ and ‘Oh, no you didn’t!

I wonder how the 2012 Olympics will look, when re-imagined by a BBC docu-drama 64 years hence. If it’s anything like next week’s charming but not exactly unclichéd account of the 1948 Men’s Double Scull — Bert & Dickie (BBC1, Wednesday 25 July) — something like this, I expect, with all sorts of imaginary obstacles thrown in the way to make our hero’s struggle more movie-friendly. Int. London Olympic Velodrome. 2012 Men’s Keirin final. An elderly man in brightly coloured skintight gear shuffles with the help of a Zimmer frame towards his shiny, high-tech bicycle. Jaunty Cockney: Bleedin’ ’eck. That old geezer looks like he’d be more comfortable on a penny farving. Cockney’s mate: You may larf.

Among the many reasons I shall miss Simon Hoggart’s presence as my Spectator co-TV critic is that I used to rely on him to take the heat off me. Since landing this gig all those years ago, I’ve always felt something of an imposter owing to my extreme reluctance to sit down and watch any more TV than I absolutely, strictly have to watch. Simon, on the other hand, was so conscientious he’d often review three or four programmes in a week. If this were the second world war, I’d be the equivalent of some Cairo desk wallah, while Simon would be a Soviet punishment battalion. But just because Simon’s gone doesn’t mean I’m going to change tack.

You wouldn’t necessarily use the word subtle to describe a programme in which a well-dressed, well-spoken woman describes a speech that’s been altered as ‘pencil-fucked, completely’ but Veep (Monday, Sky Atlantic) is subtle, sinuously subtle. In his way Armando Iannucci is as creative with the English language as James Joyce. He is proof that doing an English degree at Oxford is not necessarily, to adapt another of his phrases, ‘like using a croissant as a dildo — it doesn’t do the job and it leaves a lot of mess’. His neologism in The Thick of It — ‘omnishambles’ — is now as much a part of our political vocabulary as ‘white paper’ or ‘liar!

One of the great things about working in a collapsing industry is the cornucopia of possibilities that begins to open up of all the stuff you could do instead. In the past 18 months I have toyed with becoming: a speechwriter, a radio shock jock, a YouTube cult, a think tank senior visiting fellow, a TV star, a corporate communications director, an internet entrepreneur, a self-help book author, a Buteyko guru, a truck driver at an Australian mine, a gold bug, a fixer, an after-dinner speaker, a stand-up comic, an MEP. Some of it might actually happen. So I think I have a pretty good idea what David Bowie was going through in 1972 in the run-up to recording Ziggy Stardust — whose 40th anniversary was celebrated by Jarvis Cocker and friends in a BBC4 documentary this week (Friday).

The BBC has been heavily criticised for its coverage of the Jubilee flotilla, and the tone was incredibly annoying. All those smiley celebrities pretending to enjoy themselves! The tabloids, those for whom the Beeb can never do anything right, would have been just as mean if the treatment had been sombre and serious. ‘And we see a boat, followed by a barge, and next to that, another boat. And Her Majesty is waving, now to the crowds on the embankment, now to the next boat…’ The queue of vessels was a feeble idea, the rain made it worse and there was nothing anyone could have done. Bagehot himself would have been reduced to burbling about souvenir sick bags.

For my holiday reading in Australia I chose Max Hastings’s brilliant but exceedingly depressing Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Once you’ve read it, it’s impossible to take any pleasure from second world war history ever again. Basically, runs Hastings’s persuasively argued thesis, we were rubbish at pretty much everything. Our generals were useless, our citizen soldiers lacked dash and folded at the first opportunity, our tanks were ill-protected and undergunned. Apart, maybe, from Bletchley, we contributed nothing major whatsoever to the Allied war effort: the Soviets doing all the killing and dying for us and the Yanks providing all the materiel.

Now and again a sitcom gag lodges in the public mind. In 1974, Ronnie Barker, in Porridge, was reminiscing about Top of the Pops and its all-girl dance troupe, Pan’s People. ‘There’s one special one — Beautiful Babs,’ he says. Beat. ‘Dunno what her name is.’ Her name was Babs Lord. She attracted the attention of a young actor called Robert Powell, then in a long-forgotten thriller called Doomwatch, so he met up with her in the celebrated and notorious BBC Club at Television Centre; after 36 years they are still married. She also became an explorer, described as the only housewife to have visited both the North and South Poles, which is an impressive feat, though a patronising title, since it sounds as if someone felt they needed tidying.