Simon Hoggart

Coup! (BBC2, Friday) was quite a brave programme. It was the story of the failed mercenary coup in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny but oil-sodden tyranny on the west coast of Africa. This was led by an adventurer called Simon Mann (I have often said it is a great mistake to trust anyone called Simon, unless, possibly, they are in hairdressing) and supported by Mark Thatcher. It would have been easy to run this as a grim, heart-of-darkness drama, with lessons for us all about the evil nature of imperialism, or the vile conspiracies of multinational corporations. Instead, they played it boldly, to a large extent, for laughs.

The World Cup, and once again people who don’t watch football from one quadrennium to the next manifest an interest in all those surreal pairings: Ecuador v. Poland, Iran v. Mexico, Togo v. Switzerland. I (and many others) have been disobliging about John Motson in the past, but he is perfect for these events, assuming no prior knowledge in his listeners, making you half-imagine that every match is the first he has ever attended. ‘Nice move!’; ‘Oh, Lampard there’; ‘England finding themselves on the back foot now...’ Real football aficionados hate all this wide-eyed simplicity; they get cross, just as trainspotters would at Crewe if crowds of housewives elbowed them off the platform.

I greatly enjoyed The Impressionists (BBC1, Sunday) in spite of clunky lines such as ‘This is Paris, in 1862,’ and ‘Cézanne! Do you know everybody?’ There are the scenes where they are painting their actual paintings, when Rolf Harris seems to have been parachuted into an episode of ’Allo, ’Allo! There was an unconsciously funny moment when Renoir is injured by a discus hurled by the English discus champion — who just happens to be training in the Forest of Fontainebleau, an activity which seems only marginally less stupid than practising the shot put on a mud flat.

I went to train in Manchester a year or so after the Moors murders, and they continued to hang over the city like an old-fashioned smog, sickening and inescapable. Reporters who had covered the trial in Chester and heard the tape of Lesley Ann Downey pleading for mercy and begging for her mother said that they used to lie awake at night hearing the little girl’s screams. The sense of a horror that existed on the fringe of normal life, yet hovered unnervingly nearby, was made worse by the moors themselves. These are not the cosy landscapes of the Peak District but are desolate and displeasing; the kind of scenery you never see on the cover of a Beautiful Britain calendar.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be, but then in television it rarely is. For example, Dr Who (BBC1, Saturday) is back with David Tennant as the 10th full-time doctor and Billie Piper as his 21st female assistant. The show was first screened the day after JFK was assassinated. Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, a risk I am generally prepared to take, a large part of the appeal of the old Doctors was the cheap, sticky-tape-and-string nature of the sets and the villains. Children might have needed to watch the Daleks through threaded fingers from behind the sofa, but they still looked like dustbins festooned with egg boxes and sink plungers. Nor were the Cybermen or the Ice Monsters more convincing.

Like everyone else I loved Planet Earth (BBC1, Sunday), which came to only a temporary end this week. The images are fabulous. If the global-warming doomsayers are right, and if in 50 years’ time what’s left of us are living on mountain tops, chewing grey squirrels and watching DVDs powered by lichen, it will be a perfect way of remembering what we have lost. Or rather what we never quite managed to catch in the first place. Where, for example, have you been able to see thermal imaging of kangaroos slobbering on themselves to keep cool? It could be number 983 on our cable box: the Kangaroo Saliva Channel, 7.00 to 8.00: Great Expectorations. As computer-generated images become more powerful and more convincing, real life has to struggle to keep up.

Deal or No Deal (Channel 4, weekday afternoons and Saturday) is the quintessence of television, in that it is remarkably boring, mildly hypnotic, and stars Noel Edmonds, he of the neatly trimmed beard and the grin that manages to be simultaneously wolfish and ingratiating. Noel Edmonds! He seems like a figure from the mists of television history, like Muffin the Mule or Gilbert Harding. We thought he had vanished decades ago. Had he emigrated? Was he even still alive? Not only is he still alive but he’s back. He wasn’t gone all that long. It just seems that way. Noel’s House Party died of terminal naffness, but just 17 years ago.

I caught the last Facing The Truth (BBC2, Saturday–Monday) in which Desmond Tutu moderated a meeting between the widow of a Catholic killed in the Ulster troubles and Michael Stone, the Milltown cemetery killer, who was behind her husband’s murder by loyalist gunmen. It was slightly less moving than expected — at least before the startling finish.

My advance DVD from the BBC was marked ‘The Virgin Quenn’, which I thought was pleasing and evocative. Possibly the quenn was a mythical beast, condemned to live for only one generation due to its perpetual virginity. Or perhaps it was bawdy Tudor slang, used by Shakespeare: ‘Why, friend, a queen shall have a quenn, as well as Mistress Scapegrace!’, a line which would have made the groundlings collapse in ribald glee.

The notion of updating Shakespeare always strikes me as a curious one. For a start it assumes that the audience is stupid. Do we say, ‘I hadn’t realised that Julius Caesar contains universal themes of ambition and betrayal until I saw it set on the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade’? Or, ‘It never occurred to me that Macbeth might have significance for our time until they played it in a Birmingham Starbucks’? And why doesn’t it work the other way round? You never see The Caretaker set in imperial Rome, or Abigail’s Party at an 11th-century Scottish castle. The one time when this updating works is when it’s merely the plot that has been dragged kicking and yelling into the 21st century.

Norma Percy’s latest documentary, Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace (BBC2, Monday), was another remarkable production from Brook Lapping, a company that specialises in catching history on the fly, as it whizzes past. The first episode (of three) covered 1999 and 2000, when Bill Clinton became the latest US president to imagine that he could do some good. He was wrong, but you had to admire him for trying, with bravery, optimism and that slightly alarming secret smile of his. The Brook Lapping style only works if you have the main players on camera, telling exactly what happened, and by some miracle they had managed to get them all. Except for Yasser Arafat, of course, though they had library film of him, too.

I tried hard to love Elizabeth I (Channel 4, Thursday) because such work and effort had gone into it, but it was an uphill job. The opening scene, of a doctor examining our heroine’s vagina, was no doubt meant to be challenging and attention-grabbing, but it felt unnecessarily gynaecological. As Barry Humphries would have said, the doctor was just keeping his hand in. The other problem is that we have seen so many depictions of these people and this era that they all echo round each other, with, for some reason, Blackadder the loudest. The Duke of Anjou (Hugh Laurie with a comedy French accent): I muzz ask you ziss; are you minded to tek me as a ‘usban’, in all seriousness?

A publisher has just reprinted, in time for its centenary, H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story (Galore Park, £19.99), which in its day was the immensely successful ‘History of Britain for Boys and Girls, from the Romans to Queen Victoria’. I’m old enough to remember this from first time round — it went through many editions —and it’s rather touching to see it again. It uses fables and legends, some possibly true, to illuminate the succession of monarchs, culminating in the glory of our Empire. Good people are rewarded and bad people, such as King John and Richard III, meet unhappy and well-deserved ends.