Simon Hoggart

The Duke at 90 (BBC1) was another engagement in Prince Philip’s ongoing war against the media. The Duke at 90 (BBC1) was another engagement in Prince Philip’s ongoing war against the media. As usual, he won this skirmish. There was a difference between this programme, presented by Fiona Bruce, and the earlier ITV effort with Alan Titchmarsh, who had decided that constant fawning was the way to the Duke’s heart, as he had done last year with the Prince of Wales. Presented with Sir Walter Raleigh’s problem he would not have laid his cloak down for the Queen, but would have placed himself in the puddle, a human duckboard. The Duke attracts stories. Take the media party at Windsor Castle held nine years ago to celebrate the Queen’s 50th Jubilee.

Two self-directed films this week, and that is usually a bad sign. Every television auteur, even the best, needs someone at his shoulder saying, ‘Nah, mate, won’t work.’ The lack of an independent voice can be disastrous and lead to Billy Bunter levels of self-indulgence. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC2, Monday) was the latest Adam Curtis film, named after a poem by Richard Brautigan. This imagines — ironically, I suppose — a situation in which humans return to a state of nature, with all our needs cared for by computers. It was a typical Curtis film, resembling one of those dreams you sort of remember because you’ve just woken up. One image follows another without there necessarily being any connection.

The Trouble with Love and Sex (Wednesday, BBC2) was extraordinary and quite successful. They took two couples plus one lonely single chap, recorded them talking to counsellors at Relate (formerly the Marriage Guidance Council, following the same rule by which the Royal Association for the Protection and Furtherance of Deaf Persons would become Eh?) and then turned the resulting dialogue into cartoons, so you heard their real voices but saw only drawings of people who didn’t look like them. These days, when people will suffer almost any humiliation to get on television, I am sure they could have found folk who would eagerly have appeared on camera to talk about the most intimate details of their marriage. But it wouldn’t have worked so well.

This is how heavily Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic, Monday) is being promoted: the preview discs came with a big, wider than A4, stiff-backed glossy book containing pictures of the actors and the settings, plus a glossary and a guide to the programme’s fantasy land — more than any lonely schoolboy in his bedroom could wish for. This is how heavily Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic, Monday) is being promoted: the preview discs came with a big, wider than A4, stiff-backed glossy book containing pictures of the actors and the settings, plus a glossary and a guide to the programme’s fantasy land — more than any lonely schoolboy in his bedroom could wish for. But this is not just aimed at lonely schoolboys, though I’m sure plenty will watch it.

Britain’s Next Big Thing (BBC2, Tuesday) is another reality show in which members of the public risk humiliation for the chance of brief success and even briefer fame. Britain’s Next Big Thing (BBC2, Tuesday) is another reality show in which members of the public risk humiliation for the chance of brief success and even briefer fame. It’s Masterchef with craftwork. In the first episode, various people tried to pitch their designs to Liberty, the department store in London that resembles a mock-Tudor country-house hotel. The kind where the rooms have names instead of numbers and there are tortuously worded notices telling you not to steal the dressing-gowns. The chief buyer is Ed Burstell, an American who wears a casually knotted scarf, even indoors. Ed is camp.

I found myself among a group of young people the other day, and they were talking with much hilarity about The Only Way Is Essex (ITV2, Sunday and Wednesday). This is cult television, adored by the generation that watches it. The show is a strange hybrid: real people play themselves under their real names, but with much of the script and many of the plots written for them. So it’s a reality show that has more or less ditched reality. The cast are young Essex people with money. They spend their time in expensive cars, in the gym, or making themselves beautiful in salons and nail bars. Nail bars! No female would expose her real fingernails in this series any more than she would wear pants that showed off her cellulite. If it hadn’t already been liposuctioned away.

The BBC’s Horizon is, amazingly, almost 50 years old and this week, in its The End of the World? Guide to Armageddon (BBC4, Thursday), it looked back at some of its scariest predictions. The BBC’s Horizon is, amazingly, almost 50 years old and this week, in its The End of the World? Guide to Armageddon (BBC4, Thursday), it looked back at some of its scariest predictions. The media have always loved frightening us to death, and there are plenty of scientists ready to help. The most recent, of course, is the greenhouse effect, and man-made global warming. I find myself an agnostic, lacking the absolute certainty possessed by many Spectator writers and, on the other side, the equal certainty of various scientists, politicians and activists.

I had prepared myself for another rant at Comic Relief, a grisly occasion on BBC1 in which every year parades of slebs preen themselves on their good works. What made my teeth curl was the way some comedian would announce that the Twistelton Lions had held a pram race through the town (with the mayor dressed as a baby!) and took £1,459, a fraction of what the sleb expects for a single performance. Last year we saw Jonathan Ross congratulating all those people who had climbed Kilimanjaro, so raising one-20th of Ross’s annual salary. Couldn’t he have saved them the trouble by writing a cheque? As Jeremy Hardy used to say, if you were collecting door-to-door what would you think if someone said, ‘Yes, I’ll give £10 for cancer research.

Successful programmes often become bloated, and MasterChef (BBC1, Wednesday) is headed that way. They are now increasingly focused on the human interest rather than the food. What a long way it has come from the days of Loyd Grossman, and his catchphrase ‘deliberated, cogitated and digested’ as he contemplated some appalling dish of liver in a gooseberry jus, served with individual mackerel and yam pavlovas. In those days contestants were hoping to prepare a half-decent dinner party; now they want their lives changed. I am sure many lives are changed, though most winners seem to disappear, from our ken, at any rate. But the hype is needed to evince the emotion. Contestants weep with gratitude if they make the last 20; others weep if they fail.

Sky’s new channel, Atlantic, kicked off this week with two big shows: Boardwalk Empire, which is set in 1920 and is about gangsters, and Blue Bloods, which is set in the modern day and is about a family of New York law enforcers. Sky’s new channel, Atlantic, kicked off this week with two big shows: Boardwalk Empire, which is set in 1920 and is about gangsters, and Blue Bloods, which is set in the modern day and is about a family of New York law enforcers. As in all American cop shows, there is a lot of badge-flashing, though for some reason none of the people they flash their badges at ever asks for a closer look. It would be quite easy to make one from an old credit card and a milk-bottle top, quite good enough to pass in the half-second the average flash takes.

Horizon (BBC2, Monday) asked, ‘What is reality?’ and didn’t really have an answer. Horizon (BBC2, Monday) asked, ‘What is reality?’ and didn’t really have an answer. Well, it seems nobody does, though plenty of physicists, mathematicians and astronomers are working on it. As the voiceover told us, ‘Once you have entered their reality, your reality may never look the same.’ You can say that again. It appears that quantum particles can literally be in two places at the same time. But we are made up of quantum particles, and we are never in two places at the same time, even if that would occasionally be useful. So maybe there are more of us, all made up of the same particles but doing different things in different places.

The Radio Times now lists 72 channels, and that’s not all of them. The Radio Times now lists 72 channels, and that’s not all of them. No wonder television has to feed on itself, like a hungry tigress scoffing her cubs. In particular, it devours the past, so this week we had a Morecambe and Wise evening on BBC2, starting with the Christmas show from 1976, a third of a century ago. These shows got peak audiences of 28 million, inconceivable now, and just as French education ministers can allegedly tell you what every child in the country is studying at any moment, programme controllers could sigh with pleasure and know precisely what flickering image was in front of more than half the population. They riveted the nation, in Bagehot’s sense: they tied us together.

It is the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street and there seems to be as much celebration and feasting as there was for the Queen’s own golden jubilee, in 2002. It is the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street and there seems to be as much celebration and feasting as there was for the Queen’s own golden jubilee, in 2002. I have to declare a personal interest here. The inventor of Corrie is Tony Warren, who told my father that his book, The Uses of Literacy, had been one of his inspirations. It had shown working-class life to be as rich and complex as the lives lived by the middle and upper classes. This does not mean that it was in any sense superior, merely that it was as textured and as interesting as anything that happened to people with more money.

I’m writing this near Ludlow, a town which has miraculously kept its centre. I’m writing this near Ludlow, a town which has miraculously kept its centre. On Saturday last there was a bustling market, selling hundreds of things you might actually want to buy. Around it were the shops: independent butchers with pheasants hanging above the door, bakers you had to hurry past because you’d want to buy enough cakes to bring on a heart attack, independent clothiers selling long-forgotten styles, none made for 7p an hour by children in Bangladesh. It all looked marvellous.