Simon Hoggart

The Private Life of a Masterpiece (BBC1, Saturday) got an Easter outing about Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking of Christ’. The Private Life of a Masterpiece (BBC1, Saturday) got an Easter outing about Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking of Christ’. It was superb, as this series invariably is. Understated yet informative, packed with unpatronising experts, it fascinates from start to end. Did you know that Caravaggio was a gangster and murderer, who spent the end of his short life on the run? Or that this particular painting was then the most expensive ever commissioned (125 scudi; I have no idea what that might have been against sterling), or that it sold in Scotland for just eight guineas 120 years ago?

Television often throws up unpleasant images to surprise you, like finding an earwig in the sugar. The BBC has got the transmission rights for Formula One motor racing, and they were lucky in that the Australian Grand Prix (BBC1, Sunday), which opened the new season, proved a very exciting race, and was won by a Brit. There were lots of crashes, nobody was hurt, and that’s the way we like it.

The most gruesome television moment of the week I caught on Saturday night, part of the Red Nose Day mutual congratulation fest. A gang of minor celebs had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and Davina McCall — she must be hard to live with, running into the bedroom, shaking her face in yours and screaming that the toast is ready — informed us with breathless excitement that they had raised ‘a staggering £3 million!’. What was offensive about this was the fact that Jonathan Ross was there on stage. Three million quid is just half his annual salary! He could give it away every year, with tax relief, and still have £8,219 to live on every single day. Had nobody thought this through? Seemingly not.

Last weekend we learned that Heston Blumenthal had closed his Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, because 40 or so customers had reported feeling ill. I’m not surprised. I felt ill just watching the start of his new series, Feast (Channel 4, Tuesday), and not a morsel had passed my lips. (Actually, some years ago I managed to get a table at the Fat Duck. The food was extraordinary, the price reasonable considering it was that year’s Best Restaurant in the World, but the experience was marred by the snotty French waiter who said the tasting menu was for the whole table only, so I couldn’t have it. Since I know I will never eat there again, this was both disappointing and infuriating.) There is, I fear, some desperation in this new series. Where can Blumenthal go next?

I often drone on about how there are television programmes made with love and there are those that are knocked out cynically, to win ratings and advertising, or because the programme makers are just too lazy to come up with anything new, challenging, informative or even entertaining. Hole in the Wall is obviously cynical, as is I’m a Celebrity. On the other hand, Strictly Come Dancing might be as camp as a drag act at Pontin’s, but it is at least made with craft and dedication. You may not care for the show, but somebody plainly cares about getting it right. A classic instance of getting it right is Iran and the West (BBC2), which has been running over three weeks on Saturdays.

Nationwide tribute (BBC 4, Thursday); Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA (Channel 4); Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life (BBC1, Sunday) Nationwide began 40 years ago, and on Thursday BBC4 showed a tribute. The show ran nightly up to 1983, and was always the cheekie chappie of BBC programming. In the early 1980s I did a series of jokey sketches for them from the party conferences, and we ran an item about Denis Thatcher signing autographs for a disabled charity. ‘Good old Denis,’ I said, ‘helping legless people everywhere.’ That would be far too bland for Mock the Week or HIGNFY now, but back then we had a long discussion which ended with the line being broadcast.

It’s funny how much television depends on repetition. Daytime, especially. The same house is always being auctioned, the same chinoiserie discovered in the attic, the same boxes being opened on Deal Or No Deal. Even the new Countdown has eschewed new letters. It might have been fun if they added a few Greek ones. This repetition is comforting, and it only applies, so far as I can see, to television. The last film I saw was The Reader, and somehow I doubt we’ll ever see The Reader II. Even the James Bond franchise goes in for variety — for example, Casino Royale was very good, whereas Quantum of Solace was rubbish.

There are still some things that the BBC does incredibly well, and The Diary of Anne Frank (BBC1, Monday to Friday) was one. It’s the licence fee that allows the corporation to take these risks, and next time the Murdoch press whinges about it, you might contemplate the limitless dross we would have to suffer if it went. (By the way, taking the Times and the Sunday Times for a year costs nearly three times as much as the licence fee. I wonder which most people would think better value?) If Anne Frank had lived, she would have been 80 this year. Over the decades the story has become sanitised in the popular imagination. Delightful, heroic, saintly family living together in appalling circumstances, in the end betrayed by someone unknown.

So what were we watching in 2008? The multiplication of television continues at speed. If you have cable TV you might have, say, 80 channels to choose from, most of them having nothing to offer you whatsoever. Some have almost no viewers. You could afford to advertise a missing cat on some of them, except that nobody who might have seen your cat is watching. Richard and Judy have been demoted from terrestrial TV to a hopelessly obscure channel — ratings at one point dropped to 21,000 — yet their book club continues a sort of phantom existence, selling huge quantities of paperbacks even though almost no one sees R&J plugging them.

My favourite programme last week was France on a Plate (BBC4, Sunday) in which Dr Andrew Hussey investigated the link between gastronomy and la gloire; French glory and destiny. He began with a recreation of François Mitterrand’s last meal, which climaxed with the illegal consumption of ortolans, an endangered songbird which is blinded then boiled in Armagnac. Yum! As you crunch the creature whole, its tiny head dangling from your lips, you wear a napkin over your head which keeps the flavour in, and emphasises the sacerdotal significance of the act.

Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. Andy Hamilton was an exceedingly welcome panellist in the days when I did The News Quiz, so I’m biased. But I genuinely found his sitcom, Outnumbered (BBC 1, Saturday), co-written with his long-time collaborator Guy Jenkin, terrifically funny. It is set in a well-worn situation — the family — and the first episode was a cliché plot, the wedding where everything goes wrong, but that didn’t matter. I watched it on my portable DVD player during a crowded train journey. People miserably standing, propped upright only by each other as we bounced over the points, watched in resentment as I sat curled up and cramped, laughing my head off.

I watched Russell Brand’s Ponderland (Channel 4, Thursday) if only so that you don’t have to. It’s rather lazy, like the unpleasant message he and Jonathan Ross left on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone and then broadcast on Radio Two. You’d think that if they were going to be offensive to a well-loved old thespian gent they would have laced it with wit — some tonic and lemon to go with the gall. In a gruesome way, what made it even more awful was the fact that Brand really did sleep with Sachs’s granddaughter. In the old days, a gentleman never bandied a woman’s name about. Now you can boast to her old granddad that you’ve shagged her, and tell everyone at home as well.

Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV, Saturday); Hole in the Wall (BBC1, Saturday); Saturday Night Live (NBC); The Sarah Silverman Program (Paramount, Monday and Tuesday); Desperate Housewives (Channel 4, Wednesday) I don’t want to come over as obsessive, but I was delighted to see the return of Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV, Saturday). This show, which has huge ratings, assails everything on television that is stupid, shoddy, lazy, contemptuous of the audience and generally rubbish. Last weekend the main target was Hole in the Wall (BBC1, Saturday) which I mentioned a fortnight ago as a terrible example of what happens when the Beeb turns bad. Clearly Harry Hill, or someone on his production team, takes exactly the same view.

There’s something agreeably aimless, even melancholy, about late Saturday afternoons, after you’ve finished whatever you were doing in the day and before it’s time to go out. I found myself in a hotel room in Yorkshire last week at the crepuscular hour of 5.30, too lazy to do any work, too enervated to shower and change. So I flipped on the television, and caught a programme called Hole in the Wall. It is an extraordinary confection. Two teams, each of three celebrities (of course), stand wearing wetsuits and crash helmets in front of a pool. At a signal a plastic wall, roughly eight-feet high, moves towards them. There is a cut-out in the wall of a human shape: crouching, spread-eagled, upside-down or whatever.

There was a sad moment in The Family (Channel 4, Wednesday) this week when Dad, the very long-suffering Simon Hughes, is inspecting his daughters’ bedroom, and doesn’t like what he sees. He has been assured that the room is neat and clean, so he responds with a blast of sarcasm. ‘Oh, look at this tidy, tidy, tidy room, oh crumbs, how tidy it is, all this stuff doesn’t exist, it’s a figment of my imagination...’ I felt a blast of pity for him. Most dads, like me, would have given up long ago but he goes onward, ever onward, in the quest for orderly bedrooms. Sisyphus had it easier with his rock. Of course, the kids don’t see it that way.

Time to pay tribute to New Tricks, which ended its most recent run on BBC1 this Monday. The penultimate episode had 8.9 million viewers, which meant that more people watched it that night than Coronation Street. It has a good claim to be the most popular programme on television. All of this brings much satisfaction. For one thing, New Tricks is everything a TV marketing man hates. It is about older people. It probably appeals to older people. Marketing men have a set of beliefs which are quite as irrational as any cult religion. One is that only young people are worth advertising to, since they are crazed neo-philiacs and can be persuaded to switch brands, whether of cars, cook-in sauce or toilet cleansers.

It’s three in the morning and a BBC executive is home in bed. Suddenly he wakes up, sweating. ‘What is it, darling?’ asks his solicitous wife. ‘I had a nightmare,’ he replies; ‘I dreamed that one of our viewers was bored. Bored! Just for a moment, but, my God...’ It’s the only explanation for some of the Corporation’s programming. It seems to believe that we can’t cope with anything more than five seconds long. If it doesn’t provide us with new excitements in a constant, hectic flow, then we will — the ultimate horror — switch to another channel. Take The One Show, which goes out on BBC1 at 7 p.m. most weekdays (though not during the Olympics).

A three-part series called Expedition Guyana was hurriedly retitled Lost Land of the Jaguar (BBC1, Wednesday) possibly in the hopes that viewers might think it was a spin-off from Top Gear, more likely because a BBC suit suddenly realised that the name ‘Guyana’ wouldn’t pull in viewers. No doubt someone else wanted to call it Lost Land of the Jaguar Celebrity Makeover, but a compromise was reached. Thank goodness, because this really was terrific. At first I suspected it would be just another hectic, ‘Hey, gang, follow me into the jungle!’ BBC documentary in which the mere subject takes second place to the breathless presenters. And it started that way. ‘Guyana is the size of Great Britain, and has the population of Liverpool!