AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

All my life I have heard glowing references to Ben Travers farces and I finally listened to one last night on Radio 4X. Luckily it was the prince of the genre, Rookery Nook, so a fair sampling. I am not kidding, it was so lame that, even for research purposes, I had lost the will to live after three quarters of an hour. Perhaps that's the point. Some kind of nihilistically-induced stupefaction. An English No play. Oh well, another box ticked.

Or I might write one, seemed easy enough. Unless they are like Mills & Boone novels, harder than they look. No, I'll stick to world-shattering theories, easier than they look. I'd give my right arm for people to listen to one of them for forty-five minutes.

[Mick Harper]

1916 (PBS America)

This is the Irish version of the Easter Rising (intoned by Liam Neeson) with the English playing the part of the Nazis. Even so, quite balanced viz the Dublin population were furious with the insurgents and sided with the occupying forces. The Brits threw it all away with their brutality and the IRA won in the end, only it wasn't the British who suffered, but the Irish having to put up with fifty years of rule by people who thought paying the blood sacrifice was better than waiting a couple of years and getting it for free.

One new fact. The British had eleven soldiers killed and thirty-three wounded capturing a Dublin street so they executed fifteen Irishmen who happened to live in it. When your number's up....

[Mick Harper]

Callan and Wolf Hall finishing on the same night! You would think the Ministry of Culture (there's a joke for a start) would make sure these things didn't happen.

[Mick Harper]

The Truth About Traveller Crime (Channel 4, 9pm tonight)

This might be interesting. Dispatches can be unpredictable, within limits. The problem, of course, or at least I predict, is that only the answer "They're bang at it, whadya think?" is a believable one. It may be that they are not but it would take more than a mainstream telly documentary to convince me such is one's expectations of mainstream telly documentaries.

[Mick Harper]

The Quiz (ITV-1)

I have struggled through part one (of three). I thought I knew the story but clearly not. Even so, the revelation (to me, does everyone else know? Go on, make my day) about there being a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire underground is proving less gripping than it oughter. It may be the painfulness of watching the Soldier Hero -- which doomed my interest when it was a cause célèbre -- that may be to blame. Or the fact that I am always crap at pub quizzes despite being the world's leading polymath.

Speaking of its original incarnation I was amazed at how often I would walk into some fastidiously intellectual household to be told, "Shh, Millionaire's on." I am proud, proud I tell you, never to have watched it.

[Mick Harper]

Netflix send me an email, "Michael, what are people watching in your area?" I would find this intrusive since it implies they are also telling my neighbours what I watch except it turns out they mean 'the UK'. Which just about sums us up.

[Mick Harper]

So, both Dispatches and Quiz turned out to be mildly shocking. The lesser, first. The army major who was in Mensa. Since this is the one part of the programme that had to be true (please, God) we had better work out how a whole country could have been left all these years with the firm impression that this was the story of a dimbo married to a vixen. Except what to make of a man who refuses to let people know he is a member of Mensa, yet wears a Mensa badge on his lapel for all to see, yet nobody would ever know what his lapel badge stood for?

A hall of mirrors that begins with trying to work out where the sympathies of the programme makers lay, making a programme about how programme makers are fooled, for a television network that showed the original programme. And exactly how many and with what stipulations were all the permissions they needed to air so much realité? The judge, who has access to far more information than the rest of us ever get to see, clearly thought they were innocent. Me too, just about.

[Mick Harper]

I don't want to go all liberal on you but the most telling contribution was the criminologist who when asked the significance of why travellers' communities have fifty per cent more crime than the national average within a mile of them (or whatever, it wasn't made entirely clear) pointed out that this wasn't surprising given the age range and levels of deprivation in the average travellers' community.

Let's put it another way. If you plonked a like-for-like group of families into the South Beds countryside, would the crime rate within a mile go up by twice, thrice, or back to London-in-a-trice? But it doesn't matter. That's what the travellers have chosen -- normal like-for-like folk lose themselves within their communities, our communities -- so traveller families have to accept the consequences, fair or unfair. Which, let's face it, not even a settled traveller living within a mile of them would or should have to put up with.

But there's a bit of the rub. The slightly sinister celebrity traveller they wheeled on said one presumably true thing: the problem is caused by 'one or two' rogue traveller families, but then said a much truer thing, "These one or two families ought to be sorted out by the other families." But this is never possible when the 'other families' happen to belong to a community in which defending their own against outsiders comes way, way ahead of all other considerations. But again that's what they've chosen. So, liberals, would you please, pretty please, just this one time, remember it's not our fault.

Still, it will be interesting to see what happens now the dam wall has been breached ever so slightly.

[Mick Harper]

Behind the Bastards (Podcast)

[Mick Harper]

DEVS (BBC2)

As with all BBC productions (though this seems to be a co-production) it is a good idea ruined by a glacial pace. Someone in the hierarchy believes their products have to be meaningful and meaningful means fortissimo violins while someone looks into the middle distance for an inordinately long time. A few interesting sociological markers however:

1. All characters are non-WASPS except baddies who are all WASPS
2. Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller had sex in an unusual way in the 1950's but was destined to become a cliché on television sixty years later
3. A Russian spy has been murdered as a plot device and which has put the whole operation in jeopardy when ushering him off-site looked to be just as effective.
4. Although production values are generally high, costs have been cut whenever there is a requirement for the screen to be teeming with people. But an air of foreboding emptiness is a sci-fi trope. Apparently there's to be a lot less of us in the future even when the future is now.
5. All female characters are highly assertive and resolutely non eye-candy. Male characters follow their lead with grim doggedness.

[Mick Harper]

Van der Valk (ITV-1 & Talking Pictures)

It might be disorientating watching the same bloke fifty years apart except that this ITV one is so formulaic and the ITV one of 1972 is so weird that even switching between them allowed me to take detailed sociological notes. I don't like being fashionable but the earlier one is much the superior. Why? Well, first of all the action has to be crammed into an hour (versus a stately two) and second, there is no requirement to please an international audience by having a convoluted but easy-to-follow plotline rather than a convoluted one that required a detailed knowledge of Dutch Resistance politics (which I have) and you still couldn't follow it. But at least you felt flattered.

Barry Foster was great (noble but a bit of an arsehole) whereas who's-is-name was just summoned from the back lot because the only cop shows that have male leads nowadays are ones that are revivals of last century cop shows. Plus it was refreshing having a male-male duo to prevent will-they/won't-they syndrome as opposed to a hetero male-lezza duo to achieve the same non-effect. I left the modern version when the he(te)ro was falling for a witness, which presumably means she dunnit. Male pathologist though. Could be the start of a backlash. Usual black bloke that knows more than anyone else. But remains non-threatening.

[Mick Harper]

Reilly, Ace of Spies (Talking Pictures)

It makes a change learning history from a drama series rather than throwing one's stilettos at the screen because they're getting it wrong. However, the one bit I did know about, the Zinoviev Letter, was something I might have got wrong. All my life I have been brought up on this (a forged Soviet call to arms aimed at British workers) losing Labour the 1924 General Election but it took this programme to remind me (a) of the sheer unlikelihood of such a thing and (b) that left-wing academics are always looking for reasons why the British people so often refuse to vote for the party they vote for other than the incompetence of the party they vote for.

One shocking feature of the series is the constant desire of comely actresses to take their kit off for Reilly which requires them having to stand for several seconds full frontally facing the camera with bare breasts pondering their next move. The reason it is shocking is because while our own times are infinitely more sexually permissive than the nineteen-seventies when these programmes were made, this does not include such blatant sexploitation of women. It would be like Page Three returning to haunt us.

[Mick Harper]

Friday Night Dinner (Channel 4)

As this might be the last ever episode (and is followed by back-to-back episodes from the first series) it is worth a shout-out. The premise is always the same: two Jewish sons dutifully turn up for dinner with their parents and things go wrong. As someone who has horned in at such proceedings over the years it seems authentic enough (without the things going wrong). The basic difference between them and us (if I can put it that way) is engagement. After horning in on 76,847 non-Jewish dinners I can vouch for how boring non-engagement is. [If only they knew it's better that way.]

[Mick Harper]

The Shadows at Sixty (BBC-4)

I dozed off for a bit during this and, on waking, looked at my watch to see how much I had missed (it was very good). Only to discover that I was watching the repeat four hours later! What a beatnik. I went to the 2 I's once but only to sneer at the tourists, not because I was hoping to be the next Helen Shapiro or something. Actually I was in CND at the time and we didn't approve of pop music. All different now of course. Techno, garage, funk -- you play it, I'll dance to it.

[Mick Harper]

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (BBC-2)

Though an unwatchably twee film, the title has some resonance for me. My Uncle Reg was arrested by the Gestapo for peeling potatoes, at the German Officers Club where he worked, unusually generously and taking the result home with him for nanny and grampy. Leastways I was brought up on the story.