Historians are the Vikings of television presenting. Competition for the past sends them out to plunder other people’s specialities. Art historians are more like Lindisfarne monks, diligently illuminating. If they looked out of the scriptorium window last week, they’d have seen the longship of Simon Schama come to plunder their relics.
There have been a lot of pursed lips, flicked forelocks and meaningfully cutting postures struck over Simon Schama’s Power of Art (Friday, BBC2), his new big series on painting. In fairness, he does hove from the arty-crafty wing of history, more interested in creation than desecration. His timelines are always halfway to go rather than half-spent, and he has written pyrotechnically about the high beauty of the Low Countries.
I am a fan of Schama because he’s an enthusiast, and history has too many I-told-you-so cynics with 20/20 revision. His television persona is part Candide and part Dorothy. It’s infectiously watchable. This series was billed as a look at the pictures that had blown up his skirt. Fine, that’s fine. We like skirt-blowing on TV; desert island paintings. But there was a little sag of disappointment that we started with Caravaggio. Everybody does Caravaggio, he’s very accessible, very today, very punk. His life is dramatic. He was a murderer who died on the run. It’s often assumed he was also gay, though Schama chose not to go there.
What we were offered were his deeply chiaroscuro, hysterically calm paintings of haut Catholic suffering, which were used as illustrations for his life. This did two things: it elevated his grubby psychotic story to a biblical grandeur it doesn’t deserve, and it diminished the pictures to being allegorical snapshots in a diary. Nobody ever says Corot’s landscapes are evocative of the calm, dull life he lived. Nobody says Giorgione’s pictures are allegories of his sex life, because we don’t even know if Giorgione is actually his name. This programme was the historical art version of Heat magazine: a breathless, prurient, easy-listening gossip, delivered with multiple exclamation marks and the pictures dropped in like paparazzi shots. It pandered to the pustular curse of dumb celebrity, smeared over the Renaissance. Caravaggio is Pete Doherty.
Nobody came out of this looking good, not Caravaggio, not Schama, not the Catholic church, not even the Virgin Mary, but I expect it will sell a lot of books of the easy-watching compilation type. The point of these authored, visually clotted documentaries is really to be infomercials to advertise instant coffee-table tomes.
Like Agadir, the Fashoda incident and the second Ashanti war, Suez is destined to settle into the sediment of footnote history and to be of interest only to nerdy postgraduates in search of a thesis. This is the 50th anniversary of the final splenetic, blimpish act of global entitlement of empire, and it’s probably your last chance to find out what all the fuss was about. And there really was a huge fuss. Suez divided the nation between those who’d make a new Britain and those who wished to cling on to the wreckage of the old one. My father risked his job at the BBC to hand out leaflets and got spat on and thumped by livid men in bowler hats.
The Suez debacle was started by, and finished, the impossibly dashing war hero Anthony Eden, who despite all his promise turned out to be unstable and impulsive. He’d spent four decades waiting in the wings for the doddering, drunk and demented Churchill to step down, and then when he got the big job, he overreacted with a typically Churchillian flourish, which was in an equally Churchillian manner: vainglorious and hopelessly wrong. The old man himself drily commented that he wouldn’t have gone in, but once in, he damned well wouldn’t have got out.
Today, looking back, Suez looked desperate, racist, vindictive and delusional. I doubt if you could find a single contemporary politician who would defend it. But it also looks strangely prophetic. In the Middle East, only the goalposts have moved, and what was a disastrous national humiliation can now be seen as a bitter dose of good luck. Imagine if it had worked, if Britain, France and Israel had taken back the canal; if we were still there, trying to defend it; if the empire loyalists had been encouraged to tighten their grip on the miserable tatters of empire.
The documentary Suez (Monday, BBC2) was well researched, well written and well constructed and, well, Eden was performed by James Fox. It was, though, essentially a radio programme, and it reminded me there is a danger that BBC4 is becoming the best wireless on TV.
The first episode of the final Prime Suspect (Sunday, ITV1) was about as good as television ever gets. If you watch this and you still think there’s nothing worth watching, then do yourself a favour: bin the box and get a guppy, because you’re never going to understand TV. This is the seventh Tennison mystery, stretching back over years. As a collection, it’s been brilliantly sustained, and this is mostly down to Helen Mirren’s performance. Her heroic decline into the bottle and loneliness is Shakespearian, except that Shakespeare never wrote parts this meatily tragic for women.
This final act managed to encompass so many shades of emotion, so much more than the taut fear and suspense we expect from detective fiction. Every facet of the story was allowed to breathe, was given space to evolve without losing momentum or grip. It was textbook plotting. But, still, at the heart was the simple, heartbreaking character of Tennison, poignant without ever begging pity. There was not a single sentimental look, not a false gesture or unconvincing word, and it was a nice touch to bring back the retired nemesis of the late Tom Bell.
One of the abiding gifts of drama on the small screen is that the audience grows with the characters. They change, and we change with them. Not film nor theatre, nor books, nor the endlessly interactive web have such a symbiotic relationship with their audience. It is a great pleasure to watch and review something as good as this, which must be nice for Andy Harries, the producer who was also responsible for the damp Twiglet that was the terminal episode of Cracker the other week. Oh, being a producer is a critical rollercoaster.
And, finally, from the best to the very, very, very worst. Ladies and gents and kiddies, I bring you Cirque de Celebrité (Sunday, Sky One). It’s not a circus, they’re not celebrities and it’s not French-Canadian. What it is is beneath and beyond even postmodern irony with the help of hallucinogenic drugs, and it is also another milestone in that Homeric saga that is Ruby Wax and her attempt as a presenter to overcome all of the worst formats in the history of the world. For a time, she was neck and neck with Paul Ross, but he seems to have fallen under a gameshow. Ruby is now out there on her own. An achievement no less laudable than Dame Helen’s. Go, Ruby, go! You are the drunk man’s Richard Hammond.
