TV and Radio
The Sunday Times February 26, 2006
Television: AA Gill: Where to get your TV kicks
The only problem with a tropical paradise miles from the hugger-mugger hurly-burly of the great grind is that it is cut off from news of the hugger-mugger, hurly-burly of the great grind. All we hacks suffer from an addiction to news. I have been known to buy papers in languages I don’t speak, in the desperate hope I might absorb some information by osmosis. I always imagine I can go cold turkey, that the cornucopia of sybaritism will detract from the dearth of news, but it never does. I am weak-willed and creep off to catch a fix of satellite.
For the past week, my only hit has been the BBC’s rolling world-news service. Desperate though I was for almost anything current, this was almost worse than nothing. It has been quite some time since I seriously watched the BBC’s international output, and to say it’s eye-bulgingly, vein-poppingly, irredeemably stupidly God-awful is actually to be diplomatically reserved. BBC World News makes Fox sound like the sermon on the mount. It’s not just that it’s formatted as a pastiche of mid-Atlantic, visually portentous kitsch, with the strutting Tourette’s of repeated station idents; and that it produces news with all the energy, purpose and fluency of a constipated whippet; or even that the nuggets of content are squidged in between the garish furniture of braindead graphics and pointless graffiti. What was most depressingly sad was the upbeat, vanilla content of its reporting and investigation, as if it was all made by a committee from some timid, people-pleasing global development agency.
There was a Middle Eastern strand that reported on how happy Saudi Arabian women were with the great strides they had made in the workforce and being given driving licences, nearly. I am not making that up. The overall effect is of a news purveyor whose overriding concern is not to offend or spoil anyone’s breakfast. It competes with other rolling news channels by being as similar to the middle-of-the-road template as possible: all information is relative, all stories have a heart-warming angle. It also has ugly gobbets of advertising and commercial sponsorship.
At this point, I should remind you that the BBC is the biggest and richest broadcaster in the world, far larger than any American network. It also has the largest news-gathering organisation in the universe, with an un- rivalled heritage and wealth of experience; and on top of all that, it has a unique form of funding that allows it to be both secure and independent. At a time when international news is being strong-armed and censored by commercial, religious and political pressure, from Google in China to fundamentalists everywhere else, there is a desperate need and desire for authoritative, implacable, touchstone news and a forum for unguarded comment, and the BBC is one of the few broadcasters — perhaps the only one — with the tools, ability and respect to provide it. It should set the gold standard other broadcasters aspire to. Instead, it seems to be aspiring to catch up with the worst of the commercial newsmongers. BBC World News is nationally and professionally deeply shaming.
I returned to one of the dullest weeks on television we have had for ages. It will come as no surprise to you that critics watch most programmes on tapes or discs, so I settled down to view The Apprentice (Wednesday, BBC2), the new series of the franchise of Donald Trump’s American original, with Alan Sugar — a small, frenetic, stubbly haemorrhoid, who comes over as a plutocratic Abanazar — shouting at a covey of gelled and power-suited young Aladdins, who imagine they are taking part in a headhunting contest for a great job when in fact they are cheap victims for a reality-TV game show. Which doesn’t say much for their nous right from the start. In fact, they all appear to have been grabbed from the staff room of PC World.
As I sat through it quite happily, and just before the denouement of the first episode, the screen went blank. They had done it on purpose. We called the production company and asked what they had done with my happy ending, and why send a television critic a programme without one? They said they would tell us what happened over the phone. Can you imagine a theatre critic having to call the RSC to find out how the play turned out? Anyway, a nice chap in our office got the lowdown and repeated it all back to me — and, actually, listening to it was far more exciting than watching. So I suggest you don’t bother: just find someone on the bus who has, and get them to tell you what happened.
If you haven’t seen it already, stay in one afternoon to watch Deal or No Deal (Mon-Sat, C4). This is a game show that demands the mental skill and dexterity of a fridge magnet, that has contestants as plain and unexciting as a chiropodist’s waiting room, and a studio audience who would defy Tommy Cooper and Jessica Rabbit to warm them up. It also has zero viewer participation or empathy. And if all that wasn’t enough, it’s got Noel Edmonds as well. And the last thing it has is that it is utterly compelling, the most brilliant format for a gameshow since Michael Miles’s Take Your Pick.
It is based entirely on chance and choosing boxes in which there are printed amounts of money. Periodically, an unseen adjudicator offers the contestant some cash to stop playing. If that doesn’t sound utterly enticing, it’s because I am describing it badly. I would defy anyone to make it sound anything other than terminally dull. But the brilliance is that, though the process is identical in every episode, the plot is quite different. Most gameshows boil down to the binary excitement of winning or losing; this one has an internal tempo that builds and twists like a Hitchcock plot. It’s just that, instead of Anthony Perkins, we get Noel, with his mum’s hair on his head and her bikini wax on his chin. I’ve had to forbid myself from watching any more. It’s like putting heroin in the TV remote in the middle of the afternoon.