TELEVISION Where would English humour be without farting jokes? A new series on science, Bang Goes the Theory (BBC1 Monday), will this coming week feature the sight, and the sound, of a cow passing wind. This is to aid the observation that cows are deadlier for the ecosystem than cars, since they release some 500 litres of methane a day into the atmosphere – and the world contains 1bn of them. In fact, most of that comes out through the mouth, but to start at that end would obviate the fart and the feeling that, while this may be about hard science, it’s cosily familiar.
The first episode began last week with a piece about CCTV, much blamed for having turned the UK into a police state (haven’t you noticed?). It came up with the observation that if you ducked into an un-camera’d shop, changed your clothes, put on a hat and acquired a companion, then emerged again, the secret watchers wouldn’t notice. Duh. But then it segued into an interesting piece about gait technology: Southampton University scientists are working to identify anyone, no matter how bewigged and accompanied, by walking patterns. So the police state will be still more efficient.
On next to “controversial geneticist” Craig Venter, on his yacht – he got only a few minutes, but out of these he put across the message that he was going to save the world, and the “controversial” tag went largely unexplained. Still, the programme’s items might prompt more curiosity; it’s jaunty and clear, and it stimulates.
The cavil is that too much of the programme was gone with the cows’ wind and not the science. The presenters, a young woman, Liz (the leader), and three young men, pattern their relationships on her chivvying the lads out of their messiness into doing interesting things. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Last week, one lad, Jem, manufactured a vortex that would smash a wall, which was interesting; next Monday he will make (or not) a jet pack using water jets from a fire engine, which seems pointless. But the programme did strike a poignant note, for in its cast and location in a lab, it reminded those of us who still grieve for Bonekickers of that most demented programme of 2008, a true postmodern artefact. Bang Goes the Theory does not attain that level – what could? – but it stroked the old ache.
Psychoville (BBC2 Thursday) ended, and frees up half an hour for something better. It was at once charmless and puzzling: the narrative lines, of half a dozen wierdos pursued by invisible demons, were resolved in a Gothic lunatic asylum, in which all had been abused by a sadistic matron. They had risen against her, and – as they thought – killed her, but she, in turn, rose from the grave. There was one moment of grace: when the blind millionaire soft-toy collector, finding a lost first-edition teddy bear after years of searching, hugs the battered object – then throws it into the sea. Life, he screeches, has nothing for him but the hope of an all-but-hopeless quest; for a while, his existential dilemma is solved. Looking for teddies is not Waiting for Godot, but good comedy (if comedy is what this was supposed to be) has to have something of the latter, a sense that wit, jokes and comic situations are parentheses, time out from the cosmic farce that he not busy being born is busy dying.
Another way of making life bearable is to affirm it. Monday’s episode of The Street (BBC1) was aired as the Ministry of Defence said it would fight to limit compensation to the “original injury” rather than, as its QC, Nathalie Lieven, put it, “a claimant’s condition at some later date”. Nick, serving in Afghanistan, failing to shoot in time a suicide bomber in a burka clutching a baby, has one side of his face burned and pockmarked. Invalided out, returning to his family and girlfriend, he descends into despair, hatred of self and the world – pushing away the girl as one who could not love a face more suited to a horror film. Reckless of life, he tries death – by stepping in front of a taxi. Recovering, inert on a hospital bed, he can finally hear the message from his girl: that she finds beauty in him still. They marry; life hurts, but restarts.
It was a little glib at times. Injured by an Islamist terrorist, he is nearly killed by a stricken Muslim taxi driver – who, as Nick says at his wedding, was the medium for his recovery. But its steady and in the end unsentimental concentration on Nick’s abyss and on the possibilities within him and his closest circle for self-regeneration were both aesthetically satisfying and inspirational. His “condition at a later date” had improved, from the use of his own emotional reserves.
Much of the commentary and the art inspired by the wars of the past decade or so which the west has fought – in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan – has been in search of culprits, usually to be found in Downing Street and the White House, who are seen as hypocrites at best for proclaiming that these are wars for human rights. For the military, these themes are hardly of much use. No man or woman with any power of thought who signs up now can fail to reflect on the purpose of his or her possible self-sacrifice. Joining up and staying on are their own statements of purpose. The Street, in its three episodes so far, affirms the autonomy of the ordinary man and woman. A gem of a series.
john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd
