TELEVISION Fawning does not become television but Mandela at 90 (BBC2, Saturday) not only fawned but – filming in the year leading up to his 90th birthday – showed others doing it, over and over again: Oprah Winfrey, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown all want that photograph. Nelson Mandela is the moral touchstone of our age: who else so demonstrably chose conciliation over conflict, when he had such cause for bitterness? But still, here is a man of flesh and fallibility, raised in the life-or-death school of the ANC when it was a guerrilla movement; the only hint was when an aide, daring, said he had been “what some would call a terrorist”.
One wanted to know more, to make up one’s own mind as to his greatness. The programme seemed to attest to the view, popular among radical thinkers, that we must bear the guilt of centuries of oppression of darker-skinned races – and thus need repeated absolution by means of the worship of figures from Nelson Mandela to Barack Obama. It seems a bad way to get a better world, which Mandela, in his stolid, uncharismatic way of speaking, kept insisting was still his business. “Don’t you think they exaggerate about me?” he says at one point. “But,” says his wife, Graca Machel, “they need to celebrate greatness.” Among those in his revolving court was Morgan Freeman, who is already tipped to play him in a forthcoming biopic. Thus does the man see his mythmakers study his style.
Myth is central to the history of Scotland and Neil Oliver’s five-part History of Scotland, which ended last Saturday (BBC2), had begun with the bold claim that it would dispense with mist and myth, and “find the real Scotland”. No historian worth the hiring would claim that of any history, and the series raised questions. Why did it end with the rule of James VI of Scotland and I of England (didn’t Scotland continue after the Union of the Crowns, indeed after the Union of the Parliaments a century later)? Did the series give too central a place to Scots-English hostilities, too little to the factiousness of the Scots themselves? And did it not need a better account of the revolutionary nature of 16th-century Calvinism – a movement sacrificed to the admittedly operatic story of Mary, Queen of Scots? Still, I admired the BBC for putting out a didactic programme in the middle of a Saturday evening, and sympathised with the filmmakers, whom poverty had reduced to endless shots of hills, glens and ruins, with Oliver striding about them like a bonnie laddie.
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A more recent revolution was celebrated by the evergreen South Bank Show (ITV1, Sunday): what happened to British comedy under the influence of the Cambridge Footlights, the university club whose alumni include Peter Cook, John Bird, John Cleese, Stephen Fry, Griff Rhys Jones, David Frost, David Mitchell and then some. It had enough snippets of “the best of ... ” to show the quality and the occasional genius, but not so many that they overwhelmed a narrative that pointed to a tradition set by grammar school boys (nearly all) who wanted to send up the public school Cambridge, and did so by ferociously competitive gag-writing and sketch-acting. To be sure, there was much self-parodying luvvieness about the reminiscers. But it did what SBS does best: illuminate a bit of the culture.
Two new shows to watch, I’d suggest, with a sceptical eye but an open mind. The Old Guys (BBC1, Saturdays) has two male pensioners sharing a bungalow and ... that’s it. It is promising, conjuring up variously Waiting for Godot and One Foot in the Grave. It throws all on the writing and acting – and that is probably good enough.
There is a bit too much of a reliance on weak bladders and weaker memories, but the first at least produced a fine ending, as the two, bladders bursting, are revealed peeing in their hostess’s kitchen sink. Roger Lloyd Pack is a bit too noisy as the shades-of-68-er Tom, but the formidable Clive Swift is pitch-perfect as the more conventional Roy – while Jane Asher, slender as ever, is believable as a lusted-for neighbour and Katherine Parkinson plays Tom’s daffy daughter very daffily.
Whitechapel (ITV1, Monday) is a three-parter that has the omnipresent Rupert Penry-Jones as fast-tracking Detective Inspector Chandler, who pitches himself with casual arrogance into a serial killer mystery in Whitechapel. He’s maladroit, snobbish and obsessed with cleanliness, yet he beats the contemptuous street-wise detectives he inherits to the realisation that the murders are being staged in imitation of those done 120 years before by Jack the Ripper.
The mechanism creaks more than a bit, but Chandler’s insecure fastidiousness contrasts nicely with the gang of louche toughs in the homicide squad, and his detective sergeant, played with a perpetual cynical snarl by Ray Miles, is a craftsman’s piece of work. Both Whitechapel and The Old Guys may mature or may go off the tracks: it’s worth judging which.
john.lloyd@ft.com
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