TELEVISION The sexualisation of our media is so commonplace we barely notice it. A male deodorant promotes its “pulling power”. Every starry occasion, Emmies, Baftas, Oscars, is also a most-breast-showing competition. Clothes catalogues approach soft porn. After a while, it fades. Erotic wallpaper is, soon, more wallpaper than erotic.
Thus the first episode of a new comedy series, Horne and Corden (BBC3, Tuesdays), starring two hyperactive actors, had sketches that featured a gay war correspondent, a class for 11-year-olds in how to do a proper graffito of an erect penis and a full-on sex scene in which the man kept gasping “I’m coming”, but never did. Thus, too, the last episode in the series of The Old Guys (BBC1, Saturdays) had Roy and Tom seek late sexual joy through their patronage of a lovely Belarusian prostitute – both falling in love, exiting the series by flying to Minsk, whence the object of their passion had returned.
The conviction of the English of their talent for making comedy from sexual embarrassments is well founded. It might be possible to trace it back to the Shakespearean buffoons who felt themselves irresistible – Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Bottom and the tragicomic Malvolio – or to the voluptuaries and ageing suitors in Restoration comedy. But it’s probably more recent – stemming from the discovery, in the early part of last century, of a comedy gold mine in flouting Victorian standards and in playing tunes on the absurdities of lust. If the fun in seeing someone slip on a banana skin is in the sudden reduction of a haughty biped to the status of a crawling animal, so sex, through the English prism, is also the comic animalisation of the rational human. For all our cleverness, we are goats and monkeys.
The Old Guys, which I had my doubts about, has come through well and certainly should return. It’s still a little overscripted – too many words. But last episode’s mixing of Tom and Roy’s winter passion with Tom’s anxious questioning of a young vicar – whom his endlessly hopeful daughter is trying to seduce – as to whether or not God will tolerate lust if it is coated with love, produced fun in two registers – one, worries as to sexual potency and, two, worries as to the eternal life. As for Horne and Corden, their manic dedication to milking their situations also makes for bursts of laughter – but it is too febrile for deeper enjoyment.
Storyville: The Children’s Ward (BBC4, Monday) was a lingering film, shot in Sudan and Afghanistan, showing with the minimum of comment the suffering of children, whether (in Sudan) with a chronic heart disease or (Afghanistan) maimed by land mines. It was slow, meditative and unmawkishly moving: the distinctive character of the kids was of stoicism and even cheerfulness in the face of horrific injuries – amply shown – and slim hopes of survival. A conversation between Afghan lads on their injuries, in which a seven-year-old narrated to his rapt friends a story of picking up a mine, taking it home to play with, then one day dropping a magnet on it and making it explode, was as dramatic a piece of dialogue as I have seen.
The film was built round the work of the Italian organisation Emergency, clearly deeply admirable, although the BBC-trained viewer in me looked for and missed a certain distance between the makers and the subject. The result was worth the loss of it, though.
The largest dramatic event on television in March is Red Riding (Channel 4, Thursdays), a grim and confusing trilogy on the corruption of the presumably fictionalised West Yorkshire police force in the 1970s and 1980s. I wrote last week that one of its many puzzles, for me the dominant one, was how far the makers of more than six hours of television drama believed they were lifting the lid on a cauldron of corruption and brutality – of a foulness that which would have done the Stalin-era KGB proud – or, instead, making a dystopian vision of what might happen should a police force rot from the head. The statements of David Peace, the novelist from whose quartet of the same name these films are taken, would seem to point to the first – together with the naming of a real police force and the use of real events, such as the Yorkshire Ripper’s bloody career and eventual arrest.
This week’s episode had the Ripper, a small but effective part, but focused on a senior detective brought in from another force by the Home Office to expose the West Yorkshire rottenness. He was framed, terrorised and finally killed by the guardians of the illicit business-cum-terrorist grouping that the senior ranks of West Yorkshire had become. The finely crafted performances are put to the service of an obscure plot line and a vision stuck in a deliberate refusal to make up its mind between exposé and allegory. A pity, in the end, that such tremendous art should be crippled by such a confused politico-social view.
john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd
