The vile bodies of the waste-of-spacers

In Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1930) the Bright Young Things – a pack of rich, aristocratic waste-of-spacers – briefly find themselves living in a house together. Helpless, squabbling and fearful, they fall to pieces and escape back to pampered dependency. A new series of Young, Dumb and Living off Mum (BBC3 Sundays) borrows this conceit and democratises it: the nine waste-of-spacers who are put into a house, each with an unemployed person’s allowance, are a cross-section of parent-parasitic late teens and early 20s, each more sponging, whining, deluded, solipsistic and repellent than the other. They are children only a mother could love. Mothers were shown doling out money, washing and ironing clothes, providing food and, in one case when one of these wasters was shown to have cheated an employer whom the programme had organised to give them a taste of work, flatly denying that the precious child had done anything wrong.

A small but significant number of children of African immigrants in the UK are ruined in another way: Despatches (C4 Mondays) showed that, from very young, they can be suspected of being witches and painfully exorcised. Despatches is an uneven programme, but at its best, as in this case, it has a great heart and the skill to go with it. It used a trainee journalist of African family, in her early 20s but passing for mid-teens, to complain of various ailments and filmed the result with hidden cameras. The pastors to whom she went for help instantly diagnosed witchcraft, and subjected her to raving sessions in which they held her face down and beat the air above it with their hands, an exercise for which they charge a large fee. The programme revealed that the guardians of eight-year-old Victoria Climbie, who tortured her to death over a prolonged period and were convicted of her murder in 2001, had thought she was possessed.

After such freaks and horrors, The World’s Squarest Teenagers (C4 Sundays) was a programme of calm observation, following some young Amish men and women as they met Londoners, mainly the Idowu family whose 14-year-old, David, was knifed to death two years ago in south London. Hearing Grace, the mother, speak out against the rash of knife crimes in the area, the young Amish murmured that nothing like that could happen in their communities: like Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms (pronounced “whinnims”) in Gulliver’s Travels, they have little concept of lying – or crime, or brutality – and visibly reel when confronted with London society and reality. They (the Amish) seemed balanced and dutiful, earnest and polite: they got by with their coevals – the Idowu family’s kids and their friends – with a lot of laughter, but you could feel the tension, and the mixture of envy of the materialistic lifestyle and relief that they were not living it.

The BBC’s new reading of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock, BBC1 Sundays) takes Conan Doyle’s first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, and reworks it round a contemporary “consulting detective” and his obliging flatmate, Dr Watson – the latter, like the original, just back from Afghanistan, still steeped in the blood of the British over 120 years later. The skeleton of the story is preserved, together with Holmes’ refreshingly honest arrogance about his extraordinary deductive powers when compared with blundering policemen.

I had thought, when it opened with clips from the (contemporary) Afghan war, that it would be a clichéd thing, but Benedict Cumberbatch is a powerful Holmes, while Martin Freeman’s Watson manages to make the lame doctor’s adherence to one who offers him little in the way of conventional friendship explicable. Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, plays a larger part than he does in the canon, and is presented as a kind of superstate security supremo, all suavity, with a glamorous girl aide always on a BlackBerry whom Watson cannot make interested in him. This is less a new interpretation than a homage: fine.

At the other extreme from repellent youth – reluctant age, the sixth of Shakespeare’s (As You Like It) ages, “with spectacles on nose and pouch on side”, as the boomers reach their mid-60s and wonder how to get through the seventh and eighth decade with dignity and even a little happiness. Joan Bakewell, who confessed, incredibly, to being 77, guided us through a Panorama (BBC1 Mondays) which refused to forecast misery, relying on indomitable 80-somethings who greeted the day as the first of the rest of their lives. It featured the idea of complexes in which the elderly, having sold their homes, could purchase flats and count on care in them when needed. Our inventiveness, said Bakewell, will see us through the ageing bulge ... yet the end will come.

It has not yet come to The Last of the Summer Wine (BBC1 Sundays) though this new season – the 31st: it began in 1973 – is billed as its last. The ageing mischief-makers are sexier now or, rather, the women they try to placate or escape from are randier: there were no less than three trysts in the bushes in the first episode. It’s also slightly multicultural: Entwhistle, the electrician, played by Burt Kwouk, is of Chinese descent, and offers Chinese medicine as a sideline. Roy Clarke, who invented the series, still – at 80 – writes it, and will write it, in its seventh glorious age, into mere oblivion.

john.lloyd@ft.com

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