TELEVISION The ambiguities of community were seen through many televisual prisms this past week, most powerfully in Channel 4’s prestige offering Endgame (Monday). It told the story of the secret talks that preceded South African president FW de Klerk’s announcement, in 1990, that Nelson Mandela was to be freed. The story was told well, with finely pitched performances and a narrative line that was clear without being over-simplified. Tension was maintained by intercutting the negotiations with the dirty tricks employed by the South African secret service. The hero of the drama was less Mandela (played by Clarke Peters) than Thabo Mbeki, the main ANC negotiator, who was to succeed Mandela as president and to whom the programme lent most lustre.
At one point in the talks, Willie Esterhuyse, the Afrikaner philosophy professor who had put himself in obloquy’s way by agreeing to lead the white side in talks with the ANC, said to Mbeki: “Our fear stems from the deep-rooted belief that one day we will be punished for all the terrible wrongs we have inflicted,” the most fundamental of which was the creation of a community that excluded the majority. To this, Mbeki countered with the ANC vision: “If we are to win our freedom we must banish bitterness,” an explicit commitment to creating a community that included the former oppressors, with all their guilt.
The real Mbeki lost much of his lustre in his presidency. Now it is up to Jacob Zuma, Mbeki’s successor, to prove that he can lead an effective and clean government. It lent poignancy to Endgame that the liberation it charted and celebrated should now seem so far away and its results so contested. Yet it was one of the great events of those few marvellous years at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, when, briefly, the illusion went abroad that the world itself could be a community.
Scheduled against it (and receiving some five times more viewers) was a drama called Compulsion (ITV1). The drama was loosely based on Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean play The Changeling, which tells of the obsessive attraction felt by a woman for the man who murders a prospective husband chosen, against her wishes, by her father. Transposed to a wealthy Indian family in today’s London, it showed Anjika, a Cambridge graduate, rebelling against her father’s choice and gradually falling under the sexual spell of Flowers, a chauffeur. Anjika, betraying her community of upper-class Hindus, has Flowers get rid of her father’s choice – then begins an affair with him before going on to kill him. Contrary to her equivalent’s end in The Changeling, Anjika gets away with it – murdering Flowers and marrying her (non-Indian) college boyfriend. It was neatly done but shallow.
Inspector George Gently (Sunday, BBC1) came back with the usual accoutrement of a broken heart (his wife died), which adds to his years of investigation a deeper sense of life’s tragedy and a greater insight into the springs of crime. It is hard to argue that we need another cop series but this one, instantly popular, has a small success in evoking its 1960s setting through a representation of the choppiness of the culture, as one tide ebbed and another surged.
The story told of two victims of sexual abuse in a wartime children’s home, evoking the overblown allegations of murder and torture in Jersey last year. But it wove the tale into the local community and in doing so managed to express a truth about communities: that they can, when under threat, create repressive conspiracies against the truth. Martin Shaw’s Gently, all lugubrious meditation and unillusioned patience, contrasts nicely with his eager, puppyish sergeant. It is yet another, but pleasant, variation on the theme of teacher-pupil that tends to run through these series, with the older man elevated to the status of a Japanese sensei, one who has attained expertise and knowledge through long experience and maturity of character.
Martin Clunes’s trip round the Islands of Britain (Sunday, ITV1) is occasionally interesting about communities. His first selection, of islands off the north of Scotland, shows people able and willing to welcome “incomers”. But Clunes’s curiosity, or that of the programme, is limited. He mentions, for example, that the Wee Free sect (the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland) is strong on Harris but eschews further examination of a group whose determined cleaving to a rigorous faith makes it, one would think, more worthy of examination than the woman who runs a kite-buggy business or the man who takes tourists to shoot deer (which Clunes says, too often, he does not wish to do).
A travelogue of this kind needs such illuminations and/or a guide – such as Billy Connolly in his Journey to the Edge of the World (ITV1, February) – who is entertaining in himself. Clunes is amiable – too amiable, too prone to that annoying English habit of seeking laughter in everything, without discrimination as to whether or not it actually has some comic substance.
He’s doubly unfortunate: his revival of Reggie Perrin (BBC1, Friday) patently lacks the demented quality that Leonard Rossiter brought to the part in the 1970s. He can do mournful self-deprecation, and there is some comedy in it – but not enough.
john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd
