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What Do We Want To Despair Of Tomorrow?
I sometimes think this country is going out of its collective mind.
During last night’s Royal Television Society Huw Wheldon Lecture, shown on BBC2, the cameras kept cutting away from the lecturer Paul Abbott to gawp at the famous faces in his audience, the aristocracy of British broadcasting.
While Abbott slated today’s TV drama for lack of ambition, overdependence on speech, overreliance on plot at the expense of character, and refusal to trust its audience with complex narrative, we glimpsed Greg Dyke grinning, Grace Wyndham Goldie looking (I thought) a little smug, and – one of the real pioneers – Admiral Sir Charles Carpendale picking his teeth and eating what appeared to be baby gherkins, though they may have been mutant grubs.
As Abbott deplored the decay and death of Brookside, was I the only person who spotted Janet Street-Porter having what looked like a stand-up row with Lieut-Commander Tommy Woodroofe, or Jana Bennett slipping off her blouse and replacing it with a glittery boob-tube and a sort of bronze torque, possibly supplied by the BBC’s Head of Torques?
No one seemed to bat an eyelid when Stanley Holloway burst into a raucous Cockney ballad. Fifty Cent and Golda Meir diverted themselves with arm-wrestling, while the Dalai Lama’s serene features were disfigured by a custard pie flung by Aleister Crowley, secretly Director of BBC3.
In the back row the Nolan Sisters were getting on famously with the Soledad Brothers. Darth Vadar was running his claws through the blue-rinsed locks of Baroness Knight of Collingtree. What I think is known as a ‘foursome’ was being attempted by the late Jimmy Clitheroe, the Wife of Bath, the Elbows-Out Painter and a chap whose face I recognised from the Rosetta Stone but couldn’t put a name to.
But why the hell did nobody raise the alarm when hundreds of Vikings charged in at the back of the room and began chopping up the furniture and raping and pillaging each other (what they call a ‘training exercise’) while flames seethed around them?
It just goes to show that today’s TV audience has become totally desensitised and there’s no point bothering to make programmes anymore. I had to spend two hours gobbling crack in a derelict warehouse to recover.
(REAL) DEATHS IN AUGUST 2005
9 August: Abe Hirschfeld, publicity-mad car park magnate whose personal website was said to read ‘like a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual entry on grandiose delusions’. c25 August: Philippe Bradshaw, artist whose studio was an unconverted ladies’ lavatory, who created a fictitious estate agency selling refurbished wartime bunkers and urinated over a huge stack of his empty beer cans in Bethnal Green, a performance entitled ‘An Inventory of Everything I Drank’.
Carping snidey-bootses have been making a good living (Take A Break book deals, free holidays in Skegness, etc.) out of moaning that I never reply to comments in my comment boxes.
Well, now I’ve replied to the whole bleedin’ lot, more or less, so they can jolly well shut up and give all the money and holidays back, can’t they? Hah.
BETTY said…
Re: the Huw Wheldon Lecture - all that I can remember is a shot of Billy Cotton Jr. in a clinch with the slightly boss-eyed redhead from the Television Toppers. "That's not what I want to see on the television" I thought to myself.
ABISHAG said…
Damn! That sounds far more gruesome than CSI Miami. Knew I should have got off my arse to change the channel!
Please tell me I didn't miss Alan Wicker doing the tango with Esther Rantzen!
PETER said…
I'm sure that was the Vernon Girls in the backing group. Me, I always fancied the one in glasses.
Great post, Toasty. (As ever.) *Jealous*
THE MERKIN said…
Through my absinthe-induced blindness, I think I saw the short one from the Chuckle Brothers engaging in some light fellatio with Sir Trevor McDonald. Or was that the after-show party? BONG....
AIMLESS said…
Was that a bang I heard - or a whimper?
SURLY GIRL said…
it was a bong, i think.
he's gawn orf again. hasn't he?
AIMLESS said…
He's off like a spaniel that's cleared the fence.
AIMLESS added…
Or did you mean he's 'gone off' like cream that's been left on the sideboard for a week? That would apply, too.
TOASTY replied…
Too right, mate. My Personal Hygiene Issues were becoming quite pressing, so I thought I’d spend a fortnight in a car wash, being sprayed with a mix of eau de Cologne and sulphuric acid, but it hasn’t had quite the effect I was hoping for.
Abishag, it wasn’t Esther Rantzen, it was that woman from Eastenders who lost her septum in a cocaine-related mishap. She wasn’t looking too brilliant – whole head seems to have gone now.
Peter, I hope you realise the one in glasses is now known to have been Alan Bennett in drag?
Betty, it’s not enough to sit there and be discontented. You should set up a crusading organisation to drive this filth from our screens. That way you could be on telly every day yourself – wouldn’t that be something? You might even be groped by Billy Cotton Jr (to quote Sebastian Flyte, ‘I think it’s more or less compulsory at Cannes’).
Legal note: as far as I know, Billy Cotton Jr has never groped anyone whatsoever, least of all me, so put that writ back in your pocket and untie me immediately, your Worshipfulness.
Furthermore I do not for one moment doubt that the woman whose name I can’t remember has now stopped doing whatever it was that she previously did that had the unfortunate side-effect of depriving her of her septum, if, indeed, she ever did any such thing, which is not admitted, so God save the King, huzzah.
And Merkin, if you can’t tell the difference between Sir Trevor McDonald and the after-show party, it may be time to do a quick septum check.
Anyway, once more unto the thingummyjig, dear friends, or close the wall up with something or other – plastic wood, maybe, if they’re still making it.
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