It was a choice between humiliation and humiliation: watching celebrities swallowing raw kangaroo anus or a Royal celebrity experiencing her "annus horribilis". I began with Ant and Dec in Australia who looked like a couple of convict throwbacks in the outback, inflicting tortures on jungle-hungry contestants in I'm a Celebrity... Get me Out of Here (ITV1).
Down to five with the ejection of Sabrina, Romeo (in this case, Stuart Manning) had lost his Juliet. The nation had voted to starve young love. For Sabrina there was the tempting prospect of a hot shower and a decent meal; for the rest the chance of a farewell fumble.
Interior designer Justin poured gallons of curdling, stinking yoghurt and buckets of mushy, maggoty strawberries over Chef (Gino) who was seated in a supermarket trolley. This was meals on wheels for dysentery lovers. As treasure seekers, they had to hunt for the hidden metal stars in the teeming rot and grot.
And that was just for hors d'oeuvres. The main course, hardly in Gino's repertoire, was fly-blown fish and offal, marinaded in E. coli sauce. And if the maggots didn't get Gino, the cockroaches would: "Somebody's nipping my willy," he cried.
I was more concerned about the appetite of the nation than about the state of Gino's genitals. By the final he was chewing crocodile tongue and downing worm stew. These were dishes straight from Macbeth's witches' cauldron. But Gino's reward was being crowned King of the Jungle. All that education and this is what we watch in our spare time.
Meanwhile, the Monarch experienced humiliation by the decade in a week of The Queen (Channel 4). Barbara Flynn portrayed the wounded woman behind the caricature when, in 1992, Princess Di leaked her story to Andrew Morton, turning the Royal Family into a living soap opera. We had believed the marriage was a fairytale. Ironically it was, but not one with a happy ending.
There was a lot of old footage, recent commentary and too-brief, dramatic re-constructions with delightful humiliations: Charles squirmed at the taped telephone conversations with Camilla in which his lurid tampon fantasies were exposed. He was in the wrong programme: Ant and Dec could have sorted it for him in the outback.
But Charles was brave enough to take an ice pick to his emotionally frozen "mummy", the glacial Queen, with the rebuke that Diana's redeeming feature was the amount of time she spent with her children, compared with his own mater.
Ten years on, in the final episode, Diana Quick played the present Queen, grieving for the loss of her sister and mother. They had gone, but Camilla hadn't. There was enough frost to prevent an ice cap melting; perhaps someone should tell the climate change campaigners.
Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.
Article originally published here: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6029952
Monday, 21 December 2009
Monday, 14 December 2009
Tune in, switch off - Getting physical
How is this for a new concept: preventative policing? No, it's not setting up Neighbourhood Watch schemes or putting extra bobbies on the beat. This is about the perfect solution to any crime. You solve it before it happens and then try to change the course of events. Imagine that burglary you might have next Thursday. The good news is that they have caught the perpetrator.
Paradox (BBC One) is a new time shift drama that plays on our credulity about the endless possibilities of technology, based on the premise that images of the future can be downloaded. We can all think of events in the past that we would like to change. With this system, you sort them in advance. Nothing beats good planning.
The programme even has a real physicist consultant who claims that if fourth and third-dimensional space combined, events normally separated would occur simultaneously. I checked this out with an A-level science class, who politely told me where to go on the space-time continuum. The writer, who claims that it is all plausible, is called Lizzie Mickery. And that is what she is taking. Not to mention the fact that it has all been done before in Minority Report.
DI Rebecca Flint (Tamzin Outhwaite) was the detective investigating an explosion that had not happened yet. It would take place in 18 hours. Start the clock ticking and the adrenalin flowing. No chance to snooze either as the flashing red numbers on screen looked just like my alarm clock.
Dr Christian King, world-renowned astrophysicist, was the informer, either a mad terrorist or a future gazer. Despite his name, he rejected all talk of God, claiming mankind to be a planetary aberration. His frisson of flirtation with Flint was as sparky as a meteorite, as he dreamed openly of making delirious love to her. Still, she didn't make an arrest, though I think she would have relished putting him in handcuffs.
He showed her photographs of the devastation, but was it a hoax? It looked like a bomb so Flint had to convince others, including her Scottish slouch of a colleague, to get stuck in. But were they in a police drama or a sci-fi thriller? Was she Dr Watson or Dr Who? If "God created economists to make weather forecasters look good," as one character quipped, these sci-fi detectives must do the same for real police officers.
Like those accidents in Casualty that you can see coming even if you are not a fortune teller, a propane gas tanker trundled along with a sleepy driver whose sat-nav had failed. In this race against the clock, time won. Flint arrived at the scene seconds before the lorry hit a railway bridge, blowing up a stationary train on the tracks above, all as predicted. I will never complain about cows on the line holding up my journey again.
But space-time continuum theory is my new excuse for missing deadlines. If I could sort those time dimensions, I would get twice as much work done. And so would Year 11. Dream on.
Ray Tarleton
Paradox (BBC One) is a new time shift drama that plays on our credulity about the endless possibilities of technology, based on the premise that images of the future can be downloaded. We can all think of events in the past that we would like to change. With this system, you sort them in advance. Nothing beats good planning.
The programme even has a real physicist consultant who claims that if fourth and third-dimensional space combined, events normally separated would occur simultaneously. I checked this out with an A-level science class, who politely told me where to go on the space-time continuum. The writer, who claims that it is all plausible, is called Lizzie Mickery. And that is what she is taking. Not to mention the fact that it has all been done before in Minority Report.
DI Rebecca Flint (Tamzin Outhwaite) was the detective investigating an explosion that had not happened yet. It would take place in 18 hours. Start the clock ticking and the adrenalin flowing. No chance to snooze either as the flashing red numbers on screen looked just like my alarm clock.
Dr Christian King, world-renowned astrophysicist, was the informer, either a mad terrorist or a future gazer. Despite his name, he rejected all talk of God, claiming mankind to be a planetary aberration. His frisson of flirtation with Flint was as sparky as a meteorite, as he dreamed openly of making delirious love to her. Still, she didn't make an arrest, though I think she would have relished putting him in handcuffs.
He showed her photographs of the devastation, but was it a hoax? It looked like a bomb so Flint had to convince others, including her Scottish slouch of a colleague, to get stuck in. But were they in a police drama or a sci-fi thriller? Was she Dr Watson or Dr Who? If "God created economists to make weather forecasters look good," as one character quipped, these sci-fi detectives must do the same for real police officers.
Like those accidents in Casualty that you can see coming even if you are not a fortune teller, a propane gas tanker trundled along with a sleepy driver whose sat-nav had failed. In this race against the clock, time won. Flint arrived at the scene seconds before the lorry hit a railway bridge, blowing up a stationary train on the tracks above, all as predicted. I will never complain about cows on the line holding up my journey again.
But space-time continuum theory is my new excuse for missing deadlines. If I could sort those time dimensions, I would get twice as much work done. And so would Year 11. Dream on.
Ray Tarleton
Monday, 7 December 2009
Tune in, switch off - Blyton blighted
If, as a child, you enjoyed Enid Blyton's books and still have happy memories of what her publisher husband, Hugh, called "bunnies, picnics and talking bloody gollywogs", please look away now. Pour yourself a ginger beer and turn straight to the back page column, or close your eyes tight.
Blyton's hundreds of novels haven't made it to the screen - probably because the characters are too flat and the plots too thin. They may work on the printed page, in children's heads, but on film they would be like half-drawn cartoons. Her own life, however, was a dramatist's dream and a therapist's nightmare.
In Enid (BBC Four) we saw her as so spiteful, selfish and naughty that in one of her own stories she would have been scolded and sent to bed without any supper. Helena Bonham Carter, a touch too beautiful but otherwise pitch-perfect, revealed her icy heart. This was Blyton blighted.
Although Blyton genuinely believed she was the guardian of children's morals, she was, in fact, a liar and a hypocrite, pretending, for example, that her mother was dead and her father a saint. Her secrets would have turned her gollywogs grey and made Big Ears's giant appendages burn.
She began telling stories to comfort her younger brothers during their parents' rows. Her father's desertion left scars only a fantasy world could hide. Embarking on her big adventure in the far away tree where writers live, she had no family contact until her mother's death 30 years later.
For Enid's emotions were frozen in time, just like her undeveloped uterus, described by her doctor as that of a 12-year-old girl. She underwent hormone treatment so she could bear her own children, but instead she lavished affection on the dog she carried around, refusing to pick up her own howling infant when she finally became a mother.
Dorothy, the midwife, calmed the baby by holding her, while Enid cuddled her pet, really believing her week-old daughter was naughty and wilful. Peremptory in manner, she sounded like Margaret Thatcher without the kind side or Joyce Grenfell without the jokes.
Her hapless chauffeur was told to get rid of his cold by the end of the week or he would be fired.
While her own children were exiled to the nursery, she hosted parties for her little fans in which success was measured by the amount of raspberry jelly consumed. Her irrational, callous behaviour towards first husband, Hugh, drove him to drink while she unjustly claimed he was having "a fandango with a floozy". Who said her vocabulary was limited?
After her affair with Kenneth Waters, she offered Hugh unlimited access to the children in return for his playing the bad guy in divorce proceedings, but it was a double-crossing deal. Then she told her publisher to sack him or she would remove her books. That's how she treated chauffeurs and husbands.
But did they all live happily ever after like the Famous Five? Not likely. You can open your eyes now.
Ray Tarleton
Blyton's hundreds of novels haven't made it to the screen - probably because the characters are too flat and the plots too thin. They may work on the printed page, in children's heads, but on film they would be like half-drawn cartoons. Her own life, however, was a dramatist's dream and a therapist's nightmare.
In Enid (BBC Four) we saw her as so spiteful, selfish and naughty that in one of her own stories she would have been scolded and sent to bed without any supper. Helena Bonham Carter, a touch too beautiful but otherwise pitch-perfect, revealed her icy heart. This was Blyton blighted.
Although Blyton genuinely believed she was the guardian of children's morals, she was, in fact, a liar and a hypocrite, pretending, for example, that her mother was dead and her father a saint. Her secrets would have turned her gollywogs grey and made Big Ears's giant appendages burn.
She began telling stories to comfort her younger brothers during their parents' rows. Her father's desertion left scars only a fantasy world could hide. Embarking on her big adventure in the far away tree where writers live, she had no family contact until her mother's death 30 years later.
For Enid's emotions were frozen in time, just like her undeveloped uterus, described by her doctor as that of a 12-year-old girl. She underwent hormone treatment so she could bear her own children, but instead she lavished affection on the dog she carried around, refusing to pick up her own howling infant when she finally became a mother.
Dorothy, the midwife, calmed the baby by holding her, while Enid cuddled her pet, really believing her week-old daughter was naughty and wilful. Peremptory in manner, she sounded like Margaret Thatcher without the kind side or Joyce Grenfell without the jokes.
Her hapless chauffeur was told to get rid of his cold by the end of the week or he would be fired.
While her own children were exiled to the nursery, she hosted parties for her little fans in which success was measured by the amount of raspberry jelly consumed. Her irrational, callous behaviour towards first husband, Hugh, drove him to drink while she unjustly claimed he was having "a fandango with a floozy". Who said her vocabulary was limited?
After her affair with Kenneth Waters, she offered Hugh unlimited access to the children in return for his playing the bad guy in divorce proceedings, but it was a double-crossing deal. Then she told her publisher to sack him or she would remove her books. That's how she treated chauffeurs and husbands.
But did they all live happily ever after like the Famous Five? Not likely. You can open your eyes now.
Ray Tarleton
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