Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, once regarded as so dangerous that even his voice on television was dubbed by an actor, played truth seeker in The Bible: A History (Channel 4). As they couldn't get King Herod to present, I suppose he was next best choice.
He talked to experts about Jesus' core teachings from the cradle to the cross, beginning with a Bible scholar's view that Jesus was probably not born in Bethlehem or even in a manger. "You're ruining Christmas," muttered Adams in one of the few light moments.
This was Adams working again on the Irish peace process - but peace for Gerry, wanting forgiveness. He read his Bible aloud, including the injunctions to love your neighbour and not to kill. Did he agree? Well, it would depend on the day of the week and the cause itself. We would have got more truth from a Robert Mugabe documentary on Gandhi.
Did he have blood on his hands? Adams claimed to be just the leader of a struggle that had caused hurt to others. So it was all the fault of the movement. That is the kind of politician's dodge that gives the term dodgy a bad name (besides, we heard that at the Chilcot inquiry).
Some, whose relatives were murdered by the IRA, told Adams that the cause was not worth more than 3,000 lives lost. What about their forgiveness? They eloquently disappointed an unrepentant Adams: their suffering would never end.
New quiz show The Bubble (BBC Two), meanwhile, saw truth seeking of a lighter kind. Frank Skinner and Victoria Coren lived in a media-free vacuum for four days without even a mobile phone, so they wouldn't know if an election had been called or whether it was snowing. The aim? To sort real news from spoofs.
David Mitchell, the tweedy-twee quiz master, much mocked by third bubble member, louder-than-life Reginald D. Jones, sported his "women don't fancy me" persona, looking as if his hair had been parted by his mother, her lipstick hastily wiped from his cheek.
But the "true" stories he presented were so obscure that the panel could have skipped the bubble. Try this one: "What was found inside a tin this week? A cat's head, an image of the Virgin Mary or a chicken tikka masala?" Why go into hiding to miss that?
Well, it was a tin that got stuck on a cat's head. Proof was a photo from some obscure parish magazine. But before you ring the RSPCA, it was not so much Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as Cat in a Spot The Tin Spoof (I made that punch-line up).
A year of Tune In: Switch Off has allowed me to watch TV in my own bubble while pretending I'm working. Now all that is left is to wipe the hard-drive of all those unviewed, unreviewed programmes. I'm pressing the delete button. Now.
Ray Tarleton
Monday, 8 March 2010
Monday, 1 March 2010
Tune in, switch off - Tears and tugs to go
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. Unless you watched Leaving Home at 8 (Channel 4) and saw for yourself the folly of Forces parents on the move, trying to create some security for their daughters by placing them in a boarding school. Ironically, these were the very families that should bring up their own children, unlike Mr and Mrs Alcoholic Asbo on the housing estate nearby whose children's life chances could be transformed by a bit of boarding.
It wasn't Dotheboys Hall. The new eight-year-olds were well looked after, offered decent meals, stimulating teaching and activities galore at Highfield in Hampshire, a top prep. But it wasn't home. Summoned to ease the pain, nurse told the little people there was no medicine for homesickness, advising them to keep busy and get really tired. My wife gives me the same advice.
Yet no amount of galloping about the stately grounds could compensate these tiny exiles who were grieving for their mothers. We used to threaten our kids with boarding school when they were particularly badly behaved. Nowadays we would be up before child protection for such cruelty.
Oddly, fathers were not mentioned in this mummy-centric yet mother-free universe. Back at home, meanwhile, the mothers moaned with that Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal look - pools of sorrow in limpid eyes. They had lost their offspring after only eight years. It's bad enough 10 years later when they clear off to university. Eight is a childhood gone.
Keeping busy, one mother briskly walked her dog. No threat of kennels: we are always kinder to animals. Brief reunions revealed mothers' hugs and fears; children's tugs and tears. And if the parents suffered more than their kids, we felt it served them right.
There were more tears on Piers Morgan's Life Stories: Gordon Brown (ITV1). Alastair Campbell was close to tears on the Andrew Marr Show because the playground bullies keep teasing his mate, Tony, about Iraq. So would old Growly Jowly copy the spin supremo's mix of sneers, tears and smears?
For this was I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Back in Here - here being Number 10. Every insult made about him was re-heated and served up by Morgan. "I've gotta get better," joked the Prime Minister as his mistakes and social ineptness were paraded like a game of pinning the tail on the donkey at a children's party. The audience laughed and the opinion polls remained obstinately static.
Time to show emotion; on cue, the Prime Minister revealed his agonies as a parent facing the death of his baby daughter, perhaps copying David Cameron who does the same routine about his son.
The camera repeatedly panned to Sarah Brown in the audience. Why was she not by his side? I may have forgotten how to teach drama, but I can remember this cheap trick heightens the focus.
If the Prime Minister was completing his self-evaluation form for Ofsted on his performance and his government's, too, I wonder what grades he would give. Now shed those tears.
Ray Tarleton
It wasn't Dotheboys Hall. The new eight-year-olds were well looked after, offered decent meals, stimulating teaching and activities galore at Highfield in Hampshire, a top prep. But it wasn't home. Summoned to ease the pain, nurse told the little people there was no medicine for homesickness, advising them to keep busy and get really tired. My wife gives me the same advice.
Yet no amount of galloping about the stately grounds could compensate these tiny exiles who were grieving for their mothers. We used to threaten our kids with boarding school when they were particularly badly behaved. Nowadays we would be up before child protection for such cruelty.
Oddly, fathers were not mentioned in this mummy-centric yet mother-free universe. Back at home, meanwhile, the mothers moaned with that Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal look - pools of sorrow in limpid eyes. They had lost their offspring after only eight years. It's bad enough 10 years later when they clear off to university. Eight is a childhood gone.
Keeping busy, one mother briskly walked her dog. No threat of kennels: we are always kinder to animals. Brief reunions revealed mothers' hugs and fears; children's tugs and tears. And if the parents suffered more than their kids, we felt it served them right.
There were more tears on Piers Morgan's Life Stories: Gordon Brown (ITV1). Alastair Campbell was close to tears on the Andrew Marr Show because the playground bullies keep teasing his mate, Tony, about Iraq. So would old Growly Jowly copy the spin supremo's mix of sneers, tears and smears?
For this was I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Back in Here - here being Number 10. Every insult made about him was re-heated and served up by Morgan. "I've gotta get better," joked the Prime Minister as his mistakes and social ineptness were paraded like a game of pinning the tail on the donkey at a children's party. The audience laughed and the opinion polls remained obstinately static.
Time to show emotion; on cue, the Prime Minister revealed his agonies as a parent facing the death of his baby daughter, perhaps copying David Cameron who does the same routine about his son.
The camera repeatedly panned to Sarah Brown in the audience. Why was she not by his side? I may have forgotten how to teach drama, but I can remember this cheap trick heightens the focus.
If the Prime Minister was completing his self-evaluation form for Ofsted on his performance and his government's, too, I wonder what grades he would give. Now shed those tears.
Ray Tarleton
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