In praise of … Jonathan Meades

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/29/jonathan-meades

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Television is awash with presenters; but it prizes authors: the people who not only front documentaries but write them, and imprint upon them their own personality and point of view. Think St Kenneth Clark of Civilisation or Jacob Bronowski. Authors are now rarer on the small screen, but one of the greats returns this week to BBC4. Unlike his predecessors, Jonathan Meades doesn't seek to be a figure of authority: his judgments are not so much magisterial as provocative. He strolls across the screen, shielded behind sunglasses, a laconic mix of Walter Benjamin and Mark E Smith. Mind you, the camera is as likely to focus on his overcoated back. But what makes Meades such a consummate TV author is a delight in language (the Millennium Dome is renamed "Museum of Toxic Waste") and a repertoire of expertise: exhausted suburbia, crappy buildings. The new series is called The Joy of Essex: it promises to be classic Meades.