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| Rewind TV: The Great British Bake Off Easter Masterclass; Our Girl; Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a Day; Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise | Rewind TV: The Great British Bake Off Easter Masterclass; Our Girl; Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a Day; Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise |
| (6 months later) | |
| The Great British Bake Off Easter Masterclass (BBC2) | iPlayer | The Great British Bake Off Easter Masterclass (BBC2) | iPlayer |
| Our Girl (BBC1) | iPlayer | Our Girl (BBC1) | iPlayer |
| Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a Day (BBC2) | iPlayer | Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS in a Day (BBC2) | iPlayer |
| Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise (BBC2) | iPlayer | Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise (BBC2) | iPlayer |
| I think the wheels might finally be starting to come off the nostalgia bus. The Great British Bake Off Easter Masterclass must have seemed such a good idea back in August, when the sun still lived somewhere in the sky and there was, oh we crazy human fools, such a gentle assumptive hope of spring. The problem at macro level is that the BBC can't see a dying horse without dearly wanting to flog its aching, wrinkled withers while somehow at the same time, in a hugely misguided case of category error, trying to milk it. Worse: the Beeb will first send out overbubbly press releases about Dobbin's rude health, reclassify him as a unicorn, sneakily thwock a bolt into his forehead while lying about milk yield and tethering him to a sinking barge, and simultaneously commission a few seasonal specials focusing on his excitingly fine health, then have to hold a chin-stroking inquest into why, after all that effort, they still simply have a canal-ful of dead horse. | I think the wheels might finally be starting to come off the nostalgia bus. The Great British Bake Off Easter Masterclass must have seemed such a good idea back in August, when the sun still lived somewhere in the sky and there was, oh we crazy human fools, such a gentle assumptive hope of spring. The problem at macro level is that the BBC can't see a dying horse without dearly wanting to flog its aching, wrinkled withers while somehow at the same time, in a hugely misguided case of category error, trying to milk it. Worse: the Beeb will first send out overbubbly press releases about Dobbin's rude health, reclassify him as a unicorn, sneakily thwock a bolt into his forehead while lying about milk yield and tethering him to a sinking barge, and simultaneously commission a few seasonal specials focusing on his excitingly fine health, then have to hold a chin-stroking inquest into why, after all that effort, they still simply have a canal-ful of dead horse. |
| At the micro level the problem was twofold. First: devoid of the golden sheltering blanket of peppy vim which Mel and Sue ever bring, and of any of the entertainingly sectionable contestants, it was just Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. I know I'm no oil painting, unless one fashioned by the unhappy six-year-old twins of Hieronymus Bosch, when they were drunk, but dear Mary and Paul simply looked, well… old (not her fault, it happens), and chubby (not his fault, it happens, after all those cakes). Crucially, though, there was desperately little fun, or warmth, between the two. After a while, we were just watching a nice wrinkly person and a nice increasingly fat person put things into an oven, separately. After a while, it was like watching paint rise. | At the micro level the problem was twofold. First: devoid of the golden sheltering blanket of peppy vim which Mel and Sue ever bring, and of any of the entertainingly sectionable contestants, it was just Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. I know I'm no oil painting, unless one fashioned by the unhappy six-year-old twins of Hieronymus Bosch, when they were drunk, but dear Mary and Paul simply looked, well… old (not her fault, it happens), and chubby (not his fault, it happens, after all those cakes). Crucially, though, there was desperately little fun, or warmth, between the two. After a while, we were just watching a nice wrinkly person and a nice increasingly fat person put things into an oven, separately. After a while, it was like watching paint rise. |
| Second, and this is the point: I love cookery shows, and weekend mornings wouldn't be the same without James Martin. But with the good ones you can at least write down the things you might need to make the thing, and realise you can get them nearby, and afford them. Here, for a hot cross bun, a simnel cake and some pastel de nata, you needed, at my last count, two or three of those sexy but ruinously expensive £380 K-blade Kenwood mixers, seven not-cheap sets of differently shaped things to cut lard, 143 baking tins, 12 differing condoms through which to pipe purple sugar, a personal postcoded lake of clarified butter, a floured table half the size of Wisconsin and, presumably, some mug to wash up the whole damned kebabble after. I looked at the eventual tariff (cash and elbow grease and lemony Cif) with the existential horror you'd experience if you looked in the mirror and suddenly realised you'd been gene-spliced with George Osborne. Last time I checked, you could fly to Lisbon on Sleazyjet for £54, get that lovely tram along the waterfront to Belém, sit outside that pretty tiled place which originally made these pastries, not have toes splintering through frostbite, and eat the lovely things for so much less. | Second, and this is the point: I love cookery shows, and weekend mornings wouldn't be the same without James Martin. But with the good ones you can at least write down the things you might need to make the thing, and realise you can get them nearby, and afford them. Here, for a hot cross bun, a simnel cake and some pastel de nata, you needed, at my last count, two or three of those sexy but ruinously expensive £380 K-blade Kenwood mixers, seven not-cheap sets of differently shaped things to cut lard, 143 baking tins, 12 differing condoms through which to pipe purple sugar, a personal postcoded lake of clarified butter, a floured table half the size of Wisconsin and, presumably, some mug to wash up the whole damned kebabble after. I looked at the eventual tariff (cash and elbow grease and lemony Cif) with the existential horror you'd experience if you looked in the mirror and suddenly realised you'd been gene-spliced with George Osborne. Last time I checked, you could fly to Lisbon on Sleazyjet for £54, get that lovely tram along the waterfront to Belém, sit outside that pretty tiled place which originally made these pastries, not have toes splintering through frostbite, and eat the lovely things for so much less. |
| I'm not saying that we shouldn't cook. Learn. Have a few handed-down gifts from hard-graft analogue eras. Personally, I hope and suspect that human courtesy will be the main survivor. But this desperation to cling to pasts – the BBC is soon flogging out something about the Great British Sew-In, when we all know that no one in Europe under 50 sews or wants to, excepting two of the Queen's more outrageous valets and six keen amateur pederasts in eastern Belgium – is now clogging our lives. Cupcakes. Sewing. Pies. Pinnies. Fat pies swimming in suet instead of meat. Beetroot. Rickets. The love of going to the seaside to sit in a car wearing a newspaper-hat and moan about the blackies. Typhoid. Old maids cycling somewhere through dawn mists to tell lies about someone. | I'm not saying that we shouldn't cook. Learn. Have a few handed-down gifts from hard-graft analogue eras. Personally, I hope and suspect that human courtesy will be the main survivor. But this desperation to cling to pasts – the BBC is soon flogging out something about the Great British Sew-In, when we all know that no one in Europe under 50 sews or wants to, excepting two of the Queen's more outrageous valets and six keen amateur pederasts in eastern Belgium – is now clogging our lives. Cupcakes. Sewing. Pies. Pinnies. Fat pies swimming in suet instead of meat. Beetroot. Rickets. The love of going to the seaside to sit in a car wearing a newspaper-hat and moan about the blackies. Typhoid. Old maids cycling somewhere through dawn mists to tell lies about someone. |
| Yet it's strangely uplifting that all the retro stuff might now be beginning to chunder itself to death, because it signals that a change must really soon, surely, come, and Britain can begin to move on. | Yet it's strangely uplifting that all the retro stuff might now be beginning to chunder itself to death, because it signals that a change must really soon, surely, come, and Britain can begin to move on. |
| But, before that, we need to have the endgame. Gosh, and we got it this week. First with Our Girl. | But, before that, we need to have the endgame. Gosh, and we got it this week. First with Our Girl. |
| Rule one in journalism used to be: never trust the newsdesk and always keep a carbon. Rule two: when someone tells you it's not about the money, it's about the money. And, lo, when everyone loudly insisted that Our Girl was not a recruiting campaign for the army, it turned out that this was a recruiting campaign for the army. | Rule one in journalism used to be: never trust the newsdesk and always keep a carbon. Rule two: when someone tells you it's not about the money, it's about the money. And, lo, when everyone loudly insisted that Our Girl was not a recruiting campaign for the army, it turned out that this was a recruiting campaign for the army. |
| It was a reasonably dreadful piece, almost wholly salvaged by the performance of Lacey Turner. Her gin- and club-sodden life before she epiphanied, outside a recruiting office, taught us nothing about the truth of Manchester; it simply fuelled myths. Her army "conversion" taught us nothing except about the whiz which comes with packing your locker correctly after years of, well, dirty panties. Nowhere in the entire screed was the sheer pointlessness of the Afghanistan "conflict" mentioned: it was all about heroic redemption. Don't think, just act. We were back in 1940. But Lacey was wonderful. | It was a reasonably dreadful piece, almost wholly salvaged by the performance of Lacey Turner. Her gin- and club-sodden life before she epiphanied, outside a recruiting office, taught us nothing about the truth of Manchester; it simply fuelled myths. Her army "conversion" taught us nothing except about the whiz which comes with packing your locker correctly after years of, well, dirty panties. Nowhere in the entire screed was the sheer pointlessness of the Afghanistan "conflict" mentioned: it was all about heroic redemption. Don't think, just act. We were back in 1940. But Lacey was wonderful. |
| Similarly, the health service thing. Keeping Britain Alive: the NHS in a Day was fun in the quiet way that it contrasted the brilliance of the surgeons with the stupidity of the patients. It was also filmed winningly, with great access, and in most ways – possibly excepting an exceedingly nasty liposuction scene – deeply watchable. But, and it's a big one, no analysis of societal shift: of whether, for instance, some of those seeking treatment, the Very Fat Family wanting lipo, or the chap who kept insisting he was having a heart attack when his only problem was his unfathomable addiction to Nike, should instead have just been gently told to… go and have a word with themselves. No footage of nurses clustering round Facebook while patients croak pleas for a glass of water (which is actually what everyone's talking about these days), nor any hints of box-ticking management lunacy, or the politics which wanted it that way. | Similarly, the health service thing. Keeping Britain Alive: the NHS in a Day was fun in the quiet way that it contrasted the brilliance of the surgeons with the stupidity of the patients. It was also filmed winningly, with great access, and in most ways – possibly excepting an exceedingly nasty liposuction scene – deeply watchable. But, and it's a big one, no analysis of societal shift: of whether, for instance, some of those seeking treatment, the Very Fat Family wanting lipo, or the chap who kept insisting he was having a heart attack when his only problem was his unfathomable addiction to Nike, should instead have just been gently told to… go and have a word with themselves. No footage of nurses clustering round Facebook while patients croak pleas for a glass of water (which is actually what everyone's talking about these days), nor any hints of box-ticking management lunacy, or the politics which wanted it that way. |
| Perhaps this lack of analysis could be seen as a strength. Goodness knows there's enough ill-formed judgmentalism around about the NHS, and this series does still have serious promise; but with all this access to management and doctors and patients, and concomitant potential to set a few things square, the absence of any questioning tone made it feel dreadfully like a public service broadcast from… well, we were now in 1949. | Perhaps this lack of analysis could be seen as a strength. Goodness knows there's enough ill-formed judgmentalism around about the NHS, and this series does still have serious promise; but with all this access to management and doctors and patients, and concomitant potential to set a few things square, the absence of any questioning tone made it feel dreadfully like a public service broadcast from… well, we were now in 1949. |
| And so to the 1950s, and Beano Boris. Michael Cockerell's documentary, Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, was as entertainingly good as you'd expect: not too unfair, though I thought making Mr Johnson have to watch his sister skewer him with such unthinking abandon on not one but three TVs was stupid. Boris didn't come out of it that badly. What he came badly out of was the preceding day's interview with the fabulous Eddie Mair. What people liked about Boris, the reason they voted for him, was his occasional ability to tell the truth. With Eddie, he niggled and piggled and wriggled. He'll have lost some votes, but it won't kill him… but my money's still on Michael Gove. | And so to the 1950s, and Beano Boris. Michael Cockerell's documentary, Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, was as entertainingly good as you'd expect: not too unfair, though I thought making Mr Johnson have to watch his sister skewer him with such unthinking abandon on not one but three TVs was stupid. Boris didn't come out of it that badly. What he came badly out of was the preceding day's interview with the fabulous Eddie Mair. What people liked about Boris, the reason they voted for him, was his occasional ability to tell the truth. With Eddie, he niggled and piggled and wriggled. He'll have lost some votes, but it won't kill him… but my money's still on Michael Gove. |
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