8 Favourite TV Programmes
Some time ago I was tagged by Marion - to come up with “eight random facts/habits about” myself. I decided to list eight of my favourite television programmes.
1) I don’t really share the rosy-tinged nostalgia for ’70s sitcoms common among my generation. There were a few good ones, though - Dad’s Army, for instance, was always a favourite in our house and Fawlty Towers, of course, was a classic. But the best, so far as I am concerned, was Rising Damp. It starred Leonard Rossiter as the sleazy landlord of some squalid bedsits. His character, Rigsby, was obnoxious, a boor, a scruff, a miser, and a bigot, forever interfering in his tenants’ lives. His performances were pure genius. Just to recall the sneeringly camp way he pronounced the name of Miss Joan’s fiancé, Desmond, has me in stitches. The sets were wonderful, too, dreary, faded, rundown, dull and dusty - a reminder of how much wartime austerity still lingered on in 1970s England.
2) I didn’t watch much television in the early ’80s - I was more interested in going out - but I never missed Brideshead Revisited. A strange taste, perhaps, for one who had been a punk not long before and still considered herself an anarchist? Well, I thought the accusations of snobbery hurled at the work irrelevant, really. The slightly decadent, luxuriantly aesthetic, elegiac mood of Brideshead Revisited certainly touched something in me. I read all Waugh’s novels around this time and revelled in them. While I’ve read the book half a dozen times over the years it is the filmed version of Brideshead which has nourished several of my fantasies. The second episode takes place in Venice, for instance. It has never looked more dreamy. If I ever get married it is where I want to go for my honeymoon. Not a very likely occurrence, I know. The same episode stars Stéphane Audran as Cara - shall I confess that it is her portrayal which has always been my model of “how to be a lady”?
3) It was when I was at Kent University that Dynasty became my favourite television programme, indeed the only programme I watched regularly. For me it is still the supreme soap opera - highly camp, gloriously absurd, terribly over-acted. I watched other soaps over the years, Dallas and all the rest, but what could compete with the home-knitted sweaters the gay characters were forced to wear, Joan Collins’ bitchiness and shoulder-pads, the catfights, the hysterical melodrama, the physical resemblance between Blake Carrington and Jacques Derrida, the distressing frequency of amnesia, the way they all kept the fire in their living-rooms lit even at the height of summer, the constant illustration of the dictum that money does not buy good taste, the Moldavian Massacre. It was all… delicious.
4) And that leads me to the other essential programme of the 80s which was Soap. No one talks about Soap these days but I thought it was hilarious. There were other American comedies I enjoyed later on: Taxi, Cheers, Frasier, The Simpsons. The last two in particular were so intelligent and funny. Soap I liked because it was wonderfully over-the-top. It was a sit-com which satirised soap operas. All the clichés were there - murders, affairs, suicide attempts, disappearances, madness, amnesia, kidnapping, the Mafia and the Moonies and South American revolutionaries, possession by evil spirits and alien abduction. My favourite character was the teenager Chuck who used his ventriloquist dummy to say spitefully cruel but amusing things about everybody else.
5) I have no hesitation in proclaiming Twin Peaks as the best television programme ever! I really was obsessed with that series. Perhaps I’ll do a longer post about it one day. For now just a few things. It disappointed me that so many people missed the whole point - and finding out who killed Laura Palmer was not the point. At the time I read only one article by someone who seemed to get it. They suggested that Twin Peaks resembled an ancient Roman novel in mixing any number of heterogenous genres. It was no coincidence, I’m sure, that the series was made at the height of interest in Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque - which relies on that very collision of modes and genres. It was thus precisely that which most claimed to be the programme’s great weakness which was in fact its great strength and fascination. Anyway, while I identified myself with Norma Jennings, I liked the FBI characters best. The fantastically sarcastic and misanthropic Albert. David Duchovny’s cross-dressing agent - I would suggest the most (the only?) convincing portrayal on film of a transvestite. And the wonderful Agent Cooper. Just listening to his voice makes me feel as giggly and flirty as Audrey Horne. Here, for your pleasure, is the tape that Cooper makes for Diane as he drives into Twin Peaks for the first time:
6) One of my old teachers liked to say that if you wanted to acquire a perfect grasp of English grammar you should study the works of P. G. Wodehouse. He was absolutely correct. In addition Wodehouse’s writing also illustrates the transformative quality of art in the way it elevates the utterly trivial into the realm of beauty. What unites, of course, the perfect use of grammar and this artistic alchemy is a sense of style. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the television version of some of Wodehouse’s stories, Jeeves and Wooster. I recall at the time there was some quibbling about the casting but I think it was ideal. Hugh Laurie plays Bertie Wooster not simply as an upper-class twit but as a bumbling idiot with oodles of charm. Stephen Fry, meanwhile, as Jeeves, is exceedingly competent and smart, effortlessly more aristocratic in manner than any of the ‘gentlemen’, and just so slightly sinister. The ridiculous story-lines are wonderfully plotted, every scene however farcical is played straight, and every caricature has the ring of truth. On top of all that I just adore the clothes and the furnishings. The art deco sets are a joy to the eye (and the major attraction of the similarly produced Poirot, too).
7) I am a big fan of American cop shows, NYPD Blue and Law and Order in particular, but Homicide: Life on the Streets was surely the greatest. It was bleak and beautifully filmed. Some episodes were so intense they were almost too much to watch. It had great characters - the cynical Munch, the sensitive pretty-boy Bayliss, and best of all the existentially-troubled Catholic Pembleton, a highly intelligent and ethical man who while being a brilliant detective seemed to be floundering in the cess-pit of criminality surrounding him.
8) My current favourite television programme is, without a doubt, Desperate Housewives. Actually, when it was first aired I suspected it would be to my taste but something or other, I can’t remember what now, prevented me from seeing the first few episodes. A recent conversation, though, with a woman who told me I would love it prompted me to catch up on all the old episodes. And I do love it! It is so well written and observed I could hug myself with glee. Bree is my favourite character. I know she is a terribly uptight control freak with serious issues but be honest, isn’t there a tiny part of you which is secretly envious of her whole perfect Stepford Wife act? Or is that just me? If nothing else there is a lesson or two for the transgendered about successfully concealing one’s flaws!
