Category: TV and radio

Davina McCall

On By Laura MorganIn Rants, TV and radio3 Comments

When Big Brother first started, I really liked Davina. I thought she provided a comforting, big-sisterly presence both for the viewers and for evicted housemates as she accompanied them on the terrifying journey out of the house and into the TV studio.

I think it was around the time of Kate Lawler – Kate who liked a drink, and enjoyed fooling around and flirting – that I began to get the sense that Davina (that’s the same Davina who has happily spoken publicly about her Drink And Drugs Hell™) had a rather disapproving attitude towards attractive young women who liked to have fun. And I think that’s got truer and truer over the years, to the point now where I actively dread watching her interview anyone with the temerity to be young, pretty and unmarried.

This reached its horrific pinnacle last night with the eviction from the Celebrity Big Brother house of Katia Ivanova, most famous for being the woman for whom Ronnie Wood left his wife Jo two years ago.

Katia is twenty-one. This means that two years ago, when she got involved with sixty-year-old relapsed alcoholic Ronnie Wood, she was nineteen. The relationship ended abruptly just before Christmas when Ronnie was arrested and cautioned over a “domestic incident”.

Katia is now reportedly “seeing” someone else, and the behaviour of which Davina vocally and solemnly disapproved consisted in her becoming involved with Jonas Altberg, a Swedish musician, during her two-week stay in the Big Brother house.

Shall we take another look at those facts? At nineteen, Katia entered a relationship with an alcoholic over forty years her senior, who (she says) drank and took cocaine daily during their time together. The relationship ended with a violent incident over which he was arrested. This happened less than a month ago. Since then, she has become involved with another man, who was shortly afterwards superceded in her affections by Jonas, aka Basshunter, who we were told at the start of the series is well-known in Sweden for his womanising and who has a sex tape circulating on the internet; who nonetheless treated her gently and thoughtfully during the time they spent together.

Davina’s interview with Katia consisted in its entirety of Davina asking Katia whether she thought she’d behaved well in the house, over clips of Katia and Jonas variously talking, flirting, kissing and sharing a bed (very decorously, both fully clothed). At the end, and this was the point at which my blood started to boil, Davina asked Katia whether she thought she’d improved her reputation in the eyes of the public, and Katia laughed and said “probably not”. Rather than chummily joining in, which was what the situation – by now quite awkward – desperately needed, Davina gave Katia a severe look and said “learn from this, OK?”.

I’m sorry, learn what? It seems to me that Katia has already learned, in the last month, that she doesn’t need to be in a relationship with a violent, alcoholic sexagenarian; that there are plenty of men who are young, attractive and want to be around her, and that at twenty-one she is entitled to a little uncomplicated fun. There is no reason in the world for her not to do whatever she likes with whomever she likes, and Davina’s holier-than-thou disapproval was unnecessary, mysogynistic and downright unpleasant.

I hope that when her daughters are teenagers and sleeping with middle-aged alcoholics (and Davina has form in this respect: she once dated Eric Clapton), she manages to be a bit less judgemental and a bit more understanding. And I hope that Katia takes as long as she likes to settle down, and isn’t felled by the unkindness of people who can’t find their way out of their own jealousy and spite.

Advent song for December 15

On By Laura MorganIn Christmas, Music, TV and radio

One of the headlines in Radio 4’s 8am news today was that an academic at Durham University has “discovered” that While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks was once sung to the tune of On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At. They could have saved themselves the bother of doing the research by talking to me, any of my family members or most of the people I know, all of whom have been singing it to that tune for as long as I can remember. And to prove we’re not a relic of a bygone age, here is a choir called the DWS Chorale doing exactly the same thing, with variations.

(I know I only said yesterday that this was a pop advent calendar, but I like to be topical, and if there really are only thirty people in Britain who know you can sing While Shepherds Watched to the tune of On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At then I’d like to spread the news, because it’s much more fun than singing it to the usual tune.)

Oh, Mandy

On By Laura MorganIn Music, TV and radio

Peter Mandelson was brilliant on the radio this morning. He and Evan Davies got into one of those tedious scraps where everyone is shouting and nobody can be heard – usually a signal that it’s time to turn off the radio and get out of bed, because it’s impossible early morning listening – but somehow Mandelson managed to stop it with a very patient, very measured “Evan, with the greatest love and respect I think I’m going to have to take some time to answer your questions.”

Whereupon Evan shut up for a good ninety seconds. It was lovely, and I wish more of Today’s guests had the guts, or the presence, or both, to try it.

But you don’t want to listen to Today when you don’t have to. Here’s Barry Manilow instead.

Last night’s TV

On By Laura MorganIn TV and radio

I spent most of yesterday evening watching TV in bed, which is something I should do more often, because it’s brilliant.  I got off to a bad start with Miranda, the new sitcom starring Miranda Hart, when I only realised several minutes in that it wasn’t a sketch show. Once over this initial hump, though, I started to enjoy it. There are some good jokes (my favourite is that Miranda, having been to public school, is too refined to bring herself to say the word “sex” and instead pronounces it “snex”) and, well, it takes a while to start enjoying new sitcoms even when they’re great, so I’ll give it a pass for now. Patricia Hodge was good as Miranda’s mum, although my suggestion, Penelope Wilton, would have been even better (I suggested her via Twitter; I’m not one of the programme-makers).

However. I would really love it if someone somewhere had decided to make a sitcom starring as its lead character a slightly odd-looking, slightly overweight and very funny woman who wasn’t a massive loser. Miranda’s character is 34, single, desperate for love and living with a flatmate, Stevie, who is also all of those things. Actually, it’s the last one which bothers me. The kitchen in which the scenes in the flat are filmed looks like a set from The Young Ones, and the jokes about Stevie bringing men home wear a little thin when both women are of an age when they ought to be able to have sex with whomever they like, whenever they like. I don’t mind if the BBC want to make a sitcom about a single woman’s search for love, but need she also be financially inept and a domestic disaster? Why can’t Miranda be comically bad at dating whilst living by herself, like real middle-class single women in their thirties do?

I also watched I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!, whose title deserves the correct punctuation. Last night, we were treated to the sight of a middle-aged woman lying in a glass coffin wearing nearly nothing while a selection of sea creatures and creepy-crawlies were dropped down a funnel on to her chest. Her response was admirable, and she won a full complement of evening meals for her fellow celebrities and managed to tell Dec off at the same time. Bravo her.

But while I’ve always enjoyed I’m A Celebrity, I do wonder whether the cavalier attitude it displays towards animal life isn’t a bit passé, these days. Is there any reason it’s better to kill and maim witchety grubs and cockroaches for entertainment’s sake than it would be to kill, I don’t know, puppies? It’s compelling viewing all right, but does that justify it, when we’re simultaneously watching programmes about the number of species facing extinction due to human activity?

Which got me to wondering whether it mightn’t be possible to conceive of jungle-based challenges for the celebrities which were somehow designed to have a positive impact on their environment, rather than wiping out large numbers of its insects. I haven’t got quite as far as coming up with examples, but there are many people better qualified than me to think of something. I’m sure the brains behind the show could work with local conservationists to come up with something that was at once hair-raising and sustaining, rather than destructive.  I know that sounds a bit ridiculous, but I’d like to think that one day it won’t, if some of us start saying it now.

In the meantime, like everybody else, I will be eagerly watching poor old Katie Price attempt “The Deathly Burrows” this evening.

A question of terminology

On By Laura MorganIn Language, TV and radio

The Today programme’s top news item this morning was the non-story that antenatal diagnoses of Down’s Syndrome are on the rise, partly because women are having babies later in life and partly because screening methods have improved over the last twenty years.

None of this seems very surprising, and I wasn’t sure why it was given top billing, unless the editors at Today are part of that humorous crowd who think that women are putting off parenthood because we’re selfish and (even worse) feminists, rather than because we think it’s important to have (a) careers which we can go back to now that one income cannot support a family and (b) relationships which are likely to last, our parents’ generation having been the first to see divorce as an acceptable alternative to unhappiness, and we as a result having seen more than our fair share of acromonious break-ups – and experienced at first-hand the effect they have on children. Or perhaps the Daily Mail would rather we get pregnant at the earliest opportunity and stay at home claiming benefits while we bring up our children single-handedly.

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, Down’s Syndrome. It’s a sensitive subject because people’s responses to the idea of bringing up a child with Down’s vary wildly, and because it’s hard to know what one’s own response is likely to be until it happens. It’s probable, though, that there were people listening this morning who are wondering whether to have the test, or, having had it and received a Down’s diagnosis, are thinking about whether to continue with their pregnancy. That being the case, you would expect the programme to treat the subject with care.

In the segment I heard, John Humphrys interviewed Joan Morris, one of the researchers who had provided the latest statistics, and Jane Fisher of Antenatal Results and Choices (ARC), and I was struck by his repeated use of the word “abortion”, when both women used the less emotive alternative, “termination”. The two words have the same literal meaning, but “abortion” has developed a second metaphorical meaning of something ugly or awful, and in my mind it’s ready to be discontinued in its sense of ending a pregnancy. But a bit of googling reveals that that opinion is by no means universal, and I realise that just because a word has taken on a certain weight for me, it doesn’t mean it holds the same associations for other people.

There’s no guidance in the BBC’s style guide on the use of the word “abortion”; nor is there in the Guardian’s (my preferred source of arbitration, because it seems to have been written by real people who have spent time thinking about it). So I wonder: is my response to the word an unusual one, or is it genuinely dropping out of use? Is there a turning point at which we can say “this word is  no longer considered appropriate”? And how can that measurement be taken? It’s all interesting stuff, and I think I’ll take a bit of time to find out more about words which have fallen out of currency, and whether it’s possible to reconstruct the process by which it happens.

But back to this morning’s show, into which Humphreys still managed to inject a bit of his customary heavy-handedness. Joan Morris had explained that although the percentage of parents who choose to terminate a Down’s pregnancy has remained stable, the number of terminations has increased in line with the higher number of diagnoses.  Jane Fisher added that this was not new information, since we already know that more pregnancies are resulting in Down’s diagnoses, and that a certain proportion of those end in terminations. At this point Humphrys jumped in with “does that imply that you think too many women are having abortions?”, which apart from bearing no relationship to what either woman had said, was an extraordinarily crass attempt at creating controversy where there wasn’t any.

I always feel a little as though I’m watching Chris Morris starting a war between Australia and Hong Kong when I listen to John Humphrys on Today. It irritates me when I can’t hear what guests are saying because he’s drowning them out by arguing every point, however insignificant. But irritating your listeners is one thing. Attempting to scare up a controversy over a subject that is already difficult, and about which many listeners will have strong personal feelings, is pointless and unforgivable. I wish they’d retire him from the radio and leave him to present Mastermind, where I think he does an admirable job (unlike Paxman, whose feigned astonishment whenever a University Challenge team fails to answer a question he thinks they should know grows more wearisome every week).