- guardian.co.uk, Sunday March 26 2000 02.29 BST
- The Observer, Sunday March 26 2000
Seeing Red ITV
Puppy Love C4
Love and Money C4
Jam C4
According to a particularly Auntie-ish BBC2 voiceover, Budget Day is the only time alcohol is allowed inside the Commons (and since an Act of Parliament in 1670, on Budget Day a rare breed of wonk-faced sheep is, probably, also entitled to ruminate in the public gallery), but I'd barely had time to get my head around this bit of arcane nonsense when here was David Dimbleby pithily summing up a bit of perceived governmental Robin Hoodery:
'Have loads of kids and don't worry about getting married!' 'But,' chipped in A. Fiscal-Pundit Esq, 'only if you're on a low income!' Which showed just how far Coral Atkins was ahead of her time.
Last Sunday's Seeing Red told the truish story of Ms Atkins, the 1970s TV star-turned-hopelessly romantic, idealistic owner of a touchy-feely free-range children's home. Coral's truth was strange enough but after being filleted and filtered as drama, the result was inevitably a Sunday night smile-and-sob story, told with several spoonfuls of saccharine to help the unpalatable realism go down.
But whatever you thought of the screenplay - the baddies all cardboard cut-out villainry, the goodies all bleeding heartiness - this was Sarah Lancashire's big moment or, more accurately, the latest in this year's line of increasingly impressive Sarah Lancashire moments.
Right after a taut double-handed Coronation Street opposite estranged TV husband Curly Watts in early January, she was on to Clocking Off, during which one could never not watch her, even when she was just passing through another character's plotline. But now I think Lancashire has proved herself the best British actress of her generation, bar none.
In his film, Puppy Love, Waldemar Januszczak identified what he described as our 'cruel ambivalence about the dog'. Examples? Um, describing people as 'a dog' or 'a bitch', apparently. Silly Waldemar - these aren't examples of humankind's cruel ambivalence to canines, but ongoing proof of mankind's cruel ambivalence towards women. Well, I've never heard of a man being described as 'a dog', even on his very worst comb-over hair day. Admittedly, I write as a pathetically biased dog owner, but Januszczak's tirade was an intolerant hatefest, littered with numerous other clunking misobservations and boasting a subtext of ill-disguised misogyny, none of which, I hasten to add, stopped it from being immensely watchable.
Unfortunately, however, Januszczak couldn't quite contain himself from making a few reasonable and pertinent points along the way, particularly about the kind of in-breeding that has ensured bulldogs are now so freakily deformed they practically breathe out of their eyes: 'If the Nazis were doing this to people, we'd be calling it eugenics, but when the British do it to their dogs, it's just a bit of fun and out come the marquees.'
It may be that I'm over-sensitive, but it struck me that throughout Puppy Love a certain sort of female dog-owner cliché - perhaps childless, certainly frustrated in love, desperately sentimental but unconsciously manipulative - had at some point left her sweaty pawprints all over Januszczak's soft furnishings, because he seemed both downright terrified and riddled with loathing for women he identified as inured to the needs of dogs, while exercising the control that they might well have been forced to relinquish in other areas of their lives.
Still, what of it, Waldemar? Not exactly Nazis,are they? Personally, I have no qualms about admitting that I gave a recidivist Battersea dog a comfortable, permanent home, two square meals a day, lots of nice walks and, in return, expected (and received) unconditional doggy love, replete with unwaveringly devoted gazing into my eyes and round-the-clock snoozing while curled like a warm, soft comma at my feet. And if anyone thinks that this marks me out as a needy, barren old sad-sack, then so be it.
I don't know if he is or has ever been a dog owner, but I suspect that George, star of the first in a predictably prurient new documentary series called Love and Money, husband of Karen, father of Bertie and all-round cartoonishly hilarious sexist pigface of the very first order, might enjoy the company of, if not wolves, then perhaps a Staffordshire terrier ('Such big testicles!' the nice Aussie vet had observed admiringly of the breed during Puppy Love, just before he'd chopped them off).
But then I decided that George and Karen had been sent to try me in what was fast turning out to be National Misogyny Week. Love and Money looked at the problems that beset a Double-Income-No-Kids couple when they decide to breed and thus lose one salary, at least for a while.
In fact, it was a statistic from Relate that had inspired the programme: according to a 1998 survey, British couples argue more about money than any other subject. George must have known he was presenting himself as a sullen, spud-faced bastard for whom greed is good but women are no better than they ought to be. 'I make the decisions round here because I earn the money'; 'You got the vote; what more do you want?'; and of his decision not to allow Karen to be signatory on their joint bank account: 'I didn't want her to get her grubby little hands on it. Spend it on shoes and cigarettes and women's fripperies.' George was fortyish. This was satire, right?
The first in his new series, Jam, saw Chris Morris plying his compulsively dark and unlovely trade in a place somewhere just beyond satire, though it's too early to say precisely where that might be, because Jam was much closer to Morris's defunct Radio One show, Blue Jam, than to either The Day Today or Brass Eye and, indeed, only the sketch featuring the woman miming Minnie Riperton's 'Loving You' while being beaten with a Spacehopper was giggle-making; the rest was merely madly - and maddeningly - compelling.
For when he isn't making you laugh, Morris is capable of bringing out the latent Angry of Media Vale inside almost any reasonably well-balanced viewer.
For me, the most haunting and disturbing sketches (though it's not quite the right term for a writer and performer whose 'sketches' are more Francis Bacon than they are Morecambe and Wise) were those that recalled the dread quasi-dreamscape and loss of control that often comes with impending anaesthesia. Morris is usually described as surreal but Jam is, in its own way, very far from surreal - more like a persuasively warped commentary on a thoroughly bad-to-the-bone and threatening world we perceive to be slipping swiftly and scarily from our individual grasp.
Anyway, I'm glad Morris is back and producing true millennial terror TV, brilliantly abusing the medium he knows best, especially given that he proved himself a disappointingly unfunny spoof newspaper columnist. So much suppurating rage, Chris - perhaps you need a dog?
