Wild Weather with Richard Hammond (BBC1) | iPlayer
Homeland (C4) | 4oD
Imagine: Colm Tóibín: His Mother’s Son (BBC1) | iPlayer
Posh People: Inside Tatler (BBC2) | iPlayer
Last week was one of those weeks in which it got dark just after lunch and nothing of note started or ended on TV. There’s a reason they call it the bleak midwinter. And you know that you’re heading into its chilly depths when what sticks out in the schedules is Wild Weather with Richard Hammond.
Hammond is the John Noakes de nos jours. He’s game, eternally boyish and diminutively proportioned like the intrepid Blue Peter man, but instead of Noakes’s baffled innocence, Hammond is all ironic attitude and exaggerated opinions. In that sense you can see why he was chosen to front a series about the weather. If he can wax exasperated about sticky gears or rave about a saloon car’s torque, what could he do with strong wind?
The answer was very much what you’d expect. He shouted a lot as fierce gales blew about him. It was much like his reports from the cockpit of a sports car, only in this case he was stationary and it was the air that was moving.
I’m not convinced that the new arrangement was an improvement. I’m no petrol head, but I like a sports car as much as the next man. Take it away from Hammond and you’re just left with a small bloke in an anorak on top of a mountain in New England screaming about wind speed.
Yes, there was some science too, as there must be to justify the various international locations, but it was all done in that mock naughty tone that doesn’t encourage close attention. The long and short of it is that it can get very windy in the library footage of tornadoes and hurricanes. And when it does you need someone who can talk over it as if he’s just had a jug of ice cubes poured down his pants and secretly enjoyed the experience. In those circumstances, Hammond’s your man.
In Homeland, someone has been messing with Carrie’s meds. As she explained to the dishy ISI officer she mistook for the dead Brody when under the influence of the messed-up meds: “That was fucked up, what they did to me.” It was too, but on the plus side it did allow Claire Danes to bring out her whole ballistic armoury of facial tics. Not since the early days of her failed romance with Brody have we seen such gloriously mad gurning and eye-swivelling.
Brody’s absence has removed much of the momentum of the original story, and the attempts so far to complicate Carrie’s emotional life have seemed weak and unconvincing. It’s resulted in a strangely subdued series, stripped down and introspective, with almost all the characters on the brink of mental collapse. Carrie’s abandoned her baby, Quinn, the former dark ops agent, is a walking time bomb of seething anger, and Saul looks ready to top himself – as he nearly did last week.
If there is any link between the shifting atmosphere of Homeland over the last three years and America’s changing attitudes towards the war on terror, you’d have to say that it doesn’t suggest a new mood of optimism.
Nor, if the portrayal of the relationship between the US and Pakistan is anything to go on, does there appear to be a great deal of hope for America’s foreign policy in central southern Asia. The ISI, Pakistan’s infamous intelligence service, has been depicted on Homeland as openly in cahoots with the Taliban. And Art Malik is so unctuously untrustworthy as the Pakistani high-up, I’m not sure he’ll be welcome in Islamabad anytime soon. There is definitely an air of foreboding.
“It’s like I’m finally seeing it now for the first time,” Carrie told the troubled Quinn. “Nothing good can happen in this fucked-up world we’ve made for ourselves.” Given that almost everyone she encounters ends up dead, damaged or abandoned, you have to wonder why it’s taken her so long to achieve that particular insight. Quinn just told her to get some rest, then walked out of the room, no doubt to punch a random passer-by.
If it seems odd that the CIA should rely so heavily on people who appear criminally unstable, there is something to be said for the positive effects of mental suffering. In a touching Imagine that profiled Colm Tóibín, the Irish novelist showed Alan Yentob the uncomfortable chair he writes in to stiffen his resolve.
Yentob looked at it as a free man might inspect an instrument of penal torture. Tóibín’s father died when he was a young boy and in one way or another he’s been working out his grief in his writing ever since. Yentob asked if all this psychological anguish had enhanced his work. Tóibín gave a pitch-black and pitch-perfect response: “I’ve never known happiness to help prose style.”
The second episode of Posh People: Inside Tatler included a scene that was more painful than Tóibín’s writing chair. Two editors talked about why they had had to reject a writer’s work because it wasn’t sharp or witty or good enough. To have your copy spiked is humiliating enough at the best of times (I would imagine), but on peak-time TV? That’s so cruel the National Union of Journalists should intervene.
What a lucrative three-part advertisement this BBC series has turned out to be for everyone involved. In the first episode, Tatler itself came in for lots of free promotion. Fair enough, it could be argued: it opened its offices, just like any other business that is the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
But in the second episode we saw the secondary beneficiaries get in on the act. Namely Cartier, the upmarket jeweller, which was awarded a priceless chunk of prime television to display its wares. They couldn’t have looked any happier had Roman Abramovich stepped into the New Bond Street store waving his wallet.
If only all infomercials were as entertaining.
