The ITV Leaders’ Debate ITV1 | ITV Player
Drills, Dentures and Dentistry: An Oral History BBC4 | iPlayer
The one thing that emerged from the leaders’ debate was not, or not necessarily, the rise of the outliers but the fact that there’s a hearty appetite for another female head of government. Of perhaps a different hue.
This was a triumph for all three women. Nicola jinked between legs and nipped at Savile Row groins run to the soft; Leanne, if a bit valley-heavy dai bach, made sense and drew blood; Natalie enjoyed a fine new command of brief and exuded equal bright-eyed conviction to the other appassionata on stage, the oddly sweaty Mr Farage. All three made cogent cases for a rollback of “austerity”, and it was as fresh and new as a splash in green spring seas.
After interminable weeks of Balls and Osborne dutch-auctioning each other to promise ever more gleeful winnowing, the women collectively offered a shocking light bulb moment. As in: oh, my! Someone’s said it might not have to be that way at all. And: there is an unspun left in this country, which might remember what it stands for.
The men? I listened, but I didn’t hear, because stats were being flung. I simply thought: when is the chillaxed Cameron ever going to age? I’m sure I’m not alone in having dreams about being a bug sliding unhappily down his oversmooth pink cheeks into his oversmall mouth. And when is poor Ed ever going to seem normal? Even though he was the one leader to genuinely glad-hand the audience afterwards, his woeful spinners had enforced a habit of making him randomly turn and gaze with his freshly doped-spaniel eyes straight into the camera. Rather than talking to people, he was “talking to people”, with all the carefree spontaneity of a man who’s been ordered to remember 23,000 things at once. And when is Cleggers of the debating society (though his “Miriam and me” was a sub-schoolboy error) going to open a nice Norwich shoe shop?
This was gripping and chaired in exemplary fashion, and should be the template for all our unforeseeable futures. By Friday the Telegraph online was asking: “Julie Etchingham for PM?” Another woman, you’ll notice.
The Ark was, as befits the Christian church on these islands every Eastertide, sweet, tamely brave, family-oriented, well meaning and, unintentionally, quite hilarious. Casting David Threlfall as (a highly credible) Noah was a fine stroke, and everyone who followed Shameless will have cheered to see Frank Gallagher momentarily reborn, as Noah nutted a marketplace bully not 11 minutes in. But elsewhere, he was wise, impossibly loving, stoic, tortured and – eventually – helped by the love of a good family.
It was essentially the story of his fourth son – after Shem, Ham and Japheth he apparently had “Kenan”, and though there is no actual reference to this in the Bible, that certainly hasn’t hindered anyone else’s dramatic licence for a good 2,000 years. Kenan went to the bad, lurking in the big city in the lap of a delicious doxy. Noah quietly railed against iniquity, and faithfully, back-breakingly, with twigs in his beard and ashes in his mouth, went about God’s work with the cubits and the gopher wood.
On first viewing, this was lovely. Writer Tony Jordan, with sterling work behind him on EastEnders and Hustle, knows how to tell a story and crammed into 90 absorbing minutes a tale of redemptive love, faith in family, blind leaps of trust and the cathartic solace in working together.
It was only when I was going through notes afterwards that I began to struggle with some dialogue. Jordan had, I’m sure accidentally, managed to make references to two films – This Is Spinal Tap and Jaws – in just one 10-second sequence, when Noah’s wife, Emmie (a terrific Joanne Whalley), says: “Please tell me you’ve made a horrible sizing mistake. We’re going to need a bigger hammer.” Elsewhere, she had such gems as: “Although you’ve clearly gone mad and made the leap from farmer to idiot, you’re my idiot”, while Threlfall had: “If you really love me, let me be the man that you love” to savour. Shem and the rest generally contented themselves with tag-wrestling choruses of “but what if it doesn’t?”, thus inadvertently giving rise to the entire insurance industry.
And I know the BBC isn’t CGI Hollywood and all the better for it, but to say the whole animals two-by-two thing was underplayed is to redefine the word. I think a few small birds flew into view. I may have caught sight of a limping guinea pig It had all the grandeur and menace of a petting zoo on the Isle of Wight, and the flood all the drama of a leak in a shower mixer valve in Homebase. For all that, it stood high above many painful predecessors in the biblical epic stakes, with several superior pieces of acting.
Professor Joanna Bourke, while researching a book on the history of pain – hey, whatever lifts your skirts – “discovered our teeth are a constant source of woe”. No, really. For all that, Drills, Dentures and Dentistry: An Oral History was a little gem of a programme, by turns fascinating and inviting you to hurtle from the room with a mouthful of vomit. Endless little gobbets of information included that of teeth transplanted forcibly from the poor and dead men’s teeth (imported particularly from Waterloo) nailed into early falsies for the rich. These shells were formed of hippopotamus ivory, which tended to fit snugly in exactly the way you would expect a large alien jerry-rigged mammalian tusk to if you stuck it in your mouth. It also rotted rather quickly, due to the hordes of new and exciting bacteria in hippo-mouth land.
And did you know a full 5% of crucial British second world war pilots’ sorties had to be called off due to toothache (it’s worse at altitude), leading to the new profession of oral hygienist? One surprise was that almost all the chief advances in Britain – power drills, amalgam, anaesthetic, cosmetics – had been achieved by about 1920. Why, then, did it take until about 1986 for most of us to lose our atavistic fear? Were evil guerrilla dentists just sitting around for 66 years, laughing at us and perfecting drills that sound unconscionably ever more like Coldplay?
Gracepoint is the US remake of Broadchurch, transplanted wholly – pretty much identically, scene for scene – from Dorset to California. A good cast includes Michael Peña and Anna Gunn, but Anna’s no Olivia Colman. And among things that haven’t travelled well are David Tennant’s accent – which would be perfect but for its being unidentifiable in any part of the north American continent – and the seedy sense of claustrophobic brooding. The coast is just too damned rich, with too many god-damned good teeth. It’s a fine drama. Ish. But… why?
