I used to have a black and white TV, this little thing, that had a dial on the front for tuning. You’d turn the wheel through endless expanses of grey snow to tune it, and get BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel Four, but you’d only get Channel 4 in the afternoons because it hadn’t started in the mornings yet. Living near the East coast you might even get a hint of a Dutch channel if the atmospheric conditons were right, but it was usually some news show with coverage of trams or glasshouses or graffiti, and not naked European women playing volleyball, which was obviously always a disappointment.
Nowadays we have the EPG. The Electronic Programme Guide. Digital TV gives us a neatly stacked pancake stack of TV so we can zip up and down the list looking for something less tedious than what we’re currently watching, all arranged in neat chunks of time like Tetris blocks in some house of crapovision. So tonight I’m zipping up and down and caught Paul Merton in India, and Ricky Gervais and Dylan Moran doing stand up. Ricky Gervais must have been funny enough at some point to get all the work he’s had since, but all the work he’s had since then… meh. He’s kind of like a white Lenny Henry. Gervais is sometimes called the king of cringe, originally because he was David Brent, a character who found himself in cringe-making situations. Now he’s the king of cringe because he just makes you cringe.
Paul Merton in India caught my eye. I watched a recording of his show tonight, where he went from Delhi to Bikaner in the North of Rajasthan to visit the Karni Mata temple at Deshnok, commonly known as the rat temple, where the souls of the dead supposedly inhabit the numerous rats that scurry around the place, drinking the free milk and mainly hanging around looking mangey or dying. Before walking in to the temple, Merton put on two pairs of socks and spent the whole time with his nose perpetually wrinkled in disgust, and it was at this point that I realised that I’m braver or stupider than him, because I went to the Karni Mata temple on my own, walked in bare foot, and scraped the dried rats piss off the soles of my feet afterwards. And I travelled round the whole of India on my own with resealable plastic bags in my backpack in case I soiled my trousers and needed somewhere to stash the filthy evidence. Which I did at least once.
I’m one of many thousands who have been to India, and there are many documentaries about the country, but many thousands of people will seemingly still watch a TV celeb going round India even if they’ve been there or seen the documentaries. Lately, Paul Merton has been sent to India and filmed, Stephen Fry has been filmed in the US, and Charley Boorman has been filmed practically everywhere between Ireland and Sydney, and while I have a lot of affection for Stephen Fry, I have come to the conclusion that Michael Palin was enough, and I am now sick of watching famous people in travel documentaries. These celebs (and Charley Boorman) are the main attraction. Stephen Fry is positively dashing at breakneck speed around the US, and while there is an occasional stunning shot of an Appalachian mountain or Manhattan skyline, it’s obvious that we’re supposed to be watching Stephen Fry, not the rest of it, which is given no more time than a movie trailer gives the plot of a movie.
It’s not unlike publishing a cookery book with the chef’s face on the front instead of the food – what should be the most interesting thing takes second place to the celebrity. A cookery book should have a picture of a beautifully cooked duck, pie, or souffle on the front and instead it has Gordon Fucking Ramsey squinting smugly at you, no less unappetising a sight than if Fanny Cradock was to stick her freakishly high eyebrows on the front of the book or Keith Floyd were to appear on the front of a book and belch alcohol fumes at you when you opened it. A documentary should in my opinion have a detached voice doing nothing more than pointing stuff out or describing it as David Attenborough did in Planet Earth, but instead we get Paul Merton prejudicing our view of everything by gurning at everything.
These people have been entertaining when they have acted or appeared in panel shows. That’s what they do. I don’t need to see them diversifying because someone evidently thought that the stunning natural sights of this world were boring and needed to be narrated by a sweaty actor struggling to deal with the situation, any more than I need to listen to Gordon Fucking Ramsey talking over a decent recipe. Done.
With Stephen Fry, I wondered if his meter was running?
I didn’t see the Paul Merton thing because he annoys me more than I could say. If ever I was on Room 101 my temptation would be to put him Room 101 as my first item.
The Stephen Fry thing looked good at first but like you say it’s all too quick – he’s really belting through the states (and not even picking up on what I would have thought would be some of the interesting stuff to say in the places he does stop). I wonder if the detail has been left for the book?
I cringe whenever he puts on an ‘American’ accent in front of Americans too, is he paying them back for Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins? Fry is still the definitive screen Jeeves though, in the same way that Jeremy Brett is hard to beat as Holmes. Not that that’s got anything to do with anything.
I like stories…
Yeah, on the Paul Merton thing I’ve given it another try and it still seems to come across as a poor man’s Michael Palin… there’s no innovation there, I still can’t enjoy it. Stephen Fry in America I have watched more of and it is still too bloody quick.