Other Strictly elements of proven toxicity were also present, including the
long, tense pause between the build-up to any announcement and the actual
announcement. One of the male non-professional dancers selected for the show
was a footballer, or perhaps a rugby player, or something like that. He
dutifully looked nervous while waiting to be told who his female
professional partner would be. “The lady you’ll be tackling your dances with
is… (tense pause long enough to allow the construction of the Parthenon)…
Kristina!” And Kristina came swaying forward, her lash-laden eyes promising
to transmit to her new partner all the sinuous secrets of the smouldering
tropical samba.
At the top of the pile of the show’s most unbearable features, the berserk
judge Bruno Tonioli was there again. But not even Bruno’s impersonation of a
mad spaniel can put you off the show entirely, because its capacious format
has just as many pluses as minuses. There is Darcey Bussell, sitting calmly
while she earns the dosh she’s got coming after years of self-sacrifice as a
mere prima ballerina assoluta. There is Tess, prettier every year. And
finally there is Brucie, he who has stopped time. I wish I could.
I suppose there are feminists who disapprove of the fact that Tess should gain
so much attention just from her capacity to stand around, marshal the
traffic and pretend to be amused by Brucie’s sense of humour. They have a
point; and if the relentlessly pro-cheesecake Silvio Berlusconi were in
charge of the BBC they would have a war on their hands. But the Beeb keeps
the Tess factor fairly well under control, one would have thought. For this
year’s season of Formula
One, it was high time that a woman should head the presentation
team, and Suzi Perry has been showing every competence: it isn’t her fault
that she is so much easier to look at than David Coulthard and Eddie Jordan.
When the F1 circus was away touring the world, there was sometimes no saving
the show from tedium: the tarmac sat cooking on the desert and you couldn’t
see a tree. But lately, thank heaven, we have been back in Europe, and
whether at last Sunday’s GP at Monza, or at the previous GP at Spa, the
Beeb’s presentation team have proved that they are fully in command of their
three microphones. Their ability to snatch a quick interview or to introduce
a short video sequence is crucial to their task, because otherwise the
audience at home would have nothing to watch for a whole hour while the race
got ready to start.
Anybody who thinks that the preparatory hour could therefore be dispensed with
is dreaming. The teams want the television exposure. At Monza, the show
started with a compilation of Ferrari footage that added up to a blatant
commercial. And to think of all those times on BBC radio when I wasn’t
allowed to mention my own books.
Patrick Moore is gone but The Sky at Night (BBC Four) still lives.
Visiting my home town, Cambridge, the show talked about black holes and met
some of the astronomers who study them. It quickly became apparent that
there are more astronomers in Cambridge than there are stars in the
universe. They stood around on each other’s lawns having tea while they
discussed the mass of gas that is being torn apart at the centre of our
galaxy right now. I must have been bumping into them in Marks Sparks
for years.
But they look just like normal people. Judging from the billions of light
years and zillions of tons they talk to each other about in private, they
should be wearing pointed hats decorated with tinsel cut-outs of heavenly
bodies. Experts should dress the part, or at least dress up. In The Last
Night of the Proms (BBC One) Nigel Kennedy might not have looked like a
violinist specifically, but he sure as hell didn’t look normal either.
You could say that his clothes were just an assembly of random cloth that hit
him after a mattress factory exploded nearby, but his hairstyle was the
dazzling proof that his get-up was all his own idea. Spiked and shining with
fixative, his coiffure rose vertically as if it were being sucked into an
overhead air duct.
Meanwhile he was playing The Lark Ascending, by Vaughan Williams; and very
beautiful it was. Well, if that’s what it takes for an instrumentalist to
relax, why not? Although I can’t remember that Vladimir Horowitz ever wore a
clown’s costume to play the piano. But then he really was mad, crazy etc.
(You can always tell them: they work flat out to prove themselves normal,
whereas people who carry on like nitwits crave attention, not solace.)
In
What Remains (BBC One), the flashback story of Melissa
grows sadder all the time. She was having an affair with the resident that
we most dislike, although not as much as we dislike his son, the most
repellent character in a house full of repellent characters. Last episode
tomorrow night.