Andrew Anthony on television: When you're in a hole, stop digging

Tag : kid's sock

What he watched
Bonekickers BBC1
Dispatches C4
Tribal wives BBC2
Imagine... BBC1
Lab rats BBC2
Of the many challenges that confront the film-maker seeking to basea thriller around an archaeological dig, perhaps the most vexatiousis how to make a hole in the ground look interesting. For StevenSpielberg the answer was to fill it with mortal perils: snakes,booby traps and the like. The producers of Bonekickers , BBC1's new drama series, have taken a different approach. They'veopted to fill it with upturned earth.
Now in another context that decision might be seen as admirablynaturalistic. But a conspicuous fidelity to real life is not amongthe accusations that could be laid at Bonekickers' muddy door. Interms of plot authenticity, it's fair to say that it makes The DaVinci Code seem like the work of Raymond Carver. So it's somethingof a mystery as to why so much of the action was focused on themundane sight of an open pit.
Perhaps the idea was that everyone would be too bemused by HughBonneville's Indiana Jones hat and Crocodile Dundee mac to thinkabout the dramatic limitations of exposed soil. This seems areasonable supposition, and it might have worked, too, had notBonneville himself appeared utterly bemused.
You can sympathise with his predicament. Dressing like you're aboutto pull out a bullwhip may pass unnoticed in the sleazier quartersof Ulaanbaatar, but not in the Somerset countryside, even allowingfor the proximity of Glastonbury. Yet whether Bonneville was morediscomfited by his outfit or dialogue or career turn, it's not easyto say.
He played Professor Gregory Parton. 'Think of him as Google with abeer gut,' explained another character. I tried that, but as Partonseemed to possess neither a search engine, nor a large stomach, itwas difficult to get past the hat.
Parton is part of Wessex University archaeological team led by arather stroppy and ill-cast Julie Graham. In the opening episode,the team found a 13th century Middle Eastern coin lying in themiddle of the big pit. Closer inspection revealed that it must havebeen part of a mediaeval conspiracy to rob returning Crusaders ofthe cross on which Jesus was crucified. Modern science - isn't itamazing?
There's nothing wrong with a bit of daft entertainment, and anyonewanting to excavate meaning from this production would do bettersearching for priceless Egyptian artefacts in my sock drawer. Butit wasn't the absurdity of the storyline that buried Bonekickers somuch as the BBC's paint-by-numbers version of politicalcorrectness. The first rule of this charter declares that anyonewith a fruity accent is by definition untrustworthy, sinister orboth. Thus Michael Maloney, as a vain academic, and Paul Rhys as afar-right Christian evangelist, were pantomime posh. It'sreassuring to know that the corporation is in such vibrantfinancial and artistic health that it can afford to place talentedactors in throwaway roles.
There was also a preachy subplot in which the Knights Templar weredenounced as an early Islamophobic sect intent on 'the massslaughter of countless Muslims'. But as 700-year-old crimes of hateare some way beyond the statute of righteous indignation, we alsosaw a modern day Christian psychopath beheading a peaceful youngMuslim man in an unprovoked attack. It was actually a nasty littlescene, completely out of keeping with the tone of the rest of thepiece. What's more, its very gratuitousness had the counter-effectof reducing Muslims once again to cut-out victims, no more thanwalk-on ciphers for liberal guilt.
A Martian watching TV drama of late would probably conclude thatthe country is crawling with homicidal Islamophobes, desperate tokill those few Muslims who have not already been interned by thegovernment or shot by the police.
In Dispatches: It Shouldn't Happen to a Muslim the political columnist Peter Oborne had nothing to say about suchfiction. Instead he was concerned with the other kinds of fictionsthat regularly appear in newspapers: scare-mongering terror threatsthat demonise all Muslims, fabricated stories about banning piggybanks, and the general drip-drip of anti-Muslim sentiment.
It's a laudable subject that could do with some forensicjournalistic attention. But Oborne took a more scattershotapproach, hitting the occasional target, like a Daily Expresscolumnist, but more often than not blasting himself in the foot.
He interviewed former Metropolitan police assistant commissionerAndy Hayman, who recalled what a Muslim youth had told him. 'It'slike this. We just wait for the police to come into our house andthey shoot us.' The kid's obviously been watching too much TV, butneither Hayman nor Oborne thought to make that point, preferring totreat the comment as you would an established fact.
Oborne also spoke to a man whose house and car had been vandalised.The man said that he and his friends were considering moving toTurkey, where Muslims were afforded proper protection. Then Obornesuggested that less than 1 per cent of British Muslim women wearthe veil, or niqab, 'but that doesn't stop politicians fromlecturing Muslims on how they dress'.
Yet here Oborne was guilty of the same sloppy conflation for whichhe admonished others. If a politician suggests that a veil inhibitssocial interaction, that opinion no more applies to all Muslimsthan the injunction that binge drinking is anti-social inculpatesthe drinker of a glass of wine. Who is roping in the other 99 percent? The unnamed politician or Oborne?
In Turkey, of course, the new sanctuary for Muslims, head scarves,let alone veils, have long been illegal in schools and governmentbuildings. That's another, more Byzantine story. And while thepolemicist's target is usually hypocrisy, his enemy is alwayscomplexity.
The Himba tribe in northern Namibia is not overburdened withpolemicists, though it does have plenty of polygamists. In Tribal Wives , Yvonne, a single mother from Blackpool, joined the Himba for amonth and told the cameras: 'I want a sense of adventure in mylife.'
That didn't include becoming one of the wives of the 70-year-oldman whose family she joined. And it turned out that after a fewdays the adventure was too much. The Himba women covered her intraditional copper body paint, dreadlocked her hair and put her ina tribal skirt (she chose, perhaps wisely, in contrast to localcustom, to keep her breasts concealed). She looked like the womanfrom Haysi Fantayzee. The tribe laughed and Yvonne cried.
All issues and no tissues, she seemed to be weeping for most of thedocumentary. She had been forced to marry as a pregnant teenager,and now she saw young Himba girls dragged screaming into marriage.The girls have their teeth knocked out at around 10, the better toprepare them for the harshness of life ahead. That tribal womenhave it tough appeared to be news to Yvonne, who was also surprisedby the African sun. 'I didn't anticipate it would be so hot,' shesaid.
Towards the end of this exercise in anthropological therapy, Yvonnebrightened and started to look relaxed. Everyone, including Yvonneherself, said that this was a sign that she had 'grown' from theexperience. But to more sceptical eyes, it just seemed that she wasrelieved to be going home.
The last film Anthony Minghella made was set in Africa, though thefar more genteel Africa of The Ladies Number One Detective Agency.It was said in Imagine 's tribute to the late director that it was the film that mostreflected his optimistic and genial character.
Perhaps, but it's an unfortunate rule that the very qualities thatmake people so likeable in life are very difficult to memorialisein death. Posterity requires dark vices and irrational behaviour,not a blamelessly sunny character.
To make things still more problematic, Minghella really did seem tobe a nice guy in a business where niceness is often taken as asynonym for failure. And yet Alan Yentob's film, which was ladenwith testaments to Minghella's status as an 'exceptional humanbeing', managed to transcend luvviness.
Harvey Weinstein came across as a pussycat, Nicole Kidman seemedmore than usually weird, and Jude Law looked like an actor who haslost the one director who understood him. But it was Minghella'sbackground biography, his life on the Isle of Wight and time atHull University that really captured the man's instinctive gift forhuman drama. He was that most rare of creatures, an intellectualwho liked people.
There's nothing that can be said about Lab Rats that will prevent its like from multiplying. This strain of comedyis immune to criticism. All that can be usefully observed is thatthe term 'sitcom' here is not an abbreviation of the genre but ofthe condition necessary for its appreciation: sitting comatose.That aside, it's set in a laboratory, which is not nearly as funnya location as an archaeological dig. Reality and fiction
One of the drawbacks of 24-hour rolling news is the over-relianceon presenters interviewing reporters in a fact vacuum. In TheConspiracy Files (BBC2) we learnt that the paranoid ravings of the9/11 'Truth' movement are partly inspired by such an exchangebetween a BBC World presenter and the reporter Jane Standley. Whenword came through on that extraordinary September day that Tower 7of the World Trade Centre had collapsed, the presenter in Londonasked Standley, in New York, 'What more can you tell us about thecollapse?' Knowing nothing, she ad-libbed: 'Only what you alreadyknow.' In fact, the tower (not one of the Twin Towers) was stillstanding - despite concern for its stability - and didn't fall foranother 27 minutes. So the Truthers concluded that the BBC was alsopart of the conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Centre, alongwith the American government, police, fire service and mass media.That's where you end up when speculation gets the edge onreporting: feeding the fantasies of the chronically deluded.
· Kathryn Flett is away