‘Do try and get out a bit when you’re there,’ said a concerned friend. ‘You know what you’re like about British telly.’ ‘Quality with a capital Kwer, wasn’t it?’ said another, sipping the cuppa I’d just made her. I quelled her with a glance before launching into a list of all the things I expected to see in Britain that were not actually bounded by a TV screen. Then I started putting them right about the British TV thing. Unbiased news coverage, I said. Free and independent commentary, I said. Intelligent quiz shows, said I. Brilliant new comedies and adaptations of great works, I continued. I must have gone on a bit about it because when I eventually finished they were in deep conversation, being horribly kind about an absent friend, something I was also about to become quite soon.
Well, they’re being reasonably kind to me now I’m back: they love being vindicated. To put it mildly, most of British TV makes you understand why they like Neighbours and Home and Away so much. There is a kind of bad TV that is compulsively watchable, and there is a kind of bad TV that sends you out to look at the tourist sites even when you are only there to visit relatives: British museums and monuments and markets are doing great business.
First the good stuff. Patrick Kielty’s Almost Live was a clever, vicious Backberner type of show that flayed Bush and Blair with a potted history of the bin Laden/Taliban/CIA/Bush Snr./Gulf War/oil connection that any child could understand. And I was able to save about 40 zillion dollars not going to Covent Garden because the Royal Opera House’s latest (David McVicar) production of the opera I wanted to see, Mozart’s Magic Flute, was televised on BBC2. There was some really good singing, particularly from Simon Keenlyside (a fantastic Papageno) and Dorothea Roschman as a bang-on-accurate Pamina—and Colin Davis was conducting. And it was fun to sit there and bag John MacFarlane’s truly awful po-mo ragbag costumes and the dreary black stage sets while appreciating Davis’ wise, singer-friendly tempi making Mozart’s music even more humane and gorgeous. But Roschman should never forgive MacFarlane for putting her well-rounded soprano form into a boned bodice which was strapless and kept threatening to become topless whenever she took a deep breath. In ‘Ach, ich fühls’ it was touch and go. And the skirt was