What’s this? Funny sitcoms on ITV?!

I had a curiously old-fashioned evening last night, watching sitcoms on ITV1 in real time.

They weren’t half bad either - considering ITV’s lamentable history with sitcoms.

Yes, the new shows, ‘Vicious’ and ‘The Job Lot’, were much better than ITV offerings of yesteryear, such as ‘On The Buses’ and ‘Love Thy Neighbour’.

First of the new shows, ‘Vicious’, has quality actors Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi playing two long-term, elderly lovers with a penchant for putting each other down and trading OTT insults.

Frances de la Tour – a sitcom star herself in ‘Rising Damp’ (one of only two good sitcoms ITV ever produced; the other was ‘Shelley’ starring Hywel Bennett) – plays something of a vamp in ‘Vicious’ and is a good foil to Jacobi and McKellen, the principal characters.

There were lots of sharp lines last night; including McKellen as a struggling actor bigging himself up by shouting: “And I got to murder a prostitute in Coronation Street!”

This elderly-flavoured and elegantly camp sitcom was followed by ‘The Job Lot’ – a brand new one set in a humdrum midlands JobCentre, and quite topical at this time of benefit reforms. Russell Tovey – and actor much-used by trendy BBC3 in recent years and famous for his bizarre sticky-out ears – is one of the lead characters.

But best character in ‘The Job Lot’ is the neurotic centre manager, played by Sarah Hadland, who has the unnerving habit of mentioning personal dysfunctions such as her “self-harming” and “night terrors” at inopportune moments.

All in all, good stuff from ITV1.

And these two sitcoms, watched back-to-back, certainly beat dull old Crimewatch on BBC1 in the same timeslot.

Why 'celebrating' Thatcher's death is shameful

I am currently ashamed to be British. The continuing determination of quite large numbers of people to 'celebrate' the death of Margaret Thatcher has made me feel this way.

I was NEVER a supporter of Mrs Thatcher, by the way. But the widespread willingness to celebrate her death betrays a big loss of compassion and a weakening of moral discernment among people of the Left in politics.

(And I count myself as someone on the Left in political terms.)

Also, the powerful bitterness and hatred exhibited to a frail old woman who has died after a debilitating illness – quite simply it disgusts me.

This is not about politics. It is about respect for the dead – i.e. respect for human life.

Particularly galling was the outpouring of wormwood from the sneering gob of Glenda Jackson during the tribute debate in the Commons last week.

If only the Hamsptead luvvie understood the words 'respect' and 'dignity' as well as she does 'bitterness' and 'showboating'.

And now the BBC and other media are starting to report the prospect of demonstrations and 'turning of backs' along the route of the London funeral procession as a morally neutral issue. Such displays will not be morally neutral. They will be bad and degrading to our country.

The pouting, preaching crap that is Holby City

Just because broadcasters CAN aim endless crap docs’n’cops dramas at thick viewers, I really don’t think they should be allowed to.

I’m not usually a fan of State regulation of broadcasting, but there is simply too much TV of the stupid kind in the digital era – and most of it is a sinful waste of creative energy.

Broadcasters’ airtime should be heavily cut back by force of law – to give quality broadcasts a chance to stand out from the sea of mediocrity and worse.

Holby City, for instance, has been running since it started in1999, but it is rubbish and gets abysmal ratings.

Essentially, a hospital-based soap opera, it features a string of moody medics displaying dysfunctional attitudes to personal relationships, and emotional incontinence at every medical case that comes their way.

The casting is appalling. The characters don’t behave like medics and they don’t look like medics. Most of ‘em have the appearance of thin, blandly good-looking young models and drama school graduates who like to pout. Which is presumably what they are.

Rosie Marcel as consultant cardiothoracic surgeon Jac Naylor is the worst of the bunch. She tries to cover the whole emotional range between A and B but somehow her perma-pout just always gets in the way.

And the writing is crap. Some of the life-or-death dilemmas are so clumsily-written that the viewer needs a heart of stone not to laugh.

I suppose Holby City has been useful for the BBC – as yet another platform on which to push racial and sexual justice agendas. I have no problem with those values in ethical terms but I do deeply resent all the heavy-handed preaching the BBC gets up to in drama.

Holby City has rightly been criticised for its lack of realism, not least by the British Medical Association which denounced the portrayal of organ donation, for instance. Also, an accident and emergency nurse at the 2008 Royal College of Nursing conference accused the programme of fostering unrealistic expectations of the NHS and fuelling compensation culture.

Seeing life humbly from a golden throne

A difficult day in a tortuous month. By 5.45pm today, following a call to the car mechanic, I’d had enough.

New furry hat on (thanks Oonagh!) then up the perishing hill I went to the MASSIVE Ss Peter and Paul Church, New Brighton, Wirral (well, if you’re gonna do the Church Triumphant you might as well do it New Brighton-style).

Six o’clock and I’m on my knees at the shrine of St Philomena the Wonder Worker – in there saying the special words provided and inserting my ‘special intentions’ at the relevant points. She was an early martyr of the Church, and my mum in Wigan carries her name. Powerful stuff indeed, whichever way you cut it.

Philomena is a great intercessor with God. You either get that or you don’t. Most ‘reformed’ (non-Catholic) Christians don’t. But then their forefathers didn’t ‘get’ how Satan messed with Luther’s head – and theirs.

At 6.30pm I’m down the hill to the bar I helped name ... Tallulah’s. A large red and then I sit on a huge golden throne (remember this: nothing in New Brighton is normal).

Sometimes you need to sit on a golden throne to see the world in its humility. Truth often comes in drag as a paradox. It’s like war – often you must take up arms, fight and kill, if lasting peace and justice are to be established.

So I sip wine, and a man – also called Stephen (after the Protomartyr) – comes to my table and talks to me. He’s a security guard at a store in Liverpool, and something of an expert at spotting 'bagheads'.

We talk of love affairs and the struggle to be human. It’s a nice interlude. I like it when strangers come up to me and spill. It's something that happens quite often.

As we talk some great 1980s music is playing – Go West, Spandau, and Sheena Easton, then Terry Hall’s soulful vocals for – what was it called? – ‘Ghost Town’. It takes me back to my time in Norwich (happy days), where I'll be going for a reunion weekend soon.

But then I suddenly also recall the video for ‘Ghost Town’ which I think featured the band driving through the Blackwall Tunnel in East London, and I’m transported to the many times I drove through that tunnel, journeying between my job as news editor of the Kentish Times in Gravesend and my flat at the Angel Islington.

And at this point the TV is showing many scenes of London – some sort of railway journeys programme fronted by Michael Portillo, who seems very good as a presenter, I must say,

So now I’m thinking of Philomena, and those problems that I laid before her, and I’m wondering whether this emphasis of London and Noriwch is some sort of early sign or omen.

Next, The Proclaimers are belting out on the sound system, and I’m reminded of Scotland where I had such a good time as a journalist in the '90s and made brilliant friends who I see to this day.

Finally, up to me in the bar comes a young man who I know vaguely from around the local manor, and he’s spouting poetry at me, Browning, I think. It’s all so lovely ... this experience. I can feel Philomena’s wonder kicking in benevolently, step by steady step.

I'm being shown what joys and riches my life so far has contained, and I'm being reminded of how good and warm people can be.

At about 9pm I get up to go home. As I leave the bar there’s a woman outside the entrance, smoking. She flashes me a big smile, fixes me with a look of affection, and says ‘bye love’. It this simply the natural warmth of Merseyside people – or is it Philomena sending me more signs?

BBC – something rotten in the state of Britain

I’ve never been a fan of the BBC.

In recent decades it’s been good at comedy, I’ll grant that, but pisspoor at most other things that broadcasters are supposed to do.

Now its demons – which I’ve been pointing out for years – are showcasing themselves in a most unedifying public spectacle.

Let me name those demons: arrogance; a misplaced sense of superiority; corporate self-love; sloppy journalism; greedy pigs of news executives; and the sickly deference shown to the Beeb’s mediocre pool of “talent” - i.e. “stars” such as Jimmy Savile.

And while some among the BBC staff are good people, many display the sort of hate-filled Liberal-Fascist tendencies that are indefensible and increasingly beyond parody.

All the same, I want the BBC to survive its current difficulties and emerge from them stronger, slimmer, not so bureaucratic, and more in tune with the public it claims to serve.

What a MASSIVE culture shift that’s going to take!

If I were the new DG I would start with a cull of all BBC employees caught reading The Guardian. That should clear out 90 per cent of the editorial staff.

PS As for the current media coverage, who gives a damn about the career difficulties of overpaid state-regulated broadcasting managers?

What really matters is the evil done to vulnerable people by paedophiles.

Hail, the Queen of the Street!

I do hope Julie Goodyear isn’t voted off Celebrity Big Brother. Without her the show would not be worth watching.

I fear she may be voted off, however, not least because most of the people who ring the Channel 5 phone lines are … well … young and a bit thick.

Sorry if that seems cruel, but the type of people who regard the rapper MC Harvey and the US actor ‘The Situation’ as celebrities - or even remotely interesting – must be dim.

The Situation is a former underwear model who was in the axed and very crap reality show Jersey Shore. Yes, he’s that tacky, folks.

Julie Goodyear, however, is a tough old bird who really does have a genuinely strong personality – a megastar of Coronation Street as the brassy barmaid Bet Lynch with her famous catchphrase, “What can I do for you, cock?”

Julie is from the rough-as-rats Lancashire town of Heywood. And as I’m from the equally rough-as-rats Lancashire town of Wigan, I know what I’m talking about.

I once met Julie, as it happens, when she was starring in some camp nonsense of a stage show in York, and I was a columnist for the Hull Daily Mail. I think it was in 2002, somewhere around that time.

She was due to appear in the same show in Hull a few weeks later, hence I was sent to interview here for my weekly Out To Lunch column – which had a cult following in the city’s evening paper.

It was my duty in those days to take a celeb out to lunch at a restaurant each week and ask them a few questions while getting sloshed on expenses (me getting sloshed, usually, not the guests; they knew they had to stay sober and on their mettle).

Naturally, I researched each interviewee first, and among the cuttings on La Goodyear was an interview she’d done with a Fleet St columnist who had written that our Julie had “more facial hair than all of The Dubliners together”. Miaow!

Julie does have a bit of a face fuzz problem, as it happens, but it would be ungallant of me to dwell on that.  

Anyway, during my interview with her, she didn’t want any lunch. It was all done in the theatre dressing room, with the actress (and she is, actually, quite a good actress) smoking from her trademark cigarette holder and giving arch replies to my questions.

One question – and it is, unfortunately, one that provincial journalists are expected to ask of a star about to visit their local patch – was: “So are you looking forward to coming to Hull, Julie?”

Hmmmm... She chose not to reply verbally; she merely gave me a horrified look. Time spent in Hull ….definitly NOT something anyone in their right mind would look forward to. That was the meaning of her look.

I was tempted to say, at that point, “Oh, come on Julie. Hull’s not THAT bad. I find it easy enough to endure if I keep myself topped up with booze” but I thought better of it.


Anyway, Julie’s an old pro, so she gave me some decent catty and camp quotes for the interview. I remember the paper ran it as a spread (across two pages) with the strapline ‘The King of Hull meets the Queen of the Street’.

I should explain that, at the time, I was billed as the ‘King of Hull’ for my critiques of the city and its incompetent Labour rulers in the column, which appeared in the paper three nights each week. Happy days.

Anyway, back to Celeb Big Brother. I think Goodyear's been the star of it – with her two-faced moaning, that episode of genuine kindness with a sobbing Martin Kemp, and for her constant use of “F**k off” and “Piss off”.

Also, I think the show deserves a big pat on the back for its positive promotion of SMOKING!

Virtually, all the BB residents smoke. Good! Two fingers to the many health fascists in Government and the medical profession who are trying to stamp out smoking altogether.

Smoking has many positive aspects – it boosts social inclusion and relieves stress, for example.

No-one is pretending that smoking is actually healthy, of course, but the ban on smoking in pubs, restaurants and workplaces is most definitely evil – an act of tyranny.

After all, what is the point of being healthy, if you are not free?

If I remember, I will put my money where my big gob is – and vote for Julie to stay in the BB house.

Arrgghh! She’s got Sean Bean eyes

The Accused (BBC1 Tue 14 August) was a drama that will be long remembered – and not just because it featured manly Sean Bean dressed up as a woman.

It told the adventures of a gay man (Bean) who is a rather unglamorous teacher of poetry by day and a gaudy transvestite by night.

It was generally well written by Liverpool’s Jimmy McGovern, apart from one or two scenes towards the end, which I’ll come to later.

I'm pleased that mainstream British TV can still do socially-engaged drama such as this example in The Accused anthology series.

This offering was about many things that people today (more people than we realise) find hard – gender identity, loneliness, sexuality (rarely a straightforward matter, as it goes), and workplace alienation (very common indeed, in my opinion).

The drama was brilliantly cast. Sean Bean's a great actor. Some silly people might say he was “brave” to take on this role. I’m not going to say that, obviously, because there is nothing brave about being an actor. They get paid for dressing up and pretending to be other people – bravery doesn’t come into it.

But I do think Bean did a lot of powerfully subtle acting as transvestite Tracie, who picks up men in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink kind of way among the vulgar bars of central Manchester.

The humanity of the character’s situation was put across well by Bean, and, of course, by the writer Jimmy McGovern, who knows a thing or two about being an outsider and struggling with life.

The drama was only an hour long, so the story had to be swiftly told. Basically, our Tracie gets into a relationship with a married man who is secretly gay, and maybe also hating himself for being gay.

Stephen Graham was well cast as married man Tony, whose wife finds out he’s been having sex with Tracie. Tony then knifes his wife to death. Mercifully that isn’t shown; merely the bloody aftermath.

The story is inter-laced with an unfolding court case where Tracie is accused of being an accessory to the murder. And, for me, the court case sections were less than successfully handled by McGovern.

Tracie gets off the murder rap because she appears in court in drag with false nails, high stilettos etc. How, she demands of the jury, could she have had anything to do with the body in the boot of the car when she was dressed like that?

The jury buy it. They are right to, of course, because Tracie is innocent of any murderous intentions or actions, but it hardly seems a procedurally accurate or likely court scene.

At this point McGovern makes another mistake. He has Tracie stand up in court and say that Tony – also on a murder rap – is refusing to exonerate her because he is afraid that doing so would mark him out as a “nonce” in prison, and therefore bring him harsh treatment.

For me, the word “nonce” was the wrong one to use here. I think in prison terms, and generally, “nonce” is better understood and much more widely used to describe the sexual abusers of children – not men who occasionally have sex with very grown up gay transvestites.

Apart from those criticisms, I enjoyed this. McGovern managed to give us all food for thought about how hard it is to be human, to be governed by passions that aren’t rational.

I also liked the modern poetry of some of the script, and the fact that former teacher McGovern also took a satirical swipe at fuddy-duddy old-style poetry.

I would have liked to have seen a little more moral purpose in the script overall – for example a hint about the folly of always pleasing the self and following one’s carnal desires without thinking through the consequences for other people.

But you can’t have everything in an hour of drama.

And I do hope Sean Bean will reprise this role, perhaps by working poolside at in the ITV comedy series Benidorm. He would certainly give Time Healy a run for his money as the least likely transvestite in the whole of Europe.