A Boris hunt! [Sounds horn] Tally ho! Chasing him – for 16 months – is a Channel 4 camera crew. Boris Johnson: Blond Ambition (Channel 4) it’s called. Go on, get him!
But it’s not really that kind of a hunt, to the death. More of a game, like drag hunting. So Boris, a big posh polar bear, bounds off – to Turkey and Tory party conference in Birmingham, and Belgrade, Hillingdon, India, Myanmar and Thornbury to make cup cakes.
And the camera crew races off after him, baying and yelping. Boris doesn’t seem to mind too much, he appears to be quite enjoying it. He looks over his shoulder, sometimes he slows right down, comes over to say hello. “Hello, nice to see you,” he greets them in Yangon. Media attention, it’s just so damn irresistible.
Gary Gibbon, the Channel 4 News political editor, stays at home and does the interviews. With MPs Keith Simpson, Nadine Dorries, Andrew Mitchell, Jacob Rees-Mogg – a bunch of Tories, who range from hinting at mild annoyance to full-on fawnathons. Not a hell of a lot of Boris-bashing coming from them – he still may end up being their boss one day, they seem to think. Nor from this chap at the Tory conference, who says that Boris motivates him, makes him think, “Wow, now we should go out and do something.” Yes, but with respect, sir, you have a Salvador Dali moustache, so it doesn’t matter what you think.
No, it’s Boris who does his own bashing, of himself. There’s not a lot here that you won’t know if you’ve been paying attention over the past year or so. But seen like this, all together – from his appointment as foreign secretary in July last year, to his Brexit vision in the Telegraph the other day, and set against the dubious colour of his travels – it paints a pretty extraordinary picture.
Epic U-turn after epic U-turn – on Turkey’s EU membership, on Russia and Putin, on Trump … almost as if he doesn’t really believe in anything at all apart from what best serves Boris Johnson right now. But he’s unique, and funny, and clever, say the fawning fans. He can reel off a few lines of Kipling’s Mandalay on a visit to the Shwedagon Pagoda. Yes, that’s one kind of clever, which probably comes of having been to Eton. Another would be knowing that spouting pro-colonial poetry at his Burmese hosts might not be the greatest idea.
“He is impossible to dislike,” says Mitchell. I don’t know, watching this I’m finding it quite easy. He’s a chancer and a chump.
To another colonial outpost, Aden, in the mid-60s, the setting for Peter Moffat’s The Last Post (BBC1). Inside the Royal Military police base, British officers and their men indulge in fried eggs on hunks of white bread, cards and hearty band-of-brotherly bants. The wives do their best to stay British and do what is expected of army wives. And they cool down with gin and tonics. Lots of those for Alison (Jessica Raine), who will then generally do sweaty sex with Captain Page – who isn’t her husband – while Lt Laithwaite, who is, is out inspecting the perimeter fence.
The depiction of life on an army base abroad, the historical context and splendid scenery (actually around Cape Town; Yemen isn’t great for filming right now) lifts The Last Post above soap level. Outside the perimeter fence, local chaps with guns and bazookas plot to overthrow the oppressive occupier.
“None of us should apologise for what we’ve given to those parts of the world lucky enough to have us,” says Major Makham. Meanwhile, in the guard room, a hooded prisoner is being tortured, his screams drowned out by Charles Penrose’s Laughing Policeman. Oh ho ho ho ho ho ho, ha ha ha ha ha ha …
Still in the desert, and this – Escape (Channel 4) – is fun. Crash sites based on real-life incidents are recreated in extreme environments. A team of engineers has to make a vehicle out of the wreckage – of a Boeing 727 and a Cessna in this first episode – in order to get back to civilisation. Ant Middleton off SAS Who Dares Wins is there, too, to help them not die. Kind of The Island meets Robot Wars meets Lost then.
And it’s really interesting – because of the amazing stuff they do and make, and because of the group dynamic in extreme conditions over six days. There aren’t enough engineers on TV.
And this one’s also really moving. When they’ve made their vehicle, a rear-engined flightless desert plane, they call it Elsie. Elsie was the daughter of Phil, one of the engineers; she died.
And after some teething problems, it – she, Elsie – works. She gets them out of there, home to safety. Go Elsie, whoop whoop.
