In the second instalment of Land of the Midnight Sun (ITV), Alexander Armstrong continued his journey through the frozen north. This particular segment of the Arctic Circle took him as far as Greenland. His first stop, however, was Thingvellir national park in Iceland, a place where the Eurasian and North American plates meet. It doesn’t look like much, to be honest.
“I’m told I can get an even better view by immersing myself in near-freezing water,” said Armstrong. That’s right: if you’re minded to, you can snorkel through icy water along the chasm between two tectonic plates. If you’re Armstrong, you have to. If the modern celebrity travelogue serves any purpose, this is it: someone you have heard of does something you probably wouldn’t do yourself, but are mildly interested in watching. The two most important qualities of such a programme are the affability of its presenter and the forbidding remoteness of the destination.
Armstrong is, of course, the embodiment of affability, whether he is dancing with Inuits or accompanying Danish soldiers on their 26-month sled dog patrol across a snowy expanse of nowhere. He treats everyone he meets as if they have just had a really good round on Pointless. And Greenland is one of those places I’m really glad I watched a programme about, instead of accidentally going to.
There is, for example, Ilulissat, a dramatic cityscape of icebergs floating down a fjord. “Even the name Ilulissat means ‘the icebergs’,” said Armstrong. You couldn’t really call it anything else. Armstrong boards an ice-breaking vessel with a man whose sole employment seems to involve sailing out into the bay to collect chips of iceberg for tourists to put in their drinks. “The ice is never better than when you’ve picked it yourself,” said Armstrong. I’d be happy to stay in the hotel, and take his word for it.
The Face of Britain by Simon Schama (BBC2) continues to be one of the best things on TV; it can certainly claim to be without peer on Wednesdays. Last night, Schama dealt with the portraiture of love, beginning with the story of Sir Kenelm Digby, whose wife Venetia – a great beauty of the age – died unexpectedly one night in 1633. The distraught Digby summoned his friend Van Dyck to paint her on her deathbed; they even pinched her cheeks to give her face some colour. The resulting portrait, in which Van Dyck managed something like a resurrection, is both touching and haunting.
The most fashionable evocation of romance in those days was the miniature. It was art you could carry on your person – “the 18th-century equivalent of your phone picture” – and it became a vital tool in the pursuit of love. Richard Cosway was the go-to guy for miniatures, and the Prince of Wales was his best customer. In his relentless pursuit of the twice-widowed Maria Fitzherbert, Prince George commissioned a lot of miniatures, and Cosway finally hit on the most effective wooing device: a tiny painting of the prince’s eye (it seems to me the less you saw of the actual George, the better he looked). “It’s strangely possessive,” said Schama, but it worked, and eye-only miniatures became hugely popular.
Thomas Gainsborough’s painting of his daughters was cited by Schama as not just a great expression of parental love, but “one of the great masterpieces of English painting.” Gainsborough himself didn’t have a terribly high opinion of the sort of portraiture that earned him his living and his reputation, paintings of judges and merchants, men who, as Schama put it, “wanted to be represented in the full swell of their self-congratulation”.
Schama ended the episode with a moving but clear-eyed look at the famous photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono taken by Annie Leibovitz hours before Lennon was murdered. If it took someone of Schama’s brashness to conclude a history of romantic portraiture with a Rolling Stone magazine cover, it took someone of his skill to carry it off.
Bull (Gold) is a new sitcom commissioned by a channel that mostly shows old sitcoms, and it has the look and feel of something from yesteryear. Suffice to say that everyone who appears in Bull is wasted in it.
Robert Lindsay plays Rupert Bull, the teak-stained owner of an antiques shop presided over by his chain-smoking sister (Maureen Lipman). They are aided by shop assistant Toby, who suffers from the kind of severe but undiagnosed stupidity that once afflicted characters in sitcoms, but doesn’t really exist any more, thanks, I’m imagining, to the ban on leaded petrol. Toby can’t tell a Fabergé egg from a real one. You can imagine the trouble that might cause in an antiques shop. But if you are imagining the hilarious consequences, you have done more work than the writers.
