That’s a familiar voice, the narrator’s in MPs: Behind Closed Doors (Channel 5). An actor? Off Corrie perhaps, somewhere around that latitude … it’s John Prescott! Who can actually sound quite actorly.
But he’s better than an actor, because he brings his own experience (40 years of it) as an MP to his narration, plus a bit of attitude and mischievousness. Like when he introduces one of the three MPs whose surgeries the cameras are visiting. “Nick Clegg’s heady days as a deputy prime minister may be long gone, but he still remains the MP for Sheffield Hallam,” he says. Ooh, just a teeny bit bitchy John (also a former deputy PM of course, now Baron Prescott)?
Of Naz Shah (Labour, Bradford West), Prezza says: “She’s already forged a reputation as a somewhat outspoken and controversial MP,” almost certainly referring to the antisemitism row that had got her temporarily booted out of the party. You would expect him to have most jabs at Jacob Rees-Mogg, but the Tory MP for North East Somerset gets off relatively lightly. It’s down to filmmaker Rachel Tracy to ask Rees-Mogg whether he thinks his constituents are surprised to find out he’s actually human. “Ha, erm I don’t know, that’s very difficult to answer,” he replies, poshly and a little taken aback. “The gift of seeing oneself as others see one is a great one and I’m not sure I have it as completely as I would wish.”
I’m surprised this hasn’t been done before, a fly-on-MPs’-surgery-walls documentary. It’s fascinating, because of the massive range of issues they have to deal with. An angry remainer wants to pick a fight with Rees-Mogg about Brexit; a family with a severely disabled son are distraught after finding out their care package will be stopped; a man has come to talk to him about tax, and people – especially people at the HMRC – spending too much time on Facebook, and about a computer worm called Stuxnet that was developed by the Israelis and is shutting down the Iranian nuclear programme (I actually feel a bit sorry for Rees-Mogg over that one).
Shah has a young Afghan man terrified of deportation and a woman who can’t find adequate schooling for her son. Clegg has a couple of cases connected to mental health, a family tragedy abroad and a man who doesn’t want his pub knocked down to make way for another unnecessary supermarket.
It’s also interesting because it’s a rare peek at MPs not braying at each other in Westminster but actually among real people, the people it’s their job to represent, actually having to listen. It’s a good cast, too – high in profile but very different – that Tracy has persuaded to play. Maybe they didn’t need much persuading. They are certainly very aware of the fly. I doubt more promises have ever been made – to write letters, make calls, take it up with so-and-so – or so much empathy has ever been shown. Especially by Clegg, feeling the collective pain of every single one of his constituents, of whom he is barely worthy …
It seems to work though. Mitch – who has come to see his MP with a proposition to legalise cannabis, for medical purposes – comes away with the promise of a letter to the health secretary and a revised opinion of the former leader of the Lib Dems. “I must say I didn’t get no reptilian vibes off Nick Clegg,” he says. And a lady called Kathleen, who is unhappy with development plans for her local leisure centre, comes from her surgery even gushier. “He was lovely,” she says. No sorry, I’m not having that, of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Human possibly, but not lovely.
This is jolly too, in spite of the annoying title: Tour de Celeb (Channel 5). Eight of the remaining TV and former sports personalities not currently cha-cha-cha-ing on Strictly or gargling live crayfish in the jungle, have eight weeks to prepare to take on the toughest mountain stage of the Tour de France. In lycra, naturally.
The trouble is, they are at very different levels. So Austin Healey the rugby player is pretty much already wearing the yellow jersey, while television’s Angellica Bell can’t really ride a bicycle. Maybe she forgot how to. Quick, give some of whatever Lance Armstrong used to take, otherwise I don’t think she’s going to make it. Somewhere between the two, Pineapple dance studios’ Louie Spence somehow and skilfully manages to compare a long hill to a sexual partner: “There was this peak that didn’t know when to peak. It was like, are you ending? No. Are you ending? No. It just went on, for ever.” L’Étape du Tour is going to be positively tantric.
