Caravanner of the Year (BBC2) | iPlayer
Aliens: The Big Think (BBC4) | iPlayer
I Want My Wife Back (BBC1) | iPlayer
The Tunnel: Sabotage (Sky Atlantic) |
The most unintentionally entertaining hour of the week was Caravanner of the Year. It featured a judge called Grenville, who looked every conceivable inch a Grenville. Grenville was chairman of the Caravan Club, could easily have been played by Arthur Lowe, and wielded much fierce Argyle-patterned Pringle-wear and something called “a magnetic torpedo level”, with which he was wont to check the perpendiculars of awnings.
Mainly it also featured six couples vying, unaccountably, for the title. The 108-year-old Caravan Club, which started with just 11 members but now has (again unaccountably) more than a million, has just introduced this battle royal, and producers must have thought it a great wheeze to get in on the inaugural action. Tellingly, though, it hasn’t been festooned with the moniker “Great British…”, and is only scheduled to last another week, which is BBC2’s way of admitting they might have bought a pig in a poke.
Because almost every one of the contestants was terminally awful at caravanning. At least with the cake thing contestants could bake, in many cases sublimely: here the teams took an average of 45 minutes just to get awnings up, with breaks only to scream with piercing laughter at use of the word “erection”. (There was much of this sort of thing, having to give one’s erection a bit of a tug and so on, along with, on show in the caravans, the result of an apparent ram-raid on the entire southern English stock of Keep Calm and Carry On posters and cushions.) They then had to reverse a caravan or, in a couple of easy cases, a campervan, through a laughably wide open gate: two couples took a full 15 minutes.
Keith and Angela will probably win, because they’re “list people”, and relatively sweet. “I said to Keith on the way here it’s like the charge of the light brigade. You know… into the valley of death… um.” Indeed, the similarities are uncanny. Later, Angela would ask: “Did you remember the breakdown cover documents? The English Heritage book? The new one?” Have you ever looked, dear woman, at the man you married? Keith had spent the previous day devising a 14-point plan, all colour-coded, just to get an awning up. The probability of Keith forgetting the breakdown cover documents was, mathematically, precisely that of his ever winning a Most Interesting Man in the Room competition.
We knew, of course, we were meant to find it all sweetly and eccentrically British, in just the way foreigners find us so winsome and charming (or so we kid ourselves). And there were sweet and human aspects, but also much, much bickering and legally defensible grounds for divorce or, quite possibly, a bijou gun rampage. And if these were, handpicked from a million members, the very crème, it’s little wonder caravans generally are accorded as warm a welcome on back roads in high summer as a turd in a punchbowl. Who will win? Tenterhooks isn’t the word.
Aliens: The Big Think was, I think, fascinating. I only hold back because much was too boggling for my otter-sized mind to take in. Indeed, I was immensely grateful to Peter Capaldi’s lucid voiceover for the information that there should be “loads” of intelligent alien civilisations out there. That I could cope with, whereas anything more formula-specific had me gazing bereft at 50s American scientists – square-jawed, clean-cut, collectively mad as a giggle of headless ferrets – scrawling urgently on blackboards. But even they were only guessing, and guessing hugely.
Capaldi had been paraphrasing Enrico Fermi, who tried to calculate the number of planets in the universe capable of supporting intelligent life – basically, yes, “loads”, although this was possibly not his actual final answer. Fermi then quite famously asked, at Los Alamos in 1950, “So where is everybody?” This was the crux of the programme, which I do need to watch again if only to feel less stupid: why, when so many possibilities for life out there should exist, has nobody been in touch yet?
Until quite recently the preserve of fringe science, this discipline is now attracting serious minds – Martin Rees, our astronomer royal, the fabulous Monica Grady of the Open University – encouraged by vaulting leaps in our own technology. But the answer might have to do with the appalling unlikeliness of our “window” of intelligent civilisation coinciding with other intelligent, organic windows elsewhere. Essentially, goes the argument, they’ll still be cytoplasmic slime for a few billion years, or have evolved eons since into efficient unmessy machinery.
So the new big question is: how long do intelligent civilisations last? Our own planet’s history offers little hope on this: but some fine minds and tech are now focused on finding the last remnants of organic intelligence in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” (not too hot and not too cold), looking for radio signals, or artificial artefacts, any sign of the death-echoes of intelligence. They’re obviously looking inter alia for the point at which any planet’s Caravan Club membership topped a million. (They didn’t actually specify this, but it was heavily implied).
I Want My Wife Back is a truly unfortunate title, in that it not only reveals a tin ear for titling of programmes but will let snarky reviewers change the W to an L. And, yes, I wouldn’t mind that half-hour back.
Everyone, I imagine, likes Ben Miller (the non-smug Alexander Armstrong) but not even he, nor Caroline Catz, could quite save this derivative sitcom, not while the likes of Camping and Fresh Meat exist. A love-rat boss? A surprise party gone wrong… surprised? A pleasant middle-class English chap caught out lying by an insistent pedant, his lies getting more outre and unmanageable by the minute? Well, I laughed until I stopped, which was frightfully quickly.
And just waited for my new highlight of the week, The Tunnel: Sabotage. A spin-off from The Bridge (with blessings from same), it has survived the somewhat clunky transition of locale to the Chunnel, mainly through superb work from stars Stephen Dillane and Clemence Poesy. And now, fabulously, we get to see Emilia Fox unleashing her inner… fox… as a toxically nasty chain-smoking villainess.
It is seriously moreish, and intelligent in scope, grappling unstintingly with high issues of terror, racism, Islamophobia, autism, and my does it batter along with a fair wind and lashings of style. In episode one we got a plane crash, hackers remotely controlling a cockpit – gulp, is that possible? Last week: an interfaith retreat, and a gunman targeting, chillingly, one Jew, one Christian, one Muslim. Jarringly, only too possible in these death-echoes of intelligence.
