King Lear (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Jonathan Meades on Jargon (BBC Four) | iPlayer
The Battle for Britain’s Heroes (C4) | All 4
Peter Kay’s Car Share (BBC One) | iPlayer
One aspect of King Lear that can always puzzle is this: just why would anyone put up with the petulant old sod in the first place, never mind when he’s in the throes of fast-onset Alzheimer’s disease? His casual, easy charm? No. His unselfish generosity? No in italics. His being king? That’ll be a bit of it, though it still doesn’t wholly explain the fondness, the love even, so felt towards him by, among others, his loyal Fool, his faithful Gloucester.
But it helps give context, at least in the latest big BBC Shakefest – an unapologetically cerebral offering for an undemanding bank holiday, even if truncated to two hours and given a sleek, threatening modern setting, all sinister Range Rovers and bombs at bus stops – to the behaviour of his daughters, for once rescued from stereotypical witchery. Regan and Goneril were not (or not wholly) money-grubbing, scheming charlatans; to a huge extent, they’d simply had enough of the tricksy solipsist, though that didn’t stop Emily Watson (blowsy, leering, dangerous) nor Emma Thompson (icy, Tory, dangerous) acting up the storms of which both are so very capable. And a fine Florence Pugh, as Cordelia, you felt in particular was just rolling her eyes – often not metaphorically – at the old man, inviting him to have a word with himself.
This, then, was Anthony Hopkins’s challenge, to make Lear a man not a monster, and it will come as little surprise that he accomplished much of this superbly. Much of Lear is loud and shouty, and there are passages – “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks … you cataracts and hurricanoes, spout …” – where that’s entirely justified, but Hopkins was best in the quiet; forlorn with a recalcitrant shopping trolley in a windswept Stevenage mall when he comes across Edgar and the blinded Gloucester (a scene that lingers long); and his eventual sweet, wise tenderness towards Cordelia. This Lear, from director Richard Eyre, in fact, was always best when it was most quiet – the updated setting didn’t exactly intrude, but the mortars and helicopters merely served as would the alarums and horse war of old, ie just noise – or, indeed, when it featured Andrew Scott. His Edgar was searing, but then again Scott reading aloud Miffy the Bunny Gets New Pink Breeches would make it sound crack’d, mephitic, beseeching, wondrous.
What lucky people we are to have such a fine blisterer as Jonathan Meades in our midst. Rightly and richly pedantic, unforgiving, forever taking on “wall-to-wall witlessness” where he finds it, he turned his gaze (for once shorn of sunglasses) last week on language, specifically the difference between slang and jargon. There were so many lovely little phrases in a small hour I was hugging myself. Slang, wrongly denigrated, is “the expression of what we think, rather than what we are enjoined to think; it describes the actual rather than the hypocritical. Slang deflates the preposterous idea of human perfection.” Jargon, on the other hand, is everything that slang is not … evasive, euphemistic, unthreatening, conformist, aesthetically bereft, “the language of people who can’t think for themselves and arrogantly believe that the rest of the populace shares their infirmity. Slang mocks: jargon crawls on its belly, giving great forelock, hoping for promotion.”
Politicians were an obvious target and he was good on the “Trump-lout, the most mortgaged man on earth” and his “new turd of despicable jargon: alternative facts”. But lawyers, footballers, artists – especially, gleefully, artists – got a most welcome thumping, and Meades even managed to find time to put in a passionate defence of the RP accent. He certainly convinced me. The argument (eloquent, lucid, brief) was that the RP accent, before it was wholly shanghaied by the BBC, formed a useful lingua franca: it would allow a pyromaniac from Elgin to understand an assurance assessor from Port Talbot. Whereas the increasing regionalisation of accents – a form of tribalism disguised as groovy new diversity – effectively prevents communication and as such represents a linguistic apartheid. There were so many more ideas in this hour than in the entire output, since its inception, of (say) The One Show that it was almost embarrassing.
The once doughty Afua Hirsch looked almost tremulous as she appeared in The Battle for Britain’s Heroes, a Channel 4 one-off to explain why she had called, in a Guardian column, for Nelson’s column to be challenged, possibly removed. She hadn’t expected quite such vitriol, “literally a torrent”, and said so, repeatedly: much of this was a little too much about her and her Twitter trolls. She ended up somewhat pulling her punches, agreeing with various admirals about nuance, with Jacob Rees-Mogg about context, and one was left with the inescapable feeling that Channel 4 had just wanted to ramp up a social media storm only to be let down by their protagonist, who impolitely insisted on seeing the other side of every argument, to the extent that she could now “see how framing the debate around toppling Nelson was a distraction”. Not a mistake, mind; just a distraction.
She made some good points. There is doubtless a need to be taught, at least offered, some hinterland to our heroes, rather than having a pristine history literally – yes, literally – carved in stone. But not sure about the lengthy concentration on Churchill… I knew all this, his warts’n’all stuff. I think it’s been about 25 years since I first heard of Churchill’s unsavoury dabblings with the writings of eugenecists. So the one truly shocking moment came when earnestly smug activists burst into London’s Churchill-themed Blighty Cafe to protest against “imperialism and gentrification”. The late Philip Roth, among his many fine phrases, had one particular killer, written well before social media: he spoke of the “ecstasy of sanctimony”: he should be remembered these days, by both mad left and mad right, against whom reasoned debate, as practised by Hirsch, is shoutily impossible: might as well try to talk to the wind that dried your first shirt.
Peter Kay’s Car Share ended with just – just – enough grit to redeem it from wholesale mawkishness. Sight gags – a billboard for C4’s forthcoming My Big Fat Undateable Bake Off – and local radio trickles (“Forever FM… get in touch with your favourite bubble-wrap memories…”) helped, and Kay and Sian Gibson gelled as ever, but you wonder whether both aren’t just a little glad to get shot of it, after an unsuccessful (worse, just unfunny) improvised recent episode for which they got pelters on (sigh) social media. It’ll still be hailed as something of a delight in reminding us of the glories that can be found in the dullest of routine lives, but I hadn’t quite remembered the relative grubbiness of some of the gags. Then again, life – the idea of human perfection being, remember, preposterous – is mostly grubby. Amen to that.
