The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs (BBC1) | iPlayer
Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue (BBC2) | iPlayer
9/11: Truth, Lies and Conspiracies (ITV) | ITV Hub
The Great British Bake Off (BBC1) | iPlayer
Three biggish documentaries this last week: one fascinating, one guiltily absorbing, one lazy beyond redemption. A programme about some of the flimsiest ephemera of our age – frocks, models, snobbery – gripped with way more heft, intelligence and friction than did a programme about the defining hours of our age, 9/11, and surely that shouldn’t have been so. Surely? Yet in a week where a froth over cupcakes succeeded in focusing the nation’s attention on the future of the BBC in ways of which chief whipper-upper John Whittingdale could only have dreamed, the thought strikes that maybe that is what television is often for. To be clever and flimsy and thus reflect our values. To remind us what we’re fighting for: the right to entertain those myriad values, however subtle, or wise, or silly.
But first the fascinating. There was no other word for The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs, Dr Chris van Tulleken’s troubling, lively and possibly epoch-changing first hour of allowing telly to showcase a little experiment of his: to wean all Britain off pills. My, we do take a lot of them, and my, they don’t work particularly well.
There were the usual BBC flurries of heated statistics, and, as usual, my notebook didn’t get all of them. Either Britain ingests 30bn prescribed pills every year, or perhaps it’s just 100,000 each in a lifetime, or something like that; whatever, it is indubitably too much, and we should just stop swallowing. A few real facts: in Chris’s 12 years as a doctor, prescriptions have risen nationally by 50%; in Blackpool, one in five people are on prescriptions for antidepressants; ibuprofen goes for the kidneys and paracetamol for the liver.
As this programme galloped along, with its bouncily winning presenter – like Gareth Malone with a PhD in molecular virology – two things became absurdly clear. The first was that he has a fight on his hands. Sometimes people need pain killed; they need painkillers. We have had, since ever, painkillers.
The second was the number of demands being made on GPs, most inner-city ones now having an absurdly rigid 10-minute slot in which to diagnose everything from filthy cancer to mendacious malingery. It is absolutely no surprise that Chris, slotted with a lovely Chingford GP for a day, watched him prescribe antibiotics for 39 patients out of 40; there has emerged a new kind of contract between patient and doctor, in which the patient can’t leave without hope, or a little paper bag of hope.
As was pointed out here, there is a crucial difference between viral and bacterial. The first is invasive and normally batters itself against an immune system, except with the likes of such squirrellers as Ebola and HIV; the second comes from within your own body and might need antibiotics – gum disease, thrush. I do hope I’ve got this right. Trust me, I’m a journalist.
Chris, like Doc Martin gone benign, told kind truths to fat people, lazy people, troubled people. He made home visits, which is surely one answer if only GPs had the time. And why aren’t they given the time? Next week he will try to curb the tyranny of painkillers, and I will wish him the heartiest good luck as I chug my co-codamol. If I was on a desert island, as he wisely didn’t say, I wouldn’t have the option. A first-world problem then, but it is a nasty (and possibly greedy, in terms of pharmaceutical companies fleecing our health) problem. The show is terrific; please do watch next week.
Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue had more first-world problems, chief among them who to believe. The film-maker, Richard Macer, was about the worst interviewer ever: he ended every interview with an “um…” as someone slithered out of the room. And his hesitant soliloquy, “Elitism is at the heart of this world; it’s what makes fashion tick”, fell a twitch short of Orwell. But Alexandra Shulman, editor, for the last quarter-century, of British Vogue, was also a difficult watch; this had been forced upon her by the PR department and she radiated concomitant gracelessness.
Away from those two, Lucinda Chambers, who’s been the mag’s fashion director for about 180 years, was warm and wise and pretty and exuberant and always looking ahead, as we all should be. “That’s the bugger about fashion: you just see more stuff that you can do stuff with, so you’re just permanently excited to do the next shoot.” She was great, and gave me faith in print again. Meanwhile…
Macer: “I notice you’ve put Samantha Cameron on a table with Kim Kardashian. That will be an interesting… combo.”
Shulman: “Interesting is always good.”
Macer: “What was your thinking behind that?”
Shulman: (as if to a five-year-old with learning issues) “That it would be interesting.”
Creative director Jaime Perlman had designed an unassailably gorgeous cover for 100 years of Vogue. I would happily have it on my wall. The shades of white and of light gold, the magical typography. Shulman, who I now like more than Macer, rejected it; the final cover was of Kate bloody Middleton. It waltzed out of everywhere, sold gadzillions. I would have gone for the Perlman, which perhaps explains why I am not editor of this paper. In the end, despite Macer’s blunderings, this enlightened. It spoke little of fashion, yet volumes about magazine journalism. It’s not just about getting a royal on the front page. And yet, somehow, it is. I can only applaud Shulman’s wisdom, and mourn any hope of a republic.
And so to the lazy. 9/11: Truth, Lies and Conspiracies was a piece of reheated trash which demeaned the memories. The first two-thirds were given over to conspiracy theorists – never a smart choice, unless it results in the headline “JFK: it was suicide!” – and the last third blamed, rightly, Saudi Arabia. There are voices being raised in a few parliaments this month, but way too few, and way too pianissimo.
The Great British Bake Off this week had lovely folk trembling over lacy pancakes with the kind of tearful concentration that might have been appropriate only if their firstborn was being held hostage. It was all obviously recorded before the furore. I will miss Mel and Sue hugely; they deserve damehoods simply for turning down the Channel 4 dosh. I hope they’re snapped up quickly to jointly host something next year – both have their own personalities and careers, but there’s a synergy when they’re joined at the lip.
Channel 4 has much to do over the next year to get it just right. Much will be in the hands of Love Productions, still licking wounds from a by-many-accounts fractious relationship with the BBC – the £25m a year might be a teensy salve – but C4’s will still be the masthead on the chopping block. They have a bun in their oven now. Please let it not be Rosemary’s baby.
