Mary Beard’s Shock of the Nude (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The Story of the Nude (BBC Four) | iPlayer
Baghdad Central Channel 4 | All4
Frankie Boyle’s Tour of Scotland (BBC Two) | iPlayer
I first misread it as “Mary Berry’s Shock of the Nude” and steeled myself for an hour of cake-based whimsy and tastefully naked WI gels. Must stop doing that: I misheard a film title two years ago as “I, Daniel Craig” and wasted a couple of months trying to imagine the plot traction offered by watching a charming, tuxedoed superspy struggle with claim forms in a Gateshead jobcentre. Anyway, Mary Beard of course it was, duh, pin-sharp and refreshingly direct as ever, taking us, sometimes gently, sometimes by the short and curlies, through little less than the entire history of the nude in art.
Nude, note, not “naked”. Naked is just people not wearing any clothes, and thus for the plebs, for porn, for “erotica”; nude is what it’s called in “art world” world. And has been ever since Praxiteles’s Venus/Aphrodite of Knidos, “the goddess of love – no, let’s call her what it is, goddess of sex”, in the fourth century BC. Pretty much since then, the story of the nude, especially in the religion-muddled west, has been the story of the male gaze.
Ms Beard – and an equally enthralling quasi-companion piece the night before, The Story of the Nude, fronted by an equally splendid Kate Bryan – took us assiduously through the many weaselly ways in which men have sought to camouflage their right to look at women in the scud through the fig leaf, as it were, of “art”. From the first, the sculptures and the reclining nudes were depicted as innocently “caught”, half-bathing or somehow sleepily compromised, often in faux-biblical/classical narratives. It was possibly only, as Bryan argued, with Goya’s Clothed Maja and Naked Maja that the male gaze was dared to be confronted, even rebuked: a real woman, dark eyes gazing out defiant, arms thrown back, made the spectators no longer feel safe outside the frame.
And this erotica/art fuzzy boundary was seldom better encapsulated than in Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting The Origin of the World, called once “the Mona Lisa of vaginas” – I’ve just had to Google that to remember Courbet’s spelling and wish I hadn’t. Beard mused whether the critical talk, all the “delicate, amber colour scheme” and the rest, and the very title, might blurrify the lines by laundering, in the name of aestheticism, the beady-eyed, erotic male gaze. “Whereas if it was just called, say, Jeanette’s Pussy… ” Although I don’t know quite why she had to bring poor Jeanette into it.
Alarming, charming, hugely instructive, not least in that we got to see (male) televisual art critics of the 1960s and 70s making utter pawing Benny Hills of themselves; and Mary Beard is always brave enough to admit her intellectual doubts, for nothing in this ongoing art/porn debate was left writ in stone. In the concluding part next week, proud Mary gets her kit off.
Baghdad Central, a new six-part thriller set just after the coalition invasion of Iraq, brought back to me personally urgent memories of 2003, very few of them good. I’d covered that huge anti-war march of February; about six weeks later I was in Baghdad – and have to say, 17 years later, that air of skittery menace is wonderfully encapsulated here. Such vivid memories of the hamfistedness of the US, letting Iraq drop into an unserviceable cesspit nightly. “Oops, butterfingers” doesn’t quite cover it, when you consider the upheavals since.
Producers have been wise enough to allow Waleed Zuaiter centre stage throughout, even though there’s a grand performance from Bertie Carvel as a British diplomat, in this adaptation (by Stephen Butchard) from Elliott Colla’s book. Zuaiter is widowed police inspector Muhsin, trying to summon the weary guts to cope with one daughter lost, one ill: and it’s slow, and yet it grows, grows, into an intense and terrific tale of compromise, and of love, with a decent grounding in (compromised) policework.
A lovely and inspired return from Inside No 9, now juggernaut enough that few British stars can or would want to say no. Twists turned and turns twisted, and we were gently jawdropped. Elsewhere – what a shocker from Silent Witness, not least in that this series it has made a remarkable recovery from Silent Witless. But we’ll be lucky to instantly find, before the next, quality replacements for Richard Lintern and, more crucially, Liz Carr.
If you thought Frankie Boyle’s four-part jaunt around Scotland was just another comic dropping off the mousewheel for a freebie, think again; apart from anything else, Mr Boyle is there well before you and does all those gags but better. And it is a severely different beast to so many travelogues, in that it includes genuine understated humour, mainly through the voiceovered asides: your ears blink in a disbelieving, did-he-just-say-that? manner. Within five minutes he meets a hermit “who’s chosen to live alone amid the shallow graves of the dense forests of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire”, and delighted hermit Jake by describing his caravan-in-a-treehouse as both “a kind of low-level Scottish Dignitas” and “this is where I’d like to come if I was in witness protection”, while gently mocking the vogue for “living in the moment”. “What, like a heroin addict, or a dog?”
Boyle quite likes the long-established eco-community of Findhorn, “which has its own currency and, sadly, its own theatre”, and notes, driving down Glencoe – “like me it has a rugged and a dramatic beauty, and we’ve both caused several ramblers to go missing” – that Jimmy Savile once had a home here. I can never quite look that savage glen straight in the eyes again. “Here he would entertain such luminaries as his friend Margaret Thatcher and the demon Adrammelech, ancient Assyrian commander of hell.”
A few decades earlier it fell to another comedian, Billy Connolly, to pithily rip off the carapaces of many aspects of his own country, exposing coy kailyard sentimentality and sectarianism for the ludicrosities they were. Boyle is doing an equally smack-up job of explaining the confusions of a small-sprawled nation to ourselves, in the fraught and twitchy 2020s, while knitting in just enough aspects of history and politics, such as Robert the Bruce’s drive for independence – “700 years before Nicola Sturgeon took up his mantle. And his haircut” – to keep it all urgently relevant. I’d urge anyone watching south of the border to revel in it. You might learn something; if little else, then to relish the high concept of tinder-dry, mournful glee.
