While many papers like the Daily Mail are getting rid of their TV critics, despite the fact that vast parts of their paper revolves around the medium, others provide a fuller service, but I begin to wonder why they bother.
My paper of choice is The Guardian. And they employ one of the finest television critics writing today in Nancy Banks Smith. They also have the excellent Screen Burn with Charlie Brooker.
But then they insist on employing Sam Wollaston as well.
Why should writing about TV be seen as some kind of way to get into comedy writing? We’re talking about the medium that is foremost in most people’s minds. They spend many precious hours in front of their television, and by and large take it seriously. They care about what they watch – be it Emmerdale or University Challenge. Certainly, people want entertainment, but if they think a programme is rubbish, they don’t watch it.
That’s why I want to read a critic who can inform as well as occasionally entertain me.
The Guardian also employs Peter Bradshaw as its film critic. Now he may be sneeringly supercilious, seemingly hating most films that he watches. But he does care about them, and even if he only gives Burn After Reading two stars out of five, he at least believes in it, and it’s because he takes the medium seriously.
Wollaston on the other hand, reviews an episode of Timewatch, largely concerned about how attractive he finds the presenter.
Phwoar, new TV history totty. She looks like a cross between Boticelli’s Venus and Meryl Streep’s French Lieutenant’s Woman. And she’s brainy as hell and writes books.
Yes – I know he’s saying it for effect. But over time, you wonder if that’s really not all he’s thinking about. Was the show any good? Is it worth me watching on the iPlayer?
He then goes on to discuss a programme on Ian Fleming, largely on the basis of how attractive he finds Joanna Lumley. Only a review of the US edition of Wife Swap do we learn anything vaguely interesting – basically that they make stuff up for it and reshoot scenes.
That’s not enough. Tell me about the programmes please. And if you can’t do it seriously, then maybe I should be looking elsewhere for my television criticism.
Now let me chase down a copy of Clive James on Television.
[UPDATE] Oh dear. Today’s Wollaston column is arguably even worse than yesterday’s. Shark sex “looks wrong” to him. This is then followed by lots of guffaw guffaw writing about animals having sex. How amusing thirteen-year-old Guardian readers must find it all.
Later on he moves on to The Sarah Silverman Programme. This has apparantly leapt ahead of Fonejacker as the funniest thing currently on television. Now Silverman is funny – although that’s probably debateable if you were in the audience at Hammersmith the other night when you got 45 full minutes of comedy for your £50.
But even the idea that Fonejacker was ever the funniest thing is utterly bizarre. It’s a rehashing of the decades old art of phone pranking better practioned in the medium of audio by such people as Victor Lewis Smith, The Jerky Boys and even Jon Culshaw as “The Doctor” on Dead Ringers.
With Wollaston at The Guardian and Kathryn Flett at The Observer, it feels like a horrible pincer movement’s happening.