Here are some things that don't happen much on BBC 2's The Great British Sewing Bee (soon, post-Brexit, to be renamed The Little English Sweatshop, but let's not dwell on this).
The presenter, likeable big-fringed quipster Claudia Winkelman, does not appear as a disembodied voice that no one else can hear, in order to instruct morally flexible contestants to play psychological mind games with other contestants.
No one mistakes the news of David Bowie’s death for news that a fellow contestant has died. At no point does a contestant start screaming “shut up you bitch!” or “stop disrespecting me!” or “I’m not here to make friends”. In fact, no one gets up in anyone else’s face at any point whatsoever during the whole series.
The contestants are not sporadically drugged with a socially acceptable drug. Twins do not count as one person.
Contestants do not sit around in a hot tub between tasks discussing threesomes they have had before having a public "sex romp". (Apologies. I hate using that phrase, but it's an official term in The Irish Times style guide.) And if they do this, it happens off-camera.
No one is encouraged to eat insects or eyeballs to the sound of Ant and Dec’s hideous, bone-chilling chortling.
No one on the programme has dreamt since childhood of becoming a celebrity needle-worker and they do not reveal that the British experiment in social democracy has failed by declaring their time on the programme as their “last chance”.
The losers are not laughed at by a gibbering mob corralled into a stadium on the edge of a minor British city.
The winners are not lowered body and soul into the voracious smirking maw of tiny-eyed worm-god Simon Cowell (Winkelman might take a nibble of a contestant here and there, but her appetite isn’t very big so she largely leaves their souls intact).
In short, The Great British Sewing Bee does not make me feel sad inside, as many other reality television competitions do, but makes me feel light and happy and hopeful.
Much like its food-based sister-show, The Great British Bake Off, The Great British Sewing Bee exhibits the best of British values: craftiness, stick-to-itiveness, humour, tea, multiculturalism and pluck (internationalists will notice, of course, that these are not British values but generic good-human-being values).
This week, we’re at the semi-final. Winkleman bops around jocularly, elbow-jabbing one likeable example of cheerful grit, then another, while silver-haired Esme Young and foppish Patrick Grant float in and out making pronouncements about “draping” like ethereal visitors from a more orderly realm. Meanwhile, pizzicato string arrangements borrowed from Danny Elfman dial the moody from reflective whimsy to dramatic whimsy and people become gently emotional.
As usual, I have no idea what’s going on. It’s just nice to watch people who are good at something doing it well and politely.
Jeremy Clarkson's iteration of Top Gear, with its chummy, jowly chauvinism, was once seen as the more considered political wing of the nefarious organisation known as UKIP. So, in some ways, it's a shame that Clarkson and co aren't helming the programme in the early days of UKIP's dream Britain (for more details watch Mad Max: Fury Road or "the news").
Unfortunately, that version of Top Gear ended when Jeremy Clarkson punched an Irishman in the face for not giving him hot meat. This was, I believe, an actual UKIP policy at the time. Things have changed. Now millionaire man-of-the-people Chris Evans – he keeps mentioning he owns really expensive cars – and affable Yankee cheese-monger Matt LeBlanc – a real-life immigrant – are operating in a pre-recorded, pre-lapsarian, pre-Brexit world.
Off to Dingle
On Sunday, the current Top Gear (BBC2) crew ricochet across Europe with barely a border in sight. Young newcomer Rory Reid drives a Jaguar from Coventry to Geneva in emulation of a test drive years before, and LeBlanc and Evans take their Rolls Royces around the Dingle Peninsula without getting wrapped in any of the red tape you might expect from the stuffy, bureaucratic old EU.
In Kerry, there are plenty of Irish-dancing and GAA-playing locals dotted picturesquely about the place to meet them. The new Top Gear still seems a bit leaden. Kerry looks amazing though. Evans refers to it as "paradise", which is accurate enough, particularly when you consider the despotic hellscape from whence he came (BBC Radio 2).
(For the record, Jeremy Clarkson was actually anti-Brexit. He did, however, punch an Irishman because he was hungry. That really happened.).
Maybe I'm projecting, but everything looks Brexit-shaped to me this week. The great new psychologically-complex ghost story The Living and the Dead (Tuesday, BBC 1) is about a progressive Freud-reading 19th-century couple who bring new technology and foreign notions to a superstitious, folksy community of hard-working Luddites (see also: Top Gear in Kerry).
It's written by Life on Mars co-creator Ashley Pharoah, features Irish actor Colin Morgan and it contains ghostly apparitions, eerie Wicker Man-style folk music, faded daguerreotypes, Victorian hysterics and hints of time-travel (much like a UKIP meeting). The first episode beautifully elides the real with the fantastical and undercuts scientific optimism with deep, primal trauma. It's also, I can't help but noticing, all about the conflict between isolationism and internationalism, stasis and change, fearful tribalism and personal freedom.
I might be reading too much into it. Then again, reading too much into things is a noble legacy bequeathed us by the original Freudian, Sigmund Freud, for whom a cigar was never just a cigar (it was a sublimation of the masturbatory impulse, since you asked).
Bettany Hughes explores his life and ideas this week in her excellent, clear-eyed Genius of the Modern World series (Thursday, BBC4). It's great. Freud, incidentally, was an Austrian-Jewish refugee who lived his final days in London.
