TV Review: 'They're doing this because I'm a complete shit," explained James Hewitt as to why a camera was following him about. "We're trying to make me less of a shit. It's not working."
James Hewitt: Confessions of a Cad, Channel 4, Thursday
Coronation Street, TV3 & ITV, all week
Eastenders, RTE1 & BBC1, all week
Don't Drop the Coffin, ITV, Tuesday
Townlands: In the Barber's Chair, RTE1, Wednesday
Confessions of a Cad proved to be another Hewitt plan that would go utterly awry. If you saw the promotional trailer for this programme, you will know it to have been so splendid that the programme couldn't possibly match. It didn't, but it came close.
Hewitt is a certain class of toff. You can't help but mention Bertie Wooster, because Hewitt is an abundant source of all that Wodehouse bottled.
He is cut adrift in a world of vicious tabloids and enterprising documentary makers. Confessions of a Cad was edited with precision. It spliced his mannerisms into mocking montages. It had a Carry-On soundtrack that turned his upper-class buffoonery into an almost choreographed performance.
He did, though, proffer the raw materials. A visit to a drive-through McDonald's became an adventure in confusion. When he spoke to women, it was in a drawl copyrighted by Terry Thomas. He smoked a pipe in the bath, while discussing the origins of his reputation as a bounder. It was impossible to see what the most adored woman on the planet found so attractive in him.
But, if you could put up with the constant prickle of your skin crawling, he would probably make entertaining company. The researchers - their regional accents standing out like a mule at a polo match - seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely.
Hewitt is currently trying to flog the love letters written to him by Princess Diana over the course of their five-year relationship. They seem quite bland, almost teenage in their sensibilities. "Demented woman on the loose," she wrote, "That's for sure!"
He is looking for £10 million for the lot. Nobody will buy them. There was the suggestion, however, that he may not be able to rid himself of everything given to him by Diana. There is a rumour doing the rounds that Hewitt is the father of Prince Harry. He dismissed the scurrilous titbit with great eloquence ("bollocks!"), but the theory overshadowed all else. Harry, you suddenly realised, does have a similarly auburn mop and a certain ruddiness in his face. At the very, very least, it is an unfortunate coincidence.
For all his bluff, Hewitt is coy, divulging little of substance and instead parading his superficiality. He didn't come over as particularly bright and sports a perpetually wounded expression. As Wodehouse put it, he possibly feels like a man who, chasing rainbows, has had one of them suddenly turn and bite him on the leg.
Having seen its way through the pantomime excitement of the Richard Hillman storyline, Coronation Street is back to its worst. This week, Tracy Barlow drugged and bedded Roy Cropper. Tracy, daughter of Ken, left the Street several years ago as a sweet, mildly rebellious young girl. She returned a sociopath. No-one, however, seems to have noticed the join. In between, there was a chapter in which she required a liver transplant, and her stepmother's late Moroccan toyboy husband donated the organ. Nobody has mentioned Tracy's ailment since, mindful, perhaps, of drawing any attention to the idiocy of past storylines.
As it happens, one of Ken Barlow's other children, Peter, became a confirmed bigamist last Sunday. The writers, unfortunately, have not yet drained the barrel dry of Barlow children. Neither have they fully scraped everything from the bottom of it.
Roy, on the other hand, is an excellent and singular character; awkward, bumbling, painfully shy. He is played with such conviction by David Neilson that you sometimes believe that he must live on the set, curling up to sleep under the counter of Roy's Rolls café as the actors and production staff go home to their families. Roy married a transsexual called Hayley, but for all the contrivance behind their coupling, they became great Coronation Street characters. They are a reliable source of beige cardigans and tender comedy.
Their storylines must be limited, because they are limited characters. Yet, they now sit snugly in the tradition of the Street's best couples. They are from a different culture to the one that created Hilda and Stan or Jack and Vera, but they are as vital to the tradition of the soap.
This week, the people behind Coronation Street forgot this, just as they have forgotten a lot of things. They have forgotten some of the basics of telling a story, for instance. Sunday saw a one-hour episode that sold itself as the climax of the bigamy storyline, yet which ended with an unrelated storyline. It is ineptitude that would never be tolerated by EastEnders. This week, it brought us the murder of gangster Jack Dalton. Through two exquisite episodes, and ignoring all other plotlines, it never dared flinch in its focus nor stumble in its climax.
Coronation Street's one-hour special ended with Tracy dragging a drugged Roy to bed. The next episode had him waking up, naked and amnesiac beside her. They would never have dropped Hilda Ogden in a rape storyline, but they've done it to Roy Cropper. On Monday night, they had him broken and weeping, wailing with guilt as he scrubbed himself down in the shower. It hurt to watch, not because of the skill in the writing or the raw emotion of the character, but because of its overbearing crassness. It was clumsy and gratuitous, and represented not the finely honed torment of a popular character, but the degradation of a once great drama that soils itself so often it doesn't even notice any more.
Don't Drop The Coffin is a docu-soap. It is similar to the series Airport, only it is set in the biggest departure lounge of all. It follows a firm of undertakers, Albin & Sons, a business that would be preparing itself for a subsequent upsurge in custom if prospective customers weren't so finite. It is based in Bermondsey, south London. Famously, London is a great city in which to die, where even the horses still dress for the occasion.
The programme is timid. There is nothing so uncomfortable as grief, nothing so piquant as a corpse. It fits that it was filmed in winter, when the trees were bare and world grey. The voiceover comes through the comforting tones of Nick Berry, who narrates in the manner of a priest delivering a reassuring eulogy. It is more in keeping with the elegant writing of Thomas Lynch than the antics of Six Feet Under, although it really shouldn't be elevated to the level of either.
It is intended to satiate the public's growing interest in the business of death, but needs first to satiate its interest in good television. The camera sought out personalities, but struggled. It went out of its way to introduce driver Lee as the "practical joker" of the firm. The practical jokes, though, never followed. Nobody discovered that their tea had been laced with formaldehyde. No hands burst from the ground. The one thing that Don't Drop The Coffin could do with is more life.
Townlands brought us In The Barber's Chair, a short but sweet documentary on the trade. Apparently you can tell a barber from the way he stands ("firm to the ground"). He must have "the feet of an elephant, the legs of a table, the patience of Job, the hands of a surgeon, the psyche or mental abilities of a psychiatrist or psychologist and the confessional abilities of a priest". The customer, though, must have deep reserves of trust. In Dublin's Waldorf, the cut-throat razors are vintage 1920s, and there is an Asian barber who ignores the leather strap and sharpens his with the palm of his hand, swishing the blade, criss-cross, the Zorro of Westmoreland Street. The wet shave has made quite a comeback. None of the barbers sang the Ballad of Sweeney Todd, but they must all know it off by heart.
Today, the barbershop is on the up. They will be around for a long time yet, suggested one, even if it had been touch and go for a while. It needed to recover from fashion's nervous breakdown. During the 1970s, long hair almost wiped out these sanctuaries of manhood. During the 1980s, you might recall, permsalmost wiped out manhood.
