TV Review: Jerry Springer: the Opera, the controversial televised version of the stage musical currently running in London (where it has been seen by more than 500,000 people), was broadcast last weekend to the rattle of teacups and the outrage of some radical Christian groups.
Since the broadcast, the BBC has received more than 50,000 complaints and some of its executives have received death threats. Not your average Saturday night then. So what are people choking on their Jaffa Cakes about? Why the fuss?
Jerry Springer's long-running TV show is a bad-taste, low-rent affair, in which people get 15 seconds or so of fame to air their grievances against lovers, children, dieticians, whoever they perceive has dumped on them and their less than auspicious lot. Jerry Springer: the Opera is a high-camp roll-call of some of the show's worst excesses. The juxtaposition of operatic arias and the crude monosyllabic language of Springer's guests creates a sometimes disturbing but ultimately witty and entertaining spoof.
Act one opened with a trailer-park chorus of bleached hair and stone-washed denim singing "my mom used to be my dad - snip snip". It was funny - really. Then, following the chat-show formula, the warm-up guy got the chorus baying for the guests - "the mutants, psychos and losers" - to come on down. Then we got Springer, the infamous, insouciant Springer ("He's bigger than Letterman; give or take a couple of million he's bigger than the Pope"). Springer was played by David Soul, looking spookily like his character. Disappointingly, Soul was the only one on stage who didn't get to sing - after such catchy lyrics as "She's a chick with a dick with a heart" and "Lose the facial hair and you might find a pimp", a blast of Don't Give Up On Us Baby would have been a welcome relief.
Springer blithely gets his guests to reveal their guilty secrets, and from time to time he is bothered - literally - by his conscience, a Brunnhilde figure with a cross-your-heart breastplate and plaits. "It's all very well for you," he shouts at her, "occupying the moral high ground. It's a lot more difficult to confidently occupy the moral low ground."
Act one had some memorable moments, including a dancing Ku Klux Klan singing "Dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians". The chorus then sang and performed the commercial break, a smorgasbord of delights including Viagra, Prozac, guns and weight-reducing parasites.
Then we came to the focus of the controversy, act two, when Springer is shot and begins his descent into hell.
"Accidentally shot by a man in a diaper - not exactly the epitaph I was looking for," says Springer. "Still, it might look good in Latin." "I don't do conflict resolution," he offers later, when Satan demands that Springer gets Jesus to offers him an apology for throwing him out of Heaven. The consequences for Springer if he fails to resolve the ancient split between good and evil are probably unprintable. In his efforts to save himself, however, he faces a misogynistic Adam, a sexually explosive Eve, an angry and disappointed Virgin Mary, and a Brandoesque God character singing "Billions of voices making all the wrong choices - it so ain't easy being me".
The question the opera asks is how responsible are Springer and others like him for the society their shows reveal. Would we be as violent, as vulnerable, as gullible and as cruel without them? "History," Springer answers obtusely, in a finale of feathers and top hats and a song about "three-nippled cousins", "defines us by what we do and what we choose not to do."
We can also choose what we watch and what we don't watch. And against a background where the recent actions of Sikh militants forced the Birmingham Repertory Theatre to pull the play Behzti (Dishonour) because of fears for cast and audience, it seems important to support and defend the BBC's decision to air this opera (surely nothing more than a cleverly surreal, satirical cartoon) and save the outrage for the exploitation of Springer's real-life participants.
ONE OF HISTORY'S bleakest events, its inception and development, was the subject of Auschwitz: the Nazis and the Final Solution. To mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps, Laurence Rees's new series traces the history of the camp in which more than one million people died.
The opening programme began with the arrival of Commandant Rudolf Höss, whose job it was to turn the former army barracks into a prison for Polish political prisoners. Of the 23,000 people initially detained there, half were dead within 20 months.
The reconstructed diary entries of Höss, who lived on the perimeter of the camp with his wife and four children, describe his chilling calm when his experiments with Zyklon B gas were successful and gassing prisoners was deemed a reliable method of extermination. He was, he wrote, pleased to be spared the bloodbath of execution by shooting. There had been some concern among top-ranking SS officers that murdering women and children in cold blood would produce an army of "neurotics and brutes", so they had to find a better way of killing - for the murderers, not the victims.
One of those soldiers, Hans Friedrich, now an old man, described the mass execution of Polish and Russian Jews: "They were so utterly shocked and frightened you could do what you liked to them." Asked what it felt like to shoot women and children at point-blank range, he said: "Nothing. I felt nothing. My hatred towards the Jews is too great - that is my unshakable conviction."
Using recently discovered documents outlining Himmler's grandiose, megalomaniacal plans to construct a mini-German empire in Auschwitz (an area rich in natural resources and minerals), archive footage of early experiments in gassing (which under the Third Reich had begun with adult patients in mental hospitals), and the crystallised recollections of survivors of "the procession of sceptres" walking to their deaths, this meticulously researched programme made grim watching. The series continues next week.
IN LYNDA LA Plante's Commander, Amanda Burton, along with a pair of 15-denier barely black tights and a persistent little mobile telephone, played Metropolitan Police Commander Clare Blake. Blake and her team were on the trail of a computer hacker who had been tampering with hospital records, killing some patients in the process, and who had threatened a baby unit if he didn't get £20 million. Throw in a scissors-wielding schizophrenic stalker with scary hair, a smack-snorting sister who's dying of cancer, a raging media campaign obsessed with Blake's previous relationship with a murderer, and you'd wonder how Blake still had the chutzpah to sleep with her assistant's boyfriend. This wasn't vintage La Plante. Burton, like a mildly disengaged bull in a second-hand china shop, somehow failed to inspire.
She might think about relocating to Glasgow and getting to grips with some ghouls. Sea of Souls, the new series of the spook-busting drama, was about as plausible as Jerry Springer embracing Buddha, and a lot funnier. The story had two strands: one involved the team's boffin ghostbuster, a grungy Frodo Baggins type, following ley lines to find a man who had disappeared from his top-floor flat, walked 300 miles across Scotland in his shirt-sleeves and morphed into his grandfather, all in the time it took his girlfriend to pop into the kitchen and make a cup of tea. You'll be glad to hear it all got sorted out by his Geiger-counter - now all he needs is a haircut. The other strand was much tougher to swallow: the rest of the team moved in with a wealthy Glaswegian family which was having a spot of Brazilian poltergeist difficulty. You could tell they had a lot of money because they ate salad leaves out of a big glass bowl and rolled their spaghetti like Sicilians.
Anyway, there was a bit of phantasmal activity in the basement and before you could say "pass the Parmesan", the washing machine had sorted everything out. It produced a hammer out of the spin cycle and a car key to the husband's mysteriously unused car from the bit you put the fabric conditioner in - and via a bit of spontaneous pyorrhoea (you really don't want to know) told us that the poltergeist was the former au pair and that the over-ambitious wife had done her in. Well, tut tut. Next time they should let the washing machine launder the script.
