Whether television can tell you anything genuinely new or not is a moot point
— but, at its best, it can confirm suspicions you’d always held but never
had the time to prove.
On Wednesday, BBC4 had a film of a woman talking banal rubbish — not in itself
especially remarkable. However, she was talking while surgeons sawed off the
top of her head and poked around with long pointy things inside her brain.
Then they proceeded to slice gobbets of grey sponge out of her cerebellum,
chopping through arteries and — just for a change — zapping her with
electrodes implanted directly into her brain. None of this made the
slightest difference to the stuff coming out of the woman’s mouth. She
continued jabbering as the sawbones went about their work, the top of her
skull perched beside her like a very messy ashtray.
This was Blood and Guts — A History of Surgery, presented by a
dutifully awe-stricken chap called Michael Mosley. The point of this
particular sequence was supposedly to show how infinitely complex and
localised in its functions the brain really is. Well, maybe. But I suspect
if you’d scooped out her entire brain and put it in a blender with sour
cream, garlic and dill, then it would have had no effect on what this woman
was saying: the same stuff would have kept on coming, and coming. My thesis
has always been that when women speak, they do so independently of their
brain — perhaps through some mysterious, as yet undiscovered organ — and I
took this film as scientific confirmation of the fact. But I suppose it
could be that there’s just one tiny, microscopic portion of the brain that
controls women’s speech — and the rest deals with shoes.
The premise of Blood and Guts was the same as all those cor-blimey-innit-a-wonder
docs about docs — aren’t they brilliant and isn’t it a good job they’re not
like they were in the old days? The old days being, in this case, 40 or 50
years ago. There was an interview with a mild-mannered, middle-aged American
bus driver who had been lobotomised aged 12 by a surgeon who hammered two
ice picks through his skull, via his eye sockets. The bus driver
subsequently came to think this all a bit rum. The man who operated upon him
was Walter Freeman, who, to judge from the black-and-white footage, was
himself the subject of one or two admiring documentaries in his day. Driving
an ice pick through the skull was, back then, thought cutting-edge
technology for dealing with nutters. Today’s brain surgery, by contrast,
involves slicing off the top of someone’s head and poking at the brain — and
still seems to me a touch, shall we say, primitive and, indeed, risky. Let’s
see what the documentaries make of it in 30 years. Cut to — by now — grainy
footage of the woman talking rubbish while having her head sawn off: “Can
you believe they once did this?”
Television treats modern medical professionals in much the same way it treats
dolphins — they are an unalloyed good thing, deserving only our admiration,
and a joy to behold as they leap with those happy smiles upon their face.
So, it made a pleasant change to hear Professor Robert Winston offering one
or two mildly expressed caveats in Super Doctors (Thursday, BBC1).
Winston’s worries were about the ethical and practical ramifications of
remote robotic surgery. It was good stuff. Mind you, in television’s
hierarchy of sainted figures, Winston ranks even higher than doctors and
dolphins. He is a giant, noble, majestic sperm whale of a broadcaster,
spouting great plumes of water out of his blowhole.
There were more suspicions confirmed in Who Do You Think You Are?
(Wednesday, BBC1). Come on, if you were to hazard a guess about Boris
Johnson’s antecedents, you might suppose there was an embarrassing sexual
scandal somewhere, that he was related to royalty, and that at least one
great-grandfather, like Boris himself, had allied himself to an outdated
political viewpoint and later paid for it dearly. All absolutely correct,
but it was a fascinating journey getting there, and Boris was on top form —
witty, self-deprecating, reflective and occasionally genuinely moved. Here,
he was taken to Bavaria, where copious research revealed that, to his
genuine surprise, he was directly related to George II of Britain and,
indeed, the entire European royalty of the period. His
great-great-grandfather, meanwhile, was a Turkish journalist and politician
who, with great principle, allied himself to the anti-Ataturk cause. In the
1920s.
Bad, bad mistake. The Turkish historian, reading from the records, explained
how great-great-grandpappy Johnson was tried for his beliefs and then
kicked, stoned and stabbed to death outside the courtroom and hanged from a
lamppost. There was an affecting mistiness in Boris’s eyes, and the blood
drained from his face: he had not known any of this. He paused, and then
quietly muttered: “Bastards.” This is a wonderful series, and Boris’s
bizarre lineage the best of the bunch — just edging out the wonderful moment
when a joyfully tearful Patsy Kensit was informed that not every member of
her family dating back to William the Conqueror was a petty thief.
It has been difficult reviewing the television when I’ve had to fight tooth
and nail for the remote with Emmeline, my two-year-old daughter, who wants
to watch only Nickelodeon Junior. (It used to be CBeebies, now it’s Nick Jr.
Soon it’ll be Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, I suppose.)
Luckily, it took her a good 25 minutes before she realised
Mischief — Cheap Homes for Sale (Thursday, BBC3) wasn’t Nick Jr, so fabulously
stupid, patronising and dunderheaded was it. At what tranche of the British
population is BBC3 aimed, exactly? Two-year-olds? Geese? Whelks? Here, the
presenter, Alex Riley, “investigated” the scandal of Britain’s overpriced
housing market — a premise undermined, of course, by the fact that house
prices have fallen by 10% in the past 12 months. Even so, there are good
questions to be asked, but not by a man who seems caught midway between the
intellectual standpoint — and, indeed, ingratiating, witless manner — of
Fireman Sam and Dora the Explorer. It is genuinely a scandal that, as the
film revealed, in Haringey it would take an indigenous family with infant,
elderly and disabled members between five and 10 years to get a council
house. But Riley brought nobody to account and, upon encountering an
Albanian immigrant bloke in a gold chain who already had a council flat, did
not even think of asking why he had been given preference. So, politically
correct as well as stupid — no wonder Emmeline, bless her, was fooled.
Wife Swap is back (Sunday, C4). It was a good idea once, but, like all
reality TV, it begins with the best of intentions before becoming a vehicle
for Britain’s most boring exhibitionists. And so the whole point of the
enterprise — the surprise, the conflict, the sense of unmatched people
pitted against one another — is entirely lost. Exactly like Match
of the Day (Saturday, BBC1), featuring the Premiership, in fact, which
has also returned to our screens. I like Lineker and Hansen and Lawrenson,
and sport is maybe the last thing the BBC does better than anyone else. If
only they could change the rest of the cast — Ronaldo, Rooney, Lampard et
al.
AA Gill is away
