Lost in Austen (ITV1, Wednesday) The Sculpture Diaries (Channel 4, Sunday)
God on Trial (BBC2, Wednesday) Lost Horizons: The Big Bang (BBC4, Thursday)
The Big Bang Machine (BBC4, Thursday)
Hugh Bonneville recently tried to convince us, in Bonekickers, he was an
archeologist. Was anybody fooled? Of course not, because we know he potters
about at home in a frock coat and ruffed collar, loading the dishwasher and
dusting the awards cabinet, on 24-hour standby for the call: “Action
stations, Hugh! Agreeable middle-aged gentleman needed urgently on set in
the late 18th century.”
As an actor, he gives the distinct impression that an hour not spent in
waistcoat and breeches is an hour wasted. He is the benign, middle-aged gent
of choice. Earlier this year, he was the vicar and failed suitor of Jane
Austen, in Miss Austen Regrets. Last week, he was promoted to the
prestigious position of Mr Bennet, affing and blanding his way throughLost
in Austen.
This first of four parts involves more time-travel drama along the lines of
Life on Mars. Here, the heroine, Amanda Price, finds herself pitched into
the fictional world of Jane Austen. The start was rather shaky. We
discovered Amanda was obsessed with Pride and Prejudice, and watched her
boyfriend drunkenly propose using the pull from a beer can as a ring. To
make him look more of a prat, he called her “babe”. Then one day, rather
unexpectedly you have to admit, she finds Elizabeth Bennet in her bathroom.
Using a secret door in the bathroom wall, Miss Bennet catapults Amanda into
18th-century Hampshire without so much as a toothbrush.
Amanda’s modern world - surly, rude and self-obsessed - compared unfavourably
with life at the Bennets’, who were witty and welcoming. Could this be the
reason time-travel drama is so popular? Is there something about the modern
world that repels us?
There’s a Tom Stoppard play, The Real Inspector Hound, in which two theatre
critics, Moon and Birdboot, suddenly find themselves caught up in the plot.
The same happens to Amanda. By the end of the episode, we are left with the
distinct impression she will marry either Mr Bingley or Mr Darcy. Which
might be tricky to explain to her boyfriend.
Elliot Cowan scowled his way through the part of Darcy with an aristocratic
disdain. He wore the permanent expression of a man ordered to look after
five children so his wife can go on a girls’ spa break.
And so to The Sculpture Diaries, about which I should first make a declaration
of interest. It was presented by Waldemar Januszczak, who is the art critic
of this paper and a long-standing colleague. However, I’ve only spoken to
him once, when I telephoned to ask about the meaning of art, which had
temporarily slipped my mind. As far as I remember, he said - among other
things - art should make you think in a different way about life. On that
definition, this qualifies.
Perhaps because sculpture is all around us, in parks and public squares, we
rarely give it the consideration it deserves. According to Januszczak, the
curator of a gallery once told him: “Sculpture is what you trip over when
you step back to admire the paintings.” He began his three-part series by
considering female beauty, starting with the Willendorf Venus, a tiny
figure, about 25,000 years old, which you can hold in the hand. She has huge
breasts, third helpings of hip and buttock, and an early version of the
beehive hairdo: by which I mean her head appears to be stuck in the beehive.
This was a symbol of fertility. These days, she’d be sent to Weight Watchers.
God on Trial dealt with a question we must all have asked from time to time.
Even Richard Dawkins. If God is all-powerful and loves us, then why can He
be such an utter bastard? It is set in Auschwitz, where the question was
more than particularly relevant. Half the prisoners in one block have been
chosen to die and half to live. With that extra twist of which the Almighty
seems so fond, none of the prisoners know which is which. So they spend
their last night on earth putting God on trial for breaching His covenant
with the Jewish people. As the prisoners - gaunt and shaven-headed - recount
their experiences, it doesn’t look too good for God. Not even Rumpole of the
Bailey could mount a convincing defence.
What especially worries the prisoners is His aversion to small children.
Antony Sher, playing a rabbi, reminds us of David and Bathsheba, the wife of
Uriah the Hittite. Does God punish their adultery? No, He punishes their
child with a lingering death. When His record of crimes against the
firstborn is taken into account, it is no surprise the Auschwitz court -
supposedly based on a true incident - finds God guilty as charged.
God on Trial was one of the one-off dramas that the playwright David Hare says
television doesn’t do any more. It was almost theatrical in performance:
essentially a conversation in one location from which a series of ideas
unfolds. Such a play lives or dies on the acting and the script. I was
astonished to see it was written not by somebody who has grown up with
Jewish theology but by a Catholic. As for the acting, well, we need say
nothing more than the prisoners included Sher, Rupert Graves and Jack
Shepherd, probably the only cast member who had to bulk up for the role.
You don’t get much theology on television these days. It’s one of those things
it just doesn’t do, like chemistry or cell biology or much in the way of
mathematics. But give it some particle physics or cosmology and it’s as
happy as an up quark in a cyclotron. The camera can sweep across the vast
expanses of the universe, and the computer-graphic artist can explore the
inside of the atom. And there are plenty of pictures to be had from
observatories and particle accelerators.
On BBC4 last Thursday, it was Big Bang Night. Well, not so much Big Bang Night
as Big Bang Two Hours, a couple of programmes to mark the launch this week
of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator. In a
way, both these programmes were also about theology. Thanks to the
astronomer Edwin Hubble, we know the universe is expanding. Big Bangers,
reversing this expansion, say the universe must have exploded into being
from an impossibly small area. The question is: how did the original matter
get there, and what was there before?
InLost Horizons: The Big Bang, Professor Jim Al-Khalili took us through the
history of Big Bang theory with the help of archive foot-age from the BBC’s
Horizon. Nothing much has changed over the years, except scientists had more
beards in the old days and there were no women. Without computer graphics,
they had to be more imaginative with their special effects back then. In
1978, to demonstrate the Doppler effect, Horizon put a band of Salvation
Army trumpeters on an open truck pulled by a steam train, and asked them to
hold one note.
InThe Big Bang Machine, we visited the accelerator itself in the company of
the particle physicist Brian Cox, who looks like the lead guitarist of an
indie band (actually, as I discovered after writing that, he once played
keyboards for D:Ream). There have been suggestions that when the accelerator
is turned on this Wednesday, it will create a huge black hole into which we
will all be sucked. Cox dismisses this idea, but best set the recorder for
Lost in Austen.
AA Gill is away
There is something slightly weird about people who treat their ailing pets like children
Is 'Lost In Austen' available on 'watch again' (freeview/cable)?
John , Chadderton, England