- The Observer, Sunday 16 December 2001
- Article history
The BBC Sports Personality of the Year BBC1
The Turner Prize C4
When Louis Met The Hamiltons BBC2
Bigamy
BBC1
The BBC's Sports Personality of The Year is invariably the most tedious slice of live TV broadcast in any 12 month period - but last Sunday's SPOTY might have been considerably enlivened by the presence of Madonna, who was busy putting in a 'controversial' simultaneous appearance over on C4.
Despite not being a sportswoman (though a decade of power yoga and that part as a baseball player in A League of Their Own might have swung it) she is obviously comfortable with the language of the terraces and would at least have provided a 'personality'. And - hey! let's take this ball and run with it - how nice it would have been to have had Golden Balls Beckham presenting the Turner Challenge Shield to that cheeky Martin Creed for his fine work The Lights Are On But Nobody's Home.
The most diverting part of the SPOTY was marvelling at the knot on Beckham's white silk tie (uncoordinated and messy, perhaps it was intended as a sort of visual metaphor for Man United - though surely Victoria couldn't have had a hand in it?) while the very worst thing about this (and every other) SPOTY was that it looked like a Tory Party conference: there was the chest-puffing classical music, the mind-numbing speeches, the complete lack of humour and the inappropriate streak of wild-eyed jingoism masquerading as 'national pride'. During that interminable slo-mo edit of England's World Cup qualification the river of molten sentimentality was so ickily glutinous you'd have thought we'd already won the bloody thing. Do get over yourselves.
Mind you, the Turner Prize was arguably worse. Someone really should have reminded Mayfair's Pearly Princess Madge about the occasion when Jools Holland swore on The Tube ('Groovy Fuckers' wasn't it?), way back in the 1980s - a time when using naughty words on live telly was already as passé as the Sex Pistols, though admittedly he did get the sack. But nowadays swearing on Channel 4 looks pretty uncool coming from a fortysomething mother****** -of-two - especially one who is starting to look less and less Like A Virgin and more and more like Meg Mathews.
But enough TV trivia - let us move on to the strange, dark, foetid place where Louis Met The Hamiltons, in which there was no swearing but a great deal of lewd behaviour. Here the most deeply unpleasant aspect of a programme that was unpleasant in oh-so-many ways was watching footage of the Hamilton's solicitor announcing to the press the specific details of the allegations against his clients while standing next to them on the steps of the police station. I must have been reading newspapers of a particularly delicate editorial constitution when this story originally broke because until this point I'd remained in blissful ignorance about precisely how Neil and Christine were alleged to have comported themselves during the Essex sex party. And I really really really wish it had stayed that way.
It's not often you can criticise a documentary for providing too much information, but this was an occasion when I emerged longing to know far less than I did. I wonder if the show's reluctant star, Christine's 'Granny' (actually her Mummy - and that fascinating relationship is worth an entire documentary in itself) had known all this unsavoury stuff before the programme was screened?
As a freakshow it was entertaining enough (if 20 minutes too long) - the drunken ramblings that triggered outbreaks of Neil's gurning and Christine's disturbing flirting; the sight of Christine, in Norland Nanny mode, deftly unbuttoning her husband's shirt while he stood stock still (perhaps dangling a moth-eaten teddy just out of camera range), which again told us far more than we needed to know about their inter-personal dynamic thingy.
But for all the eye-rolling, giggling and 'oh-my-God's the programme evoked, this wasn't one of Theroux's finest because, despite their apparent naiveté and silliness, the couple still seemed to be calling most of the shots. In previous Theroux shows you've often felt that, archness aside, Louis was firmly in control, but here, oddly, he seemed more like the Hamiltons' passenger than their driver.
The one good thing you can say for the Hamiltons is that, as a couple, their relationship will clearly survive the kind of seismic shocks that would have lesser pair-bonds scuttling towards separate solicitors. Trust is usually a very good thing in a relationship. But perhaps not too much blind, starry-eyed, twitty trust.
At the end of BBC1's riveting Bigamy, for example, you didn't fancy Mrs and Mrs Fred Jackson's chances of a happy silver wedding anniversary surrounded by their loved ones.
Sandra Jackson, a Scottish mother of two, had met her Fred, a burly, highly-decorated ex-US serviceman, through an internet lonely hearts advertisement. Before long he had invited her to visit him in Savannah, Georgia, and accompany him to a regimental reunion dinner.
Sandra said that, after getting off the plane, she was so bowled over 'I could hardly speak for the first half hour', while her suitor was equally smitten: 'I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.' Before long, Fred proposed, Sandra accepted and they got married at a register office in Wick.
Unfortunately, it had slipped Fred's mind to divorce his first wife, Angela - also Scottish and the mother of his two sons. The arrival of a second Mrs Jackson didn't go down terribly well with Angela, despite the fact that she and Fred were apparently long-since estranged, but Sandra took the sudden appearance of another wife surprisingly well and vowed to stand by her man while the mess (assumed by Sandra to be mostly a technical hitch to a proper legal hitching, rather than, say, a complete con on Fred's part) was sorted out.
As the film unfolded, the story got better and better. Fred came across as amiable, if a bit foolish and weak. Angela, on the other hand, looked increasingly like a hysterical harpie whose full-time hobby was cultivating a vindictive streak (abusive emails a speciality), an impression that was not helped by the fact that she was physically unprepossessing, with poodle hair, a weak chin and far too many teeth in the wrong places, while pretty Sandra, with her tousled curls and dark soulful eyes, looked like the blueprint for the perfect wife. Even though he was still married, you really couldn't blame Fred for baling out on the ill-named Angela in favour of sweet Sandra, could you?
In the event, Fred was found guilty by the Scottish courts of 'setting out to deceive' and though he escaped a prison sentence he was given a £2,000 fine. He and Sandra set a date for a proper wedding. Meanwhile the production team contacted the Pentagon to find out more about Fred's heroic military past. He turned out to have served 18 months in the US army before being discharged, as a private, in 1978. There were no medals and no recorded time as a member of the elite Army Rangers, despite the fact that Fred had married Sandra in full dress uniform, loaded with ribbons and tin.
Of course, it doesn't necessarily follow that a man who can invent an entire career is a con-man in every other area of his life, too, but it doesn't quite rule it out either - apparently five out of 10 bigamists have previous convictions for fraud. 'I know he will never hurt me,' declared Sandra. Angela, needless to say, wasn't quite so sure.
Finally, I'd like to nominate last Thursday evening, 13 December 2001, as perhaps the most consistently depressing viewing in the history of British terrestrial television. Kicking off at 8pm, Channel 5 treated us to 60 minutes of The Sarah Payne Story which, if you felt so inclined, segued neatly into The Murder of Sarah Payne: Every Parent's Nightmare on BBC1 at 9pm. Searching for light relief elsewhere, you would have had a choice between BBC2's Everyman: Facing the Enemy (in which Jo Tuffnell met Patrick Magee, the man who had planted the bomb that killed her father, Sir Anthony Berry, at the Grand Hotel, Brighton, in 1984), but if this didn't tickle your light-entertainment fancy you could have enjoyed How The Twin Towers Collapsed, on C4 - a fascinating but inevitably pretty grim account of the architectural shortcomings of the World Trade Centre. Which, in turn, would have put you in exactly the right mood for both the BBC and ITV Ten O'Clock news, featuring extensive coverage of the latest Bin Laden tapes. After this you could either have decided to emigrate or stayed up to watch BBC1's special report I Was Not Asleep: Gary Hart and the Selby Crash.
I have a hunch that last Thursday ITV might have done rather well in the ratings: their primetime combination of Peak Practice and The Farmer Wants a Wife never looked more alluring.