Television
The new, news-less ITV prime time has roared off to an indecent lead over BBC1, attaining on some nights two or three times BBC1's audience. On Newsnight last week one of the evil geniuses behind Who Wants to be a Millionaire? found himself tamely promising Kirsty Wark this could not last. But it may. It is now obvious that the building blocks - the soaps, the game show, the "quality" drama - were all there. It just needed News at Ten to be demolished for a shopping mall of middle-brow entertainment to stretch across four hours of every evening.
What is specifically new at ten is ITV's seven-part comedy-drama Wonderful You (Tuesdays). It has been wrongly described as a British Friends, perhaps because, like Lisa Kudrow's Phoebe, its star plays bad songs in a cafe. It is really a variation on Granada's surprise hit of last autumn, Cold Feet, except that the average age of its cast has been pulled down from the mid-thirties to 30 and the action relocated from Manchester to London's Crouch End.
Wonderful You stars Richard Lumsden as gawky Henry, a bike courier and would-be pop singer who notices he is turning 30 without having made any noticeable progress in his life: "I'm still renting, for God's sake." He is the marrying type, but harbours inflated hopes of the kind of woman likely to wed him. On his wall he keeps a collection of photographs of girls he has wanted to go out with, which is sad. The only thing to be said for unrequited love is that it gives Henry something to sing about, and I am not sure this is good news.
Henry is looking, he croons obliquely, for a "girl like orange". One day on the bus he runs into a squeezable Jaffa, an old in-his-dreams girlfriend named Clare (played engagingly by Lucy Akhurst). "I'm not together," he stutters comprehensively and begins a dopey kind of stalking, not put off when he discovers that Clare lives with Marshall, a successful chartered accountant who looks just like Greg Wise (is, in fact, Greg Wise). By the end of this week's second episode, Marshall, who has been exhibiting commitment-phobia, and Henry, who has been exhibiting the reverse, have both proposed to Clare.
The series boasts some superior writing, although the best, as well as the most self-indulgent dialogue, goes into the mouth of Lumsden, who, funnily enough, co-wrote the series (and, I bet, the "orange" line). But the pull is conventional: we want to know whom Clare will marry. More interesting is what kind of viewers are likely to be pulled. As with much of ITV drama now, the characters are mirrors of the network's target audience, which is much more N8 than Weatherfield. Despite his looks, his wealth and his sports car, Marshall, for instance, is carefully not written to look like a shit. Henry's witty thirtysomething friends are the types who ten years ago would be unlikely to watch much ITV at all, except to sneer. In episode one a couple of characters even reminisced about skipping lectures to catch Mr and Mrs. They all agree, they should bring it back.
On Thursday where News at Ten once stood we got a one-off documentary, The Truth About . . . Men. If you were being polite, you could call this hour-long festival of celebrity sound-bites a montage. If you were being truthful, you would have to say that in more rigorous days - like last week - it would have been the starting point from which a documentary could be made rather than a documentary itself. Some of the boys were certainly worth quoting: Andrew Neil told us men had become "emotional transvestites"; the DJ John Coleman explained men played with gadgets because they "stop us playing with ourselves"; and the comedian Jeff Green trumped them all with "if they ever make a vibrator that can open pickle jars, we've had it". But we had to join the dots ourselves if we were to make out a pattern. Much of it was plain contradictory: one moment a magazine survey reported one in four women found "their" men "unbearable" when ill; the next, Shane Richie said he was so fearful of admitting to illness that he once ended up being taken to hospital on a stretcher.
Let us hope that when Trevor McDonald's Tonight finally launches, it causes some bump in the present cerebral flatline of ITV current affairs. As it is, when Dermot Murnaghan comes on with ITV Nightly News he looks like a school- master who knows he is addressing a depleted class that has been bunking off big time. Mrs and Mrs, meanwhile - and I am not joking - returns to ITV at 10pm tonight (Friday) with Julian Clary as host to make Henry and co's jokes for them. Derek Batey, the quiz's original presenter, who owns the rights to the format, once said his ambition was to have one of his shows top the ratings. The way things are going, that no longer looks impossible.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the London "Evening Standard"
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