Television
Andrew Billen - Dead romantic
Published 30 January 2006
Television - We owe our sentiment over the whale to Wordsworth and co, writes Andrew Billen
The Romantics (BBC2)
Although the story would soon end sadly, the most emotional moment on television last week was on Saturday afternoon when the stranded whale was finally lifted on to the Thames barge that would take it back to the sea. Calmed by its rescuers, the 18ft bottlenose, its great tail twitching, was winched aboard the Crossness to cheers from crowds on both embankments and, doubtless, from families at home watch-ing it on Sky News.
The previous afternoon the news channel had gone, as it were, overboard in cover-ing the whale's only occasionally visible progress towards Albert Bridge. In doing so, it lost sight, until nightfall, of the rest of the world. BBC News 24 soberly (perhaps properly) merely included Free Willy in its running order of items. But when the crucial moment came, Sky News proved again why people turn to it when news is really rolling. Whereas, inexplicably, News 24 carried no live pictures, on Sky News you got not only the moment of rescue, but a sense of the carnival atmosphere of a great city in one of its communal hours.
There were moments of absurdity, too. Sky interviewed a workman who had dived in to try to save the whale from running aground. In the heat of recollection he boasted, before correcting himself, that he'd been "first in to save the child". Meanwhile, presenters grappled with a lexicon of terms that included "dorsal fin" and "blubber index" (although "belly" turned out to be the correct term for a whale's belly). On News 24, the wildlife presenter Terry Nutkins was asked: "How do you reassure a whale?" All he knew was that he had once saved a humpback and he liked to think it knew what he was doing. "That was a nice romantic thought for me."
Here was a rare case of the adjective "romantic" being used more or less in its literary sense. To get the full definition you needed to watch the first of Peter Ackroyd's scintillating new three-part documentary series The Romantics (Saturdays, 8pm). Although the second episode (28 January) explicitly deals with nature, the opening instalment ended up with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner", the moral of which, Ackroyd said, was that man must respect his fellow creatures. Seen in this light, the whale's rescue was civilisation's belated apology for the mariner who shot the albatross. Yet the sentiment the rescue evoked would have been quite alien to our early 18th-century ancestors. As Ackroyd says in episode two: "The way we respond to a sunset is a learned experience and one we learned from the Romantics."
The first programme's theme was "Liberty". It was Ackroyd's contention that the death of this original project on the tumbrels of the French revolution led the Romantics to take their quest for free-dom into the heart of the natural world. After that first blissful dawn, Wordsworth returned to Britain minus his French mistress and daughter and began a period of wandering that would lead him to Coleridge. Together they would plot another democratic revolution, one that would give voice to women, children, peasants and outcasts. Revolutionary politics failed. The poetry would succeed. No wonder the government put a spy on to them. Skulking round Somerset, James Walsh reported back that they were "continually writing things down on pieces of paper". These were their Lyrical Ballads.
Ackroyd is a writer and, now, television presenter whose eccentricities illumi- nate rather than detract from his subject. They were well matched this time, for Wordsworth, Byron and co were nothing if not a little touched. Their fellow poet John Clare spent his last 23 years in a lunatic asylum, his doctor noting that his confinement had been preceded by "years addicted to poetical prosing". He had been driven mad by the parcelling up of the English countryside by the Enclosure Acts, and Ackroyd implies that mad- ness was an understandable reaction to revolutionary times in which factories were replacing fields, science was threatening religion and man was beginning to be enslaved by public clocks.
Ackroyd, who believes buildings contain the ghosts of previous ages, will also have approved of, or even thought up, the seemingly mad conceit of the programme in which, instead of historical reconstructions, the poets materialise in the modern world. Blake, for instance, reads "I wander thro' each charter'd street" in a Soho hairdresser's at 28 Poland Street, on the site where he had lived in 1794. When I say he materialised, I mean it, for this series has more special effects than Star Trek. The poets, dressed in half-modern, half-period clothes, were beamed into fields and restaurants. Appropriately, the actor who played Rousseau was none other than the new Dr Who, David Tennant.
There is, unfortunately, something inherently Monty Python about actors dressing up as famous poets, and things only get worse when they are then given dialogue. In Julien Temple's film Pandaemonium (2000) we had Wordsworth toy with the line "I wandered lonely as a cow" before Dorothy corrected him: "Perhaps 'cloud' would be better, William." But, for their incarnation here, the director Sam Hobkinson made each of the writers a stubbly version of the Ancient Mariner. With no shared scenes, they held us with their glittering eye and recited their own words. Besides the rescue of a stranded whale beneath Albert Bridge, anything pales, but The Romantics was compel-ling television, too.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
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