Television
When two stars collide
Published 08 May 2008
The highbrow South Bank Show is as celebrity-driven as crummy reality TV
It's a while since I've bothered to watch The South Bank Show, and now I remember why. The laziest programme on television, it runs "documentaries" that are simple hagiography most of the time. The film about Liza Minnelli (4 May, 10.50pm), however, plumbed new shallows. Melvyn Bragg's interview technique - basically, he totally sucks up - doesn't make for good copy even in normal circumstances, but in the case of a subject like Minnelli, its inadequacies were embarrassing to behold.
Minnelli is steeped in her own mythology, and tends to turn out the same anecdotes over and over, so that even those you haven't heard before sound tinny and rehearsed. Worse, she has learned the hard way that honesty, and even irony, bring only trouble, with the result that she now talks Showbusiness rather than English, a language in which everyone and everything is "wonderful", and all sentences end in exclamation marks: the verbal equivalent of the high kicks at which she used to be so proficient. Bragg's questions - so polite, so ponderous - bounced off her like ping-pong balls off a bulletproof limousine.
It's fair enough, in what is supposed to be an arts programme, to skirt a star's private life, and so only scant mention was made of Minnelli's four marriages. But what of her other woes? Like her mother, Judy Garland, Minnelli has battled pills and booze, and in 2000, having contracted viral encephalitis, was told that she might never walk again. These travails are part of her story: they make her return to the stage seem not only brave, but poignant. So why the prissy avoidance of them here?
Less forgivable was the film's glossing of her new show - a tribute to her godmother, the songwriter Kay Thompson - as a glittering artistic success. Bragg sat in the velvety gloom of the London Coliseum, where Minnelli will appear for three nights this month, and practically swooned at the thought. What he did not mention is that, in the United States, she has been playing places like the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, and not always to full houses. I would have liked a sense of the sheer struggle of it all. You know: a little light and shade.
If it was the film's intention to bring to life "the work" rather than the personality, it roundly failed. Its analysis of what made Minnelli great was as flimsy as one of her false eyelashes (flimsier, probably, because her lashes, thick and black as a chimney sweep's brushes, are built to last). By way of talking heads we were given first Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, who wittered boringly about her "icon" status. Pass the cliché. Then came Paul Gambaccini, who cleverly pinned down the way that, as a singer, she "inhabits" even words of single syllables, and who rightly noted that she came of age at a time when few seriously good musicals were being written, and thus found herself "stranded" as a performer.
But these arguments were not explored. Too subtle? Too risky? Who knows? And God forbid that The South Bank Show should use an "expert" whose name we might not recognise. This programme is as infused with the culture of celebrity as any crummy reality show. How else to explain Bragg's excessive presence on screen, for all that the films are now produced and directed by someone else? This is one star meeting another.
I find Bragg's appearances increasingly strange. No one in their right mind who makes a living doing interviews wants to hear, much less see, themselves going at it: when I transcribe my interview tapes, I feel sick with embarrassment. So why is Bragg's chipmunk smile so very often in these films, and inserted so lingeringly? Well, if the show were to cut down too far on his uniquely twee "noddy" shots, it might become obvious that any hot-shot film-maker could conduct the big interview just as ably.
And then there's the hair. I don't blame him if he wants to show it off. Star or no star, he trumped Liza on that score, make no mistake. I only hope that he didn't embarrass himself by wrestling her for the Elnett in the green room.
Pick of the week
Wild China
Starts 11 May, 8.05pm, BBC2
It's under threat, of course.
Gordon Ramsay's F Word
Starts 13 May, 9pm, Channel 4
Social skills are off the menu as big, bad Gordy teams up with Janet Street-Porter for the new series.
Storyville: The Battle for Jerusalem/My Israel14 May, 9pm and 9.50pm, BBC4
Two for Israel's 60th anniversary.
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