Television
The John and Pauline show
Published 30 October 2008
An invitation to laugh at the Prescotts is motivated by plain old snobbery
Prescott: the Class System and Me
BBC2
Working-class heroes? Absolutely: John and Pauline Prescott
The team behind Prescott: the Class System and Me (27 October and 3 November, 9pm) must have been gleeful when he agreed to take part; the cameras would begin rolling and hilarity, as they say in the movie-trailer business, would surely ensue. But how, I wonder, was the idea presented to the former deputy prime minister?
When I interviewed John Prescott last May he spoke of the film rather proudly, making it sound like an in-depth look at social class, with him playing investigative reporter. Now we can see that, far from being a serious documentary series, this is, in fact, a comic caper, with the Prescotts cast in the daffy but aspirational roles last occupied by the Armstrongs, the owners of U-Fit, Coventry's third-largest double-glazing business, whom the BBC also saw fit to give their own show. I knew the Prescotts had been set up as soon as I heard the fart of trumpets. In television land, brass only ever heralds the arrival of the pompous and the ridiculous. Dear God. Anyone would think these people were working on Trumpton: "Look! Here's the mayor talking to Mr Troop, the town clerk. Good day, Mr Troop!"
Part one invited us to sneer at the couple. At Prescott Towers, in Hull, Pauline proudly showed us her new, bottle-green velvet curtains. "I think the style of the pelmet is Regency," she said, perching her trim backside on the arm of a chair. Meanwhile, over at Asda, Prezza was launching his autobiography to a crowd of, oh, at least a dozen shoppers. The only problem with this approach, from the director's point of view, was that most viewers will have felt nothing but warmth. The fact is that Prescott has had the mickey taken out of him so often, and for so long, that the joke is as threadbare as a bottom stair. "The press are always banging me," he said merrily, a Mrs Malaprop for the Asbo generation. As for Pauline, soft as margarine, as sweet and fragrant as Parma violets, she is too lovely and ingenuous for this sort of treatment to work - and the closer the camera got to her amazing abstract-expressionist eyelashes, the more I loved her.
For no good reason at all, the film-makers took the Prescotts to lunch at the home of the Earl of Onslow, a Tory peer, where, having first asked her husband's permission, Pauline embarked on a story about finding the son she had given up for adoption (a child born before she married Prescott). The rub of it was that he is posher than her - Sandhurst-educated! - and the punchline was John's remark: "And I bet he's a bloody Tory!" The toffs laughed, and so did she, but it was a heart-stopping moment: her pride, her lack of embarrassment at something about which, long ago, she'd been made to feel so ashamed. Who would take the piss out of a woman like this? Not me.
In his feeble quest for comedy, the director left no cliché unturned. First there was the twittish earl, who charmingly praised Prescott for having pulled himself up by his "boot straps". Then there was the visit to Henley Royal Regatta, where Prescott was invited to debate private education with the privately educated. What was this meant to prove? You don't have to have failed the 11-plus to find the sight of grown men in straw boaters mildly repellent. Finally, there were the teenagers on a Lewisham estate, dragged out supposedly to show that Prescott, for all his pride in his roots, is out of touch with ordinary people to the degree that he doesn't even know what a "chav" is. Ha! This last trick failed spectacularly because he got on with them fine. "It would be nice to socialise with him again," said the ringleader, an angry sort of girl who seemed to want to chew the arms off most men. So, what did we learn from all this "documentary"? Not much about class, or how it operates in Britain today, that's for sure. No, all we really learned is that snobbery, be it practised by old Etonians or by television producers, is stupid and vile - and that the immaculate Pauline should take the tweedy Countess of Onslow out shopping as soon as she possibly can.
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Michael Portillo: Death of a School Friend
7 November, 9pm, BBC2
Portillo tells the story of a friend who killed himself at 15.
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