Alan Titchmarsh: Man or Monster?

Thinking that I was in time for Top Gear, I turned to BBC2 a bit too early last night, forgetting that their highest rated show (and one of the few things the BBC are getting right at the moment) had been postponed in favour of the snooker. However, my disappointment was lessened a bit by the discovery that BBC2 were broadcasting a new wildlife series, The Nature of Britain, which has always been another of the things that they do well. In fact, saying that the BBC does wildlife well is like saying the Pope knows his Catholicism. In God’s great plan: the two were made for one another. And, after all these years, both are just as predictable. You know what to expect: great photography, good writing, a broadly conservative presentation, and the occasional day of judgement usually involving a rigged telephone poll.

I joined the show late, but, within a minute, cows were defecating in high definition in the corner of the room. Perfect viewing after my Sunday dinner, I thought, though not everybody else in the room was equally smitten. They made their excuses and left me to watch the rest of the show. I surprised myself that I made it to the end. Not because of the defecating cows, you understand, but because of the chap who provided the soundtrack.

David Attenborough’s announcement that he was retiring from making BBC wildlife documentaries caused much debate as to who was going to get his job. Last night, I witnessed the apparent winner. Alan Titchmarsh. I think the defecating cows were robbed.

I’m ashamed to say that I always had a soft spot for Titchmarsh back when he used to dig people’s gardens for a living. He was twee, cosy, comfortable, somewhat patronising, prissy, at times pretentious, but generally amiable. Ground Force was a terribly watchable show as Charlie Dimmock would stand, hands on hips, her unharnessed chest thrown out, leaving Titchmarsh to make some wry comment about the cold weather. It was the programme that always left me feeling the same towards him as I feel about Christians in general: that they do nobody any harm and have a comfortably line in knitwear.

Only, like my tolerance for Christians, I have a line across which men called Titchmarsh should not cross. Much as I don’t like to be woken on a Sunday morning to be asked if I believe that Christ is my redeemer, nor do I like to see men getting a bit big for their Wellington boots.

It all began when Titchmarsh started to turn up and stick his fingers in our whole cultural buffet. He began to write novels with dire gardening puns in the title (Trowel and Error). Then he did radio, his own talk show, and, more recently, turned up hosting the Proms for the BBC. He was even rumoured to be in running to take over Countdown after Des Lynam was run out of Leeds. Titchmarsh was clearly elbowing his way into anything that required a man of moderate intelligence, fiercely middle-class tastes, and a ‘nice’ personality for whom the oldies would happily make sponge cakes. He’s the sort of man that if Thora Hird wanted to send messages back from the other side, she’d channel through Alan. (And before you do it, I’ve already sent the BBC my idea for a show called ‘Channeling Through Alan’. I’m told they’re considering the idea.)

Now that he’s just settled for becoming the face of wildlife shows on the BBC, Titchmarsh is set to become ever present on our screens. But to me it’s like Ronald McDonald has been given charge of a petting zoo.

I don’t wish any harm to the man but I rarely find myself calm after any time in his company. His use of bathos is the most galling, in that he has this way of trying to sound martial, grand, and epic but ends up sounding like a tax inspector having an enema. It usually involves him quoting some poetry (he loves his poetry), his voice wallowing in the luxurious description of some great English scene, to which he then usually adds his own: ‘you bet…’ or ‘you can say that again…’

There’s a fun game I've invented which you can try to help make Titchmarsh more bearable in which you try to write your own Titchmarsh script. Take any lines of English poetry and complete them in the style of the great Alan. I’ll start you off with two examples. First, Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills

‘I bet you did. And while Bill Wordsworth was larking about on all those Lakeland hills, perhaps dropping in to see Mr. Norris’s excellent shop, selling original mint cake, he must have wondered what a cloud would think if it saw all the people flocking to the Lakes…’

Or Shakespeare, from Henry V:

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'

'By heck! Bet he’s a lot of fun come a Monday. But, you know, perhaps old Bill Shakespeare has a point… This war business isn’t at all as messy as we’ve been told it is. A bit of victory here, a spot of honour there. And before you know it, a lovely field full of bright red poppies, luxuriating under a mid-summer sun.'

He was at it again last night, after the cows had stopped defecating. The BBC Wildlife department had strapped a camera to a swan or something with a similar wingspan, and sent it soaring up over the countryside. Alan had then added his own special flourish, by quoting Auden, or Byron, or Pam Ayres, for all I know... I can't say which. I was too busy strangling the life out of the sofa’s cushion.

It sounds very mean spirited of me to criticise a man who has made a virtue out of being pleasant but I say he’s a poor role model for a nation aspiring to make a name for itself in the twentieth century. While Titchmarsh fills our minds with ideas of lounging around in hammock in the garden, the Chinese are out there building warships and stockpiling germs. While Titchmarsh is encouraging us to reach for our copies of Milton and Shelley, the North Koreans are returning their copy of ‘Nuclear Fission for Dummies’ to the Iranians. While Titchmarsh rambles, the country sleeps. We should take this as a warning and put him back to doing what he does best. Digging deep bunkers in shrubberies.

My Day In Butter

‘And when he pulled it out, it had butter on it.’

It might not mean much to you but I think it’s the funniest line I’ve written so far.

Another day typing up my novel and a thousand words to the cause. A thousand buttery words at that. This novel is becoming something quite special, though I worry about revealing too many of my professional secrets. And do people really want to know what a professional stripper uses to clean his thong? Should I really describe how I was introduced to stripping by a ex-Lib Dem councillor’s secretary who caught me eating a mutton sandwich in her stock cupboard?

I await expert opinion on these matters but, for the time being, I’m pressing on with my first draft. I expect it to be ready for the end of Summer.

Speaking of literature, in today’s FE lesson we read ‘King Lear’, which Mrs. Rust insists in one of the better plays. I couldn’t understand a word of it but I enjoyed the chance to shout loudly in rhyme. Should you be wondering: I was Lear. Probably the first thonged Lear in the history of the play.

Alongside all this hard work, I’ve been indulging myself by watching the football. I’m more of a football fan than I am the rugby, which again goes to prove that a man with English genes can’t ignore the game of his forefathers. I was looking forward to the all English final, though now I’ll swing my heavily loaded thong behind Liverpool. As with stripping, effort means more than ability so it was reassuring to see the big guys lose for a change.

Tomorrow I’ll be back at the coffee shop early, another session in the dance studio, before I spend the evening watching the election results come in. I’ve grown a little disillusioned with the whole business of politics in the last few months. I think it’s when the Lib Dems refused to consider my proposals to ban thong use for anybody under the age of 21. A poorly fitting thong leads to sub-standard thong experience and it really takes a mature outlook on life to truly experience what a thong means. Which, coincidentally, is Mrs. Rust’s attitude to Shakespeare. Or as she told me: ‘Shakespeare and thongs; thongs, Shakespeare – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Good Riddance To Bansky Rubbish

I’ve had it on good authority that the Romanians have a hard time understanding our art and culture. You can hardly blame them. I seem to be the only person who thinks that Banksy is overrated. I had to stop Gabby running off this morning with a pot of white paint. She had the misguided intention of painting a large mural of my loins on the end of the Post Office. I hardly had the nerve to tell her that the wall was simply too small for a task of that size.

It did, however, get me thinking about my project for my English class. I’ve been asked to ‘write an opinion piece about two or more current events’. This is where my afternoon has gone me…

As a self-publicist, an agent provocateur, or even as somebody specialising in art parody, Banksy has no current equal, though you could perhaps make a case for Gilbert and George or any number of wittier examples found on the web. Banksy’s elevation to one of the UK's most high profile artists has just a bit of the noble savage about it. It's not far distant from the enlightenment practice of taking some poor tribesman from one newly conquered dominion and presenting him at court dressed as a gentleman. Even the cheery mateyness of the ‘Banksy’ name epitomizes so much. It’s that same game as ‘The Wife in the North’ plays with class and the north. It’s the Patty Hearst story retold to a new audience, where the rich kid hangs around the poor in order to look and feel cool. The whole thing has a patronising air about it, even before we get to the problem of people preferring a shallow fabrication to the real thing.

Quite evidently, the British media care little about understanding art. Today they report with some shock, though tinged with an oddly paradoxical delight, that a famous mural by Bansky has now been whitewashed over by council workers.

There is a thong splittingly funny moment in the piece in the form of the council’s response: ‘We recognise that there are those who view Banksy's work as legitimate art, but sadly our graffiti removal teams are staffed by professional cleaners not professional art critics.’ What makes it additionally funny is the notion that professional critics of any worth have promoted his work as genuine art. I thought Banksy’s celebrated doodles are the result of their being spotted by Angelina Jolie, that eminent critic of anything and everything.

Of course, it hardly matters if the newspapers get these things wrong. Nothing matters but readership. Certainly not facts. It doesn’t matter that Bryan Ferry studied art at University of Newcastle. It’s one of the little details ignored by the media so busy castigating him in broad strokes for having admitted to admiring the Nazi's sense of spectacle.

Ferry undoubtedly made a stupid remark. He stupidly assumed that the British tabloids would play fair. He made the remarks to a German newspaper, perhaps assuming that a more knowledgeable continental audience would understand his point. Perhaps they did as it only appear to be here in the UK that he’s held up as a Nazi sympathiser and there are calls for him to lose his M&S card. There’s no attempt to contextualise his comments, nor explain the extent to which Hitler’s regime was intimately concerned with art.

Over at The Baullieu Blog, Danvers argues that the Nazi regime oppressed the art in favour of 'sterile neo-classical works of muscular figures doing heroic things' and that Ferry's mistaken championing of Nazi projects is enough to warrant the criticism. Yet this seems to me to be an argument based on taste, a preference for (jazz, Brecht, 'modern art') and not morality. There is something about that sterile neo-classicism which Ferry apparently admires. It is to take one side in an age old debate about form and the formless. As contemptible as the regime and its methods, the Nazi master plan was wrapped up with questions of aesthetics. Nazi art and architecture is alienating in its scale, chilling in its assumptions. It rises from the absolute belief in form and reflects the Nazi certainty that Germanic archetypes are to be found in nature and history.

'Triumph of the Will', the 1934 propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl, currently has a rank of 7.9 on the Internet Movie Database. It is seen as one of the most important documentaries ever made. It redefined propaganda and Riefenstahl broke new ground in developing an aesthetic for cinema. Are those that followed her Nazis sympathisers too? What about George Lucas, whose Star Wars films are full of the kind of imagery pioneered by Riefenstahl?

Art reflects human passions, habits, doubts, ambitions. It is often bound up with moral judgements, but sometimes moral judgements that are wrong. Sometimes they are staggeringly wrong. Sometimes they are so wrong that no right minded person would argue otherwise. Yet their rightness or wrongness does not change their power of real art to affect its viewer. In this limited way, art transcends morality. We cannot divest ourselves from our immediate response to it. Art literally takes the breath away before we’ve had chance to intellectualise our response to it. I’d be surprised if anybody responds in that way to Banksy’s work. How many hearts have missed a beat on first seeing one of his pieces on a wall? Yet I’m sure thousands of people are still moved, often unknowingly, by art whose genesis lay in vilest era of the last century. Of course, this does not condone, in any way, the regime that allowed and in some cases encouraged this art to exist, but it does highlight that art is different to politics.

We face the same problem now that the media have linked the Virginia Tech campus murders to 'Oldboy', the Korean film that won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes a couple of years ago.

Before the events of the last few days, I had considered 'Oldboy' one of the finest films of the last decade. It’s Shakespearean in that it is one of the few modern stories I could imagine written by a sixteenth century revenge tragedian. The last half hour is as disturbingly brilliant as storytelling gets these days. Yet it’s less bloody that 'Titus Andronicus'; much less bloody than many American films whose whole premise is gore. Where most action and horror films laud the grotesque, 'Oldboy' lauds the tragedy of forbidden love. The few moments of violence play out more in the mind than they do the screen, such as the one brief scene in which the lead character eats a live squid. It’s not pleasant to watch but it’s part of the film’s culture and significant to its themes.

The media will never care to discuss this sort of thing. Art is reduced to the simple morality of good versus evil when described by the tabloids. Simple judgements overrun the complexity of the issues that still surround Cho Seung-Hui's actions. Two still images from a Korean film seem to match photographs taken by a Korean killer. One easy association that makes for big headlines.