EXCHANGING South Bank sophistry for Cumbrian candour, Melvyn Bragg returned to his hometown of Wigton. In hacking jacket and waistcoat, squared shirt and bulky tie, he was as tweedy as one man ... no, two men and their dogs. Was he going to start whistling and barking orders? Was he taking the mick or was he simply a local man in local rig-out? This was the authored documentary as sartorial thriller.
It tumed out Melvyn was weaning his Lake District duds as a homage to his roots. Bragg on America, screened over the last two Sundays, was advertised as a television essay on the relationship between Britain and the United States. Up to a point, it was. But only intermittently was it so general. Perhaps inevitably, it became more centrally an essay on the relationship between Bragg's Britain and Bragg's US.
Not that that invalidated it. But it did elevate the personal to a degree where Bragg's own transatlantic history (and current stage in life) was too unquestioningly allowed to stand up as an Everyman metaphor. His central thesis was that, really, there's nothing left to envy about America. Sure, it has influenced us all, but now the game is up...
Certainly, America, now that it has learned how to replicate so much of itself beyond its borders, is not the wonder that it was to previous generations of Europeans. But, while "nothing left to envy may well be the truth for Melvyn Bragg and others who, with ample reason, despair of rampant American consumerism, it is hardly true for the young. That they may envy it less than, say, the young of the 1950s or 1960s, does not mean that its appeal, for good as well as ill, has ended.
Bragg recalled three Americanisations of Britain in his lifetime: the second World War, the 1960s and the 1980s (or GIs, hippies and yuppies). The GI and hippy influences pleased him. But he hated "the hard face" of the "ugly" 1980s. Norman Mailer agreed: "Yeah and in the 1990s the yuppies have become, they think, gentler. Now they re into freedom for everything - whales, lesbians, blacks, gays, trees you know, freedom for everything except labour unions."
Scenes of sleepy Wigton, Wordsworth country on the horizon, were overlaid with Ennio Morricone spaghetti-Western music and Frank Sinatra singing New York, New York. Not the most original touch perhaps, but amusing all the same. "Through its films, especially its Westerns, America colonised the imagination," said Melvyn, before proposing a fishy link between Wordsworth's "common men" and the "regular guy" heroes of the Westerns.
To be fair to Bragg, he was careful to distinguish between east coast and west coast US. New York he suggested, was not only geographically but culturally half-way between Europe and California. When, in the second of these two programmes, he headed for Hollywood, the sort of hyperbole he had used to criticise New York was inadequate even to describe the awfulness that is Los Angeles.
Remembering that when he worked as a scriptwriter in LA, "people who couldn't spell would tell you that sentences didn't work", Melvyn got a little personal about the "movies and shopping capital" of the world. He was right too, even though he was too quick to sentimentalise old England's virtues by comparison. It was clear, by this stage, that he was leading up to making a rallying cry for Britain to detach itself culturally from America.
Time was when what happened in America, happened later in Britain and later still in Ireland. But that model, for various reasons (global economy,
European integration, Japanese economic power...) is less accurate nowadays. And yes, there is a growing sense in much of Europe that America is not always a very pleasant place (barbarous gun laws, workplace ruthlessness the dollar deified. .
But Melvyn Bragg overstated the case for his native Cumbria. Dressing up like a local farmer - a shepherd of traditional English values - is all very well, but when he accused America, quite rightly, of allowing its old freedom agenda to be replaced by dollar idolatry, he ought to have added that agenda- led reverence for tradition, as in Britain, can often be brutalising too. Viewed from Ireland, Bragg's argument, while it was not to be dismissed, seemed mawkishly aimed at a hometown audience.
WITH a title which might make a first lesson in American consumerism, Supply And Demand was a feature-length pilot about the war between drug dealers and the British police. Melvyn Bragg might not have liked its unashamed aping of American cop opera - particularly its pyrotechnics with cars, trucks, helicopters and planes - but it was well-paced and allowably over-acted.
Freddie Starr, as a drugs gang Mr Big, was, appropriately, quite a ham star. With bulging eyes, blond punk haircut and a generally convincing psycho persona, Freddie, once you realised that it wasn't all an elaborate build-up to a punchline, was convincing. Mind you, the vanity reg plate on his gold Merc was, even for Freddie, a bit dodgy: FI5T FK. Yes, well maybe God isn't always in the details.
Anyway, the plot focused on Harrington, an ambitious, Cambridge-educated, black copper who seeks a transfer: "I want to do drugs, sir," and you knew that, with the irony that loud, he would. Stiff and nerdy, Harrington has to learn how to be Rastacool. He gets a set of stick-on dreadlocks, learns to pronounce "th" as "d", picks up a few slang words and prepares to go undercover.
What happens after that is mostly hokum. One of Freddie's partners susses Harrington, now calling himself Willie Boy. You think of the Merc's reg plate. But no. Freddie contents himself with breaking a snooker cue across Willie Boy's back and forcibly turning him onto crack cocaine. Not that, by this stage, extreme force was necessary. Willie, clearly a stickler for authenticity, had been practising with coke and spliffs the size of bicycle pumps while he relaxed with a naked white babe.
Strangely, after just one hit of the crack, Willie Boy is a shivering junkie. Freddie orders him dead but he escapes and the hokum is resolved with the usual cop-opera histrionics. Beneath the hokum, however, Lynda La Plante's script addresses the identity of the educated and ambitious black man in British society. Fair enough.
But in an institution - the police force - notorious for its racism, there is a huge naivety on the part of Willie Boy which rather undermines his reputation for academic brilliance. Still, as he suffers cold turkey, he comes to a realisation that it is in drug addiction and crime, not degrees and career, he will find his black roots. However, between nerdy copper and Rasta brudder, there is a gap wider than this sort of cop hokum can fill. Like Harrington, Supply And Demand is too ambitious for its own good.
BECAUSE Cosby is currently the top-rated sitcom in America, maybe Melvyn Bragg is right after all. This is an anaemic version of One Foot In The Grave. Minus the bile and it needs to be spiteful. Bill Cosby, as the 60-year-old made redundant, is too paternalistic for the role.
The plot, such as it was, in Tuesday's opening episode, turned on a mistaken suicide note. The set - a sitcom with "exteriors" - is irritatingly stagey but, clearly, Americans see merit in it that is almost undetectable on this side of the Atlantic. Then again, the original Cosby Show, with lawyer and doctor blacks spawning hideous children in luxury, was, in truth, an outrage.
The defence that portraying blacks in roles normally reserved for whites helps to normalise the idea of blacks as equally well-off as whites, is only valid when blacks are as well-off as whites. Otherwise, it's selective and dangerous propaganda, a palliative to the guilt of many who know the truth. The current show is not vile in that sense. It's just not very funny.
Bragg claimed that Britain's "multi-racial society works better and is less ghettoised than America's". Perhaps but there's hardly room for complacency around Brixton, Toxteth or Bradford. Yet he does have a point. Sexuality has been taken on by popular programmes across US television yet race remains taboo. Back in the 1970s, there was Roots - basically a sanitised, epic-soap. Now there's Bill Cosby fretting about... nothing, really. Too tame, too cute and, I suppose, too American in the Braggian sense.
FINALLY, Cutting Edge screened Rebecca Frayn's documentary, Identical Twins. It featured six sets of twins, including Frankie and Freddie Cox, a pair of Ken Dodd impersonators, who not only married identical twins, Pauline and Estelle, but included them in their peculiar music-hall routines. Estelle died some years ago but the remaining trio continues to entertain or, at least, appear on stage.
Then there were Liz and Mary Whitworth. Mary with cropped hair and a pair of drumskin-tight leather jeans, is a lesbian. Liz, on the contrary, is rather libidinous about men. The nature/nurture debate seemed answered by this pair. But perhaps not. One question asked of all of the sets of twins sought to find out if they felt they were two halves of one person or two wholly separate people.
Most felt both, though the degree of either feeling, surprisingly, seemed to vary, not primarily with the situation but with the individuals. Anyway, it's awkward to describe what many of these identical twins seemed to be hinting at. When a fertilised egg splits in the womb, producing two with duplicate DNA, is this the same as cloning? If so, why are some of the clones so different from each other?
Maybe a cowboy Melvyn and a sheep-trials Melvyn aren't quite so contradictory, after all. Maybe.