Idiot Box
Created | Updated Dec 4, 2002
Anal Rod Denied
After one's father, surely one's uncle is the leading male role model as one grows. Certainly I remember my own uncle talking me for walks or to the cinema, giving me advice, and generally being a supportive presence in those matters just too intimate and personal to share with my parents. A close friendship between uncle and nephew can be a wonderful thing.
You'll no doubt be cheered to hear that such a relationship seems to exist between Ewan McGregor and his uncle. Ewan, you'll recall, is best known as the younger version of Obi-Wan in the Star Wars saga, while his uncle is best known as that bloke with the alarming bouffant hair in that hospital thing on the telly. But he showed signs of wanting to broaden his output last week when he adapted and directed Solid Geometry (Channel 4), which - cosily enough - featured his famous nephew in the star role.
If this very strange, bloody-mindedly avante garde drama seemed like a throwback to an earlier age of TV, that's because it was. This was originally due to be made in 1979 by the BBC, but they took fright when they learned that one of the key props was a nine-inch penis pickled in a bottle. They feared the prominence of the penis would alarm incoming Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. I find this concept so rich in possibilities I have to take a five minute break to sit grinning inanely every time I contemplate it, and suggest you do the same.
Well, anyway, Channel 4 have now made the thing and very odd it was too, as Ewan took refuge from his shaky marriage in editing an ancestor's diaries, which concerned higher realms of geometry, the theoretical maximum number of human sexual positions, and pickled what-nots. The sex was delved into rather more energetically than the maths, and what depth and subtext there might have been to Ian McEwan's original short story most emphatically did not make it to the small screen. In the end Ewan basically made his irritating wife disappear up her own fundament, which was immediately followed by the play doing the same. Ewan revealed what it all meant: Dimensionality, he said, is a function of consciousness. Well, duh.
Elsewhere on Channel 4, I was lured back to the glossy but completely bonkers series Alias by a guest appearance from Quentin Tarantino. Alias' plots are usually so utterly bizarre and convoluted as to make 24 look like Last of the Summer Wine in comparison, but this week it was basically just a knock-off of Die Hard. The most surprising thing about this instalment was that the producers thought involving Tarantino at all was a good idea, as the man quite plainly cannot act to save his life - every performance he gives is indistinguishable from the jabbery, sniggering, wanting-to-be-cool-so-badly-it-hurts shtick he comes out with every time he has a film project to promote. When the cliff-hanger rolled around, gawky heroine Jennifer Garner (who's certainly changed since the days of The Rockford Files) was wedged up a ventilator shaft by her stacked heels, while Tarantino lurked below with a machine gun. Will the quality of her shoemaking hold out until next week? The words 'top quality cobblers' seemed oddly appropriate.
And so to Daniel Deronda (BBC1), which you may be interested to learn can be anagrammatised quite filthily have you but the will and a few spare moments. For all that this deploys the standard set-pieces of the costume drama - people dancing about and riding horses - deep down it seems like a head-on collision between a serious drama about the history of Jewish identity and Zionism, and a bodice-ripping soap opera.
Its main problem is that the hero is a saintly drip, and the heroine - she of the interesting collection of comedy hats and mighty bustle - was so convincingly depicted as objectionably self-centred and superficial at the start that her loveless marriage to nasty Mr Grandcourt (a performance of languorous brutality by Hugh Bonneville) seems like no more than her just desserts. Personally I don't think we've seen nearly enough of Grandcourt's Waylon Smithers-ish factotum Mr Lush (played by David Bamber). He looks like a cross between Lemmy from Motorhead and Roddy McDowell in his Planet of the Apes heyday. Will writer Andrew Davies repeat his House of Cards trick and let the forces of darkness triumph? I fear that in the end true love will conquer all and the leads will head off to start a kibbutz somewhere.
