All eyes on Melvyn’s hair

An American reporter once said to me that all television in his country was fundamentally about race, and all TV in this country was about class. There was some truth there, I thought, if exaggerated. Then in one week along comes a new Melvyn Bragg series about class and another attempt to revive Upstairs, Downstairs, whose original ended on ITV some 37 years ago.

Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture
began at BBC2’s prime time on Friday. There are problems with documentaries about class. In this case, one difficulty is Melvyn’s hypnotic hair. When he’s indoors, it is thick and lustrous, as if a King Charles spaniel had settled on his head. Out of doors, in the wind, it looks like a haystack in a hurricane, or a game of pick-up-sticks gone lethally wrong. You can’t take your eyes off it. It follows you round the room. His tresses seem to be pointing wildly at something, trying to signal a message he hasn’t got time to bring us himself. If Melvyn wants us to concentrate on what he’s saying, he should do the opposite of what more vain presenters do and acquire a bald wig. Then we wouldn’t be distracted.

The other problem is that describing the class system in Britain is like trying to eat a whole roast pig on your own. There is too much material. You can only show a tiny portion. And since television needs pictures, endless pictures, the images hop from place to place, side to side, as if the camera had attention deficit disorder. So we’re in the army, then moments later in a ballroom (to illustrate the notion that most people enjoyed dancing); next we zoom to a shelter on Margate prom, since T.S. Eliot went there to recuperate and mentioned it in ‘The Waste Land’, and we’re off to the middle of Bolton to look at the fact that there are no cinemas there any more, even though there used to be dozens, showing American films, which were popular with working people because they depicted a classless society.