The problem with this wretched crisis is that it infects even TV. There I was on Sunday night, trying to enjoy some soothing, mellow quality time with dear Stephen Fry — or ‘Steve’ as he now styles himself in his six-part travelogue Stephen Fry in America (BBC1) — and the whole experience was filtered through a prism of economic misery.
At one point he trundled in his black cab to the vast, ugly hotel where the Bretton Woods trade and monetary system was agreed in 1944. ‘Eek!’ I went. ‘That was designed to stop the second Great Depression like the one we’re about to have now!’ But even the bits which must have seemed so innocuous when he filmed them earlier this year were suddenly filled with foreboding.
A jolly outing with Maine lobster fishermen: yeah, but who’s going to be able to afford their catch for the next 20 years? A visit to a gorgeously sumptuous Adirondacks log cabin built in the 19th-century American millionaire vernacular: God, how distant seem the days when America had a future! A trip to an Atlantic City casino: ah, yes, losing money, lots of money, and having your life completely ruined — that sounds familiar.
I suppose this can’t go on for ever. Well, the economic slide might, but not the pall of unrelieved misery. One of my favourite Nam stories concerns the newcomer to Saigon who, on seeing the anti-grenade mesh on the buses, spent his every journey in a state of sphincter-clenching terror. After a few weeks the fear evaporated not because the threat had diminished but because after a time the brain, exhausted by the non-stop worry, surrenders to the inevitable.
How is it going to affect TV programming, I wonder? Actually, I don’t wonder, I know.
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