A Tribute To Johnny Speight - For Richer, For Poorer; Till Death Do Us Part; The Tea Ladies; The Lady is a Tramp (BBC 2, Saturday)
Armistead Maupin's More Tales of the City (Channel 4, Saturday)
Ethan Frome (BBC 2, Sunday)
World in Action: Viagra - the Hard Sell (ITV, Monday)
Home Ground: Faces of the Troubles (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Ally McBeal (Channel 4, Wednesday)
Saturday night's Speightfest started with a joke from Warren Mitchell, the actor who brought Alf Garnett to life. Garnett, for those who've forgotten, was the bigoted Little Englander who didn't like foreigners. The joke. Speight is dying. Mitchell knows he is going to have to speak at Speight's imminent funeral. Could Johnny write him something? Mitchell asked. Saying what? Speight wondered. What about, greatest living satirist since Swift, mumbled Mitchell. No way, quipped Speight, he had no intention of being embarrassed at his own funeral.
The life of Speight, For Richer, For Poorer, that followed was conventional tribute television. We got an anodyne life of Speight in bite-sized pieces intercut with generous slabs of personal testimony from comedians - Eric Sykes, Spike Milligan - and television big wigs. They all said what you'd expect. Speight was lovely, low in cynicism, big on enthusiasm, an innocent. As a watching experience, there was an intense quality of familiarity. What were they going to say? He was a monster?
But beneath the guff was something extraordinary - a comment by Mitchell. When he did the first Till Death Do Us Part, he said, he didn't think it was funny. This was brave and it said something very telling about "art" and television. Great and dangerous work such as Till Death Do Us Part doesn't click just like that. Hard work and high risk is what produces great television. Ratings-obsessed TV execs, please note.
After the tribute came the work - three Speight shows back to back. Technically, visually, the programmes looked inferior to what we're used to now. The pieces were set-bound, the camera angles were monotonous. It was "photographed theatre" in the words of Robert Bresson. The writing, on the other hand, was anything but. Time, which allows us to see how naive the technique was, also allows us to see how complex the literary conceits were. Speight did not do jokes, puns, gags or farce. He did character, fullblooded and inconsistent. All his people were flawed, Alf most of all, which is why we remember him. They were self-serving, hypocritical, treacherous, bitchy, the whole gamut of human frailty from A to Z. But no matter how horrible, Speight eschewed the cheap option; he never got us to just laugh at them.
Alf is a monster but he's always interesting and his repartee can be deft and quick. As you watch, you laugh and then you feel guilty. Why am I laughing along with this bigot's jokes about coons and Micks? you wonder. Because there is a bit of you in him. You're not that different. You think you are but you're not. Speight showed us ourselves and still we smiled. That's why Mary Whitehouse and Co really hated him. He didn't ask you to condemn Alf and feel morally superior. He did something much more dangerous. He got you to see the world like Alf, just as Swift gets you to see the world through the eyes of the cripto-Malthusian monster who authors A Modest Proposal. To connect Speight to Swift, as Mitchell did, was bang on, and the evening bore this out.
Over on Channel 4, there was more of the sort of stuff calculated to offend the National Listeners and Viewers Association. By this I mean More Tales of The City, the sequel to Armistead Maupin's hugely likable saga of sex and drugs in 1970s San Francisco, Tales of the City.
First time round, Maupin's people were interesting. These pot heads were surprisingly engaging, especially the WASPish, horny and unlucky Mary Ann Singleton, beautifully played by Laura Linney, and the enigmatic Mrs Madrigal played as a wannabe Wilde by Olympia Dukakis.
But this time round, oh dear! Everyone just wittered on about their broken hearts. At one point we even had to watch Brian, Mary Ann's secret admirer, sitting on a rocking chair while some MOR crooner intoned "Outside the rain begins". Maupin, by rights, should be a Whitehouse target but this was never going to offend, except on the grounds of dullness.
I began to crave the zapper. Then something happened. Mona, the junkie, hitched up with an old madame, Mother Mucker, and went home to Mother's brothel "to answer the phone". Mona was given a bedroom with a swing which the girl before her had used when "entertaining". Like Bunuel's Belle de Jour brothel, this was a commercial sex establishment I could believe in, for once. So good old Mona. You put out, you saved the hour. But the whole series? We will see. Somehow I doubt it.
Like her compatriot, Henry James, the principal interest of the American novelist, Edith Wharton, was the psyche. However, unlike James, Wharton's language was always crisp and to the point, and therefore her insights into the minds of her characters were always correspondingly clear. So what do you do if you decide to make a Wharton a movie, since the camera does not record thoughts as language can? Martin Scorsese, in The Age Of Innocence, tried to come up with a cinematic language that matched Wharton's prose. The wise producers of Ethan Frome decided on the easier and simpler course - cast well and let the players get on with it.
Liam Neeson was good as the unlucky, love-torn eponymous hero although surprisingly, despite his facility with accents (cf Schindler's List) I didn't feel he was easy with the New England burr. Joan Allen was fantastic as the vicious, hypochondriac wife, Zeena, and Patricia Arquette managed to wring every ounce of sympathy to be had from the role of Mattie Silver, the love interest. Was it as good as Wharton? Of course not. But it was an agreeable, modest translation; no flash, no showing off. You can't live on a diet of iconoclasm a la Speight all the time. Sometimes television must be a balm and this was that - a perfect piece of Sunday evening viewing.
Hard news goes AWOL in the summer and ditto documentary. Except the old war-horses, of course, such as World in Action, which are always with us. This week the subject was Viagra, the new cure for male impotence. What did the programme tell us? Men in the US have died taking it. Dodgy docs on Harley Street, London, now prescribe it to impotent men and soon someone in Britain is going to die. Viagra and certain nitrate-based medications taken for heart disease can, in combination, kill. One is always grateful to World in Action for information of this kind.
The programme also touched on another story. Millions of non-impotent men also want Viagra. And the drug can also help women, it is believed, so they too will soon be clamouring. Now these people are healthy. They can have sex. They just want better sex. This was weirdly interesting. Unfortunately, World In Action is too hard news to do more than scratch the surface of the psyche.
One solution, if you want to get into the psyche, is do as Home Ground - Faces of the Troubles - did. You junk "the story" and invent a device to contain the material. In this case, six well-known images were selected from the millions taken during the Troubles and the subjects were interviewed about what happened when the picture was taken and their lives since. John McFarlane, pictured outside the Abercorn, bloody and dazed, wondered if the release of prisoners wasn't appeasement? Paddy Coyle, the boy in the gas mask with petrol bomb at Freedom Corner outside the Bogside, said he now admired David Trimble. Lord Tebbit, who was filmed writhing in agony as he was carried away from the Brighton bombing in 1984, said he thought the men of violence have won. There were no easy conclusions to be drawn except that perhaps, forgotten in the euphoria that followed the Good Friday agreement, there is a depth of human hurt out there we don't know the half of.
I finished my week with Ally McBeal, the much-trumpeted US comedy buy-in. This week the nerdy lawyer had a doomed relationship with a transvestite prostitute. He died and at the end she made his face up in the morgue. Compared with the three Speight offerings, this was superb, technically. Otherwise it was awful. Speight wrote to move, to enlighten, and to ameliorate. All the makers of Ally McBeal seek is our belief in their superior moral status. This is television with a very high opinion of itself. And if this is the future of popular television entertainment - and I suspect it is - then we have all the more reason to lament Speight's passing.
Eddie Holt is on holidays