The Queen's Wedding C4
Timewatch: Jubilee Day BBC2
Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon BBC2
Now here are six words I never envisaged writing as a television critic: Paul Watson makes a duff film. But, if last Tuesday's The Queen's Wedding is anything to go by, it appears that the inventor of the fly-on-the-wall docusoap has finally been consumed by the very beast he created.
With The Family, Sylvania Waters, The Fishing Party and, most recently, A Wedding in the Family, Watson has been to documentary film-making what Martin Parr has been to reportage photography - a singularly British equal-opportunities voyeur and an unflinching mirror-bearer who is either as dispassionate, as cruel or as kind as the individual viewer perceives him to be (sometimes depending on whether they find themselves laughing or cringing while sitting on a sofa, a couch or a settee).
In the age of docusoap wallpaper his currency may have become devalued but for many of us the appearance of a Paul Watson film still constitutes a TV event - which is why I felt horribly guilty when, after just 20 minutes of watching The Queen's Wedding, I wandered away to fill that telltale first kettle. For me, tea-making while working is less a sign of genuine thirst than it is a symptom of boredom, so if during a Paul Watson film I find myself kettle-boiling, list-compiling or merely aimlessly wondering whether it will be Will or Gareth who wins Pop Idol then things are not looking good. But perhaps I just don't find Mancunian drag queens quite as riveting as Watson does.
The Queen's Wedding was surprisingly old-fashioned in that, unlike his other films, it betrayed Watson's own ignorance of and alienation from his subject matter. Though some of the questions were giggle-inducingly gauche ('Excuse me - but when you make love it's as two men?') even worse was the fact that Watson had opted to depict a bunch of homosexual men who like to dress up in frocks as a tragic freak show, camping and vamping their way though their twinkling, twilit lives perpetually tortured by guilt and/or consumed by lust.
What patronising rot! As a straight woman who rarely, if ever, missed a night out at the legendary nightclub Taboo (now a minor West End musical) in the Eighties, I can tell Watson that the trannies and gender-benders, the drag queens and boys who like boys who like girls who like girls, not to mention all the rest of the prancing, simpering, posing bunch of wannabes, shouldabeens and show-offs who are attracted to that kind of nightclub scene, are no more tragically screwed-up, miserable or guilty than your average brickie and his shop girl. The only difference is that when the brickie suffers a broken heart he's unlikely to take to his room for a week, listening to 'It Should Have Been Me' while sewing sequins onto the bridesmaid's dress he'll be wearing for his best mate's wedding.
Watson's technique - all those tight, lingering, silent, sweaty close-ups - exacerbated this air of otherness and tragedy, turning every single ordinary little queen into a would-be Oscar Wilde. And who wouldn't look tragic when filmed close up while chain-smoking and covered in gently melting pancake slap? At the end, after Neil and Mark (aka Vixen and Missy) had got hitched in front of a moist-eyed (or perhaps that was just an allergic reaction to the false eyelashes) congregation whose sartorial inspirations appeared to be Dynasty-era Joan Collins and the lovely Chardonnay from Footballers' Wives, the very final frames revealed a mirror reflection of Watson, camera in front of his face and thus safely anonymous. This is probably just as well: I fear Watson can never have seen People Like Us - otherwise he would have recognised the shocking similarities (not merely vocal) between himself and that other gifted contemporary documentarist, Roy Mallard.
Ooh, you simply couldn't move for queens last week. There was the reigning one, of course, in the news, all happy and glorious in lime green, beaming while touring a cancer ward on her first Golden Jubilee outing of the year. And then, last Friday, there was Timewatch's Jubilee Day on BBC2, looking at another country that was, in fact, 1977, a land that time forgot in which generations of working-class families still colonised entire roads in Fulham, busied themselves painting the paving stones red, white and blue while singing 'Maybe it's because I'm a Lundunner', and otherwise carrying on like a bunch of EastEnders.
Away from Fulham there was an equally contagious outbreak of national forelock-tugging and cap-doffing (these days, of course, we have discovered a powerful and effective vaccine against the deadly virus Sycophance E), and it was interesting to be reminded of the scale of all this from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. I was 13 at the time but I have absolutely no memory of Jubilee day itself - just the vague sense that my own teenage loyalties were divided between sheer guiltless enjoyment of all the mindless pomp and pageantry and the knowledge that, even if you weren't allowed to hear them on the radio, the Sex Pistols were number one in the charts, and that this was much more relevant to whatever it was that being a teenager was all about - even if the teenager's wardrobe still had, at this point, a 70 per cent bias towards flares.
I also loved Timewatch 's archive footage of Brucie hoofing light-entertainment-dementedly at the Royal Windsor Big Top ('It's Joo-billee!'), the ghastly patriotic singalongs on Nationwide (but I used to adore Nationwide ) and reminiscences about the Sex Pistols' infamous floating gig on the Thames (from the architect Ben Kelly, who may have been arrested that day but went on to make another, even cooler, contribution to the history of youthful hedonism by designing Manchester's Hacienda nightclub). Most wondrous of all was watching the royal family themselves during lunch at the Guildhall. Seated all in a row like the guests at the Mad Hatter's tea party, it was a toss-up as to which Windsor was most wild-eyed with boredom and/or dumbfounded by the sadism of the seating plan (Princess Anne looked especially horrified at her place between two Commonwealth types for whom English was almost certainly a foreign language). Ah, yes, it was fun to look back, mostly because we shall never (God willing) see its like again. Surely.
Last week's best drama was Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon, a canny cod-docuthingy set a few months in the future and focusing on the aftermath of a bio-terrorist attack on 11 April 2002. It was designed to scare the living bejesus out of us and I knew it was going to succeed when I started spontaneously itching and scratching very badly indeed. Over the years I've discovered that the personal itch-test is a far more accurate indicator of a medi-telly hit than anything Barb has yet devised, having helped me to spot such success stories as Casualty, Peak Practice, ER, Children's Hospital, The Trust and most recently, of course, Footballers' Wives. What do you mean it's not a medical drama? Are there more scenes set on the football pitch than there are at Frank Laslett's hospital bedside? Precisely.
Now... up a bit, down a bit, right a bit, yes, oh, just there. Yes. Ahhh.
