Surely things can only get better?

My 2011 television viewing began with Morecambe and Wise and I can only echo their classic verdict on the year to date. “What do you think of it so far? Rubbish!”

And rubbish plus 20% VAT, too.

I have not heard one snippet of good news since Big Ben chimed midnight on Friday, and a lot of public money promptly went up in smoke. Every time my phone rings or inbox lights up it is with news of another friend or neighbour suffering a broken limb, heart attack, swine flu or potential cancer diagnosis.

And to cap it all Nigel Pargetter has plunged from the roof of Lower Loxley Hall, with a bloodcurdling scream so prolonged that it sounded more like a fall from Blackpool Tower.

For those who do not share my addiction to Radio 4’s famously 60-year-old soap, Nigel is (or was) a character in The Archers. A stereotypical silly ass in the P.G. Wodehouse mould, he inherited the rundown local stately home, married the slightly shop-soiled Elizabeth Archer and settled down to a life of domestic bliss with their twins. He also manifested a huge if slightly unlikely enthusiasm for BBC-approved green causes such as ditching his 4x4 for a bicycle, and providing land for allotments. You can bet he had an organ donor card in his pocket when he fell.

Latterly, though, he has been leaning on the twins to study hard to get into a private school, rather than the local state secondary strongly favoured by Elizabeth’s mother. Clearly his reactionary genes were getting the better of him and he had to go. Or has he?

At the time of writing Archers editor Vanessa Whitburn was still teasing her listeners with the fact that she chose to end Sunday night’s episode with the Barwick Green theme music rather than the splat of toff hitting tarmac, so optimists could still cling to the hope that he landed on a luckily placed bouncy castle, or indeed that he was still gripping the end of the New Year banner he had been egged onto the roof to take down by his normally dull and responsible brother-in-law David Archer.

This story harked right back to The Archers’ roots as a Government-driven public information service for farmers, contrasting sensibly progressive Dan Archer with the incompetent halfwit Walter Gabriel. Because the important underlying Elfin Safety message was this: never attempt to remove a hanging advertisement from an icy roof, after dark, in a stiff breeze, after drinking several glasses of punch. A message about as stunningly helpful as advice not to lay your head on a railway line, or dip your fingers in water before stuffing them into a live electric socket.

There is a theory that, for a relentlessly right-on rural community with an appropriate quota of gays, an obsessive single mother conceiving through sperm donation, and a vicar married to a Hindu, Ambridge is a bit light on the disabled, and that poor old Nigel might yet be allowed to survive as a hopeless cripple.

Though presumably only if comatose, since allowing an able-bodied actor to speak the words of a differently abled character would surely be as unacceptably non-PC these days as permitting a white man to black up to play Othello.

You will presumably have the advantage of me, by the time you read this, of knowing how things actually panned out, but I reckon Nigel is a goner. Because toffs are in the ascendancy right now, and need to be brought down to earth. Literally.

Nigel Pargetter is surely the luckless proxy for “Dave” Cameron, after the BBC tried and failed to persuade him that it would be a topping idea to nip up onto the slippery roof at Chequers to unfurl a banner conveying his message of hope and good cheer for 2011.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Whistling to keep my spirits up

What will be the theme song of the 2010 General Election campaign? The tune that will bring it all back, like Proust’s madeleine, as “Things can only get better” encapsulates the crazed and, as it turned out, hopelessly misplaced optimism of 1997?

With my usual taste for the obvious, I am quite drawn to Noel Coward’s “There are bad times just around the corner”, but I fear that The Master’s cut glass tones would not be acceptable to any party in this demotic age. Like Sir Nicholas Winterton’s spirited defence of first class travel, even those of us who quietly agree with him must concede that it is a lost cause.

So how about “Smile, though your heart is aching”, a huge hit for Nat King Cole in the year I was born, 1954. Not only does Nat tick all the right ethnic boxes, but the tune was actually written by Charlie Chaplin as the theme music for his 1936 classic Modern Times, a silent film bravely released nine years after The Jazz Singer had ushered in the age of the talkie.

This is surely a movie for today not only because of its theme of the awfulness of modern industrial society, but also because Chaplin unfailingly reminds me of the present generation of politicians: always getting things hopelessly wrong, rarely if ever raising a laugh, yet ultimately proving maddeningly indestructible.

What could be more appropriate than “Smile” playing gently in the background as the candidates emote before hard-hitting interviewers like Piers Morgan or Fern Britton about the private tragedies they never like to talk about? At least the nation’s greengrocers must be getting a bonus from soaring sales of onions to help deliver their tears on cue.

I am sure I am not alone in being so sick of the present, and the three months of blindingly insincere electioneering still to come, that I find myself increasingly retreating to live in the past.

Which is no doubt why the other tune that has been running through my head since the sad death of Ian Carmichael is “What would I do without you, Jeeves?” The theme song of The World of Wooster, televised from 1965-67, this transports me back to an enchantingly batty black-and-white world of silly asses, dippy girls, fearsome aunts, silver cow creamers and the valet with a mighty, fish-fed brain.

From the moment I watched the first episode, and began devouring the books, I wanted to be Bertie Wooster. A drone who did nothing but sip cocktails, smoke gaspers and drive his two-seater to country house parties where something always went horribly wrong.

Sadly it proved not to be a career option without a formidable private income, so I decided that I wanted to be his creator P.G. Wodehouse instead, until I realised that I lacked not only his comic inspiration but also his formidable self-discipline as a writer.

What would Wodehouse have made of this bizarre world in which Calvinist Scots political obsessives try to pretend that they are warm, normal human beings while throwback upper-crust Tories flaunt their “change” credentials by assiduously offending their natural supporters?

Just thinking about it is enough to make anyone wish that they were back in the world of the menacing Roderick Spode and his Blackshorts, preparing to transform Britain in their swish uniform of black “footer bags”.

Yes, the outlook for the coming months is singularly depressing. But keep humming “Smile” to yourself, because it’s set to get an awful lot worse when whoever it is finally parks himself behind the Prime Ministerial desk in May or June, and feels able to come clean about the depths of the mess we are really in. Then we might all start thinking of another popular song from the last great depression of the 1930s, Leslie Sarony’s “Ain’t it grand to be blooming well dead.”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.