David Cameron`s resemblance

14 the review
THE TIMES Saturday March 13 2010
Caitlin Moran
on TV
David Cameron’s resemblance to a slightly
camp robot made of ham is extraordinary
STEVE BACK
I know what “Cameronism” is, though.
It’s that thing where George Osborne
might become chancellor of the exchequer.
Brrrrr.
Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, and Simon
Cowell was crying.
“It was a bad time,” he said, voice
suddenly very low, slow and wobbly. “It
made you realise that all the success, and
records, didn’t really mean anything,
after all.”
He took a sip of water — head tilted back
slightly, so that the tears might roll back
into his eyes. The audience was silent —
but, more importantly, satisfied. Simon
Cowell was crying! CRYING! The most
powerful man in the world — if what you
want is to be famous for exactly 18 months
— doing something quite average!
But now, this powerful man was laid low
— broken by the memory of his late father.
Piers Morgan did his understanding,
“waitingfor the grief to pass” face. And then
we all went to the advertisement break, a
little wiser.
Currently, gettingsomeone to cry during
an interview is considered to be the holy
grail of chat shows. It makes instant headlines. In the event of weeping, the interviewer is considered to have “nailed it” —
it’s the 21st-century money-shot of chat.
Where once Muhammad Ali would go on
and be inspiring, or Billy Connolly hilarious, we now have Katie Price, Gordon
Brown or Simon Cowell sobbing.
But this pornographisation of weeping is
baffling. It isn’t as if it’s terribly hard to get
people to cry, after all. You just ask a sad
questions — usually about someone they
loved dying; although divorce or sexual
assault will do equally well — and then wait
for them to get upset.
Dispatches: Cameron Uncovered (C4)
Piers Morgan’s Life Stories (ITV1)
Lambing Live (BBC Two)
George Osborne’s the thing, isn’t he?
George Osborne is the thing. You can have
all the footage you like of David Cameron
being “modern” and “quotidian” — riding a
bicycle, wearing shorts, drinking tea out of
amug instead of the EtonTea Goblet, traditionally awarded to the best Oik Basher
from Turret Six — but really, his poshness
and uselessness are but a foothill compared
with George Osborne’s. Osborne is your
go-to guy for posh and useless. He’s like
Hugh Laurie’s Prince Regent in Blackadder,
but with an iPhone.
You can imagine early Victorian
explorers discovering a Pacific island full of
huge, delicious, hapless George Osbornes
and clubbing them into extinction in three
months flat. This is, let us not forget, an Old
Etonian baronet-in-waiting who went into
politics only because he failed at becoming
a journalist.
Failed at becoming a journalist? No one
fails at being a journalist! Have you seen
who gets in on this gig? Children, freaks,
idiots, perjurers, wenchers, preternatural
fornicators, slaves to the opium pipe. Tony
Parsons. Shoot a baboon, get into fist-fights
at the press awards, make up stories wholesale — no one cares. Seriously, if an
Etonian aristo can’t put on his blagging
boots, pull some strings and score some
half-arsed “society” column in the Evening
Standard, then you suspect he couldn’t blag
his way into his own house with his front
doorkeyin hishand andhis addresswritten
on a label round his neck.
Andrew Rawnsley’s Dispatches: Cameron Uncovered, then, gave us another
chance to marvel at the miracle of the man
being seriously proposed as the next chancellor of the exchequer, literally, of our
country. Yes, it was really supposed to be a
profile of David Cameron — but, as anyone
who watched it will know, Rawnsley didn’t
really get anything on Cameron. Unlike his
current, talking-point book on Gordon
Brown, The End of the Party, there were no
“24 carat” stories here of Cameron going
stark staring mad and jostling someone in a
corridor, once. The nearest we got to a
revelation was some political analyst’s
assertion that Cameron’s target voter was
in fact his wife, Samantha.
“She might have voted for [Tony] Blair in
1997. This time around she’s thinking of
voting Tory — but wonders if they’ve
tory spokesmen George Osborne and David Cameron on the cycle path to power? Right, Kate Humble and co-star
changed enough,” he speculated. Blimey.
Cameron’s not really busting a gut here —
is he? — if his main ambition is to get his
wife to vote for him. Two lie-ins and the
promise that his mother isn’t coming for
Christmas this year, and that vote is in the
bag. If all elections consisted of only a
single vote, cast by your missus, Cameron
would storm it.
Cameron would also storm, one realised
while watching the programme, any fancydress contest that involved guests rigging
up as “a C-3PO made of ham”. His resemblance to a slightly camp gammon robot is
extraordinary. You can practically see the
breadcrumbs in his hair.
But it was Osborne who really stole the
show — his every appearance prompting
whoops of disbelief from the viewer. In the
House of Commons, railing against Brown
and Alistair Darling, Osborne’s fists were
clenched, pugilistically — save for his
pinkies, which stuck out, on auto-posh.
Amazing. Why has no one noticed this
before? He might just as well have ended
the speech with “And Nanny agrees with
me, too”.
The recurring theme among the talking
heads was a barely disguised horror at the
Tory party’s economic plans. Despite
havingrecentlycome outof recession, Britain apparently remains very vulnerable to
the “double dip” — not the fear of contracting herpes simplex froma party tub of salsa,
but momentary economic relief followed
by, if public sector spending is scaled back,
“a massive depression”. A gigantic fiscal
cold sore, if you will.
“AsktheAmericansabout1937,”theeconomist David Blanchflower noted, drily.
AsRawnsleypointedout,iftheConservatives get in, Osborne will be overseeing the
biggest spending squeeze since 1945 as they
engage in their traditional pastime of
scaling back the welfare state. Over the
decades, the main task of any Tory
administration has been to come up with a
new, euphemistic way of describing how it
will scale back the welfare state. Cameron’s
pop is the coining of the phrase “Big
Society”. BigSociety—charitiesandvoluntary organisations — will, apparently, step
in and pick up the slack in areas where once
the welfare state existed.
For anyone wondering if this might
work, Cameron’s former tutor at Oxford,
Vernon Bognador, appeared to explain.
“That is the philosophy of the 19th
century,” he said, briskly. “What does ‘Big
Society’ really mean? That if you become
destitute the Salvation Army will step in? It
doesn’t work. That’s why we invented the
State.”
Later on Rawnsley asked everyone what
“Cameronism” means.
“I don’t know,” replied Vince Cable —
Britain’s de facto tribal elder, in the continuing absence of Merlin. “And I don’t
think he does, either,” he added.
Anyway, who cared about the potential
future chancellor of the exchequer, prime
minister or Britain’s most powerful man —
when there was Lambing Live on BBC Two
all week!
When I wake up in a cold sweat at 4am —
terrifiedthattheBBC might, duringmylifetime, be murdered in front of me — it is for
shows such as Lambing Live that I tremble.
This week, as every week, we paid £2.74
for the BBC. For this trifling stipend we got
all the usual PLUS Springwatch’s Kate
Humble — tousle-haired and joyous as
ever — standing in a byre, in Wales, feeling
the testicles of rams.
“The most important thing about a tup is
a good pair of balls,” Jim Beavan, the host
farmer, explained, as Humble did a knacker
tour of the room. Woolly balls, shaven balls,
balls flecked with straw — Humble gave
them all a good old weigh. “You want same
size, good size,” Beavan added. It would
make an admirable slogan for a T-shirt.
The pleasure of Lambing Live — slow,
uneventful, meditative, self-contained —
was its window into something unchanged
for centuries. We met “nesh” sheep (too
“soft” for mountains) and watched rams
being daubed in “raddle” (blue paint)
across their chests so that you could see
which ewes they had serviced. “Rub it
right into his brisket!” Beavan prompted.
We met an orphan lamb, born yesterday,
as long-legged as a stool.
“The mother died — she had a bit of a
prolapse,” Beavan said, calmly. He clearly
lives in a world in which he’s nudging split
ewe wombs out of the way with his boot
24/7. As his grandfather always used to say
to him, “When you’ve got livestock, you’ve
got deadstock. That’s just a fact.”
Anyway, Beavan’s sheep were foppish,
pampered dandies compared with the
sheep of the Shetlands. On visiting a flock
of North Ronaldsay, we realised that these
are the Hell’s Angels of sheep. Curl-horned,
astrakhan-coated and beady of eye, they
stood on the beach, eating laver. From a
distance — red seaweed dangling from
their mouths — it looked as if they had just
killed something and were eating its flayed
flesh. Those sheep looked like — and I will
be scientific here — sons of bitches.
This was an island where man and sheep
were locked into a millennia-old combination of domestication and grudge match.
Rounding up the flock for slaughter
involved running down the beach in hot
pursuit, throwing rocks at the sheep and
shouting at them. It was a system
untouched by any modern sophistication.
As the sheep boinged away, as easy as birds,
you reflected that this was, in all likelihood,
how Asterix and Obelix would have
handled being shepherds.
Humble ended Sunday night’s broadcast
with a wholly unmissable offer: “Tomorrow, hopefully, you’re going to see me give
birth to my very first lamb.”
You just aren’t going to get that on ITV1.
SAVE THE BBC!