Knowing how it ends is only one of the problems with the translation of the agony and mystery of Christianity into television costume drama, thinks AA Gill. Because, although it comes out all hallelujahs and hosannas for believers, with the excuse to build gothic cathedrals and tell actress and bishop jokes, as a drama, it’s a bit of a fizzler: a parable without a punch line, or, indeed, much of a punch. Commando revolutionary enters capital to stir up patriotic fervour with hardcore buddies. Whacks moneylenders. Chats up good-time girl. Wins argument with quisling. So far, so good. Then, he gets captured, humiliated, tortured and nailed to a tree. The bankers go back to the temple, the Romans back to government and the quisling’s still in charge. Dramatically, that’s all wrong. What they need is a rescue after the humiliation bit. Peter and the SAS apostles swoop in. Then it’s no more Mr Nice Guy, a bit less gospel, a bit more Rambo. Finally, Jesus and Mary Magdalene ride a donkey into the desert. She wisecracks: “So, Son of Man, you gonna make a girl wait three days before you rise again?”
Another problem for every religious adaptation is literalism. The detail obscures. The more real, the more authentic, the less believable. Mysticism can’t be shown; fact hides spiritual truth. Most religions understand this and use elaborate imagery and metaphor; watching this kitsch mimicry of Christ telling parables rather misses the lesson implicit in a parable.
But the final reason Gospel adaptations don’t work is because, stylistically, first-century Judea is the worst look ever. Nighties and hippie beards and mad hats. Who’d ever go to Jews for style advice? And for this, we can only blame God. Perhaps it’s a humility thing. Renaissance painters got round it by dressing everybody as 15th-century Florentines - much sexier. This year’s BBC HBO Ecumenical Easter offering, The Passion (Sunday, Monday, Friday, BBC1), was as ponderous and respectfully timid and dramatically neutered as they invariably are, suffering from the usual hammy naming of parts. “Have you met Joseph of Arimathea?” Mark: “You still think like a tax man.” Judas: “What on earth’s in your heart?”
Jesus is traditionally played by an unknown actor. It is also the convention that you will never ever see him again, except for Robert Powell, who then had to spend purgatory playing a policeman with Jasper Carrott. Other parts, of course, can be played by stars - who could ever forget John Wayne’s Centurion? Here, James Nesbitt washed his hands as Pilate. He looked a particular prat in a Roman miniskirt and sandals, though the Northern Irish accent did bring a certain hint of religious bigotry and violence to the role. Pilate is a hopelessly poisoned chalice for an actor. Like Judas, his badness is predestined by a good God, thereby offering up the eternal dichotomy of Easter. Staying with the contradictory nature of Pilate’s role, the oldest church in the world, the Ethiopian Coptic one, canonised Pilate as a saint. His feast day is June 25. I was going to say not a lot of people know that, but actually there are 15m Copts.
Galton and Simpson were arguably the greatest writers of sitcoms, and Steptoe and Son was their finest creation. I still think it’s the funniest, most poignant and beautifully written comedy ever shown on television, but it was 10 grim years for everyone involved - except the audience. Corbett and Wilfrid Bramble hated each other and finally never spoke outside the script. Bramble was a closet gay alcoholic who couldn’t learn his lines. Corbett had been called the English Marlon Brando. Mind you, being called the English anybody American was the moniker of death. Diana Dors was the English Marilyn Monroe and Cliff Richard the English Elvis. Both Bramble and Corbett despised their fame, resented the medium and suffered huge bouts of thespian self-pity. Neither worked much after Steptoe. Corbett died at 57 of a heart attack in Hastings. Hastings somehow makes it worse.
This biopic, The Curse of Steptoe (Wednesday, BBC4), managed to capture most of the facts nicely, with two believable impressions. What it didn’t show, what it couldn’t show, was the one redeeming component, the thing that made it all worthwhile, Steptoe and Son itself. This is as fine a piece of popular culture as has been compiled by any postwar British actor. What Bramble and Corbett thought of it is in the end neither here nor there, which just goes to show another eternal truth – that actors make utterly useless critics, particularly about themselves.
While on careers that have been flushed round the u-bend of ambition, I offer you Donald Sutherland, who has plunged from the Parnassian heights of Klute and Don’t Look Now to Dirty Sexy Money (Friday, C4). He has never been typecast, yet, for the past 40 years, he has brought an identical menacing overcapped grin to a bewildering role call of duff characters in forgettable films, ending up with this dire plutocrat. Rich family dramas seem to be fashionable in the States at the moment. This one is Sidney Sheldon meets Jeffrey Archer – meretricious, cliché infested, unbelievable and immoral. You may love it. I find something particularly depressing about a drama where money is the sole motivation driving the narrative and the performers.
Elsewhere, Easter Day brought out television's nicer side. BBC One's evening schedule was given over to faith, hope and charity. While the Disciples found Jesus's tomb empty in The Passion, Lark Rise rose to a chaste climax, and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency argued that Botswana, give or take a few bad men and an Aids epidemic, is a very heaven. Thank goodness for ITV1. After reheating for a 16th time that vision of prelapsarian coppering known as Heartbeat, it brought us He Kills Coppers. After all the Good News it was like being hit over the head with a 1960s London telephone directory.
Whereas Heartbeat raids Brian Matthews's vinyl collection for tunes that will induce nostalgic complacency, in He Kills Coppers the senseless killing of three policemen was set to Dusty Springfield's haunting If You Go Away. This stunning sequence was a farewell to whatever innocence 1966 retained. “If you go away, as I know you must,” sang Dusty, “There'll be nothing left in this world to trust.” And, indeed, soon after Harry Roberts had shot two policemen for threatening to nick him for an out-of-date tax disc, there wasn't. “Eee Ay Adio, We Won the (World) Cup” was superseded on the terraces by “Harry Roberts is our friend. He kills coppers”.
He Kills Coppers, confidently adapted by Ed Whitmore from the Jake Arnott novel, is based on the story of Roberts, a small time, semi-deranged crook who knew how to use guns because he had handled them in the Army. But although Arnott's Billy Porter is a version of Roberts, his story is different. Roberts was caught after being on the run for three months; in this version, he will remain at large for 20 years, a plot device that will allow the fugitive to cast shadows across two decades of social change. As Porter, Mel Raido had the darkest, most vacant stare I have ever seen on television.
Yet Raido was not the star. That was Rafe Spall, an actor becoming less missable with every role he takes. He plays Frank Taylor, an idealistic copper soon mired in Flying Squad corruption. Spall, who will age up over this series' three parts, still last night looked like a schoolboy, a little over-eager, a little cocky, a little too attached to his best mate Jon and well out of his depth. However sharp the suit he was wearing, there was always the possibility he would dribble down it. His mistake yesterday was to pursue a Soho prostitute with his inquiries and forget to make his excuses and leave. Kelly Reilly played Jeannie as a period tart whose heart could be made of gold or ice, and that made her intriguing.
Frank's counterpart in Fleet Street is Tony. He does make an excuse and leave when he is approached in a gay club with the resistible offer of an introduction to Somerset Maugham. Tony, played with a news hack's lean hunger by Steven Robertson, may be homosexual but only under a deep layer of homophobia. Tony is perfectly happy to concoct for his news editor a feature on “how to spot a homo” and has hardly any more compunction about then throttling in a Trafalgar Square public lavatory. He Kills Coppers is great stuff, as good or better than the BBC's adaptation of Arnott's The Long Firm four years ago.
But Sykes, as she reminds us every couple of minutes, is a scientist. This apparently means that, unlike the rest of us, she wants to understand the world and won’t accept such assertions at face value. So it was that she now set her face to stern, and decided to find out if the claims for reflexology are true. Needless to say, the answer is “obviously not” – but, in order to fill an hour, Sykes was obliged to take her time reaching it. As ever, she did a pretty good job of pretending to weigh up the evidence carefully, and of putting disingenuous questions to somewhat startled academics. Last night, for example, she asked an anatomist if the feet are indeed connected in any way to the internal organs. (The answer was delivered at some length, but boiled down to “obviously not”.) She tried out the uric-acid theory on an expert who explained with impressive politeness that uric acid never crystallises in the soles of the feet, and couldn’t be massaged away if it did. Even the claims for ancient wisdom were comprehensively demolished when Sykes discovered that reflexology was invented by a Florida woman in the Thirties.
Unfortunately, with every “scientific” aspect of the practice overthrown, there were still 20 minutes to go. Unfortunately too, Sykes spent the time making some deeply obvious points of her own about why reflexology might work anyway. “As a scientist”, she then tested them out in laboratories – most, as luck would have it, in rather nice parts of America. Thus, in Beverly Hills, some big measuring machines proved that being massaged is relaxing. In Virginia, a brain scanner revealed that being held by someone you trust can be comforting.
Meanwhile, a satirical comedy show on BBC4 last night suggested that “today’s main political parties speak with exactly the same voice”. It also argued that, even though most British people are living pretty well, they prefer to think they’re in doom-laden times, so as to salve “the old puritan conscience”. The show in question was an episode of The Frost Report from 1967. Before that, however, there was a celebration of the whole series, called The Frost Report Is Back and hosted by the man himself. As you might expect, Sir David wasn’t all that embarrassed when his old colleagues kept telling him how great he was and how much he’d done for them. Nor, I’m afraid, was there any doubt that he deserved the tributes. When The Frost Report died, it exploded into a galaxy of comedies: Porridge, Monty Python, The Goodies, Fawlty Towers, Yes Minister. As Tony Jay observed ("I believe he is Antony Jay now," said Denis Norden, dryly), the shrapnel went everywhere. The survivors of that big bang remembered it, as does the Guardian's Nancy Banks-Smith.
She went to the first press call in 1966. David Frost rushed forward to greet her, hand outstretched, as if all his life had been a mere preparation for that moment. He does that with everybody. Sitting huddled together were two people she had never seen before. They looked, to her, quite petrified. They were Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, who had never worked together before. Last night, Corbett told Frost about Barker's memorial service in Westminster Abbey. "Normally the choir carry two candles ... " There was a huge whoof of laughter from the studio audience. He hardly needed to continue. "This time the dean of Westminster allowed them to carry four candles."
The third star of The Frost Report was John Cleese, who had never been on television before. The show was live. "That's when I really learned the meaning of the word terror," he said. "All I could think of was, 'My Auntie Vera in Plymouth is watching this at this moment.'" Stooping like a camel, he threaded his way through the eye of the needle into his old dressing room. There were plenty of prop hats lying about, policemen's helmets, bowler hats, judges' wigs. In the 60s you knew a man by what he had on his head. Cleese picked up a policeman's helmet and put it on, laughing a little sadly. "No one clever or crafty would ever wear one of these. It was a symbol of a kind of dumb honesty that is a thing of the past."
The Frost Report still wears fairly well argues Banks-Smith. She points to a snippet from a sketch about the difference between what politicians say and what they mean. "A referendum is not the answer" ("I love Europe"); "The public have the right to decide" ("I hate Europe"). Brian Viner is not so convinced. He concludes that what The Frost Report Is Back! conveyed most powerfully of all, as so often when television gets reverential about its former self, is how much Britain has changed. Also, he suggests, satire does not age well. Scarcely any of the sketches shown last night would make it on to a comedy show now, but that is not to say that we are the better for it. Perhaps the opposite applies.
