Be still you half-dead OU apparatchiks

I don’t expect many of you watch the BBC’s Newsnight Review, or that the Friday night arts discussion programme features on many people’s Sky Plus series links. It is the one programme in all of the schedules in all of the world of which I am utterly phobic, reveals AA Gill...

A lot of television I can’t abide, tons bores me to catatonia, masses depresses, disgusts and disappoints, but only Newsnight Review makes me want to poke my eyes out with a rusty boy scout and wander the byways of rural Shropshire humming Benjamin Brit-ten’s English folk songs in falsetto. I caught it last week – or rather, it caught me, unawares and out of reach of the remote; like being cornered by pretentious hyenas without a gun – and I thought, I’ll just watch for a bit, see if it’s still as appalling as I remember, and oh, it is. Neither age nor experience has made it any less embarrassingly rubbish.

It wasn’t presented by the usual Moira or Kirsty, those taut and trite Edinburgh cultural stamp collectors who are the postmodern daughters of Miss Jean Brodie. A man I didn’t recognise was ineffectually invigilating half a girl comedy duo called MelandSue and Rosie Boycott, who was wearing someone else’s face. That was a surprise. I like Rosie Boycott. She used to live in a comfortable two-up-two-down face that looked like Rosie Boycott lived there. Now she’s squatting in a sparse, minimal, open-plan face that looks like it might be home to a Scotswoman called Muriel. And then there was Ekow Eshun, director of the ICA, that zoo of onanistic, worthless pretension.

Over the years, Newsnight Review has produced some of the TV characters I’ve violently loathed more than anyone in fact or fiction. There was Tom Paulin, the Irish poet academic with a voice like a blocked drain, a mordant gurgle of patronage and weary disdain. But he is Tom Sawyer compared to Eshun, who gets so excited by the sound of his own opinions that his voice rises to a childish squeak. For me, he has an unwavering cloth ear, glass eye and polythene soul for culture, a flat-pack intellect of received truisms and committee-correct clichés, but is carried along by an innocent and meritless belief that his views are spring rain to a parched wasteland. It’s the embarrassment that undoes me, the gut-knotting, whimpering, double cringe at being made party to such preening opinions. I’ve been trying to work out why I should have such strong and frankly irrational feelings for the denizens of Newsnight Review, and the reason seems to be that it’s just too close, too close to what I do and who I am. There but for the grace of God... We hate what we fear. Football managers may shrink from Match of the Day commentators, gardeners may scream obscenities at Alan Titchmarsh (actually, you don’t have to be a gardener) and I simply can’t abide culture consumers who think criticism is point-scoring in an argument. It’s not. That’s a dinner party. This is criticism.

One of the cultural events Newsnight Review covered, because they’re right-on relativists, was Pushing Daisies (Saturday), the latest American import, but this time for ITV1. Much is resting on its little flowery head. Every season, new-world series come over and are assumed to be patently better and more watchable than anything we can grow at home. We’ve almost given up trying to make adult romantic drama; far easier to spend the money on Grey’s Anatomy, Ugly Betty and House. The only series that seems to have come close for a young audience that loves these things is Skins, and that appears to be indulging in adolescent self-harm by killing off its best characters.

I would quite like to have been at the meeting where the creators of Pushing Daisies sold the concept to the executives. “Okay, we’ve this guy who makes pies. He has a secret power. He can bring back the dead by touching them, but if he touches them again, they go back to being dead. So his first love dies, and he brings her back. And the thing is, he can’t touch her. And if she doesn’t go back to being dead in a minute, someone else has to die in her place. No, no wait, there’s more. Think Amélie, think Like Water for Chocolate, think Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).” It must have been a hard sell. And it still looked like it should have been made as a Czechoslovakian cartoon in the 1960s.

The trouble with the concept is the concept. It’s like walking in a room of iron girders: you keep banging your head on it. You have to buy the premise. There’s a lot of arbitrary and unexplained fantasy, but then you watch Doctor Who and Harry Potter without choking on disbelief. So I expect the success of this hyper-realistically styled show would depend on how much you like your drama sprinkled with fairy dust. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of magic realism, I find real realism quite magic enough. But it is the leitmotif of American drama at the moment, and it’ll depend on how much you like its lead, Anna Friel, who manages to be wholesome and erotic in an undead way.

It was Open University medieval week on the BBC. The OU keeps dying and then they keep digging it up in a sort of half-life. Inside the Medieval Mind (Thursday, BBC4) was a wonderful example of everything that’s wrong with and about contemporary, culturally correct, modular, issue-based history. The medievals, who sounded like a family from Shameless, apparently believed in all sorts of ridiculous things, like dog-headed men, unipeds, cyclops and God, until the Arabs introduced them to Aristotle, and then civilisation could start. This was a formless, contextless, pointless farrago, filmed with all the annoying gimmickry available to a handheld video camera. Then in In Search of Medieval Britain (Thursday, BBC4) we were introduced to Edward I’s castles in Wales. A North American girl drove us there in a hire car. I assume it was a hire car because it had a No Smoking sticker on the windscreen, and people rarely put those in their own. Then again, it might be a new BBC health and safety directive. She also had an odd ear piercing and a camera pointing up her nose, and these were the three most illuminating things in the programme. The rest of it was like a training video for the Cymru tourist board.

But to redeem the Middle Ages and history and the magic of realism, we had Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press (Monday, BBC4), in which he came and rebuilt Gutenberg’s printing press with a lot of charming and quietly blissful men who made you realise why all artists proudly thought of themselves as craftsmen until the 19th century. The process was fascinating, but what stopped this from becoming a garden shed show with added Black Death was Fry’s marvellous awe and boundless enthusiasm for the invention that ushered in everything you’d want to save in civilisation if the world ever catches fire. It was the device that switched on the lights and did it so perfectly the first time that Gutenberg could walk into Waterstone’s tomorrow and say, yup, those are my inventions. It’s a good and worthwhile story, told with humour and conviction, without patronage or side.

History is not a list of socioeconomic modules orbul-let points; it’s not retrospective social work and media studies; it’s a story, it’s your story. Don’t let any numpty, half-dead OU apparatchik tell you different.