Trilby- a mundane life

Last night's TV reviewed: Legends: Christina – a Medieval Life; Val Doonican Rocks; Am I Normal?; Generation Sex; Coronation Street; Shrink Rap; Placebo

If you think we’re living in bureaucratic times now, then Christina – a Medieval Life (BBC4) brought reassuring news that it could be worse. You could be living in the early 14th century. In those days, everything you owned was carefully entered in official records, and strict laws applied to the most innocuous-seeming of activities. Anybody trying to bypass Mick, the local miller, for example, by grinding their own corn would have their grinding stones confiscated –sometimes to make a new patio for the local abbot. And naturally their crime would be recorded too.

Seven hundred years later, of course, this mania for bureaucracy has turned out to be invaluable. As a result of it, historian Michael Wood could here give us an extraordinarily vivid account of how even some of the poorest people lived. So we're in the early 14th century, in the village of Codicote in Hertfordshire, trying to piece together the life of the unfortunately named peasant Christina Cok, born around 1285. Wood, in special manuscript-handling gloves, pores over the Codicote court book, searching for any reference to her. A court book may be a useful tool to the historian, but it's actually a fantastically boring thing - simply a record of who paid how much tax for what. But it's from 700 years ago, so that makes it fantastically interesting. Christina's father, Hugh, had to work the landlord’s fields along with those he rented from him. Even so, by consulting some of the 175km of shelving in the National Archives, Wood established that Hugh managed to double his tax liability in only 30 years of backbreaking toil. (By 1307 it was 13¾d.)

I am imagining Wood if he had been born 700 years later, and was making a film about now. A film about my life perhaps - Trilby: A 21st-Century Life. Here he is, in his special gloves, delicately holding my bank statement, and beaming with excitement. "On May 5 2008, Trilby spent £24.99, a fairly sizable sum in those days, at PC World." Then he heads off to the National Archive, still in his special gloves, to dig out an ancient copy of the PC World catalogue to see what I might have spent my £24.99 on. (An ink cartridge, if you're interested. And if you're wondering why Wood didn't just go online, that's because the internet ate itself in the late 22nd century, at the time of the great flood.)

Anyway, back to the past. The Christina device doesn't really work, because there simply isn't enough about her in the court book. Her father, Hugh Cok (I bet the lads in the village called him Huge after a few mugs of nettle ale), pays this amount of tax in this year. Then he hands over his holdings and tenements to his daughter Christina. At a time when women’s finances were especially precarious, he set her up with a stall in Codicote market, where peasants were taking their first steps towards economic freedom by selling their surplus. Many years later, Christina was able to give her own daughter, Alice, a shop to run – which, because medieval maps were so scrupulous, we know was on the site of today’s As You Like It Chinese restaurant. When Christina died her death duty was her sow, worth four shillings.

I can see the idea - to personalise history, give us non-medievalists something to get a handle on, using a young woman's story as an easy way into the complexities of medieval life. But I'm just not really getting a sense of this lady from her tax receipts. To be honest, I wasn't even that sad to hear she was dead. She was in her 60s after all, a bloody good innings in those days. Still, Christina’s life also served as a springboard for Wood to make several and often surprising wider points. It seems, for instance, that medieval peasants not only had some rights, but knew them well enough to prosecute their landlords (sometimes even successfully). The Great Famine of 1315-6, we learned, was caused by catastrophic – and presumably not man-made – climate change.

In the circumstances, it was impossible not to share Wood’s awed excitement at finding all this stuff written down so clearly. Nonetheless, he didn’t just stick to official documents. We also got medieval poems, protest songs, graffiti, cookbooks and even a medieval gag (about, as it turns out, what thieves millers are). These duly added to the stirring sense that we were dealing here with people not only real, but also unexpectedly recognisable.

And Medievalists, it turns out, are a funny lot. There were plenty of them to enjoy in last night's programme. There's Cathy Flower-Bond, a historian, cooking a pot of kale-flavoured cracked-grain porridge over an open fire in her adobe hut. John Roberts, a woodsman, chops faggots. The aptly named Jo White-Brewster stirs her ale with a wooden paddle. The ploughman, who should be called Piers but is actually a Chris, yokes up his oxen, ready for work. And Michael Wood bounds happily between them, testing the porridge, sniffing in the ale fumes, drooling over the Luttrell Psalter and other old manuscripts. These are people who are only truly happy when fully immersed in the distant past and they were fascinating. The end result was yet another example of BBC4 at its considerable best.

Legends: Val Doonican Rocks first appeared on BBC4 too – but last night was given a welcome transfer to BBC2. Anybody hoping for a work of crunching revisionism will, I suppose, have been disappointed. The nearest the programme came to controversy was when an Irish academic argued that Delaney’s Donkey and Paddy McGinty’s Goat are uncomfortably close to stage Oirishry. (This was then put to Val, who cheerfully agreed.) Otherwise, the consensus from everybody interviewed is that beneath that unflaggingly nice exterior, the man is unflaggingly nice.

Faced with this awkward fact, the documentary would perhaps have been within its rights to become a bit dull. Instead, it managed to combine its obvious affection with a sharp awareness of how much Val’s career was entwined with postwar Irish history – and with a type of showbusiness that’s now long gone. (One surprise here was to be reminded that Val remained a TV fixture until 1990.) Yet, in keeping with its subject, it did this without ever straining for effect. After all, as one critic once put it, “The great thing about being Val Doonican is that you know you’re not going to lose your voice.”

In popular psychology, two adjectives are always being popped before the word “behaviour”. The first is “inappropriate”, and the second is “challenging”. They are both irritating because they are actually just euphemisms for “bad”, which would be the mot juste were not the psychiatric classes allergic to moral judgments even when a moral judgment is exactly what is needed. Anyhow, Dr Tanya Byron, the Trisha Goddard of clinical psychology, went easy on “inappropriate” in the final part of Am I Normal? (BBC Two) but couldn't stop herself being “challenged” by, as the programme's subtitle put it, Sex. She was meeting some “extraordinary and challenging” people: a cottager, a dogger and a paedophile. She was, she told us, additionally “challenged” by leaving her “clinical environment”, otherwise known, I suppose, as her clinic, to meet them.

Although every child is taught in sex education classes not to snigger, there was something very funny about seeing the doctor in these non-clinical environments. The first was Clapham Common men's loos, a “beautiful Victorian pissoir”, commended by her interviewee, Tim Fountain. Tim is a sex addict who would have some 5,000 notches on his bedpost if he did not prefer carrying on at my local convenience. The challenge to Tanya was that during their frank chat, blokes kept coming in for a slash, at which point Tanya and Tim would have to leave. Tim told of his first sexual encounter - he was 14, in a Bradford bus station loo - and Tanya held her nose, not with distaste but in response to an odour from a nearby cubicle. After Tim's description of his proclivities, I would have thought such blameless activity a breath of fresh air.

“Let's say it is a bright, sunny day and we are off dogging,” said Tanya, trying out her to-camera patter. Dogging got its name from men who told their wives they were going out to walk the dog when they were actually heading for a beauty spot to watch other people have sex in their cars. Tanya tried very hard not to prejudge Nick Malloy, a dogger by day, a professional stripper by night. He said that Stan Collymore had a lot to answer for. She thought his mother, who had prevented Malloy becoming a professional sportsman, probably had more. As usual in this diligent but disappointing series, Byron could not quite muster an argument but ducked and dived around several. She reminded us that homosexuality was once considered perverted, talked to a ten-year-old beauty queen who flirted with judges, and interviewed the author of 'I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido', who was either a victim of “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” or an honest woman.

Then came Tanya's greatest challenge: Lindsay Ashford, a paedophile, who - if one closed one's eyes to a disgusting-sounding website that he has since closed - seemed to deal with his perversion in an exemplary way, namely by not acting on it. Byron nevertheless gave him a hard time for fantasising about a law that would allow him to have oral sex with seven-year-old girls. It struck me that these days we deal with the range of human sexuality rather well by having established-in-law the principle that what consenting adults do in private is their own affair. It is psychologists who confuse matters.

Actually, I'm a bit depressed about my own sex life after stumbling across Generation Sex (Fiver). I don't do any daisy-chaining or snowballing, pegging or spidermanning. There's all this exciting stuff going on, that absolutely everyone is doing, apparently. Except me. I don't even have a "fuck buddy", for God's sake. Who, in 2008, doesn't have a fuck buddy? Christina probably had one, way back then. She'd call in on Mick the Miller, for her oats, so to speak. Nothing heavy, just a roll in the chaff, then back to the fields. It would be in the court book, if the court book were more interesting. In truth, I'm less depressed, now that I've Googled some of these people who are telling me they're doing all this stuff, all these so-called "journalists", "comedians", "reality TV stars", "actors" and "socialites". You're all just horrible, desperate people who'll say anything to get on TV. I bet some of you don't even do half of it. Makey-uppy people, makey-uppy TV. Still, if anyone out there fancies a new f ... no, maybe this is the wrong forum for that.

Anyway, one of the immutable laws of soaps is that in episodes screened on bank holidays, at least eight characters will casually allude to it being a bank holiday. Soap episodes are recorded more than a month in advance, which places regulars at the Rovers Return, like their counterparts at the Queen Vic, at a serious disadvantage when it comes to discussing the latest developments in news and current affairs, such as Manchester United reaching the European Cup final or Boris Johnson becoming mayor of London.

That's why everyone in Coronation Street (ITV) last night kept telling everyone else that it was a bank holiday, reinforcing the illusion that their universe is perfectly parallel to ours. Despite the fact that it was a bank holiday, Ashley "Ah know it's a bank 'oliday" Peacock opened his butcher's shop. His biological father, the late, lamented Fred Elliott, would have been proud of 'im. I say, he would have been proud of 'im. Fred had a verbal quirk inspired by the Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn. He used to repeat, loudly, almost everything he said. "Be 'appy, I say be 'appy." Those were his last words.

Fred was a colourful character of the type that used to abound in Coronation Street but is now becoming scarce, like the red squirrel. One of the few remaining is the marvellously prissy Norris Cole, and yesterday he was on fine form in Ashley's shop, where at 10am he was the first customer, on account of it being a bank holiday. His mother, he told Ashley, had been a paragon of household economy. "She used to save all the nub ends of toilet soap and squash them down into a new bar of perfectly good soap." A wistful pause. "Bit on the slimey side, colours got merged." Then a proud smile. "Ooh, she knew about thrift, my mother. Discarded underpants... first a duster, then a dishcloth, then a floor cloth." Ashley had listened politely, but couldn't resist teasing. "Don't tell me, then you ate 'em?" he said. "Ooh, get away," said Norris.

Never mind the abortions, the arson and the adultery, it is dialogue like this that has set Coronation Street apart since the days of Ena Sharples and Martha Longhurst. Sir Cliff Richard once said that he gave up eating lunch on the day in 1964 that Minnie Caldwell referred to "that chubby Cliff Richard". There's the power of soap, longer lasting than even Norris Cole's mother managed to contrive. Speaking of long-lasting, let me add homage to Betty Williams, the former Betty Turpin, played by Betty Driver. She was pulling pints behind the bar of the Rovers last night, looking exactly as she did in 1994, 1983 and 1975. Afterwards I looked her up on the internet. She'll be 88 this month, the very definition of an old trouper.

Another octogenarian actor popped up on Shrink Rap, being interviewed by the clinical psychologist Pamela Connolly. This was Tony Curtis, who was ageing as well as Betty Driver until he had pneumonia last year and fell briefly into a coma. Now he looks terrible, like the young Tony Curtis made up with prosthetics to look 150. For those of us who grew up watching him punch thin air in fights with international jewel thieves in The Persuaders, let alone those who saw him first time round in The Defiant Ones and Some Like It Hot, it was a sad spectacle. But it was an affecting interview. One day, 12-year-old Bernie Schwartz, growing up in the Bronx, told his younger brother Julius not to hang around with him. Julius followed a marching band instead, was hit by a truck and killed. Bernie was sent by his parents to identify the body. Later, Bernie became Tony Curtis, but in his heart, more and more, he's just Julius Schwartz's big brother.

Placebo was a comedy pilot set in a hospital, where a drug to ease anxiety is being tested on male volunteers. It was Only When I Laugh with lots of swearing, and jokes about acne, urine, erections, Ann Widdecombe and penis seepage (one man wanted to know whether penis seepage means that your penis seeps, or that you seep penises). A series will almost certainly follow.