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Disptaches' Queen Mum documentary was about as revealing as a Victorian mourning dress, says Mark Lewis

Backstairs Billy – The Queen Mum’s Butler (Monday, Ch4, 9pm) was a Dispatches special which revealed nothing much more than that the royal family are about as relevant as an amputated wisdom tooth.

Alas, this dire, hour-long look at the court of the Queen Mother was equally pointless. The life of deceased footman, William Tallon, a servant every bit as queenly as the woman he was waiting on, had been pieced together with interviews with some old friends and one or two anodyne letters. As an insight into the royal family or the Queen Mother it was like speculating about Manchester United’s latest team sheet by reading the shopping list of Alex Ferguson’s mum’s hairdresser.

The programme kicked off by intoning coquettishly that “this is the butler who saw it all,” but ended by admitting apologetically that “he was a one-off who took many of his secrets to the grave.” What we were left with was a fact-shy, hour-long documentary about some chap.

He had been sympathetically dubbed Backstairs Billy by the press because of his position as unofficial Lord of the backstairs of Clarence house. Yes, in the same way as Fleet Street might describe someone as Sperm-Swallow Steve because of his uncanny resemblance to a whale and a garden bird!

But even with the playfully hilarious homophobia, the story failed to be in any way engaging. Backstairs Billy was flamboyant but he was not, according to best friend, Reta, camp. Admittedly, in the world of Reta, you had to be dressed in arseless leather chaps and a Nazi tunic to be considered in any way camp.

But this was nevertheless a poor attempt at intrigue. The “scandals” involving Billy amounted to changing clean forks for dirty ones, and wheeling Princess Margaret out to the gates of Clarence house on the 100th Birthday of the Queen Mum. The press should have been enjoying the parade which included some the Queen Mum’s favourite TV characters. Instead they spotted that her elderly daughter was looking fairly ill.

The real scandal, surely, was that Lizzie had made a bunch of soldiers dress up as Wombles.

Labels: "Mark Lewis" televisionreview queen mother backstairs billy

Autumnwatch is so British it might as well be smashing up a Belgian piazza, says Mark Lewis

It’s a programme so parochial it makes you want to turn off your TV*, drink a pint of regional bitter in your local pub, and have a bit of a cry over a 1st class postage stamp.

It has that weirdly British combination of impossible ambition and a cosy lack of any at all. Making it live flies so far up the nose of every notion of good natural history programming procedure that it is almost laughably industrious. But then they front it with a man wearing a fleece.

And then make that man Bill Oddie.

Autumnwatch (Monday, BBC2, 8pm) is dripping in British peculiarity. Only in Britain could we imagine that we could somehow sex up the natural history format by inserting the interminably geriatric twittering of man who was incomprehensibly popular 40 years ago. Only in Britain would his meandering verbal links, which invariably wander into the next segment, be considered comforting. And only in Britain would a barn in Brownsea Island in Dorset truly be considered “glamorous”.

This is primetime telly. And yet in one segment, Oddie is allowed to take his camera down to Hampstead Heath to film ducklings frolicking on his local pond. Had it been in Italy, a man in a sparkling suite would have been hiding in the pond on Hampstead Heath filming Bill Oddie being fellated by a dancing girl.

But this is not a programme which will be sold overseas. The only thing likely to be cheered in the United States are the forcefully anthropomorphic reminders of how much tougher the North American grey squirrel is than the rather more effete British red.

The sense of British inferiority is so palpable that Oddie might as well stop stumbling through presenting a live nature programme and start comparing his love making skills with Giacomo Casanova.

Even the brief flicker of excitement at the hint of ‘good ol’ British’ bedroom deviance is quickly extinguished when we discover that “rutting stags” is something to do with fighting deer. Admittedly the rutting stags proved to be a fairly compelling, dramatic piece of television.

But only by British standards. Had it been in America, the stags would have been shooting one another with big fucking laser beams.


*Sentence could equally stop here

Labels: autumnwatch "mark lewis" "bill oddie" "television review" "television review"