Carnaby Street, the King’s Road, the sexual revolution – none of that was going on for Sergeant Baylis.
Geri’s 1990s: My Drive To Freedom (BBC2, Saturday) highlighted what is wrong with summing up entire decades, on television at least.
I do not think it would be unkind to point out there was precious little Geri Horner (née Halliwell) in this package.
Although the programme followed a path taken previously by Keith Richard and Boy George, for example, this particular autobiographical wandering included just a smattering of anecdotes and insights.
The former Spice Girl spoke movingly about the shock of losing her father and how that had driven her to work so hard, almost to escape the overwhelming grief.
As far as her quitting the most successful girl band in history went, Geri just said she was tired.
Despite the programme being framed as a personal journey, our narrator kept us at arm’s length throughout and it became, in the main, one of those tiresome conveyor belts of clips, commented upon by people who confuse their own experiences with those of the whole of mankind.
So we had bits of The Big Breakfast and revolutionary youth show The Word. We had Blur and Oasis battling it out, Tony Blair getting into No.10, ravers, lads mags, football hysteria and all the other things that mysteriously now get called “iconic”.
Assorted rent-a-comment types, meanwhile, faded in and out, talking about the optimism of the era, the rediscovery of patriotism in the form of Cool Britannia, the rejection of Eighties’ selfishness, the mass grief over Diana and so on, as if these were things you could see under a microscope instead of very limited, personal opinions.
My own experience of the rave scene was that a lot of greedy selfish types saw it as a chance to make money – and did.
As for Cool Britannia and optimism, I spent much of the era in a bedsit in Balham trying to write jokes for Ant and Dec and getting more miserable by the day.
Had I flown a Union Jack out of my window my neighbours would probably have thought I was trying to offend. My 1990s were different.
Lord knows what Geri’s were like. Beyond the clips, the headlines and the hogwash we had all heard before, she was not giving much away.
Down The Mighty River with Steve Backshall (BBC2, Sunday) saw the naturalist and adventurer canoeing his way down Papua New Guinea’s Baliem River, spotting birds of paradise and hobnobbing with the Dani tribe.
The steep mountains, the thick jungle and the tempestuous rivers keep Papua’s humans apart – and that is the way at least some of them seem to like it.
Steve’s first attempt to explore some underground caves was scuppered, basically because none of the local groups could agree who actually owned them.
Later, he shared his hut with a venerable warrior who had been dead for the past 200 years. Carefully smoked over a fire, the mummified remains of this man – Agat Memente Mabil – now sat in a corner, ready to jump up and run into battle at any time. Paradise it may be – but it is never peaceful.
Daily Express :: TV and Radio Feed
