They Haven’t Lost It Yet
By Tom Sutcliffe
Last Night’s Television THE FAMILY CHANNEL 4 SUPERNANNY CHANNEl 4 SILENT WITNESS BBC1
“I open my mouth and his voice comes out”, said Simon in The Family last night, complaining that, despite his strenuous efforts not to replicate his father’s parenting style, there were moments of stress when the old pattern showed through. And then we saw him ventriloquising that angrier man, provoked into grouchiness by having his cooking taken for granted, his anger bouncing around the room, lighting on one thing and then another and then another. In the end, everyone else started to get the giggles at the comic energy of his rage and Simon – a better man than me at such moments – saw the funny side too and cracked a smile. And, like a lot of sequences in The Family, it was difficult to pin down why anyone but the Hugheses themselves (who might want to analyse the CCTV footage to determine the cause of the crash) would think it worth watching. Oddly, though, it is, because the continuing fascination of The Family is that it seems to offer something novel, despite showing you nothing that you haven’t seen a hundred times before, mostly on screen, but usually around and in front of it.
One explanation, I think, is that it captures the trajectory of a family row from start to finish. Most reality programmes don’t have time to watch things simmer and seethe. They have to cut to the explosion, which quite often will be replayed several times so we can appreciate its splendour. The Family, on the other hand, captures something of how rows feel as they escalate, so that three insignificant little bumps in the road will somehow combine together to suddenly overturn the car. It’s particularly good at the lethal frequency with which a two-way parental nag can turn into a three- way fight, as sparks fly off and ignite secondary fires.
It’s also good at sibling hatred, which fizzes into life like a magnesium flare. Life with children can be like having Rashmon on perpetual loop, incompatible versions of the same crime coming at you every day, with truth stomped to death somewhere in the rush to judgement. Here, you can see precisely who did what to whom, and why both parties have come away feeling like martyrs on the cross. It represents family life – so casually and fraudulently invoked as an idyll – as a string of mishandled feelings, overreactions and irritations glued together by love. Rather sweetly, the big bust up in last night’s episode ended with a hug on the sofa between father and son and a rueful explanation from Simon as to why he was occasionally obliged to play the furious old man: “What sort of parent would I be if I just let you descend into chaos?”
As it happens, he’d be exactly the sort of parent that the producers of Supernanny are looking for, a steady stream of failed disciplinarians being essential for this apparently unending franchise. Last night, it was the Porters, whose daughter Maddison was making their existence a daily hell with tantrums she appeared to have modelled from a bootleg copy of The Exorcist. And given that the bad behaviour and the remedies are virtually unchanging from episode to episode, the only explanation for the continuing success of the series is that there are an awful lot of people out there who are going through something similar and want the consolation of knowing that someone else has got it worse. Maddison, it has to be said, had a commitment to shrieking disruption that will take her a long way if applied in a more constructive field of endeavour, and it was no surprise that her parents’ will to resist had been exhausted.
Nanny Frost offered two very useful services. A reminder that no should mean no, even if it takes two-and-half hours of demonic wailing before the message finally sinks in. And, more shrewdly and observantly, that a nine-year-old girl who is cosseted like a three- year-old may react with frustrated rage rather than pleasure. Given a bit of responsibility to look after herself, rather than serve as a human My Little Pony for her mother, improved Maddison’s temperament quite markedly. Discovering that her parents would no longer fall over backwards when pushed was beginning to do the rest.
It looked as if someone involved with Silent Witness had been watching series four of The Wire, with a storyline built around the lives of inner-city black boys, their alienation from the law and the temptations – or coercions – of crime. It would be good to see some equivalent of The Wire on British television, a series that had a real go at examining how social and structural failures play out in ordinary lives, but I’m not sure that Silent Witness is quite the vehicle to do it. It’s still more interested in rummaging around in an open chest cavity than dissecting the body politic.
t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk
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