Requiem for a Dingbat

In another bold innovation, your correspondent breaks new ground (for this blog, anyway) by reviewing a programme before it’s actually finished airing. Well, this isn’t an actual review per se, but anyway. Our text for the evening is Channel 4’s The Taking of Prince Harry, another in the broadcaster’s series of  made-up documentaries about bizarre and unpleasant things that haven’t actually happened but, you know, might one day.

Following last year’s cheerful and not at all provocative exploration of what might happen were the government to have a former glam rocker lawfully killed (reviewed right here in one of our earliest outings), this year’s production poses the question of ‘What would happen should the Queen’s grandson get shot down over Afghanistan and be nabbed by the Taliban?‘ Knowledgable coves pop-up and speak gravely and measuredly about things they no doubt know a great deal about, while – er – reconstructions of things that were never constructed in the first place play out, giving work to many actors who are otherwise unknown. (It also offers a glimpse of a pleasing otherworld where Chinless Dave isn’t the Prime Minister.) Occasionally glancing through the Daily Mail (know thine enemy and all, and it’s not like I actually pay for the wretched thing) means I know how it actually ends – young Ginger gets sprung by special forces at the last minute.

As you’d expect from such a high-profile production this is lavish, credible, and solidly made (though it did seem to drastically overestimate how popular the Prince is with the general public). But it also seems to me to be a fundamentally pointless exercise. Yes, no doubt it would be utterly ghastly if Prince Harry returned to play a further role in Operation: Endless Bloodbath (as I fondly refer to the Afghan adventure), and if he was then shot down and then captured by the Taliban. But one way and another I’m not sure we can do anything to stop that happening, short of telling the lad he can’t be in the army after all (in which case we still face the problem of what to do to keep young members of the Royal Family from hanging around on street corners and making a nuisance of themselves).

It would similarly be horrible should pigeons develop a taste for human flesh and savage office workers and city dwellers across the country, but I can’t see C4 throwing money at a drama-documentary on the subject. If X Factor finalists started spontaneously detonating at random intervals, scything down their retinue and crew members with bone fragments and the like, many people would doubtless get rather distraught – but once again I don’t see much mileage in going on about it, as I strongly doubt it’ll happen. The only reason this got made was because its very nature and subject matter was guaranteed to provoke a loud response from certain elements of the media, and in turn guarantee the network a healthy dollop of cut-price publicity.

So C4 deserves a tut and a disappointed shake of the head for making this show, but the media deserve no less for going along with it. Every outraged double-page spread and stringent leader article denouncing it as provocative and unnecessary just ensured more viewers for the actual programme, which in turn increases the chances of an even-more-dubious offering appearing next Autumn. (The Mail, which as you’d expect honked louder than most that this programme should be cancelled and the makers dragged off to the Tower, then went on to list it as one of its TV Picks of the Day.) 

Many of the brickbats slung at this show were truly moronic – it might give the Taliban ideas, screeched one article. Really? Do we honestly think the Taliban are so thick as to need to take strategy tips from Channel 4 programme makers? It might upset the Queen, somebody else said. Well, I find the majority of prime-time TV upsettingly banal and formulaic, but no-one ever thinks of my feelings.

So I’m left wondering – are the press really so dim as not to realise that complaining about programmes like this provides them with exactly the oxygen of publicity that their makers are relying on? Or do they simply not care, overwhelmed by the chance to have a really good outraged chunter about something,  secure as ever in the belief they have the moral high ground? If you really don’t like a show like this then the best thing you can do is to pretend it doesn’t even exist.

(Advice, I notice, which I am contradicting simply by offering. Sometimes you just can’t win.)