No way to curry favour

Nippy Singh and Nigel Farrell in A Place in France: an Indian Summer
The Weekender

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I've long prided myself on having been the first journalist to include a full range of email anal pictograms in a TV column. Who could forget the standard bum (_!_) , the steatopygian look (__!__) , the same look after painful surgery (_*_) , the operation that went wrong (_!__) , or the shock when the surgery bill is received (_O_)?

Recently I've been experimenting with a 90-degree rotation, and have discovered that there's more to the pictogram (or emoticons as they're also called) than just the dull smile :-) . For example, [:-) is a person wearing headphones, while [:-(=) is a bucktoothed person wearing headphones. 8:-) signifies a person wearing glasses on their head, but why anyone would want to send an email pictogram of @<}:-{'}}} (Santa Claus) or =):-) (Abraham Lincoln) is beyond me. They must be *<||:o) o o o (clowns).

Were I asked to construct a suitable emotipictohieroglyphic for A Place in France: an Indian Summer (C4), I'd do so by combining :-###... (a man throwing up) with /:-) (a man wearing a beret) to produce /:-)###... That emoticon aptly summarises this nauseatingly twee chronicle of South-East France, in which Nigel Farrell (the very poor man's John Pitman) gives us le Dibleyfication of everyday village life in the Ardèche.

In the first series, we watched him slowly rebuilding a house in Laurac, a project funded in part by C4 (a nice little number), in return for his periodic updates about the quaint rural folk he encountered there. Like A Year in Provence, the result was a sort of 'Allo 'Allo for middle Englanders, full of funny foreigners, peculiar local customs, and supposedly hilarious linguistic misunderstandings, but unfortunately Farrell's weekly televisual postcards turned out most definitely to be second-class Mayle.

The current series has revolved around the opening of an Indian restaurant, in a part of the world where (so we were informed last night) "the locals haven't even tasted Indian food before" and "guests are surprised by its hot spicy nature!"

The crassness of those statements almost defied belief, because not only does France's colonial history mean that it's long been full of Moroccan and South-East Asian restaurants serving dishes that can blow your head off at 30 paces, but nearby Provence has plenty of Indian establishments too (and believe it or not, the French even take holidays abroad).

Nevertheless, 21st century Ardèche was talked about as though it was as isolated from global trends as was 19th century Siam, with Farrell intrepidly determined to teach the friendly but unenlightened locals a thing or two about wider civilised values. For the "impromptu party" he was holding, he'd even dressed up as an Indian maharaja before introducing the villagers to the mysteries of curry, thereby managing to patronise two cultures for the price of one.

With contrivance and artifice so obvious that John Grierson must have been spinning in his grave, this pseudo-documentary shamelessly magnified trivial incidents into major crises in an attempt to impose narrative onto vacuousness.

"It's critical to give a good impression to Monsieur le Mayor, but Reza's lost his shoe!" chuckled the voice-over, although the locals were all clearly far too busy preening themselves for the TV cameras to care about anyone else's footwear, while Farrell's allegedly intimate and stormy chats with his so-called girlfriend Celine were all recorded by sound engineers (no wonder she gave him le coude soon after).

Admittedly, Reza Mohammed is an experienced restaurateur, and the food was doubtless very good, but I hope they accompanied it with French wine, and didn't serve the Indian stuff that I was once given ("complimentary of the chef") in a curry house during a dinner I had with :^{= (Frank Zappa). "It is Indian wine called Vinar" the waiter told me, whereupon Frank (a teetotaller) poured his straight onto a nearby potted plant, which wilted and died before our eyes.

"This is a completely pointless waste of time," said Farrell towards the end, and who could disagree? He's a Little Englander, with a wellmeaning but condescending attitude to foreigners that wouldn't have seemed out of place in an old Archers' script (in the days before Ambridge became a hotbed of gay sex), yet he can't be wholly blamed for the boorishness of this series.

No, the greatest culpability for such televisual ordure lies with the habitually anonymous (cowardly) commissioning editors (in this case, Jo McGrath), who seldom put their names on the closing credits, even though they're the ones who decide which formats are turned into series in the first place.

In advertising, there's a useful process called "brand personalisation", whereby a product is thought of as though it were a person (Radio 3 is a chap in tweeds, LWT a Ford Mondeo driver who spends Saturday afternoons at White Hart Lane), or perhaps a newspaper. In which case, C4 is currently Titbits magazine combined with Exchange & Mart, and that's a proud boast indeed. It makes me so ... >:(

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