National Treasures

Saturday morning. The quilt on our bed is a patchwork of pink and white, strewn with sections of the Weekend FT and Daily Telegraph. I hate the sectionalising of newspapers but I suppose it means that there is less fighting over the reading matter.

I have a fishing column in the FT but struggle to find it, even when I know it’s there. It’s the same with my column on work, buried as it is among the Thursday job ads. It must be like this if you work in the pastry room at Buckingham Palace. They give you a key and a pass but you have to know your place.

I’m reading a Telegraph column by Michael Henderson, discussing Alan Bennett and why someone like Bennett is perceived as a “national treasure” when someone like David Beckham, a footballer, is not.

Hearing that phrase uttered by Libby Purves on Radio Four is enough to set off my Bruxism. Describing certain well known people as national treasures has become such an overused piece of journalese. But presenters and journalists can’t help themselves. They’re seeking a form of veneration that identifies with the zeitgeist. Blimey: Bruxism, zeitgeist? Has this blog suddenly developed pretensions?

Henderson probably did a better job of explaining the thing without resorting to fancy language. He gave some examples too and I would agree with most of them.

In this celebrity-obsessed age it’s comforting to single out people we admire, whose work and behaviour has entered the national consciousness in a way that has nothing to do with the shallow results of a photographic ambush.

Our national treasures are the sort of people who get shortlisted for Desert Island discs, but there is a fine and almost undefinable line to be drawn between those who make the grade and those who are not quite there. A lot of it, I think, is about the relationship with the ego. Of course our national treasures have egos, often quite big egos, but they're not giant egos that are out of control.

It helps, of course to be in middle age or beyond. In fact that’s probably essential.
Jamie Oliver is getting close to making the grade. I know he is detested by some but his recent food activism on chickens and school food have singled him out as someone who is his own man. Authenticity is a base ingredient.

David Attenborough is the real McCoy; so is Bill McClaren, Murray Walker and Harry Carpenter. How is that so many commentators make the grade? I think it has something to with rubbing shoulders with greatness in a way that enforces the preservation of modesty.

Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin? Never in a million years. Jeremy Clarkson. God no. It would ruin his laddish image. Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench – absolutely. Helen Mirren? Debatable, but I'd like to think so. Like Clarkson, I imagine she might throw up at the very suggestion.

Mollie Sugden and Jean Alexander are both well qualified national treasures for the simple reason that they are northerners. It’s more difficult to reach treasuredom as a southerner.

From football I would choose Sir Bobby Robson and Nobby Stiles. From telly land, Michael Palin, having already mentioned Attenborough. There’s Chris Bonnington from mountaineering. From the radio it would have to be Humphrey Lyttelton, the quintessential national treasure – warm, friendly, intelligent but cheeky to the point of being subversive.

Ian Hislop? Almost, whether he likes it or not. Boris Johnson? No, no and thrice more no. Sadly in business we are not there yet; not Branson, not Sugar, not even Sir John Harvey-Jones. It’s difficult also to feel warm about politicians. Henderson suggested Sir Denis Healey. I suppose so.

Does the US, I wonder, have national treasures? Not many. I would single out Chuck Yeager, Clint Eastwood, Betty Ford, Hunter S Thompson and George Foreman. Mohammed Ali is on another plane of international treasures shared by a very few, such as Nelson Mandela and Sir Edmund Hillary.

The great thing about the national treasure game is that it is wholly subjective with no obvious rules and yet we all understand the concept. It’s part of the national psyche to appreciate a treasure when we see one.

Life on the back roads

Not to be outdone by the BBC vogue for sending the more articulate of comedians and comedy actors on the documentary trail (Michael Palin, Victoria Wood, Billy Connolly, Griff Rhys Jones), ITV has sent Robbie Coltrane off on yet another celebrity road-doc series - B-Road Britain (Wednesday 9pm).

We can all do this. I'm not talking about TV documentaries - although those too are no longer beyond the powers of ordinary mortals - but travelling the bye-ways. In the early 80s, before we had children, Gill and I decided we wanted to see England so we put together a tour with one underpinning rule: no motorways.

Try it. If you can discipline yourself to avoid the shortest, quickest route, the journey becomes the experience and it's amazing the places you find. Yes, you can make plans, but if there is no urgency to get anywhere fast, you can break those plans too. In fact, that's part of the fun.

In those days we used the Egon Ronay Good Pub Guide to help us choose overnight stops but now it's probably easier to use this web-based guide. We had used the same principle on touring holidays in France, guided by Arthur Eperon's book, Traveller's France and the guides produced by Richard Binns.

I think it was Eperon's publication of Traveller's Britain that influenced our English tour. In this case, the holiday was confined to places south of our home at that time, near Huddersfield.

I'm interested in the distant past so the trip included a lot of stone circles and burial mounds plus chalk drawings such as the Cerne Abbas Giant.

I've been wondering if I was fresh to these shores what some of the "must sees" (outside London)I might include in a round England trip today. Here is a list of 10:

1. Stonehenge
2. Portsmouth Dockyard and HMS Victory
3. Ironbridge
4. Lake District (favourite spots: Grasmere with Wordsworth's house and the Langdales plus a walk up Helvellyn)
5. The Cotswolds
6. Whitby
7. Hadrian's Wall
8. York
9. Lyme Regis
10.Canterbury

A funny thing happened on the way to the Pole

When I was young I used to read about the exploits of Scott of the Antarctic, David Livingstone and Ernest Shackleton. I liked the idea of travelling and exploring distant parts of the globe.

What training would I need, I wondered? A military career perhaps, or something using geography or cartography?

As it turns out today such skills are not nearly as useful as those of the stand-up comedian. Ask any BBC producer.

Last month there was Victoria Wood floating around the globe's former pink bits in "Victoria's Empire." Prior to that there were the travelogues featuring comedy actor Michael Palin. Even Billy Connolly has turned his touring in to a kind of travel epic. Now I see that Channel Five has hopped on the bandwagon with "Paul Merton in China."

I wonder if Scott told jokes about penguins or whether Mungo Park ever played the Glasgow Empire? Were Lewis and Clark role models for Laurel and Hardy? After all, Laurel and Hardy did make a film called Way out West.

The BBC has missed a trick or two in the past. Otherwise we might have seen Morcambe and Wise on the Eiger or Tommy Cooper of Khartoum. At least the Carry On team made Carry On Up The Jungle.

What does the future hold? Maybe we'll see Peter Kay in Amarillo The Hard Way or Jasper Carrot in Carrot Continental or Rowan Atkinson in the Thin Blue Planet. The possibilities are endless.

Accidental angling

I had a good chat with Charles Rangeley-Wilson this morning. If you saw any of his excellent TV series, The Accidental Angler, on BBC 2 earlier this year you will understand that his mission is to tell stories - or let the stories tell themselves - through fishing in different parts of the world.

He tells me he didn't feel comfortable with the BBC format for this kind of thing where everything has to be thoroughly researched and scripted with producers going out on "reccie" trips beforehand.

"I like the idea of turning up and seeing what happens, letting things unfold for themselves," he says.

A case in point was a record Mahseer, seen in the programme mounted on a museum wall in India. "Only the fish hadn't been on the wall until the researcher arrived. It was stuck down the back of a filing cabinet and only brought out when they knew we were making a programme. Wouldn't it have been so much better if the cameras had found it where it had been stored originally?"

Charles did well to get backing from the BBC for the original series. But plans for a second series have been dropped due to lack of funds. This seems ironic given his argument that a series could be made more cheaply with less time spent on the preparation work.

Anyway, now he has taught himself to use a film camera, learned the editing software and has set about making a one-off film about bone fishing in the Bahamas. It's deliberately raw. But then, that's real life. Real life is not about contrived meetings and well-worn anecdotes. It's certainly not about Victoria Wood - fine actor, writer and comedian that she is - wandering the globe on some pretty flimsy premise to make a series about the British Empire.

This is format TV of the worst kind. You can just imagine someone at the BBC saying: "It worked well with Michael Palin so let's get another comic to front up a travel series." They tried the same with Alan Titchmarsh believing, erroneously that they could transfer him from his gardening slot on to a much bigger landscape to present a nature series. It didn't work.

People are getting fed up with format TV, just as they are tiring with format journalism. Congratulations to Rangeley-Wilson for going his own way. I hope he succeeds.

NB. Have just finished my latest column for the FT and will be publishing it in the fishing section of my website on Saturday. It's about mayfly and museums.(Note added later: If you wondered where this column had gone so did I. Apparently coverage of the Chelsea bloody flower show pushed it out so it is the following Saturday. In the meantime will all mayfly please take note and delay their hatch).