As a long time Guardian reader, I well aware of its ability to patronise, to sneer, to come across all superior. Not often, I grant you, otherwise I wouldn’t still be buying the thing, but when it comes to something like a major television series that is enjoyed by millions, the Guardian does what it does worst.
Bodyguard starring Keeley Hawes and Richard Madden has been the BBC’s best rated drama series in, I don’t know, perhaps 100 years (I am not good with dates). In these multi-channelled days, it is SO refreshing to actually talk to people at work or on-line who have watched it just like you have, a shared experience.
Far-fetched? Yes, of course it was. Unbelievable? Only if you didn’t allow yourself to drift away into a work of fiction. You could pick bits of it and say “that was just silly”, but why would you do that?
The Guardian gave the show a miserable three stars, which must mean average. Bodyguard was anything but average. But Lucy Mangan, the new TV critic, chose to take the piss. I am not even going to quote her on anything because you can probably guess the kind of stuff she came out with. Crap joke after crap joke. I felt Bodyguard earned respect. Mangan gave it none.
And the thing she missed altogether was when the show’s hero David Budd finally went into therapy for his mental health. “David going for therapy then driving off for a nice weekend with the kids (“no train journeys”). And I got really mad at this.
Budd was the hero and he was suffering from mental illness. An immensely powerful series came to a juddering halt and all the TV correspondent can do is think up jokes that aren’t funny. It’s me being oversensitive, I know, but I regard anyone who admits to mental frailty as a hero (except me, of course), even a fictional TV character. It showed that, even in wildly exaggerated circumstances, someone in the grip of demons can still do good things.
Don’t be put off reading the Guardian by Lucy Mangan’s piss-taking: it’s still the best daily out there by some distance. However, it still has the occasional awkward habit of trying to appeal to its more middle class, so called educated audience and not riff raff like me who enjoy mass market telly.
Bodyguard was brilliant. It was fiction, all made up, just like James Bond and Poldark. The pseuds should get over themselves.
