Recently, I suspected someone of trying to trick me into making a TV series with Claudia Winkleman. I know, hardly the Minotaur’s lair: Claudia Winkleman is a sparkling talent and my closest friend. “Would you want to make a TV series with Claudia Winkleman?” could be a great opener.
But that’s not how it played out. The idea involved three women on a driving challenge, and the chap who wrote said the production company were all fans of my Radio 4 series Women Talking About Cars. It was a very engaging email, saying how much they’d like me to do it, but also asking which “pre-existing friends” I’d want to do it with.
This seemed a bit premature, as if my address book would need to audition for the gig. Very much a case of, it’s not what you know but who you know.
“I bet it’s because they want Claudia,” I said to my PA. “If they’re fans of Women Talking About Cars, they’ll know Claud did an episode and it was all about us being mates. I reckon this is their way of approaching her without saying so. Quite clever, really.”
Still, it was too early for names so I just asked the usual questions about when and where they hoped to film. That’s the second hurdle at which things usually fall (after the first, which is the terrible opening idea, but this wasn’t one of those. Compared to, say, the two different production companies who asked if I wanted to investigate whether I’d lose weight faster in a hot country or a cold one.)
The chap wrote back answering those questions nicely, and adding: “Lastly, is Claudia Winkleman someone who Victoria likes, and would want to join her?”
I was disappointed in them. Overplaying their hand too early! Or too late; his opening gambit should have been that he wanted both of us. Here, he was either pretending they didn’t know we were friends or pretending they were familiar with my radio show, and neither boded brilliantly for the working relationship. Also, I didn’t want to be doing a series just because the people making it secretly hoped for someone else, who would almost certainly be too busy. My PA wrote back modestly to say that Claudia’s a much bigger name than me so they should start with her agent not mine, and they never got in touch again.
I was thinking about this while watching Amanda & Alan’s Italian Job, a new BBC One series where Amanda Holden and Alan Carr renovate a flat in Palermo together. Those two are of equivalent fame, so it’s hard to know which one got the email asking casually if they’d ever met the other. (Or perhaps one of them is actually friends with Robert De Niro and we’re on Plan B.)
It’s an odd concept. The first episode explains: “In Italy, empty homes are being sold off for €1 each, in a bid to breathe new life back into forgotten towns.” It also claims that Amanda Holden snapped up one of these properties online when she read about it, which rather glosses over the fact that the scheme must have been intended to re-people these ghost towns with Italian families. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter whether anyone actually lives there, as long as the renovation is done by Italian workers – but Amanda Holden has invited the comedian Alan Carr to do it with her as a DIY project.
And then apparently they’re going to “sell the house to raise money for UK charities”. Yeah! F--- you, Italy! (It’s worth
spending a few minutes thinking through the economics of this, to truly appreciate how majestically it confounds the spirit of the scheme.)
The problem is, like the email I got about the driving programme, it isn’t honest. We’re asked to believe that Amanda Holden has always wanted to renovate a flat in Palermo, and wants to do it with Alan Carr, and for some reason needs to finish it in three months (there’s a lot of “How will we get this done in time?!” jeopardy) without what is surely the key element: they were looking for a new television project. They need to own the fact that this must have started with a TV pitch, for it to make any sense at all. Otherwise it just seems mad. However lovely Alan Carr is to hang out with, by his own admission he’s never used a power tool. It can’t be a coincidence that he’s a celebrity.
Similarly, as a viewer I need more honesty about the friendship itself. They aren’t the perfect pairing for this because, though Amanda Holden is likable and pretty, she’s not funny. There’s nothing for Alan Carr to bounce off; his squash-ball wit lands in a sort of smily sponge and he stops bothering. When Steve Coogan made a series in Italy, he took Rob Brydon with him. That worked better.
The compensation could be an intimate frankness, but not so far. Holden tells Carr at one point: “You need a project to take your mind off your stuff.” What stuff? I felt beckoned and prurient at the same time, as if I were being invited to feel curious about something with the simultaneous implication it’s none of my business, like when Harry and Meghan publish a black-and-white photo of their child’s foot.
In TV as in life, I reckon, honesty is the best policy – though I say that with apologies to anyone who had a massive family row on Christmas Day. Another great option, of course, is to say nothing at all.
This odd new documentary proves that in TV, as in life, dishonesty doesn’t pay
This week, Victoria has been watching Amanda & Alan’s Italian Job on BBC One