The Jonathan Meades Collection (Box Set) (DVD)

...it. Called _Off-Kilter_, it was the latest quirky outing by one Jonathan Meades. If it had been fronted by Griff Rhys Jones or Michael Palin, it would have been endlessly trailed, given a feature in Radio Times and a prime-time slot on BBC2.

As it is, the BBC seems mildly ashamed of a programme-maker who, almost uniquely today, fulfils in each programme the complete mission of its founder Lord Reith - to educate, inform and to entertain.
...TV is dumbed-down, Meades is the opposite - smartened up, maybe? Dressed in his trademark dark suit and tie, as in all 13 shows on this three-DVD collection, he certainly fits the bill sartorially.

He comes across as smart in other ways too. When it comes to the style of his 50 or so documentaries, from which these are drawn, he is a self-proclaimed maximalist. He never uses one syllable when four will do. “More is more,” as he tells ... more

Eagle-eyed TV viewers may have spotted a recent three-part series about Scotland that sneaked out on BBC4. Although, hidden away at bedtime as it was, they could have been forgiven for missing it. Called Off-Kilter, it was the latest quirky outing by one Jonathan Meades. If it had been fronted by Griff Rhys Jones or Michael Palin, it would have been endlessly trailed, given a feature in Radio Times and a prime-time slot on BBC2.

As it is, the BBC seems mildly ashamed of a programme-maker who, almost uniquely today, fulfils in each programme the complete mission of its founder Lord Reith - to educate, inform and to entertain.

Still, we should be glad that Meades is allowed to make programmes at all. If most current TV is dumbed-down, Meades is the opposite - smartened up, maybe? Dressed in his trademark dark suit and tie, as in all 13 shows on this three-DVD collection, he certainly fits the bill sartorially.

He comes across as smart in other ways too. When it comes to the style of his 50 or so documentaries, from which these are drawn, he is a self-proclaimed maximalist. He never uses one syllable when four will do. “More is more,” as he tells Mark Lawson in the 40-minute interview included as an extra on these discs. His verbal style no doubt puts some people off, despite the popularity of his shows.

But myself and other Meadophiles revel in his unapologetic sesquipedalianism. I might not understand everything he says, but it is refreshing not to be patronised. There’s an incentive to watch again, to look things up. If there can be an antidote to Chris Tarrant and Phillip Schofield, this is it.

Which is not to say that Meades is stuffy or pompous. As he tells Mark Lawson, he wants to be Geoffrey Hill (brainy poet) and Benny Hill (zany non-poet). It is not a case of pushing the Benny out, or the Geoffrey for that matter. His habitual presentation style, standing hands by his sides, speaking directly to camera in his posh RADA-trained voice, might sound forbidding. But he aims, he says, for his programmes to be as much music hall as lecture hall. He wants to be neither the breathlessly enthusiastic celeb presenter nor the earnest academic.

He achieves this mainly visually. He subverts TV conventions, especially those of the worthy documentary form. So while an interviewee faces the camera, apparently speaking to him, you’ll see Meades wandering across the background of a shot. A blow-up Meades doll stands in for him on a show which explores his fear of heights. He’ll be seen peering through people’s windows or bellowing down at the camera from the top of a building. He’ll drive between locations in a battered Lada (his own) and even make an off-colour joke about eating beaver, worth of Benny himself. The soundtrack music can be Steve Reich or Tommy Steele. “I’m serious,” he implies, “but I don’t take myself seriously”.

Another way in which he deviates from the telly norm is in his trenchant opinions. He’s firmly on the side of the individual, against uniformity. He mocks the powerful and derides tyrannies both large and small, religious and political. The subject which crops up in nearly all of the shows in this collection is architecture - Meades’s specialist subject, or one of them at least. And Meades will always prefer the quirky and informal, the genuine over the fake, the occluded (a favourite Meades word) and the bodged over the ‘placeism’ of the conventionally picturesque.

His choice of subject matter is equally iconoclastic. Most of the episodes collected here are drawn from his series Abroad in Britain, made in 1989, and its sequels Further Abroad (1994), Even Further Abroad (1997) and Abroad Again (2007). A single 30-minute show can cover a whole country (Belgium), or in the case of Severn Heaven, the earliest example here, the ramshackle folk architecture of charming plotland shanty dwellings near Bewdley.

The source of such attitudes is revealed in the most touching and personal show, Father to the Man. This autobiographical 50-minute episode traces the childhood sources of his world view. He used to spend summer holidays accompanying his biscuit-salesman father around the sleepy towns of southern England. He casts himself as the ‘midget autodidact’ left to seek out the peculiarities of English topography, fascinated by mankind’s interventions in the landscape, discovering that the supposedly ugly was “entirely thrilling”.

What unites the subject matter of all these shows is the finding of the extraordinary in unexpected places. Meades delights in trampling on received views: “Everywhere, everywhere is interesting, if you shed your preconceptions,” he says. Think Belgium and fenland are boring? Think again. He’ll find virtue in obscure Baltic countries rather than their vast neighbours, and prefers suburbs to city centres. Or he’ll make you look again at urban postwar churches that you’d probably drive past without a second glance.

The only bum note in The Meades Collection is Fast Food, an episode from 2003’s Meades Eats. Here he takes his surrealist tendencies too far; the usual sumptuous camerawork is replaced by gaudy colours; Meades himself is usurped by sketches starring Christopher Biggins, of all people. Paradoxically Meades is at his slimmest here, having shed seven stone after 15 years as restaurant critic of The Times. Thus his appearance changes over the course of these discs – from looking like Elton John as an undertaker in the early shows – to resembling Martin Amis in glasses by the latter episodes.

But however slim or portly he might be, I’d argue for Meades’s place as a National Treasure on the strength of these episodes alone, despite the absence of many of his best productions. He may lack the cuddliness of Stephen Fry, but he’s similarly erudite and likeable, despite the practised tetchy persona he concocts for the screen. Like John Betjeman before him, he casts a spotlight on the things we often ignore and destroy in our pursuit of progress.

Whatever the BBC does to hide these programmes, however grudging and compromised their re-issuing of them, we should be thankful. But the world needs more Meades: seek him on Youtube, lobby for a digital channel devoted to him, force schoolkids to watch him, blackmail him into hosting Strictly Come Dancing – anything, anything – before it’s too late. 

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