TV review: Turner's Thames; A Short History of Everything Else

The Thames was essential to Turner. What would he have made of the pageant?
Matthew Collings with Turner's The Fighting Temeraire - Turner's Thames
Elusive genius … Matthew Collings with Turner's The Fighting Temeraire - Turner's Thames. Photograph: Patrick Duval/Telesgop/BBC

About 10 days ago, Anneka Rice was standing on the Millennium Bridge in London for the BBC, cheerleading a collection of sodden artists as they paid homage to both the Queen and Canaletto, while the Thames diamond jubilee pageant passed beneath them. "Wow," she said, "that looks just like a Monet!" as one embarrassed painter reluctantly revealed a ruined canvas on which the rain had made all the colours run into each other.

Watching Turner's Thames (BBC4) I was relieved to be instructed by art critic Matthew Collings rather than Anneka, and was left wondering just what Turner would have made of the pageant. When the Houses of Parliament caught fire in 1834, the great British artist's immediate response was to hire a boat so he could make a series of watercolour sketches close-up: he then turned himself into a one-man installation by completing the final oil painting in a six–hour public performance. There was little that the Young British Artists could have taught him.

Collings was excellent on how the Thames had formed the backdrop for much of Turner's work; as indeed he was on his technique, his ideas, his interpretation of the Sublime and his ability to absorb and reflect the national mood. As a one-hour, intelligent guide to Turner, it couldn't be faulted. I felt I understood the works a lot better – I had no idea The Fighting Temeraire was actually a painting of the Thames – and could probably now bullshit my way through a dinner party conversation about the artist.

What I didn't get was a real understanding of why he was so exceptional. Other contemporary artists were experimenting with the same ideas and were using light and reflection in similar ways; so what made their paintings merely competent and Turner's transcendent? How is one brushstroke a dead pastiche, while another breathes life and meaning? But maybe these are questions television can't really answer. The harder Collings tried to nail down Turner's genius – "light as feeling" was a phrase he used a lot – the more elusive it became. Perhaps that's the way it should be and Collings was indirectly proving his point.

The last time I saw Griff Rhys Jones on television was also during the pageant, when he was meandering up the Thames in a motor launch. I thought he looked miserable then, but that was nothing compared to how fed up he appeared presenting the first episode of the comedy panel quiz show, A Short History of Everything Else (Channel 4). Griff's script opened with: "We're off down memory lane without a seat belt … because we didn't have to wear them in those days" and went downhill thereafter. His rictus smile throughout was almost certainly pain, though it would be more charitable to put it down to professionalism.

It wasn't just the script that was desperate: it was the concept as well. It was as though someone in the commissioning department had watched a couple of episodes of Have I Got News For You on Dave and come up with the brainwave of dispensing with topicality and making a news show that would feel like a repeat the first time you watched it. From round to round, the format never changed; Griff would make some crap gags to introduce a sequence of archive footage before inviting the two team captains – Marcus Brigstocke and Charlie Baker – along with guests Micky Flanagan and Kirsty Wark to make their own crap gags. I guess it was cheap, but it wasn't funny.

Brigstocke looked for a moment as if he thought he had actually wandered on to the set of a HIGNFY repeat as he gave a passable imitation of an extremely grumpy Paul Merton, looking permanently pissed off and not laughing at anyone else's jokes. But, on reflection, he was probably just annoyed he too had let himself be talked into signing up for such a turkey.

Satire just doesn't work on 30 year-old archive footage. Margaret Thatcher gags stopped having any edge the moment Ben Elton started making them in the 1980s. As for the old clips of Elton John having a tantrum and the 70s beer adverts … For what it's worth, Charlie and Kirsty won by 15 points to 14. The result might seem rather more relevant in five years though, after the show has been repeated a few times.