The Viewer gets a Wannoping, too much science on University Challenge - and other Topics

I’ll get round to the hilariously bad new BBC Classic Serial in a bit. But first the other topics. There’s a contributor here called ‘R’, who comes and goes, exuding smugness as he makes what he imagines to be devastating comments. He’s fond of repeating something I have written and then saying ‘Oh dear’, as if it’s perfectly obvious that I’ve said something silly.

Take his latest : "How can anyone be unaware that they have been given a placebo, when they fail to feel the well-known intoxicant effects of THC?" Oh dear.

Well, who said : ‘One of the obvious complications in the medical use of cannabis is that the window between its therapeutic effects and the cannabis-induced high is often narrow’? Which I should say was more or less my point? Why, none other than Professor Leslie Iversen in ‘The Science of Marijuana’, published by OUP in 2000.

What Mr ‘R’ then says appears to me to be gibberish: ‘The whole idea of a placebo is that it has no effect on the body (or at least, the area in which the drug under testing is acting). The only effects from placebos are those produced by the body. Given the effects of THC (i.e. it doesn't make your toes fall off for example) it is highly likely that the body *can* reproduce the effects.’

Eh? THC does intoxicate. If the placebo doesn’t intoxicate, then any fool will know he’s been given the sugar pill. If it does, then the intoxication might provide the illusion of relief, when in fact it was just intoxication.

Mr ‘R’ continues :’I seriously think that your arguments would be better founded if you took time to read about scientific research and methodology, and use scientific papers to back up your points. Perhaps a basic understanding of science would also be useful.’

I seriously think Mr ‘R’ is not as clever as he thinks he is.

For there is also this, which he for some reason seems to regard as a giant intellectual triumph, in some way undermining my whole argument: Once again, he quotes me  ‘The drugs named in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 are illegal for a simple reason. The State still accepts that, even in their pure form, there is no safe dose.’ . And once again he stands back, with a smirk playing about his lips, and declares, as if it is self-evident ‘ ‘And, once again, you show your astounding lack of scientific knowledge.’

Really? How? What is the ‘safe dose’ of Heroin, Cocaine or Cannabis? Let alone of LSD or MDMA or Ketamine?  Isn’t the fact that such drugs, even in medicalised forms where applicable,  can only be obtained through prescription, and therefore under medical supervision, a straightforward affirmation of the fact that they are not safe in unqualified hands? Is ‘R’ aware of the fuss that hospitals make about giving morphine even to the obviously dying?   I’ve seen talk of Codeine. Well, even when this is sold in tiny doses by chemists, usually in combination with paracetamol,  it cannot be bought directly without counter-staff interrogating the purchaser and in many cases warning him of a supposed danger of ‘addiction’ What lack of scientific knowledge do I show? What superior knowledge does this anonymous person ( who I recently caught out in a childishly simple logical fallacy, over my complaint to the BBC)  possess? Oh, of course. He disagrees with me, so he must be clever.

I confess to not having read the works of Ford Madox Ford. The people who have pressed them on me have not, in general, been the sort of people whose advice I’d take on anything else. A flip through ‘Parade’s End’, now in one volume, reveals a great deal of dots…like this … and some…tortured… sentences which betray Mr Ford’s German… origins in their backwards-rolling splendour.

My Daily Mail colleague Simon Heffer has rightly pointed out some blazing faults with Tom Stoppard’s dramatisation  - the suffragette Valentine Wannop ( what a lovely name, though) sporting a hairstyle that would have had her driven from any Vicarage with howls of execration before 1914, and indeed probably before about 1928, and even then …  and characters referring to a parson as ‘Reverend Jones’ (I forget the actual name), an Americanism that Ford may possibly have fallen victim to, but is just wrong.  It’s ‘The Reverend David Jones’ the first time, and ‘Mr Jones’ thereafter, in case you’re wondering .

But my favourite is the way in which the chief character, played of course by the BBC’s new actor-in-chief Benedict Cumberbatch, declares that he stands for monogamy and chastity. In which case, why is he trapped in a shotgun marriage, after possibly ( and more possibly not ) impregnating a woman with whom he is shown enthusiastically fornicating in a railway carriage, having just met her? Chastity?....Chastity? Eh.

Why is this stuff made? Why has so much money been spent on it? For instance, couldn’t the BBC have had just as much fun filming Alan Judd’s clever little novel ‘the Kaiser’s last kiss’, irritatingly  hard-to-find( I had to obtain it in a large-print edition from my public library, the only one they had).

This neat little novel-cum-thriller, set in the Dutch home of the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm as the German army invades Holland in 1940, has sex, spying costumes, flashbacks and of course Nazis, coming out of its ears. It contains few dots, moves rapidly, and explores some very interesting ideas in an entertaining and sometimes rather moving way.  There’s a great female part in it .

Another good dramatization would be the same author’s ‘The Devil’s own Work’, a neat combination of the Faust legend and J.Meade Falkner’s ‘The Lost Stradivarius’, as well as a biting commentary on the reputations of modern novelists . or there’s Kingsley Amis’s short story ‘Dear Illusion’, about a poet at the end of his powers, who is – even so – given a major award for a worthless book of verse and brilliantly subverts the award ceremony. Tom Stoppard, many of whose plays I saw when they were new and young, could make a wonderful job of any of these and, while Mr Cumberbatch might not be ideal for any of the parts, there are still other actors around, and available.

Finally, to University Challenge, the subject of a laudatory BBC radio 4 programme last Saturday. It’s not a question of ‘is it as good as it was?’ It’s a question of ‘ is it as good as it ought to be?’ .

I was mildly irritated by the edition broadcast on TV last Monday , and so I set out to analyse it. First, it is amazing how much time they use up  on introductions, chit-chat about the history of the colleges involved. Do we need to know where they all come from?

Close contests are so often cut off just when things are warming up that I was struck to see that the actual quiz didn’t get going till more than three minutes into the programme ( which itself lasts less than half an hour).

Is ‘Fluvial Geography’ general knowledge? I don’t think so. Nor did any of the contestants. They scored nought out of three on the subject (in which the obligatory weekly reference to kilometres, or some other foreign measurement,  was made), and it took them ages to do so.

A chemistry starter question stumped both teams. A bizarre music section on people singing duets with Tony Bennett used up ages, for one right answer. Three bonus questions on the geology of igneous rocks produced guesses and embarrassing silences. A starter question on cubes  failed to elicit a right answer from either side. A medical question bombed. Two out of three questions on alloys (also not general knowledge) were, amazingly,  answered. But a chemistry question fell flat and a series of questions on dressmaking terms, which might have been reasonable in the 1950s but which might as well have been in one of the Finno-Ugric tongues in this age, produced wild guesses.

There was a tiny bit of history, about how various English monarchs had been related to each other, and Thomas Cromwell. There was more literature (flower references in Shakespeare, plus a bit of Samuel Beckett and Shelley).  We discovered, as I think I knew, that most people under 30 have never read ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and so haven’t seen John Tenniel’s wonderful, haunting illustrations of that marvellous book. But scientific subjects, maths and other Non-general Knowledge (Fluvial Geography??? Dressmaking terms???) seem to me to have had a far greater share than was justified. As for music, isn’t Tony Bennett about as far away either from contemporary (which the contestants might reasonably have been expected to know) or classical (which they really ought to know) as you could possibly get?  And does Jeremy Paxman really know the answers, as you might think from his tone of voice when he corrects some of the mistakes?