A right royal linguistic revolution

the week on television

T he last time you looked in a dictionary, "royal" was an adjective. The next time, it will have mutated into a noun. "The royals" was the sobriquet used by one and all on Monarchy: The Nation Decides (ITV, Tues), from Trevor McDonald all the way down to the born-again socialist Max Clifford. We now refer to the "royals" instead of the Royal Family, much as we say "privates" instead of "private parts": the second half of the phrase has been cut adrift, marooned by mass linguistic indolence. Forget the telephonic vote of confidence: that ought to tell the sovereign a thing or two about how highly the monarchy is esteemed. Even loyal subjects say "royals" as if it's cockney rhyming slang. (As in royal yacht: snot. Or royal box: bollocks etc)

Given the ugly mood of the debate, it's no wonder that the most strident panellist was a popular thriller writer with a basic training in catering to the mob. Frederick Forsyth took the pulse of the audience and concluded that only bloodcurdling arrogance would earn him the elbow room to have his say. "Shut up and listen", the words he scowled at anyone else on the panel who dared to challenge him, could turn into one of those catchphrases inadvertently handed down to the nation by television. A bit like "Do I not like that" (or, according to Carlton's exhaustive research, "Do I not like that Parker-Bowles woman").

Among the multitude of panellists invited by Roger Cook to say their piece in 10 seconds was Rosalind Miles, captioned here as a historian. When she cropped up two nights earlier on FutureWatch (BBC1, Sun) she was billed as a psychologist and sociologist. Assuming she didn't switch careers some time on Monday, we can attribute the discrepancy to one of two causes. Either Carlton deemed the longer job description too polysyllabic for an audience in no mood for anything but short, sharp Anglo-Saxon. Or they simply made a mistake, to go with all the others jostling noisily under the vast overarching mistake of the programme's actual existence.

Later that night, the people's channel redeemed itself with Avi Lewis's wonderfully roomy profile of David Bowie: An Earthling at 50 (ITV, Tues). For reasons even the baying monarchist mob might be able to work out, turned up in the same week as Alan Yentob's parallel interview in Changes: Bowie at 50 (BBC2, Sat). There was an unavoidable overlap: the questions, the answers, and the fact that both interviewers designed their interviews to be as much about themselves as about their interviewee. Yentob in particular, who made a seminal rockumentary about Bowie in the mid-Seventies, was revisiting not only Bowie's but also his own creative peak.

But the textbook tells of two ways to make an arts documentary, and here they both were: the conventional narrative interview, and the mimetic essay that pays its subject the compliment of imitation. Yentob kicked off on top of a skyscraper in Manhattan, affording a clear, lofty view of straight lines. Lewis, meanwhile, was down there in the mayhem of the streets, hunting for Ziggy among the muddle of cultural signposts. Yentob included a clip from his old Omnibus film of Bowie cut-and-pasting his lyrics. In more exploratory style, Lewis opted to do the shuffling for him, editing his answers into an illuminating new order. It's been done before in Bowie profiles, but never as resourcefully. In one wittily reductive sequence, the grab-bag of names Bowie dropped in the course of the interview were clubbed together into a half-minute index: there the man was, distilled to the essence of a single list.

One of Bowie's bons mots claimed that "the 21st century began in the 1970s". We got round to confronting the moral quandaries it might throw up in FutureWatch, the week's other debating chamber. The set was a steel steal from Bowie's Glass Spider tour (or, to its friends, the White Elephant tour). In the chair, gesticulating like an unfulfilled mime artist, was television's upmarket sensationalist Michael Buerk. Bowie's career may preach the value of eclecticism, but like historian-psychologist-sociologist Rosalind Miles, how many jobs can Buerk credibly hold down? When he read the lead item on The Nine O'Clock News (BBC1, Thurs) about yachtsman Tony Bullimore's miraculous escape, you could just picture him introducing the same item on 999. Newsreaders like McDonald and Buerk are hired to bring moral authority to their extramural work, but the more widely they rent it out, the more that authority is eroded.