Pesto... It’s breathless and batty – and bound to be a hit
SUNDAY mornings just became a little madder and more metropolitan. Not only do we have Andrew ‘Captain Hop-Along’ Marr growling away on BBC1, throwing his arm about like a tipsy conductor. Now, immediately afterwards on ITV, we have another 50-something London Leftie, Robert Peston, practically dancing the Charleston and blowing kisses to make us watch his latest antics.
Me, me, me – over here, camera one! No, don’t point it at that woman by the interactive screen. It’s MY show. Yes, ME!
Peston, wearing a pixie-ish new hairdo and slim-cut jacket without tie, made his Sunday chat-show presenter debut yesterday morning. Exhausting. If it was all a bit breathless and batty, it also contained its lighter moments. They have at least managed to chop back his notorious long-windedness and the show has an engaging sense of its own ridiculousness.
Less cheerfully, Peston’s first guests included Blairite spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who used to be Peston’s little friend back in the late 1990s when Peston was a political reporter at the height of the Blair terrors. It’s amazing that this old hoofer is still a go-to figure for political authority. Pass the zapper, Clarence.
The Beeb’s Marr Show had just finished and it had been loaded with hefty interviews to try to scupper the ITV pretender.
Marr had spoken to: former MI6 boss Sir John Sawers, an anti-sceptic figure who instructed us to stay in the EU; Justice Secretary Michael Gove, who said the precise opposite with perhaps more charm; new London mayor Sadiq Khan, so sleepdeprived he mumbled about not much in particular; and Prince Harry via a link from the USA, plugging the Invictus Games for disabled service people. In a pre-recorded interview, Marr cleverly persuaded the prince to complain about intrusion on his love life. That was easily the most newsy section of the show.
Come 10am, over to ITV we flew, just in time to catch some opening credits which had chunky writing and bright colours, orange and blue to the fore. They have not spent much on a theme tune. Instead we went to a skinny, bespectacled artiste in a pixie haircut. This turned out to be Peston. He was sitting at a funky glass desk in some sort of bare-brick loft apartment in London. The aesthetic was urban Sunday brunch, black coffee, granola and blueberry yoghurt, that sort of thing.
THE brevity of the show’s opening possibly took Pesto by surprise because on microphones we heard him wishing his colleagues good luck with that old theatre expression ‘break a leg’.
He swivelled towards us, face like a startled crow, and stretched his twangy larynx to say ‘Welcome to the first’ – big nod – ‘Peston on Sunday’. He admitted he was nervous and we could see that from the over-emphatic nodding that kept taking place. He mentioned ‘Zac Goldsmith and’ – another juddering, comical nod – ‘his famous sister Jemima.’ Alan Partridge lives.
Alastair Campbell was sitting at a table shaped like a tennis racquet, along with former Tory MP Esther McVey. They had glasses of orange juice and a bowl of croissants which, as ever, went uneaten. Ah, the old TV studio croissant gambit. They are only ever there for the benefit of programme researchers and camera crews who scoff them afterwards.
Sunday-morning TV wisdom is that what the viewers desire, more than anything, is discussion of politics. I doubt they really do. Anyway, Peston’s big interviewee was the Chancellor, George Osborne, who had chosen to follow the presenter by going tie-less. Mistake. Pesto was wearing a bold, blue shirt and looked, my dears, only gorgeous. Mr Osborne was in a grey effort and it very much needed a tie to lift it visually. What with his Oliver Hardy fringe, he looked distinctly pasty.
The Chancellor gave us a lecture about why we should stay in the EU (perhaps not least so that he can become Prime Minister). He was less generous about the Leave side than Mr Gove, earlier, had been about the Remainers. From time to time Pesto tried to inject energy into the show by walking round the studio set. I think his socks were riding up over his drainpipe trousers. He is not the most liquid of movers and his gait was all bones and joints, knock-knees and angles. And the voice, though kept to shorter sentences, still stretches almost Cockney vowels like chewing gum, while unpredictably blurting other words like spat-out plum stones.
WHAT a contrast we had, though, with his studio assistant Allegra Stratton. Va va voom! The wondrous Allegra, formerly of The Guardian and BBC2’s Newsnight, was dressed in black top and tight black trousers and was throwing her demerera-brown mane about with all the aplomb of a shampoo-advert model.
She was standing in front of a large computerised screen. This, for reasons too wearisome to mention, was christened ‘Screeny McScreenface’.
‘You got the fancy hairdo and I got the fancy screen,’ honked Allegra, a jolly hockey sticks Sloane. She kept pressing parts of the screen to flash up information – the inevitable tweets from viewers, most of whom seemed to be from the Westminster lobby – and when she got things wrong she chided herself by saying ‘I’m such a granny’.
Allegra was at least as big a star of the show as its eponymous presenter. If she’s not careful, she’ll find herself floating face-down in a north London canal before next week’s episode (when we are promised an interview with the show’s neighbour, Jeremy Corbyn).
It was not all politics, thank goodness. There was a watchable interview with documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux and a brief bookreview slot, featuring a book about medical psychiatry.
These segments were more refreshing than the Osborne interview but remained set in the metropolitan mould.
Politics geeks and London intellectuals will have been in their element but there was not much, here, to grip viewers from the shires and regions, people for whom Sunday might be about a great deal more than dreary politics. On the day, Marr’s editorial content outperformed Peston but Pesto himself was arguably the more fascinating compere. Like the best TV personalities, he is a living exaggeration, an exclamation mark made flesh, endearingly dotty.
You watch if only to be astonished. The show is therefore bound to be a tremendous success.