The BBC’s Books season started in earnest this week. And, so far at least, my earlier optimism
has not been shaken. My Life in Books, the new daily literary chat show with Anne Robinson at the helm, launched on Monday at 6:30 on
BBC2. P.D. James and Richard Bacon, an unlikely pairing if ever there was, kicked off proceedings. Bacon provided some blokeish bonhomie, but Baroness James carried the show. Narrating through her
list (Pride and Prejudice and A Handful of Dust being the most noticeable choices), the 90-year-old twinkled with grandmotherly charm, a welcome contrast to Robinson’s shrill and starchy turn
in the anchor’s chair.
The show is safely middle-brow, perhaps unsurprisingly given the time and channel. The set is a chunky assemblage of primary colours (with more than a passing nod to the décor of Sky’s
The Book Show), and the repartee is kept to a good-humoured plod. But it has a tea-time comfort about it, shunning anything too polysyllabic without resorting to the mundane point-scoring
that can bedevil TV book clubs. Tuesday night’s offering was silkier, with Giles Coren and Sue Perkins offering a quixotic blend of children’s books, classics and some solid
contemporary fiction. The show runs for the next week and a half, revving up for World Book Night on March 5.
Punchier fare could be found on BBC4, with Adam Nicholson’s documentary When God Spoke English: The Making of the King James Bible on Monday night.
Nicholson’s contention was that the KJB might just be the greatest work of prose in the English language and he set about proving it.
Sixty minutes on the minutiae of Biblical translation isn’t the most TV-friendly topic, but Nicolson and crew didn’t let it drag. The show had a cinematic polish and it moved busily
between varied locations. First editions were leafed through, Oxbridge libraries stalked and famous battle grounds visited. The complex histories of sectarianism and the foundation of the
established Church were incorporated into the familiar territory of mainstream Tudor and early Stuart history. More, perhaps, could have been made of the impending chaos of the British civil wars
and the turbulent after-life of the KJV, but complaints seem churlish. This was arts programming at its informative best.
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