Sometimes on a sleepy afternoon you can catch The Conqueror on TV, with John Wayne spectacularly miscast as Genghis Khan. Try not to doze off and miss his best line: "This Tartar woman is for me and my blood says, take her!" It was filmed in Utah, the site of nuclear testing, and several members of the cast, including Wayne, were later diagnosed with cancer. Thereafter Genghis Khan was given a wide berth. Apart from the shaggy dog in EastEnders, of course.
Genghis Khan (BBC1) was shot in Mongolia and in Mongolian, with subtitles of a generally violent nature and ferocious action sequences. It was also full of fascinating incidental detail such as the legend that the Khan's soldiers wore silk shirts because silk made it easier to extract an arrow. It claimed to be the most complete television portrait of Genghis Khan ever made, which would not be difficult, and to throw a kindlier light on the old brute, which would.
Orgil Makhaan was a handsome leading man who favoured a helmet decorated with tossing fox tails. Dreadfully inconvenient in battle, I would have thought. And let's hear a cheer for the stubby little Mongolian horses with their tireless stride, who seemed to trot in perfect unison. Apparently a Mongolian horse could gallop 125 miles a day and a Mongolian archer could shoot an arrow 500 yards. For perfect accuracy, you shot your arrow in the split second when all your horse's feet were off the ground. Try it sometime.
Going to Extremes (Channel 4) clashed with Genghis Khan, never a wise move then or now. It threw some light on the Mongol character, remarkably unchanged in a thousand years. They still play a ferociously competitive game with a headless goat ("thought to have been invented by Genghis Khan's followers as a test of man and horse"). And when amused (usually by journalists trying to play the goat game) they seem quite a merry bunch.
Peter Oborne, political editor of the Spectator, cheered up the election coverage no end in Election Unspun: Why Politicians Can't Tell the Truth (Channel 4). He waylaid passersby in marginal Winchester, asking if they could guess which slogan came from which party (no, they couldn't) and if they disagreed with any party slogan (no, they didn't). His point being that all major parties were peddling campaign pledges of such stupefying banality they were totally inoffensive and quite indistinguishable.
It was all rather Orwellian. The animals look from one party to another and can't tell the difference. Furthermore, some votes are much more equal than others. Only floating voters in marginal constituencies really count. Floating voters tend to be heavily in debt, sinking, so to speak, and sophisticated software can target them easily. Big Brother (or, more precisely, a database called Mosaic) knows where you all live.
Oborne is a character on the George Gale model. He pursued the elusive Tony Blair, fulminating. I am not sure if, "a pain up the arse!" and, "wretched little man!" referred to the prime minister or his press officer, but both were heartfelt. He finally found him and gatecrashed a closed meeting. There were, one was cheered to see, bags of bobbies on the beat, all busily handcuffing a young veterinary student who had thrown an egg.
In Coronation Street (ITV1) Katy Harris went to her grave with mourners outnumbered by prison guards and undertakers. The fact that she had flattened her father with his own wrench tended to alienate public opinion. In Katy's defence, however, a letter to Radio Times pointed out that any garage mechanic who used a wrench on an internal combustion engine deserved everything he got. One senses, perhaps, a rancorous hint of personal experience there.
It is a mark of Coronation Street's muscular strength that, dismissing Katy briskly, it spent considerable time on the principle of the Venn diagram. The mathematical intersection of sets was a closed book to young Chesney, as it was to me, but Roy Cropper, purveyor of barm cakes to the laity and locality, gave the subject the full force of his disturbing mind. He demonstrated with a salt shaker, a vinegar bottle and a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps at the intersection. And diversified recklessly into cheese-and-onion and prawn-cocktail. Chesney, a child who has been deserted by his family, took the whole concept very much to heart. "I don't interwhatsit with anyone, do I?" he wept. "I'm on me own!" You need some self-confidence to risk this sort of thing in a soap.