Faulks On Fiction

Faulks on Fiction ( BBC2 Saturday at 9.00 ) really should have been called Faulks on the BBC Gravy Train. Because he made Judith Chalmers look like a shut in. The idea of the show is novelist Sebastian Faulks takes us through different aspects of the British novel, the first less than riveting episode was devoted to Heroes. He kicks off with Robinson Crusoe. So we find Seb, on a beach, looking like a sun bleached Rory McGrath. But what is the point? Is this the BBC's love of scenery over content again, as so brilliantly displayed in Zen? We learn nothing really interesting about Robinson Crusoe from Seb's beach amble. In fact we learn very little through out the whole show. As Sebastian Faulks wanders the countryside to tell us naff all about Tom Jones, and stalks the nighttime city to reveal precious little about Sherlock Holmes. Seb even has time to visit the Somme, mainly to plug his own, woefully over rated, novel Birdsong.

Even the inserted talking heads ( Robert Harris and Ruth Rendell to name two) seem to be shuffled aside so Sebastian can troll off to his next venue. By the time he got to a college campus, for Lucky Jim, I'd had enough.

Late last year Mark Gatiss did a similar run through on the Horror film. But he packed his show full of informative facts, interesting interviews, and entertaining anecdotes. Which made for an enjoyable series. Faulks On Fiction tells us very little about the great works of British literature and entertains us even less.

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