“Warm bath telly” is how programme-makers describe cosy Sunday-night arts and history documentaries. Jonathan Meades, who has written and presented 50 films, brings a different energy to the game. A typical Meades piece-to-camera would find him in slightly menacing dark glasses intoning his clever, sardonic script while standing in front of a forbidding lump of brutalist architecture. If anyone was tempted to run a warm bath anywhere near him, he looks capable of dropping an electrical appliance into it.
Today Meades is on our screens less often. The commissions aren’t what they were. He doesn’t emote; he doesn’t have a floppy schoolboy fringe. He doesn’t do jolly hockey sticks. For TV executives, greater diversity in front of camera doesn’t noticeably extend to a wide range of writing or hosting styles. Luckily for his many admirers, Meades has more than one string to his bow. Once a must-read food critic, he’s also been a columnist, essayist, take-no-prisoners reviewer and novelist. From Meades’s Le Corbusier-designed apartment in his perhaps unlikely home of Marseille, birthplace of the great Zinedine Zidane and cockpit of drug gangs, he has now produced a 1,000-page novel. It’s not so much a doorstep as a block of raw concrete.
