Buller, Buller, Buller! The verdict on that Boris Johnson programme

 
26 March 2013

Regardless of what you think about his policies, Boris Johnson makes good television. That’s why Sunday’s interview with Eddie Mair was the most watched item on BBC News Online yesterday and why Twitter was full of comments about last night’s documentary about him - although he didn’t get quite as many mentions as the bearded baker Paul Hollywood. Sure Johnson is an omnibumbler but how many other politicians could fill an hour of television so entertainingly?

"This programme was such a bad idea," Johnson says at one point. But most people came away thinking the opposite, with India Knight tweeting: “15 minutes too long, but anyone who thought that was damaging is way, way off.”

Cockerell did not give Johnson the Eddie Mair treatment. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why Mair took such a hard line in his interview. It started with footage of a flaxen-haired five-year-old boy floating down some rapids in an inflatable boat, with just a stick to steer with. What Lauren Laverne called on Twitter a “magic roundabout voiceover” gave a heavy-handed metaphor about how this was just the start of navigating troubled waters on the journey to becoming “world king”.

There are affairs, fraud and shouting “buller, buller, buller” to past fellow members of elite Oxford clubs. Michael Cockerell got Johnson in an empty room surrounded by three large screens. Instead of a Zero Dark Thirty type interrogation, Cockerell made the Mayor squirm by projecting painful footage including that Bullingdon photo and Darius Guppy, the man who Johnson used to score a point against Eddie Mair by showing he didn't know how to pronounce the name properly.

And there’s a lot of exercise. Helen Lewis of the New Statesman tweeted: “What I've mostly learned from that Boris doc is that he exercises a LOT. Why is he not on a Men's Health cover?” One of the reason why he takes to the tennis court so often and with such vim and vigour is simple – his competitive nature.

This is discussed by his family, who provided some of the most entertaining moments. India Knight said, “Rachel Johnson is very naughty” and others commented on how she looks just the same as when she was four years old, running races in a bikini and reading out the Times leader column to her grandma to show she was a better reader than her galumphing older brother.

Rachel Cooke loved Boris’s mother’s description of him as a baby, who emerged from the womb looking “ready for prep school”. Once he got to Eton, he described David Cameron as “this tiny chap”.

New research from YouGov shows that Johnson is doing better than the “tiny chap”. A monthly survey of UK opinion-formers, drawn from politics, business, media, academia, NGOs and the public sector, found Boris Johnson is viewed far more positively than the leaders of the three main political parties. Two-thirds (67 per cent) say Boris is doing a good job, and only 14 per cent think he is doing a poor job.

If the programme has left you wanting more from the Johnson family, Rachel Johnson’s documentary How to Be a Lady: an Elegant History is on BBC4 tonight at 9pm. And if you chose to watch ITV’s crime thriller Broadchurch yesterday instead, well you missed out.

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