The Secret Life of the Pub
Channel 4
**
Inside No 9
BBC Two
***
At critics’ school, the first thing you learn is not to confuse form with content. You may not like the content of a programme but if the form of its presentation is perfect then five stars. As Henry James wrote, “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée”. Yet sometimes an exception must be made. As James also wrote nothing ever takes the place of liking or not liking something. The Secret Life of the Pub I did not like.
Down your local boozer, they talk, of course, of little else but critical theory. Or rather, as the makers of this fixed-rig documentary