A Window on the World

David Edgar's Play for Today 'DESTINY' (1978) - essay for British Television Drama website

2017-06-01T01:48:00.000-07:00

"An ideology red white and blue in tooth and claw"

I'm returning here to delightedly announce that I have a three-part epic essay about David Edgar's 1978 Play for Today, 'Destiny', currently being published on British Television Drama website. This is a significant play (currently viewable here) that dramatises the insurgent far-right and British national identity in the late 1970s. I have been researching this TV play for eight months and have included e-mail interviews with the writer and producer, as well as extensive use of the BBC WAC in Caversham (thanks to Matthew Chipping).

Thanks go to David Edgar and Margaret Matheson for their detailed e-mails with their memories of the play and conscientious answers to my questions. Thanks also to David Rolinson for his tireless work in editing this juggernaut of a piece (originally 20,000 plus words!), as well as Mark Sinker*, Justin Lewis**, Ian Greaves and John Williams who have assisted with queries and research.

Part 1 (David Edgar, the theatrical Destiny and British historical context) http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?p=7040

Part 2 (production of the TV play, its broadcast and its reception) http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?p=7043

Part 3 (analysis of the play and its afterlife and Edgar and Matheson's subsequent careers)
to be published 2 June 2017

*Who knows much more about English Baroque music than I.
**Who knows much more about UK chart history than I.

Tom May
Newcastle Upon Tyne

Top of the Pops (BBC-1, 01/05/1980)

2015-05-26T17:58:00.000-07:00

(TX: BBC-4, 22/05/2015)

Imagine a universe where scantily-clad, objectified and anonymised women strut about mechanistically to daintily piano-led jazz-funk music that now evokes distant memories of late-1990s late-night music for Ceefax. Picture, if you will, the Dionysian racket of Motörhead - introduced oddly as 'Leatherhead' by presenter Tommy Vance - followed immediately by the saccharine tupperware pop of The Nolans.

This edition of TOTP is epitomised by openers New Musik, complete with vaguely telefantasy-style watery set. If I haven't written about their From A to B album before, then that's a massive oversight: it's a lovely fusion of power-pop and synth-pop. The bassist appears thoroughly impassive, like a Jeff Lynne statue in large dark glasses. The keyboardist plays the fool, anticipating so much great Thomas Dolby geekery. Wimbledon-born Tony Mansfield paces to the syncopated rhythm, both out-of-place and utterly comfortable on this Top of the Pops. Mansfield went onto produce Cleaners from Venus, responsible for that great unheard 1982 indie opus, Midnight Cleaners with its impossibly lovely jangling volleys like 'Only a Shadow' and the best askew pop essay in Englishness this side of XTC or Robyn Hitchcock.

That New Musik didn't mutate into fixtures of the pop scene in Britain is testament to the usual British conservatism... That rare alignment of New Musik, Buggles, Korgis and McCartney II is one of the most delightful of 1980 English musical constellations.

Disco's there - how could it not be? Narada Michael Walden's 'I Shoulda Loved You' shimmers gorgeously, with its soul-jazz horns and elemental groove. Slightly less compelling is the reappearance of a latter-day Jimmy Ruffin, in a Hawaiian shirt, belting out some mildly Barry White-esque soul ballad on a balcony.

The 3-4 years late 'punk' brigade seem to fill one or two slots in every 1980 TOTP show, and The Chords are eminently forgettable in a sub-sub-The Jam style. The distinct heavy metal presence is different to most 1970s charts, and Tommy Vance is the apposite host, pronouncing 'lovin'' naturally without the 'g'. The genre has been on my mind, what with Marcello Carlin's sterling writing on Iron Maiden and Def Leppard on Then Play Long. And, also, Jeremy Deller's exhibition-come-treatise All That is Solid Melts into Air, which I saw at the Laing art gallery in Newcastle, which used Saxon's 'Wheels of Steel' as one of its video exhibits - the Sheffield band who appear in this very TOTP. The conceptual exhibition also included popular broadsides from the Victorian era, including one imagining a future utopia of 1973, as well as family trees of the Messrs Ryder, Holder and Ferry. Deller is from the more analytical, socially engaged end of conceptual art; ironically, given his Marshall Berman-citing title regarding modernism, his connections became ever more concrete the more you moved around the exhibition and thought. De-industrialisation was being experienced by young men in places like Sheffield; not just Mick in Barry Hines and Ken Loach's 1981 film Looks and Smiles, but Saxon and their 'Steel City' contemporaries. As Deller argues, heavy metal is hewn from the memories of industry and its noises.

Then, there is the uncannily serene slice of jazz-funk I alluded to at the start. Legs & Co. function as, well, legs and assorted objects to accompany this almost chillingly calm piece of music: 'The Groove' by Rodney Franklin. Sophisticated in a manner perhaps only achievable by instrumental jazz-funk of this era. The fifteen year-old Gilles Peterson would surely have enjoyed this, even if it is like the super-ego to the id of Incognito, Cymande or Hi-Tension, a wonderful strain of British music he played much of on last week's show.

During the 24/04/80 show, Steve Wright remarks: "Nice to see something so unusual in the charts" - and he says that of Sky... The same show included a one-two of The Cure's 'A Forest' and Elvis Costello's 'High Fidelity'. There's more here; we don't just have an ode to UFOs with a drone-like long introduction from supposedly 'safe' Hot Chocolate, but also Kate Bush's 'Breathing', one of the most horrifying and gut wrenching of any responses to the Second Cold War and the threat of nuclear doomsday. It's from the same album as the crystalline John Dowland-as-subtle-protest-song 'Army Dreamers'. If you aren't into Kate Bush by this stage, then your taste is unfathomable to me! There's no more radical place to start than Never for Ever and The Dreaming and start all should.

The Beat - 'Mirror in the Bathroom': a window on a whole new world, to paraphrase the great Dennis Potter. And Dexys Midnight Runners are at number #1, with 'Geno'. It may not quite be my favourite of theirs: that is 'This Is What She's Like' from five years hence. But it is another evolutionary step as a number 1, following 'Going Underground' a month or two earlier.

To add to the unexpectedly purplish standard, we are thankfully not treated to B.A. Robertson, a bane of this era and, not so much a poor man's Ian Dury, as a 'wacky' Bob Willis, Sky TV's inveterate misanthrope of a cricket commentator (now sentenced, Rochester style, to inserts in the studio). This episode also spares us the egregious Steve Wright, arms flung 'chummily' around invariably female and voice-less audience members.

The audience lasses are permitted but a few words by Vance, and no, sadly, they aren't colloquial or choice ones. Of course, when introducing the Cockney Rejects, Wright emits an unspeakable 'amusing' blend of cockerney and his mid-Atlantic RP: witness this and cringe.

Alas, this installment doesn't quite avoid Johnny Logan, as his 'What's Another Year' plays over the yellow credits. Yes, blandness, or beigeness in Kate Tempest's terms, always asserts itself in British culture, even amid the more awakened musical culture of 1978-82. However, this programme is generally of a different, stellar order to 1976 TOTP, which I wrote about over three years ago here. We are seeing the infiltration of subcultures and artistry of an altogether weirder and fresher hue, led by talismans such as Kate and Kevin and overseen with wisdom and lightness of touch by a 37-year-old Scouser named Paul. For the moment, commercial compromise and cynicism seem to have been kept out, with the hapless Nolans the ones marooned and marginalised.

Bizarrely, BBC-4 ordain to show an edited thirty minute version on Thursday evenings, and then the full forty or so minuter later in the early hours of Friday (here it is on iPlayer). Needless to say, the edit is superfluous. As a friend has rightly argued, they should further contextualise the show in its era by accompanying the TOTEP re-runs with repeated dramas like Play for Today or documentaries like Russian Language and People - which is at least partially available here, happily.

Tommy Vance unfurls a one-liner, following New Musik's sprightly opening number... "Just a minute I thought I was going to drown there, but luckily I didn't." As Richard Hawley would appreciate, the ocean is bountiful and strange enough to desire immersion.

Becoming a Legend: Blakes 7 - Series One

2014-02-19T11:38:00.002-08:00

TX: BBC-1, 02/01/1978 - 27/03/1978

'Fascism threatens to become fashionable. I use the term loosely, but then people do. Call it totalitarianism, and in some guise or other it is a staple theme of teledrama: an all-purpose enemy, decked out with military precision, paramilitary uniform, uniformity of thought, one fatal flaw - and of course - our hero as dissident, battling against the odds to defeat it or perish.'

-- Peter Fiddick, 'Television: Blake's Seven', The Guardian, 10/01/1978, p.8

Welcome to the first of four joint-essays on each series of Blakes 7, inspired by Neil and Sue Perryman's undertaking to watch the lot and write about it at Adventures with the Wife and Blake. I am a donor for their Kickstarter project and have greatly enjoyed reading the blog, after watching the episodes. Sharing the viewing and, now, the writing with me is Ben Brown, with whom I have also been viewing much 'classic' Doctor Who and unusual cinema in recent times... You'll see Ben focusing on narrative, character and dialogue and myself exploting the show's cultural context, themes and myths.

BB:

Kerr Avon - Thorn in their Side?

Since being introduced to British sci-fi, I have been confronted with numerous robots, aliens, monsters, spacecraft, laser guns, eccentric - sometimes megalomaniacal - characters and a host of smug one-liners. Eventually my time came to be initiated into the cult following of the dark-ish, somewhat messed-up but often hilarious Blakes 7. This was series 1 and it was 1978. Echoes of Star Wars were still pulsing through the air. [Editor's note: In the Times' TV listings for episode 2, the link is made specific: 'To keep us going until we can actually get tickets for Star Wars, BBC has come up with a new series series Blakes Seven. Worth watching meanwhile.']

The man who brought the Daleks to millions now brought us seven rebellious crew members aboard an errant spaceship eventually to be called the Liberator. This man was Terry Nation and he would make sure he would have an iron grip on the first series by writing every single episode.

The story begins with the plight of our hero, Roj Blake. His memory has been damaged, as is revealed to him ten minutes into the first episode. He has but one disturbing and intense flashback to fall back on. Consequently, we are exposed time and again to Blake’s gaping mouth and the repetition of him being clubbed over the head by an agent of the Terran Federation. It turns out that this tyrannical, intergalactic power had been responsible for the murder of his family and the subsequent wiping of his memory. Upon reacquiring his memory of the atrocities committed by the Federation, he is sentenced to be deported to planet Cygnus Alpha along with other prisoners. A prominent dissident, the Feds have really gone to town on preventing Blake from becoming a martyr. When the charges are outlined to him, charges which basically amount to paedophilia, the apparently innocent Blake realises he has been fit-up and exclaims: “You’ve done a BRILLIANT JOB!” to the security cameras.

"You've done a BRILLIANT JOB!"

Before mnemonic revival kicks in, we have to watch as Blake is told that he is guilty, and while pacing his cell like a caged animal, swears that he “is not insane!” and bellows out that he can’t “remembah… remembah… remembah… remembah…!” – a roar that still echoes in my ears to this day. Blake eventually escapes the Federation aboard the spaceship renamed The Liberator, and gradually acquires six fellow convicts to accompany him along the way:

Kerr Avon is acerbic, cool and ultra-intelligent, don’t you know? When the need arises, he is quite able to conduct himself as the ship’s resident sleuth. A Cluedo-like scenario arises in 'Mission to Destiny', where the only major difference to the usual set-up is the substitute of a manor house for a spaceship control room. It all begins when Mr Hopwood from Grange Hill keels over while trying to man the controls of a spaceship. This, of course, warrants the use of a screaming banshee named Sara upon discovery of the corpse. Eventually the members of B7 find that murder is apparent on this spaceship and Avon takes it upon himself to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

AVON: … The plan had gone to pieces. The best the killer could hope for was to delay a full inquiry for as long as possible. As a matter of fact, I think that was a waste of effort. I know - we all know, that one of you is the murderer. But proving which one... Unless, of course, as seems quite likely, someone other than the murderer already knows...

A whodunnit in corridor land!

Avon completes his moment to shine in this episode by eventually socking Sara in the mouth when he discovers she is actually behind the murders!

AVON: You better get her out of here. I really rather enjoyed that!

Olag Gan is the ship’s strong-man, and although unable to kill, due to the implantation of electronic limiter into his neck, he is quite capable of threatening to tear off some one’s arms and legs if he gets rubbed up the wrong way.

GAN: Couldn't stop the... Couldn't stop the... implant [grunt!]

Vila Restal is a lock-picker and coward and can be relied upon to deliver the odd snappy one-liner, usually to himself, except when drawn into a confrontation with… you guessed it… Avon, over access through a door.

VILA: Listen, Fingers, computers are yours, doors are mine, right?

Jenna Stannis, initially the only female aboard the Liberator, is the sexy blonde action-woman who is more than capable of carefully choreographed martial arts. She seems to like Blake and show concern for him when he returns to the ship unscathed from some action on Cygnus Alpha.

JENNA: I was so worried!
BLAKE: I had a few sweaty moments myself!

Cally is an alien guerrilla fighter from planet Auron. Initially and understandably hostile, she is confronted by Vila who reassures her.

VILA: No need for belligerence, pretty lady. I'm harmless!

Zen, the Liberator’s computer, informs the rest of the crew of approaching planets, danger and encroaching ships in a bored voice which was probably meant to sound inhumanly electronic. When he asks Blake to be more precise about a question surrounding the whereabouts of his crew, the unfortunate Zen is on the receiving end of an impatient Blake who barks: "The others! My crew! Where are they!?"

By the time of 'Time Squad', our crew is virtually fully formed to the delight of an enthusiastic Gan. Avon cannot resist slipping in another caustic remark:

GAN: I think we make a great team

AVON: Well, hooray for us!

It soon becomes apparent that the other crew members can only take so much of Avon’s saturnine comments. Gan soon gets his revenge on Avon when Avon knocks another one of Blake’s ideas:

GAN: For a clever man you're not very bright!

Presumably Gan replayed that moment over again and again to much satisfaction while lying on his bunk. Later on Blake finally snaps like a father to a misbehaving child:

GAN: We can talk and travel. We’re safer on the move.
AVON: Another one who’s prepared to let Blake do his thinking for him.
BLAKE: Enough, Avon!

The adventures that follow are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes entertaining and sometimes quite boring. Our crew land in the superfluous episode 'The Web', and we are presented with foetus-in-a-jar thing, Saymon, who chants to us in a spooky voice:

SAYMON: They. Must. Come. To. Us...!

Highlights of this episode include Cally turning evil and lamping Villa when he innocuously asks her what she thinks of his outfit. Green alien blobs, the tearful and vengeful Decimers are quite amusing as they hysterically dash about the place, clamouring at glass doors and hammering on them for dear life. They also count football as one of their native sports, traditionally played with a withered head. Jenna pays tribute to The Exorcist (1973) by becoming possessed, unfortunately without the projectile vomiting. Avon also manages to slip in some bile, in revenge to Gan’s earlier affront to his intelligence.

AVON: [The automatic repair system] It's slow - you should appreciate that problem.

Otherwise, the episode is needless and ludicrous with much head-fuddling jargon.

Every sci-fi hero needs their nemesis and Blake’s turns up in the form of eye-patch wearing Commander Travis, looking imposing with his hands on his hips. He complains to his superior Servalan that Blake is becoming a legend.

SERVALAN: Blake is just a man!

The pair extensively lock heads in 'Duel', a great episode which includes Blake in a noticeably lighter mood for the first time. This lasts until The Liberator is attacked. A hilarious scene of slowed-down speech and strung-out psychedelia ensues to evoke a feeling of calamity. The episode also has Blake’s face turning intermittently blue at one point! A real scene-stealer here is Patsy Smart as Giroc, the old crone who relishes the war between Blake and Travis. About Travis, she cackles:

GIROC: Not only is he primitive, he’s pompous as well!

'Breakdown' opens with what appears to be Gan suffering from a stroke. Grasping his head, he slowly turns evil as the electronic limiter malfunctions.

Our Gan becomes a beast that needs neurosurgery to return to his non-killer self. A medical kit comprising tranquilizer pads - whatever the hell they are - is used to mollify the foaming Gan and he is restrained on a trolley with straps. A confused Blake is exasperated...

BLAKE: Because I don't know what to do about it! And if it is the limiter, I don't know how we can help him. Unless neurosurgery is one of your particular talents.
AVON: Unfortunately, no.

Vila warns that, unless something is done, the unfortunate Gan may end up like a vegetable – that is, more vegetable-like than normal! The stress begins to get to the crew members and Avon snipes at Blake again:

AVON: Staying with you requires a degree of stupidity I no longer feel capable of!

Fortunately the day is saved by the efforts of the brain surgeon, Professor Kayn and his assistant, Renor, who seems more horny than focused on the job in hand:

RENOR: Hello! This place is full of pretty girls.

Ultimately, Gan’s limiter is fixed and all returns to “normal”. Blake becomes uncharacteristically jubilant and surrounded by his crew members, says to Gan:

BLAKE: Oh and... by the way, welcome back!

This generates such uproarious laughter that it was at this point that I questioned the state of Blake’s mental health. I noticed his mood is “all or nothing” – he’s either seriously intense or in fits of laughter. Bipolar? PTSD? The stress of his family being murdered, accusations of child molestation and running a spaceship has clearly taken its toll on him by this point.

By 'Bounty' the crew feel compelled to help another prisoner of the federation, lepidopterist President Sarkoff. Playing his warbling record all day long, the man seems hell-bent on staying put, despite Blake’s appeal to him to leave with them. Eventually he relents when Blake smashes his precious record. A fair-to-middling episode, 'highlights' include futuristic Arab Sheik Tarvin groping Jenna but also his admission that he once sold his grandmother and another biting exchange between Villa and Avon:

VILLA: I'm entitled to my opinion.
AVON: It is your assumption that we're entitled to it too that is irritating.

In 'Deliverance' the crew land on planet Cephlon and again encounter primitives or “scavengers”, albeit not Decimers, but relatively human-looking ones. A frantic man named Ensor needs to get a box of power cells back to the planet on which his father lives, to save his life. At one point, Blake uses what sounds suspiciously like a sonic screwdriver to open the lid on it. First prize has to go to Ensor for the campest groan when he finally carks it.

Additionally, Avon encounters Meegat, who believes him to be a "Lord", which he revels in.

Vila thinks the “poor woman” must be "insane". Vila is somewhat put out that it is not him.

AVON: You are hardly the stuff that Gods are made of.

The last episode contains the only recap in the series – a bloated one that smacks of padding. We meet daddy Ensor, the Prof with his mechanical ticker, who insults the helpful crew by calling them “morons”. He eventually dies anyway.

The series comes to an end when the crew acquire another computer – a supercomputer called ORAC, worth some 100 million credits. It has “all the knowledge of all the worlds”. It shows its sarcastic side when Vila speaks:

VILA: I think I've heard enough. I don't like him. Orac, be a good junk heap - shut up.
CALLY: I agree with Vila.
ORAC: Define the words 'Shut up.'

The scene is thus set for series 2.

TM:

‘Without computers we’re dead’

Blakes 7 is a strange beast and beast it most assuredly is. It lacks the possessive genitive and indeed an actual seven folk commanded by the freedom fighter or terrorist Roj Blake.

Nobody with any historical awareness would watch it expecting a 2014 level of special effects. Who cares about such concerns anyway? ‘Dated’ can be a positive label if it means that invention is to the fore in areas such as acting, direction and writing...

So, does Blakes 7 measure up?

Yes and no. Terry Nation is series one’s sole writer and it stands and falls according to this veteran telefantasy writer. Nation establishes a genuinely unpredictable, grim dystopia in the first episode. I haven’t seen any of his Survivors (1975-77) but assume it is similarly bleak. Opener ‘The Way Back’ is markedly more adult than his inane 1970s Doctor Who potboilers ‘Planet of the Daleks’ and ‘Death to the Daleks’. Indeed, it is more like Louis Marks’ ‘Day of the Daleks’ – with its guerrilla rebels – and LWT’s tremendous The Guardians (1971). He creates a dystopia with an absurdist show trial adjudicated by baubles in boxes, a summary massacre of unarmed civilians and accusations of child molestation. And this future also has an archivist jiving to his Walkman, a scene hinting at some of the ‘lighter’ moments to come in the series. Script editor Chris Boucher’s contribution is notable in adding a necessary acerbic humour.

Does Nation deliver in his thirteen episodes? Like Eve approaching verdant orchards and getting peckish, we invariably get the sort of Nation tropes that are guaranteed to be present whatever the programme he is writing for: caves, ice, genocide, radiation (sickness), carnivorous plants, cryogenic capsules, disease, genetic mutation and mutated viruses. (Thanks to West, Orton, Davidson et al.’s estimable tome Maximum Power! Miwk, 2012, for this inventory)

On 19th February 1978, Michael Palin recorded in his diary attending a BBC Enterprises banquet at the Old Ship Hotel where the Corporation was promoting its current roster of programmes. He mentions chatting with Terry Nation; Nation congratulates Palin on 'The Testing of Eric Olthwhaite', broadcast as part of the sublime Ripping Yarns exactly five years to the day before my birth. Palin mentions returning the compliment regarding Nation's new series, Blakes 7. He surely can't have caught 'The Web'!

Weaker episodes: well, there isn’t a dearth. Unlike my comrade in this project, I found ‘Time Squad’ tedious and inconsequential, with the cryogenically frozen astronauts a cringe-worthy ‘threat’. The aforementioned ‘The Web’ is just risible, making Doctor Who’s ‘The Mutants’ seem like Satyajit Ray’s Distant Thunder (1973). I may have been ironically entertained by it during the 2000 BBC-2 repeats, but this time I was struck by the preposterous monotony of solemn proto-New Romantics wandering around a meagre holiday camp, which is being pelted by tot-sized ‘savages’: the Decimas. On top of all this, there’s a foetal monkey thing in a tank. This is assailed at the end by the Decimas running amok – in scenes that rival any in television for their rowdy absurdity.

Certain episodes have potential – the Avon turns detective trope in ‘Mission to Destiny’, the simulacrum of the twentieth century exemplified by Sarkoff’s dwelling in ‘Bounty’. But these promises aren't consummated. The curious scene where Blake breaks Sarkoff’s antique opera record has no impact whatsoever, as the writing has not previously elicited concern about his supposed ‘plight’ or predicament. It is just T.P. McKenna being laid back and urbane listening to some tunes.

For me, the strongest episodes are ‘Duel’ and ‘Orac’. The former is mainly down to Douglas Camfield’s direction, which gives it a psychedelic and energetic gusto. Strangely, Cornell, Day and Topping describe ‘Duel’ as doing ‘little to inspire confidence’, mentioning its similarity to a Star Trek episode. (The Guinness Book of Classic British TV, 1993, p.299) However, its tone and weirdness distinguish it; Camfield treats us to slowed-down voices, frayed 1970s colours and flashing lights: the non-naturalism and ripe acting make it the highlight of series one.

‘Orac’ possesses refined plotting and urgency, ably bringing several threads together to round off the series. It features a range of settings – a beach, caves, a greenhouse-type science lab – which benefit the narrative.

It also subtly associates with JG Ballard; like in his evocative novel The Drowned World (1962), cities have been overtaken by environmental catastrophe and reptilian life-forms have come to the fore – they are mercifully used sparingly, kept in the shadows. The imagination is enticed not satiated.

Throughout the series, the music does get a little wearing; predictable Dudley Simpson soundtrack follows… predictable Dudley Simpson soundtrack. Most of his music is competent but uninspiring and becomes the archetypal aural ‘wallpaper’ that limits the drama. ‘The Way Back’ is intensely more effective, due to the sparring use of its more ambient, electronic soundtrack. ‘Duel’ is also made more unusual and engaging by its drifting, distant Popol Vuh-esque undertow of synths.

The acting tends to salvage things, although it is by no means consistent across the series. There are some utter stalwarts – Julian Glover imbues the preposterous melodrama ‘Breakdown’ with gravitas when he shows up thirty minutes in as surgeon Kayn. Brian Blessed enlivens the middling ‘Cygnus Alpha’; a year or so on from his subtle and spellbinding turn as Augustus in I, Claudius, he is in the default deafening mode exhibited in two guest appearances in Space: 1999 and, frankly, the rest of his post-Vargas career. This sort of performance is necessary to enliven a plodding episode, and his death scene is wonderfully ludicrous, to the point of surrealism.

"I... RULED!?!?"

Best of all is Derek Farr in the season finale. The veteran TV and film actor plays the cantankerous Professor Ensor with dynamism and heart. Farr’s CV included films like Town on Trial (1957) and The Dam Busters (1955) and TV programmes as various as Play for Today, Days of Hope, Bergerac, Star Maidens, The Avengers and Dixon of Dock Green. I have seen some of Nightingale’s Boys, Granada’s thoughtful 1975 series reflecting on grammar schools and idealism – Farr plays the old schoolmaster, Bill Nightingale. At the end of ‘Orac’, he voices that titular character, an impudent and imperious piece of hardware, which will hopefully mean Farr plays a significant part in series two.

The regular cast do their best with often variable material. None of them were household names and they do not appear in Jonathan Meades’ mordant book This Is Their Life, ‘a fascinating look’ into the hobbies, habits and home-life of ‘your favourite T.V. personalities’. By 1979, Darrow, Thomas et al had clearly not joined the favoured roster that included Dave Allen, Joan Bakewell and Derek Nimmo.

It's better than Shakespeare, this! You even get to wrestle monks.

The RSC trained Gareth Thomas came to B7 soon after an authoritative performance in HTV West’s eerie and uncanny Children of the Stones (1977) and, as Cornell, Day and Topping argue, he lends a solid, down to earth quality to Blake, grounding his quest. He can be liked or disliked depending on one’s feelings about Avon and Blake's particular tactics – and he forms, in Servalan's words, a plausible "rallying point for malcontents". Sally Knyvette retains a certain dignity despite the accumulation of inapt implied rape threats that Jenna is confronted with. Michael Keating is underused as Vila, yet deftly delivers lines which serve his function as ‘comic foil’. Jan Chappell is ill-served as Cally, contributing little to the narrative other than to be patronised.

David Jackson drew the shortest straw as Gan, the hulking great barbarian who cannot kill. He can only overact, as in ‘Breakdown’ - his centrepiece, where Gan is given next to no lines but plenty of chance to grip his bonce and out-gurn Jon Pertwee. Or, fail to make crass Neanderthal lines sound sincere, as in ‘Time Squad’: “He killed my woman…”

That same story has Gan’s chirpy “I think we make a great team!” answered by Avon in utterly languid, sardonic tones: “Well hooray for us.” Paul Darrow’s Avon is by far the strongest character in series one. Terse, sarcastic, deadpan: as the episodes accumulate, his icy asides grow in number and quality. Darrow facilitates what this show fundamentally is all about: a fractious group comprised of idealists, ne’er do wells and selfish malcontents quite frankly not getting on. American television often thrives in portraying harmonious groups; B7’s British cynicism and awkwardness is often vastly entertaining.

“We could be up to our armpits in homicidal maniacs within the hour!” (1.4)

Part of the problem with the narrative of this first series is Travis: he’s a monotone baddie, clad in black with a ‘sci-fi’ eye patch. Stephen Grief infuses Travis with less charm and genuine threat than Roger Delgado did with his similarly omnipresent Master in Pertwee era Doctor Who. In multiple appearances, he speaks about how much he wants to kill Blake but invariably fails to do so. With each reappearance, his general aura of haplessness increases. Servalan is relatively insignificant in this series – I assume she’ll get more to do as B7 develops. Too many episodes revolve around Travis’ ill-starred pursuit of Blake: for instance, ‘Project Avalon’. Unlike Cornell, Day and Topping, I didn’t find this ‘snowbound resistance melodrama’ remotely interesting, merely leaden. We could also have done with a deeper portrayal of the Federation, through a greater number of characters.

Jenna’s self-description as a ‘free trader’ gives food for thought, considering B7 accompanied Thatcher’s rise. Avon is both self-interested individual and detached computer nerd, suggesting he is a man of the future - in several senses. As a supposed smuggler Jenna seems rather easily won over to Blake’s idealistic cause. ‘Bounty’’s villain Tarvin (Marc Zuber) represents the mercantile tendency; he is given one great line, confirming he sold his own grandmother to stop being sold himself. But, fundamentally, Tarvin is a stereotyped Arab rogue, with little sense that he or his values matter in the show’s world. The preceding ‘Breakdown’ has Glover’s surgeon make several irate attacks on bureaucracy through its ineffectual embodiment in Farron: “You bureaucratic fool” “You gutless nothing!” Characters of such poise as Kayn and Avon are shown to be superior to the dull systemic thinking of the Federation, which may represent a future socialist or fascist Britain, depending on your viewpoint. From Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death onwards, British culture took a critical stance towards hidebound thinkers like Farron, hiding behind the directives of state planning: “You pathetic feeble minded little bureaucrat!”

There is a strangely telling moment at the end of ‘Breakdown’; the independent space station has been destroyed, killing hundreds of people, including Kayn and Farron. This was a preferred ‘bolthole’ for Avon to escape to and make some money. After a brief moment’s solemnity speaking to Avon, Blake goes over to Jenna and Gan and they are all quickly laughing jovially about Gan’s restoration to health. Avon’s reaction is not shown.

Series one went out on Mondays at 7.15pm on BBC-1*; it averaged an impressive 9.22 million viewers – starting out with 7.4 million and closing with the 10.6 million who watched ‘Orac’.

*Barring 'The Way Back', that slice of brutality which went out in the Doctor Who time-slot of 6pm. In a DVD commentary to 'Space Fall', producer David Maloney mentions many in the audience coming to it after being DW viewers from a young age. This scheduling clearly has much to answer for in how it shaped today's British forty-somethings!

How was the show received critically?

In The Financial Times, Chris Dunkley saw it as looking cheap in comparison to Space: 1999, Star Wars and Alphaville and mentions tightening BBC budgets. While he describes it as more ‘derivative than hoped’ from Terry Nation who created Survivors and the Daleks, he can see the ‘human story’ becoming a ‘compelling habit’ over the series. There was a preoccupation on science and its fictions beyond Lucas land: Carl Sagan’s Planets lecture having shown on BBC-2 over Christmas 1977. More broadly, Dunkley identified British television’s over-focus on a perpetual British middle class in a state of ‘permanent hilarity’, with fictions set between the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He also slams the ‘xenophobic’ Mind Your Language and the unimaginative, ‘slavish’ aping of The Sweeney, not just by Target, but by a new series called The Professionals.

The Guardian's Peter Fiddick perceived that B7 did not trade in jokes', but then he was reviewing the show two episodes in, before its change in tone. It is described as 'a mix of olde worlde space jargon, ray guns, Western style goodies and baddies, and punch ups straight out of The Sweeney.' He locates it within the television tradition inspired by Orwell: Nineteen-Eighty Four, The Avengers, The Prisoner, The Guardians and 1990, describing 'The Enemy as Bureaucracy' and the prison ship with its 'ethics straight out of the warders' room at Belsen'. The Daily Mail - via critic Shaun Usher - gave a typically upbeat assessment of both Britain in 1978 and B7's dystopia, saying the show depicted 'the future as being much the same as the present, Lord help us, only worse.'

In The Times, Stanley Reynolds reviewed 'Time Squad'; he praises B7's seriousness: its being 'straight, with real villains' and also its episodes being self-contained yet adding to a 'saga'. He enjoys the script with its 'terse commands' and its sense of action: Jenna 'fighting off the Findus fiends'. He mentions Cally as 'the latest addition to Blake's outer-space merry men' and the prospect of her spelling 'love trouble for blonde Jenna', of a sort not faced by Maid Marian in Robin Hood: incidentally, a powerful British myth that Blakes 7 taps into.

Despite such motifs as air ducts, corridors, gullible guards, sundry pygmies, nomadic scavengers and medieval types; despite excess sexism on several fronts and perpetual lines like “Do you read me…?” B7 series one seems worthwhile. There are just enough well-crafted episodes and acidic one-liners for it to achieve a distinctively down at heel British charm.

Here's how we rated each episode, plus attribution for writing and direction - the former shows impressive variety! Also recorded are dates of transmission and the viewing figures:

Ben Brown lives in Newcastle Upon Tyne. He works in the Medical Records department at the RVI in Newcastle and has studied Psychology at Master's level.

Tom May also lives in Newcastle Upon Tyne. He is a lecturer in English Language and Communication & Culture at a local Sixth Form College, having studied English and Film at universities southern and northern. He is working on a book about British culture and the cold war.

Pissing in Duchamp's Urinal: Arts Television in the Early Nineties

2014-01-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

The Thing is... Brian Eno
TX: Channel 4, 13/05/1992

The South Bank Show 15.13: Douglas Adams
TX: ITV, 05/01/1992

Paul Morley to Brian Eno: "You're good at lying aren't you?"

Maybe you are also bored with the mind-numbing, formulaic Arts TV of our times. Maybe you just might want to take a trip back to 1992: the past they do things less diffidently there.

I was over a friend's house in Darlington and the opportunity to watch recordings fromhis VHS collection. He hadn't even used his video player in two years! It was the time for that to be remedied. In addition to the two main programmes, I was treated to side courses of Adam and Joe's Vinyl Police - installments that featured a game Gary Numan and a quarrelsome and belligerent Mark E. Smith.

Then, a programme I had heard about and been curious about seeing: a half-hour documentary-'interview' on Brian Eno, conducted by Paul Morley. Morley is a knowledgeable, irreverent figure damned by many for the cardinal sin of being in love with the English Language - and moulding it according to his own directions. Reviewing an earlier The Thing Is... in The Times, Lynne Truss attacked the 'stream of gabble' - presumably Morley's use of some polysyllabic, aka. nasty and foreign lexis. Also in The Times, Richard Morrison attacked his 'pretentious name-dropping' of writers; as if mentioning Beckett and Sartre is verboten in British culture. Perhaps it is a dig from the Oxbridge graduate to the grammar school boy Morley, who didn't go to university. He goes on, in cynical fashion:

'Sometimes Morley walked round and round in a warehouse. Sometimes he knelt in a Buddha temple. "There is a pure boredom", he mused transcendantally, "that goes with being bored with East-Enders".' (The Times, 30/04/1992)

I cannot comment on all that much of Morley's written work, other than to say that his memoir Nothing captures a deeply affecting melancholy and last year's Earthbound is a laudably concise piece of cultural analysis centering around the Bakerloo line and taking in the Sony Walkman, Maida Vale and much else. That book is incisive and inspired in identifying less than obvious cultural connections and currents.

Compared with the 1980s and early '90s, he is less commonly on television today, though did feature in an engaging BBC4 documentary, wherein he attempted to try his hand at classical music composition - and he crops up periodically as 'talking head' on music documentaries (e.g. one on John Cooper Clarke) and is a BBC4 Review Show regular. Here he is a revelation as TV host; serious when he needs to be but also humorously dispensing asides to the audience like a particularly wise Shakesperean fool. In December 1990, he had presented a thirty-minute documentary on Channel 4 looking into the cultural origins of the Christmas tree, card and decorations. The Thing Is... grew out of the Without Walls (C4, 1990-97) documentary strand and Morley helmed half-hour television disquisitions on topics such as motorways (featuring JG Ballard), money (featuring Dennis Taylor), animals, hotels and even 'an existential quest into the heart of boredom' (The Guardian, 26/04/1992).

Just over two weeks before the Eno programme, The Guardian described him as looking like a 'cast-aside teddy bear in a fashionably baggy suit'. 'Names such as Ionescu, Roland Barthes and Beckett pepper his conversations with cultural theorists and Thora Hird.' Morley as a link between the worlds of continental cultural theory and Alan Bennett?

In his anti-interview, brilliant tactics include imploring Eno, on behalf of the audience, to start singing again; Morley makes reference to the four great works of 'pop song' that Eno produced in his verdant 1970s. And then the ultra dry questioning regarding his more recent collaborations: "It must be really rewarding, helping out the small bands: U2..."

A particularly amusing sequence is where he gets Eno onto the topic of sex and the bald East Anglian gives notably detailed reflections on the merits of European and American pornography. The programme cuts away to Morley clearly filmed later on, giving a few somewhat amused looks.

There is a deadpan, European surrealism to proceedings. Eno speaks positively of the creativity that could be enabled by the karaoke phenomenon. Then we cut to Morley in a high street record shop, headphones on, listening and intensely singing along to Eno's very own 'Third Uncle'.

When his rendition has finished, there is a deliberately faked 'studio audience' 'applause' followed by a delighted reaction shot from Morley.

It's a delightful programme, getting all the more under Eno's skin by avoiding linear questioning tactics and opting for an editing strategy that plays up the oblique moments, rather pushes towards any conventional denouement.

Pleasingly, the programme can be watched in its entirety here.

"High on a rocky promentory sat an electric monk on a bored horse..."

Next was a South Bank Show from the same year, but four months earlier: broadcast before the Grey Man himself ushered in another enlightened five years of Tory rule. Its subject was the mercurial Douglas Adams, whose death before he reached fifty was a loss to British culture was of a magnitude greater than if, say, IDS were to meet with a freak ATOS inspired drubbing in Easterhouse.

It explores Adams' much publicized difficulties in finishing his writing projects; so thoroughly, that they even feature his literary agent visiting him on behalf of the publishers. Everything is in place for the fifth HH novel, Mostly Harmless, except, well, the novel itself being written! The Guardian's television listings for the day mention an abortive Hollywood script project and his involvement in computing, but strangely, these areas are barely touched on.

Like Morley's documentary, there is dry humour present in its satire of the documentary trope of focusing on his 'Cambridge Days'. The past is demystified and we even get a sense of Cambridge's present in Adams' sharply edited appearances in the city. His College - St John's - won't allow the film crew to film anything at all in the grounds of the College, so Adams philosophically sits with a pint in the Baron of Beef pub. There was filming nearby for Adams' strike-scuppered 1979 Doctor Who serial, 'Shada', recently issued on DVD.

We also get an excellent sequence of Adams ruminating on getting artistic inspiration from his post-university days as a hotel attendant, having to watch the elevators open and close all day. He relives this unusual rite of passage, appearing on screen in the situation - in the best droll Jonathan Meades style.

John Carlaw had previously directed the acclaimed eight-part series Playing Shakespeare, made by LWT in 1982. His direction here is notable in its artistry, far removed from the plodding conservatism of the South Bank Show's form and presentation in its latter years - and perhaps even its norm back then. Wittily edited, it contains actors from the HitchHikers' TV series reprising their roles and engaging in postmodernist querying of their own identity. We even have the aforementioned electric monk, well and truly part of the bizarre proceedings.

While it fails to focus - somewhat surprisingly - on DA's associations with Monty Python's Flying Circus and Doctor Who, it is the sort of genuinely satisfying arts documentary that many directors, producers and writers would do well to learn from today. Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins, now bastions of whatever remains of 'Liberal Britain', are used intelligently to make points that add to our understanding of Adams' work. His application of Wodehousian humour - to infuse potentially alienating science fiction ideas with the bathetic everyday - is discussed by Fry, who was then still immersed in making the superlative sketch series A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Dawkins is used to draw out DA's good humoured antipathy to religion, but also to helpfully explain his integration of Quantum Physics within his narratives - which were moving into the area of parallel realities and all being subject to contingency.

Most of all, there is gratifyingly little stuff of this ilk: straightforward filming of cosy chat with old uncle Melvyn. Carlaw does the Arts service by making art himself. Gratifyingly, it seems that you can see this redoubtable documentary here.

Both programmes live up to Jonathan Meades' desire to see documentaries that combined the lecture theatre with the music hall. Humorous knockabout is a much more useful tool than sombre, portentous prattle while walking around 'famous sites'. In these past exemplars, we see rounded, idiosyncratic contributors to British - and world - culture: Adams and Eno. Emblems of a sceptical, worldly liberalism that has been supplanted by the shallow neo-liberal generation of Clegg and Laws - Eno, indeed, has been a regular participant in Liberal Democrat campaigns in recent years and was bizarrely appointed a youth affairs adviser by Clegg.

These are major cultural contributors who were taken seriously by television. And this is television which avoided reverence towards them or the cardinal sin of patronising its audience. It complicated the picture by fusing registers and tones; such a dexterous approach is what people deserve, rather than neatly packaged, simple narratives peddling partial myths.

-- With thanks to John Robinson.

"Fun for all the family? I don't know how they have the nerve!"

2013-06-07T06:07:00.000-07:00

Doctor Who:
'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy' (BBC-1, TX: 14/12/1988 - 04/01/1989)

It's always been a part of me, for as long as I can remember, really.

A hazy, possibly self-invented recollection of a rotund, colourful-coated man on a screen - from when I was, maybe, 4. I might have retrospectively imagined that. I'd surely have ended up a quite different person if I'd had the misfortune to catch some banal Pip and Jane Baker-penned potboiler as my first - and thus, potentially, last - Doctor Who adventure.

A definite Year Zero: 'Remembrance of the Daleks', episode 1. 5th October 1988. The true adventure began.

I enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness recently, but could never prefer Star Trek to Doctor Who. Ever since 1988.

Doctor Who's richness is in how much of an impression it makes on different generations and individuals, in unpredictable ways. Sylvester McCoy is often written off. Often by fans of previous eras, as well as the general public.

I have often regarded Peter Davison to be a slightly bland Doctor, rarely grabbing my interest as much as others. Yet, I have always been captivated by certain of his stories: along with the obvious final one, 'Kinda' and 'Enlightenment'. I have recently watched - with weary trepidation - the 1993 Children in Need 'Special' 'Dimensions in Time' and, in his brief appearance, he lends some gravitas to an utterly unseemly farrago. He is more central to and brilliant in 'Time Crash', one of the most touching and witty things that Steven Moffat has written this side of Press Gang.

Having just finished reading Richard Marson's excellent JN-T: The Scandalous Life and Times of John-Nathan Turner I thought I would write a review of 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy', watched on DVD with a friend, Ben, last Sunday. The JN-T biography is an insightful book, not just into the specifics of the show and BBC practices of the 1980s, but into a remarkable man; Nathan-Turner was the charismatic, ebullient yet flawed producer of Doctor Who for the whole of the 1980s. The book has moments of high farce and absurdity, but also a deep underlying melancholy, as personal hubris and wider circumstances lead to his slow, sad decline.

Ben liked this story, but wasn't entirely bowled over by it, slightly preferring the Pertwee era six-parter 'The Time Monster' which we also watched. I speculated that my preference for this McCoy story may partly have been through my strong attachment to it from my personal experience of the McCoy years. But it isn't just that, I'd say: it is a brilliant work, made against the odds. It repays subsequent viewings and is enriched by knowing its context.

As Marson's book and the DVD extras explain, this story had a troubled production. After the externals had been filmed in a more than typically evocative quarry, the BBC studios could not be used due to the discovery of asbestos. It looked as is this serial would have to be given up. JN-T came into his element in improvising within constraints. He decided to remount it; placing the circus tent in the BBC car-park. This actually adds a distinct atmosphere - and the lighting of this tent is first-rate: creepy dark reds, greens and blues banishing the memory of the ghastly, over-lit studio sets in earlier 1980s serials such as 'Timelash' or 'Warriors from the Deep'.

Unlike in so much Doctor Who in the troubled 1985-7 period, the casting is appropriate. They are a diverse bunch - Peggy Mount, Gian Sammarco, T.P. McKenna, Chris Dury - but this works entirely with the grain of the story. It is a truly bizarre array of characters - a weary battleaxe with a fruit stall in the middle of nowhere (Mount), berating the 'weirdos!' and 'circus riff-raff' who come into her path. Nord, self-described 'Vandal of the Roads', an irate hooligan biker screaming things like: "OI!!!! WHITE FACE! WHITE FACE! CAN YOU TELL ME THE WAY TO THE PSYCHIC CIRCUS!" Deadbeat, a monosyllabic depressive, who seems lost in his own world. Captain Cook - a pompous intergalactic explorer, always regaling us with past exploits. Mags, a glum, subordinated companion to Cook with the look of the Goth about her. There are departed characters mentioned who are named 'Juniper Berry' and 'Peace Pipe' - and, somehow, you scoff. You are drawn along by a story that shows an empathy with hippie ideals. But is in no illusion about them.

Latter-day EastEnders and Corrie actor Ian Reddington - is MAGNIFICENT as the Chief Clown. A return to proper Doctor Who villainy? Or a bold, new step into a realistic depiction of managerial evils? The use of his voice, face and body language is unnerving and masterly. It makes you sad how so few actors in Doctor Who had put real effort into their characterizations since Sharaz Jek... Maybe it was the casting, maybe the direction; but, either way, the show had hit rock bottom in the three seasons prior to this, with only slight glimmers of promise.

Mark Ayres's music is languid and fitting, after the incessant clatter provided by Keff McCulloch in most previous 1987-8 stories.

Stephen Wyatt, having penned the partially successful Paradise Towers, which heavily alludes to JG Ballard's High-Rise, comes up with a cerebral yet accessible script. After the dreary, half-hearted efforts of the previous few years, this is an intoxicating breath of fresh air. There are ideas, there are different levels on which you can take it. As Cornell, Day and Topping wrote in 1995, this was a 'return of magic, chaos and surrealism' to Doctor Who.

Episode 4 gained 6.6 million viewers: by far the largest audience the show received between 'Revelation of the Daleks' (1985) and the Paul McGann 'TV Movie' (1996) - if you don't count the execrable 'Dimensions in Time', of course.

This could be seen as: (a) an undeniably scary, weird circus story, (b) a satire of the way the show was beset by idiotically blinkered fans - the Whizzkid (played by Sammarco, TV's Adrian Mole, in similar nerd specs and jumper apparel) - and BBC bosses, who couldn't understand or appreciate its value as a programme other than grudgingly regarding its pecuniary value to BBC Enterprises. Or, indeed, (c) a melancholy depiction of the failings of 1960s idealism, with the idealists reduced to sorry, dead-eyed commerce in the heartless, Thatcherite 1980s.

Captain Cook (T.P. McKenna), "a crushing bore" in the Doctor's words, represents the stultifying arrogance of a status quo that is always harking back to old battles. The emotionless 'Father', 'Mother' and 'Child' represent the everyday horrors of a philistine Middle England tendency, the ruthless efficiency of the 1980s reforms. Reforms that made it harder for inventive and unusual things to emerge from British culture. The croak-voiced Daleks were on the march, to paraphrase Dennis Potter.

You feel for the characters. Wyatt has us rooting for the underdog. The sad werewolf girl against the pompous ass explorer. Loving idealism against cynical calculation and "every man for himself" and "survival of the fittest". A theme that runs through the wistful, yet urgently humanist Season 26.

At this stage, Doctor Who itself was the ultimate underdog - in terms of general public and BBC perception, indeed being pitted directly against the mighty Coronation Street in the schedules. Yet, here, it shows a good deal more life and spirit than no doubt many of the BBC's more prestigious 'heritage' minded drama adaptations of the time.

As Tat Wood argues in About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who - Volume 6: 'Ranged against the corporate whores are a quixotic bunch of misfits. It is surely no coincidence that in this story, the bad guys are turning imagination into a commodity'. Peggy Mount's Stallslady indeed castigates the Seventh Doctor and Ace as "weirdos", along with the others. It is impossible to imagine the Pertwee or Colin Baker characters accepting this as phlegmatically or siding as convincingly with the underdogs: the ragbag gaggle of Mags (Jessica Martin, a comedienne, very subtle), Deadbeat (Chris Dury, of Lovejoy fame) and Bellboy (Christopher Guard, excellent).

In 2003, Mark Fisher honed in on some of 1980s DW's problems: 'Davison's problem was his winning, fresh-faced toothsomeness; something intelligently offset by his reading of the character as beset by an ancient melancholia. Colin Baker, on the other hand, looked like a smug office manager in pantomime costume. He had a solid, doughy ordinariness, more deadly to Dr Who than any Cyberman or Dalek.' Baker's strident verbosity and garish coat do not make for madness or an alien quality, but a kind of conformism: the managerial type trying desperately to appear different.

"Everybody remotely interesting is mad in some way!"- McCoy's Doctor, in this story.

McCoy is never managerial, he is mysterious; sneaky perhaps, but you cannot help somehow trust and warm to him.

This also chimes with Michael Newton's recent description of the great German director Werner Herzog's world-view in the Guardian (01/06/13): 'There are few film-makers less interested in the everyday world of supermarkets, mortgage payments and Sky Sports. Herzog does not despise the "ordinary person", for it is hard to picture him believing in such a rare creature and to imagine him despising anyone. Yet in the background of his films lingers a sorrowing contempt for the blithe, banal member of "the public" – that hypothetical person who accepts society as it is, who believes bread will always come ready-packaged, and who is too busy updating their Facebook page to notice how at any moment nature might sweep us all off the Earth.'

From Herzog, Vivian Stanshall and, indeed, the Seventh Doctor I have learned the lesson that life is not about being an 'ordinary person' or 'normal'. This story may not just be getting at the BBC bosses of 1988 but also the 'armchair critics' - people writing baleful, ill-informed letters to newspapers or, to extend this to 2013, emitting endless bile from behind aliases on internet forums. People so disappointed in their own lives that they want to spread the malady. Or, indeed, it may be getting at the sort of people involved in the Starburst and DWB campaigns against JN-T. People who, in substance, may often have been right - but, who, in their approach, went beyond the pale into pure, needless nastiness.

McCoy, so often mocked, has a lovely, quiet gravitas when required. The eccentric, slightly professorial clown uncle - he was indeed strongly associated with that radical figure in British theatre, Ken Campbell. Likewise, Sophie Aldred, in Marson's book, mentions her own left-wing feminist background at Manchester University. Andrew Cartmel was 'right-on', yes, and this earnestness was just what a show that was on its knees needed. A new direction, in contrast to Eric Saward's increasingly grim, vacillating world-view. As script-editor, the key role in DW alongside producer, Cartmel put his own mark on the show, as had others before him: Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers'-style laid-back wit, Christopher H. Bidmead's uptight injection of 'science!' and Robert Holmes's wholly assured handling of the 'Gothic Horror' phase from 1974-6.

Doctor Who aligned itself with underdogs, beyond the wrongheaded pandering to fans of the previous few years. Cartmel enabled the show to become more than a sorry tug-of-war between JN-T's insubstantial, PR-chasing, panto leanings and Saward's wrongheaded bleakness. Some stories were weak - Silver Nemesis and Battlefield, the former especially - but even these had incidental pleasures.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy seemed wonderful at the time, watching this over Christmas 1988. It now seems miraculous, considering the show's dreadful 1985, its cataclysmic 1986 and its half-baked 1987.

It displayed JN-T at his very best, and this serial reflects what he could do, when supported by intelligent scripts and apt casting. It is a sad irony that the last two years of the show saw a creative renaissance while JN-T himself was losing interest, perhaps realizing that he was doomed by association with its earlier epic, tragic failings in the 1985-7 period. But he hadn't lost interest here - and this was a production that all enjoyed and reflects the very best of what this limited, yet whole-hearted producer, could achieve in the most difficult circumstances.

JN-T in 1988; Doctor Who in 1988: the ultimate underdogs. Backs to the wall, they all produce something that is of value. That matters. Or at least has to me, for many, many years. If 'Remembrance of the Daleks' captivated, it was watching earlier adventures like 'The Time Warrior' on video and new stories like this on broadcast that ensured that Doctor Who was for life.

Kangaroo Court of Love: "Peep Show" 8.6

2012-12-31T04:55:00.002-08:00

TX: Channel 4, 24/12/2012

'Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves.'
- Oliver Goldsmith, The Good-Natured Man (1768)

To follow that 'Celtic Tiger' of a comedy (Mrs Brown's Boys), we thought we would watch a slightly different sort of sitcom, also broadcast around this Christmas period. If MBB takes a condescending view of its audience's intelligence, then Peep Show probes the absurd human frailties of its protagonists for the amusement of a no doubt smaller audience. There are aspects of Usborne and Corrigan in most of us 'young men'; MBB's figurines are barely human.

David: Anyway, this should be a pleasing antidote to that.

Tom: Episode 6. Not a bad series so far...

David: Better than Series 7, anyway. No reason why this can't go on until one of them croaks it.

Tom: Super Hans is a great character; I would've liked to see a bit more of him in this series really.

David: "Coaster? Fuck's sake, Jez, I'm not an animal!"

Tom: "There are quite a few snakes in your room".

David: Has Dobby got a black eye?

David: "Five-a-side? That's where all the men go to laugh at us".

Tom: Mark's masculinity issues coming out there...

David: Further disappointment for Mark.

David: This ongoing saga relies upon M + J's constant unhappiness.

David: "Very much the on methadone, living in a halfway house type of woman".

David: Very reflective of the 'indefinite teenage years' thing that's being imposed on those of us who are unable to achieve the tools needed to 'grow up'.

Tom: "'Jason's van'. That sounds like the sort of bullshit I'd come up with".

David: Jeremy is now a 40 year old teenager.

Tom: "I'll watch her squirm"... an altruistic view of relationships there from Corrigan! Or, a realistic depiction of love with its jealousies and insecurities...?

Tom: Mark playing 5-a-side footer... bound to elicit a few chuckles.

David: "Did you see the game the other night? The big... fixture?"

David: "Take him out" / "WHAT?!!"

David: Dobby is quite intimidating here!

Tom: This show's characters ring true as imperfect people who aren't merely looking to gain laughs from saying "fuck"...

David: Meanwhile, Mrs Brown's Boys says nothing about society other than that there are masses of people who find a swearing old woman and jokes from 1972 hysterical...

Tom: "Sure, the massive apple..."

Tom: This series seems to have a sustained story-line which runs all the way through the six episodes. I don't think many of its previous series' had that. There seem to be fewer 'different' episodes, like the musical festival one or the jury service. Or the Christmas special with Mark's family last year - I really liked that one. And the jury service one with the mentalist woman defendant from Sunderland. Unsure whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that there are fewer excursions or digressions...

David: [amid the advert break] Why's Kevin Bacon pretending to give a toss about British popular culture?

Tom: Aye, Bacon is a beaming irritant.

David: Series 9 of Peep Show is already commissioned; there seem to be infinite things that they can do with the two hapless ones.

David: It must be quite cathartic for the writers to put them through whole new trends of misery; there are always twelve more months of cultural references to slip in effortlessly, too.

Tom: Yes, it is a reliable formula.

Tom: "Depressing lingerie outlet in Reading"...

Tom: Ah, the old El Dude brothers routine, ever invoked in times of crisis. I like how have they slipped in subtle references in this eighth series, such as to Super Hans' curious fixation with The Barchester Chronicles - when Jez's stuff is being cleared out.

David: They seem to have an endless supply of embarrassing situations.

Tom: The thoughts-aloud voice-overs have always been crucial to its success. Just wouldn't work as well without them.

David: "I'm sorry... what the FUCKING HELL are you talking about?" The key to it is hearing their real thoughts in conjunction with the often manipulative words they say.

Tom: Jez stuck on the train!

Tom: Speaking his mind finally - rarely a good idea!

Tom: "How can I do that when there's no such thing as elbow grease!" Great line there from Jez.

David: 10/10 dialogue - the situations often seem less important than the dialogue.

Tom: "An honourable man" again! Reference back to his flat housing committee election campaign.

David: "THAT'S your punishment of last recourse: FREE TRAVEL?!" So inappropriately pompous.

David: It's been fun watching Mark being relegated to a series of humbling jobs.

Tom: Yes, and in episode 6.1 (TX: 18/09/2009) you had a rare instance of British television responding to the economic crisis, when JLB go bust.

Tom: It's also been good to have the vocation of life-coaching relentlessly mocked in this series.

Tom: "This kangaroo court of love".

David: Editing process must be horrendous.

Tom: Mark inevitably ends up the one who is squirming...

David: Jeremy is a lovable moral vacuum.

David: "Now, time to stigmatize the mentally ill".

David: Hilariously immature. No more mature than in 2003!

David: Electric fence!

Tom: "Will you two stop electrocuting each other?"

David: "Will you two stop electrocuting each other?!"

'Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals'

David: "If you don't throw that rock at me, I'm going to hit you with this stick".

David: How did she have time to text that?!

Tom: Indeed...

David: "You FUCKED it, not me!"

David: "Why does it say here that I'm 80% gay?!"

David: "DOBBY!!!"

David: Excellence.

Tom: Yes, a pretty good series closer.

David: Perfect antidote to Mrs Brown's Arse.

Tom: Exactly.

David: Other current comedy series' close to that standard? I'll say Him and Her, Getting On and, to a lesser extent, Friday Night Dinner. But not a lot else!

Tom: Maybe could have had more Johnson involvement (following his great cameo in 8.1), but it was a well crafted series revolving around the inevitable love triangle. Dobby has been a necessary character for the programme... to throw the 'brothers' into relief.

David: I'm certainly looking forward to the sadistic events that series 9 will hopefully have to offer. Once again, it seems that we've reached the end too quickly - I suppose there were episodes on consecutive nights, though. This series didn't run alongside when it was being shown however, unlike last series which seemed to be set around the same time of year.

Tom: Interesting to think how they'll take it from here...

David: Looks like Dobby may not return.

'The beloved object is successively the malady and the remedy that suspends and aggravates it.'
- Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (Cities of the Plain) (1921-2)

Tom: Good to have them in open warfare there at the end over her...

David: I'm sure there will be one or two different women ready to play with their infantile heartstrings.

David: First time they've competed for the same woman though...

Tom: Or Sarah, Mark's sister with the fringe and Fifty Shades-inspired bedroom practices...

David: I would have liked to have seen more of Mark's older woman from his course; she was nice, but then Peep Show wouldn't allow for it to have gone well.

Old Woman Swears: "Mrs Brown's Boys"

2012-12-31T03:58:00.000-08:00

'Mammy Christmas' (part 1 of 2)

TX: 29/12/2012, BBC 1

'The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed'
- Sheridan, The Critic (1781)

After too long, us Messrs Lichfield and May return to some TV blogging, whilst simultaneously watching the goggle box. One is not entitled to an opinion on a book, a film or TV series if you've not read or seen it; thus, we trust you will appreciate an undertaking of truly fatiguing proportions.

Tom: Here we go...

Tom: A back-to-back two-parter? Why?

David: I even hate the title sequence.

Tom: That's an inept title sequence, aye.

Tom: [recalling the announcer's words about not having to listen to Slade any longer] Better hearing from Slade than this.

David: This is some cringe-worthy shit.

Tom: There’s laughter…

David: Tackiest sitcom ever.

Tom: 'Mammy Christmas'. Up a tree, tee-hee.

David: Old woman swears. Ho ho ho.

Tom: “Wek up yerbastud!”

Tom: Seemingly, speaking in an Irish accent is in itself a guarantee of 'humour'.

Tom: “Bono, my grandson”. Ha, very amusing.

David: I can guarantee I won't be laughing once.

Tom: On the “feck”-count we so far haven't any score. I reckon that'll change.

David: Three “bastard”s though.

David: No camp stereotypes here…

David: He's a hairdresser.

David: [following inordinate studio audience snickering] These jokes don't merit that level of uncontrollable laughter.

Tom: Winnie... She embodies that certain sort of irritating, 1970s/80s sitcom busybody with infuriatingly perky body language shit.

David: Even the transitions between scenes are cheap.

Tom: Hilarity ensues here.

David: Production values of a scotch egg.

Tom: Some idiot dressed as a chicken.

Tom: Ah, there had to be a priest here…

Tom: And now there’s a second one. Oddly, they seem to like rubbing in the fact that this isn't Father Ted.

David: Oh, looks like it’s Shelley-off-Corrie's mum.

Tom: The studio audience seem to react to the line “Who the fuck are you?” with utter, unabashed hilarity.

David: I'm sure we've had no “fecks” but two “fuck”s.

David: Pointlessly crude.

David: Can't we write some toss like this and set ourselves up financially for life? I thought we were past one-dimensional stereotypes in comedy?

David: Five “fucks”?

Tom: Six.

Tom: This is as irritating as anything...

David: The Scouting for Girls of sitcoms.

Tom: Now this is comedy... for people who are either without a brain. I say that in sorrow rather than anger - the level of this is depressing.

David: Or the Mumford and Sons of Irish comedy.

Tom: [following some inexplicably inane moment] Did we need that?

David: At least Last of the Summer Wine was charmingly unfunny.

Tom: [Sighs] 'Funny' religion stuff and Richard Branson 'gag'.

David: It's offensive in a completely different manner than it seems was intended.

Tom: “Winnie, it was a joke!!” If these are jokes than Silvio Berlusconi is an honourable man.

Tom: Forced laughter there from the characters themselves.

David: It's not even close to guilty pleasure status.

Tom: No pleasure in this. “Fuck no”, to quote Mrs Brown herself there.

David: Lazy, clichéd, embarrassing, boring, outdated, nonsensical, unimaginative, cheap, brainless toss.

Tom: He-he, cream over his chin forms a Santa Claus-esque beard; that's fecking inspired!

David: A cunt dressed as a cabbage.

Hey, characterization! No wait, I don't recall a single thing to like about these 'people'...

Tom: “The poor little mites”.

Tom: They think that that’s funny, seemingly – the use of the word “Panini”.

Tom: No character comedy here, other than in the broadest sense...

David: It's outrageous that this sort of shit's getting commissioned in 2012. It's like the last thirty years of comedy never happened: the only concession to alternative comedy being over-use of the word “fuck”.

Tom: Such gurning fool faces.

Tom: “FECK” #1!

Tom: “The bucking biscuits” – Stanley Unwin-esque quality wordplay there.

David: Gives the cheesiest of 1970s sitcoms a bad name. At least they had to be relatively clever about sneaking sexual references in.

Tom: And the two old biddies are under the table again.

Tom: And, surprisingly enough, there is some headbanging.

David: Has anyone fallen over yet?

Tom: This is epically tiresome.

Tom: Ah, “feck” again there.

Tom: And Fiona Phillips as the daughter.

David: It's an old woman swearing. It's an old woman swearing. IT'S AN OLD WOMAN SWEARING. That's the entire premise of the show.
Tom: Fiona subject to yet another cream drenching.

Tom: “Bono”. FUCK OFF.

David: If I was Irish I'd be personally offended by this dreck.

Tom: 'Awww...' There are sighs from the studio audience.

Tom: There's a tacked-on left-turn into sentimentality that just doesn't wash...

David: Utterly charmless.

David: Are you sure this isn't an hour?

Tom: Fairy tales and the kids... They think they can imbue this with charm at the end? After the sheer grim gormlessness of the rest of it?

Tom: Pan-pipe shite on the soundtrack. Sir Cliff Richard would be proud.

Tom: Mrs B Looks to the camera – and, yep, US, THE AUDIENCE BACK HOME.

Tom: “Goodnight Bono”…

David: Why should sitcoms for the masses have to be this toss? It's no Only Fools and Horses!

Tom: That was teeth-grinding, unremitting, desultory codswallop of the basest type.

David: That was one of the unfunniest, steaming piles of excrement I've ever sat through.

Tom: Then featuring an 'amusing' little cartoon Agnes on the end titles.

David: NO REDEEMING FEATURES.

Tom: From a country that produced W.B. Yeats and Father Ted, that was unforgivable. It made So Haunt Me look like Fawlty Towers.

David: It's bad enough living through this political and social horror without all the culture going to shit too.

Tom: What is the BBC thinking? Putting this in prime-time...

David: Was massive in Ireland for various series first, worryingly.

David: Why would a country enjoy being stereotyped like that?!

Tom: The only benefit is that we're allowed not to watch the second episode...

David: I literally would pay not to.

Tom: I think an hour of that would turn Kriss Akabusi into a subdued depressive.

ADDENDUM. While sourcing the screen-shots above, I struggled to access the BBC iPlayer broadcast due to some automatically imposed 'Parential Guidance' control. A Quality Control quarantine might be more advisable.

An Evening in the Archives... Part I

2012-06-09T03:40:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to commence a new series, or one-off, or whatever it might be... An attempt on Tuesday 05/06/2012 to watch an evening of British archive TV and to tell the tale while watching (admittedly, with some further reflection and tidying up later on). I am spurred to undertake this somewhat arcane venture by having so many DVDs piled up ready to watch; I want to start investigating more programmes and complete watching older favourites. I am also honoured to have written for the estimable Tachyon TV, concerning a 1972 BBC2 adaptation of Henry James's The Golden Bowl - which was whetted the appetite for more TV writing.

I can also, as a rather lovely coincidence, avoid the banality and sham that is The Diamond Jubilee Concert on BBC1... (or so I thought!)

1: Doctor Who - 'The Web Planet' (BBC-1, TX: 13/02/1965)

"Dragged down? To what?"

This story follows The Romans, a four-part comic serial that I remember being one of the most delightful things in Doctor Who's fifty-year treasure trove. Let's see whether this story reflects a dragging down of the programme's fortunes... It is good to start with Doctor Who, the programme which, along with Moondial, made me interested in old British telly. Of course, my education - in school, my own reading of books and web forums - led me further, towards Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale, The Prisoner, Edge of Darkness, Play for Today... But this is where it started. Not with this episode, but with this show, a venerable, silly and sublime presence on British television for nearly fifty years (give or take longer or shorter hiatuses).

Vicki states, looking out via the scanner: "That looks a bit grim. Where are we?" They are on a notably otherworldly planet; rather lunar and Ian mistakes it for our moon initially. While it looks good - artful studio sets rather than the show's later quarry fetish - there is little suspense or atmosphere established, though, as a Zarbi is shown straight in the open. No incandescent plunger revelations, as with the Daleks. Then, a strangely Dougal-esque creature sweeps into view. This is certainly odd, unprecedented stuff; if presented in a strangely matter of fact manner.

"Honestly Doctor, what a mess! One of these days I'm going to have a jolly good spring clean around here..." Barbara is as formidable, forceful and genial as ever.

The Doctor and Ian plan to leave the ship to explore, but the Doctor ensures they have on their respiratory 'compensators'; oddly lacking in so many other stories where they peruse potentially dangerous planet surfaces. Hartnell is in his element, tinkering with dials, gleefully chuckling as he trots out of the TARDIS; a hocus-pocus magician of an eccentric scientist.

Barbara and Vicki discuss education methods; when the History teacher says "We worked upwards from the three Rs - reading, writing and arithmetic", Vicki rather arrogantly retorts: "Oh, it was a nursery school..." to be met with Barbara's imperious cry of "IT WAS NOT!" Swoon.

Barbara is bemused at how advanced Vicki's education seems to have been: "What did you do in your time? Live in the classroom?" Vicki replies: "Live in the - what?" Hill plays it humorously here with indignation and curiosity; Barbara deals deftly with the precocious Vicki being irreverent about our trusted 1960s education system with her future perspective.

'ECHOES, DEAR BOY!!' Hartnell is truly in hooting, jubilant mode here. "Can't see any spooks or anything. Not particularly, no!"

A weird twenty-five minutes gets odder with Barbara's right arm moving of its own accord, and the Doctor and Ian spying a surreal pyramid. Ian seems deadly certain: "That was built." The Doctor delights in its antiquity: "Old. So old! Look at the state it's in!"

As disquieting music meanders in, their pallid silhouettes are superimposed at the bottom of the grey pyramid. Something odd and indistinct can seen at the top, though not truly discerned. Ian states with curious certainty: "Well it isn't Nelson" Then the Doctor's eccentric, rather wondrous reply: "No. No pigeons..." The subtitles actually read "No, pity", which, if anything, would be just as odd.

"Yes, it's curious, yes". Certainly is. I wonder whether the story will resolve this pregnant mystery... The scenes on the planet are filtered as through a gauze, creating an alien quality.

Then some of that science, the show's educational remit being observed: with the Doctor cautioning Ian against touching the 'water' in a rock pool. "I hope my pants stay up". "Well, that's your affair not mine". He's chortling away again as Chesterton's Coal Hill school tie is burned away by the acid in the pool after his experiment. Ian is nonplussed. As one might expect of a proud science teacher and man with clearly very few ties.

A Zarbi hides... then the distinctive and genuinely grating beeping sound of the Zarbi, which has Miss Wright haunted in the TARDIS. Who knows what is going on here, but Jacqueline Hill carries it off superbly as ever. She is led out of the TARDIS and the doors close of their own accord. The TARDIS console is even set a spinning, due to the unspecified "interference" the Doctor keeps alluding to.

Ian is assailed by webbing of some sort; a zombiefied Barbara is treading the planet, without the Doctor and Ian's fancy space suit.

"My ship... My TARDIS..." The Doctor is left wistfully staring into the abyss, as Vicki has inadvertently got it to dematerialise, and leave the webbed planet.

Overall, this good fun - if perhaps more so for the initiated and Hartnell fans in particular. It's all very enjoyable with unexplained oddities happening all over the place. The regulars are seasoned and well versed in this sort of baffling hokum. While the rest of the story has a shocking reputation - much to do with the realisation of the bumblebee people - this is an engaging opener.

2: Shelley 4.1 - 'Unkindest Cuts' (Thames, TX: 18/02/1982)

From the BBC to Thames, and seventeen years on. Circa mine own conception. I can but assume that I emerged into the world with this ITV company's glorious ident bathing everything in warmth and openness.

Shelley is something of a serial sitcom, with a developing plot. 'The Guardian reading layabout' James Shelley - as he was described in the same paper - doesn't, as conventional wisdom would have it, simply return to his jobless state at the start of each episode. Though he is clearly prone to joblessness. In series 2-3 he works, unhappily but lucratively, for an advertising company. "Thank God I start a job next week" - I assume JS is referring to his job with the foreign office, gained in episode 4 of the previous series but not commenced in that run. That series ended with Emma Shelley born - and her father telling her: "You're not here to enjoy yourself", trying to get across to the newborn that "life's a bit ropey at the moment".

"I won't be a layabout again - ever!"

Mr Jones and Mr Aziz at the Labour Exchange return from previous episodes. Shelley has been signing on "going on seven years", as he himself confirms. Jones is aghast, in time-honoured fashion: "A man with your education sponging off the state!" Shelley replies: "There's a lot of highly educated people on the dole these days. Still, the government's going to taking decisive action to stop all that." "Are they?" "Yes, they're going to stop educating people".

Never more relevant, thirty years on.

"Workshy, sponging off the state!" Jones's anger as he leaves the scene figures for mainstream attitudes today. Saint or Scrounger?

Fran enters the house, muddied, with a hair-net, clearly been gardening; to Shelley's open question she retorts"What do you think I've been doing, auditioning for The Archers?" He appreciates the joke but she shows irritation: "It's the kind of witless, automatic, smart-alec remark you can't go fifteen seconds without making. That's all. It's just a catching habit."

"The coffers are empty!" "Mother Hubbard time!" The fruity voiced Mr Fairbrass (Geoffrey Chater) outlines the Thatcherite austerity to his caller as Shelley arrives in the foreign office to clarify arrangements for his new job.

"It's all been cut, squire! It's called monetarism. Means we haven't got any."

This Foreign Office gent tells Shelley that the job he was offered now doesn't exist. Presumably due to monetarist policy, which is specifically alluded to. He has no redress, due to not having signed a proper contract.

"If the foreign office had to pay for every mistake they made, the country'd be bankrupt!"

"These brief islands of employment" - Tilbury makes virtually every character either angry or wryly mocking regarding Shelley's lack of work. This sitcom makes the point that things are often very much beyond the control of the individual. Shelley at this stage wants work but cannot gain it. The only silver lining is that he can be classed as 'redundant', thus not falling foul of the labour exchange's rules.

Shelley and Fran had by this point moved into their own house; Shelley gets the idea of selling up and moving back to Mrs H's. However, even this retrograde step is not possible. Negative equity.

It is one of the bleaker episodes, with even the archetypal safe 'job for life' type Mr Fairbrass revealed to have also been made redundant in the show's final gag.

"If feeble jokes were pound notes, we could pay everyone's rate demand..."

3: Shadows 2.1 - 'The Dark Knights of Kimball Green' (Thames, TX: 28/07/1976)

Just as I put the disc in, I am 'subject' to an awfully hammy Robbie Williams committing the worst ever mauling of 'Mack the Knife', name-checking Princess Beatrice and Eugenie... Best to step back into Thames television time.

A crow against the sky; which is replaced by bleak, monochromatic tower blocks and city litter that could be lifted from an early Human League album cover. A little girl, sullen and with skipping rope.

"Come on, y' little brat!" Amid a shopping precinct as low-rent and Go Kart Mozart as it gets.

Kimball's Green Library sign. Then into a naturalistic supermarket with her mum. She is an orphanage kid - and she enters the library. "What good does reading do you!?" Reading as a scornful pejorative. Workaday ketchup contrasted with perusing the shelves in a library. Implied disapproval for the foster-mother Mrs Vaughan's materialistic consumerism.

"Just like words! For me it's better than reading a story!"

Kimball's Green is referred to as an ancient settlement. The present contains well-meaning folk like the 70s spectacle-wearing Librarian (Karen Archer) and the Social Worker (Joan Scott), who cannot really make any meaningful difference.

The latter says, impotently: "It's so difficult finding good homes for the children".

"Nosy parker" is the idiom. Off down the bingo, is our Mrs Vaughan. Neglectful of her foster child, or actually enabling her in a roundabout way to escape via the freedom to do her own thing?

Mr Campbell (Alex McCrindle) is the sort of eccentric, scruffy old man immediately to be trusted by children of 1970s children's literature and television.

Picture book images fill the screen as she reads from Campbell's history-book. The modern-day urban setting is shown whilst he talks more about its rustic past.

"Words and music" on paper last. Which Mrs Vaughan (Barbara Keogh) would not appreciate. But Joan Aiken clearly does, in her carefully didactic script. As do Saint Etienne with their new album with its gloriously cosmopolitan London map cover.

Joan Aiken was noted for her trilogy of counter-factual 19th-century historicals which included the London-set Black Hearts in Battersea (1964), with its narrative of an assassination attempt on the hypothetical King James III. She was known as a writer of short-stories, which the producer of Shadows Ruth Boswell described as 'poetic', as recalled in Christopher Griffin-Beale's report on the new series for The Guardian (29/07/1976). Indeed, this episode emerged from her 'The Dark Streets of Kimball's Green' (1972), 'about a girl who uses fantasy to meet and transcend an intolerable situation'. Aiken had written plays for the Unicorn, a leading children's theatre in Southwark, London, but this was her first work for television. After the death of her husband, she had had to take on wider literary editing jobs and projects such as this.

Threatening kids run around, unleashed, amok. 'QPR' is scrolled on a red phone box. As is 'SAVE THE WHALE'. The situation is evocatively mundane, as in the Doctor Who story 'Survival', set in Perivale. This effect comes from the quality of video, where so often television now mimics film rather than trust in its own peculiar aesthetic. At the time, Aiken had a black and white set, so the colours may have been lost on her, and she was said to be surprised that it was shot in colour.

Mrs Vaughan is one of those caricatures you find in Roald Dahl's fiction for children; a malignant representative of the adult world the sensitive child protagonist finds immediately repugnant. Orphan Emmeline (Hannah Isaacson) is by now obsessed with the story of King Cunobel, which oddly mirrors unfortunate current-day events in her life.

Weird scenes of the mythical Queen Bellavaun (Keogh), leaping through the park fields. Bagpipes. The young lads forming an imperceptibly threatening gang, chanting "ee ay addio" and chasing a cat.

Campbell's off to the Palace Cinema, 'to earn some money'. Ironically, the cinema was just a year shy of its Star Wars-fuelled revival. Which was part of the reason this sort of genteel but socially aware children's television was supplanted. Entertainment had to become flashier, less homespun. This was possibly a choice that was made, though the BBC and ITV continued making this distinctively low-key, thoughtful kids' TV for fifteen years or so - though by my time the BBC was intent on the never more middle-class world of adapting novels with a period setting.

Romans and Druids. A gang of brutalist young lads and a defenceless old eccentric. This is akin to magic realism, with fantasy and reality bleeding into each other. Emmeline sees the present in terms of a mythic past, with a stark division of good and evil. The cultured beggar and the scrawny cat versus the non-individuated ruffian kids and the harridan foster mother. Libraries v. supermarkets.

The show was not reviewed at the time, but Griffin-Beale's report of the same day commented that 'it certainly digs below the surface of inner-city locations in Hackney, reaching deeper, enduring emotions and reverberating in the mind more than most television - for children or adults'. I have watched series 3 of Shadows recently - which vacillates between the tiresome and the profoundly elegiac. Oddly, because I usually watch such programmes in order - I had only seen one early and rather haunting episode with Jenny Agutter in a railway station. This was my first viewing from series 2; any good?

It does possess a blunt power, but isn't for me quite as compelling as Dave Martin and Bob Baker's King of the Castle which touches on the same concerns: imagination, inner-city living and an out of control youth. Then there is social class - the finally rather snooty Emmeline rejecting the common, vulgar Mrs Vaughan. And houses being pulled down - Mrs Vaughan's is threatened with demolition. Also, there is the sense of lost worlds intruding on the present, as in Alan Garner and other 1970s fantasy writing for young adults. A forlorn flute plays us out - and it's certainly not cosy or comforting. Which is as it should be with children's television.

"He didn't win! He lost!"

4: Wessex Tales 1 - 'The Withered Arm' (BBC-2, TX: 07/11/1973)

Back to the BBC; well, BBC2 in 1973 not BBC1 in 2012 with a bloated Elton bellowing 'Crocodile Rock' to a crowd of day-trippers, royals and their sedated, fawning 'subjects'...

Okay, this is the first I've seen of this series. An adaptation of six Hardy short-stories, following author Joan Aiken's specially written episode of Shadows. I don't know this short story or indeed any of Hardy's, unless I've been taught one at school long ago and forgotten. The schedule above shows just how impressive television could be: from 9.30-10pm on the main channels there was a choice of Steptoe and Son, Wessex Tales and The World at War. Beat that, multi-channel TV!

The opening titles are stately, playing it safe - no feathers would be ruffled. Rhys Adrian is the dramatist - who wrote for Armchair Theatre, The Wednesday Play, Play for Today and the ITV and BBC2 Playhouses.

"Some say she's a witch."

"Her ways be quite a woman's". West country dialects - promising some of the Bronte - Hardy - DH Lawrence - Raymond Williams - Dennis Potter interest in language, culture and place.

An effortlessly pretty lady combs her hair ("as comely as a live doll"). And then a witchly grinning apparition of this same woman appearing to the scared lad's mother, Rhoda (Billie Whitelaw), in bed; she is smiling and clawing hands - entirely sinister.

The next day after Rhoda's 'nightmare' she spies a distant figure in the fields. In broad daylight. Undoubtedly eerier than nightly apparitions, if handled well. The later series West Country Tales manages this daytime dread rather well on the whole. This turns out to be Mrs Gertrude Lodge (Yvonne Antrobus), an exceptionally anguished lady.

"Though it does get a bit lonely sometimes, with my husband away so much"

"I have never felt so well before" - Mrs Lodge has a sound grasp of irony. This seemingly tortured woman rather resembles a slightly shorter Julia Davis in a bonnet. Red blotches on her arm. "It's too horrible to see".

This production contains plenty of location work, of a notably more rural nature than Shadows. Moody clouds and rain act as pathetic fallacy, stressing the tension between the married couple.

"I will not have people of that sort attending upon my wife [...] You are to keep away from Rhoda Brook" - this repeated instruction asserts the theme of social class within this piece. This afflicted lady is told by her husband Farmer Lodge not to associate with the poorer country folk. But to stick to recognized doctors.

Nancy Banks-Smith: 'They live like pigs, or die like cattle'

But then she disobeys and elicits Rhoda's advice, after hearing stories: "Some clever man over in Egdon Heath"... "Not Conjuror Trendle!"

"Then it is just superstition". The theme of science v. superstition seems to be emerging; a key concern within our culture in innumerable texts across times.

Tingling harp music (Joseph Horovitz) follows a silent stretch where the two women have a terse parting after Mrs Lodge has seen Trendle (Esmond Knight). Gertrude's marriage is clearly suffering, her husband barely ever spending time with her. The blotches on her arm are ever-dominant.

"You must come to a private arrangement with a man called Davies..."

"So much destruction of property in the district lately" - they need to make examples. As in the Dead of Night episode, 'The Exorcism' (BBC, 05/11/1972), an anthology horror series episode by Don Taylor with striking Marxist undertones - that I saw in July 2011 at the Star and Shadow Cinema in Newcastle as part of the Alien Nation conference.

Antrobus gives an excellent performance, wraith-like, a beguilingly ghostly presence as the bedevilled woman, moving towards a gruesome compact. Whitelaw is utterly convincing as a hard-bitten, downtrodden country woman about as different as possible from the last role I have watched her play: Bertha in Private Schulz.

Nancy Banks-Smith, perennial 1970s TV reviewer for The Guardian along with Peter Fiddick, approvingly described it as 'a wonderful piece of painting. All the chiaroscuro of sunlight on a heath, firelight in a hovel. Even a bright new wife and a dark, discarded mistress.' (08/11/1973) She admired the 'swept and empty' Dorset landscape, commenting on the director Desmond Davis's cinematic experience and that the characterisation complemented his visual acuity: 'Davis made a landscape painting of them for they were part of the landscape.'

As a mildly eerie rustic drama of social relations it works, and is in the lineage of David Rudkin's Leap in the Dark: 'The Living Grave' (BBC, TX: 09/09/1980) or Alan Plater's 'The Intercessor' for Shades of Darkness (Granada, TX: 03/06/1983), if not really as haunting as either. Evelyn Hardy, a biographer of TH praised its veracity to Hardy's Dorset in a letter to The Guardian of 18th November.

In its Hardy inspired preoccupation with country ways and desperate remedies, it is not, as Banks-Smith wryly said: 'a tale to bring a smirk to the face of the BMA.'

5: The Edwardians 3 - 'E. Nesbit' (BBC-2, TX: 05/12/1972)

I have previously seen one episode of this series, 'The Reluctant Juggler' (TX: 26/12/1972), Alan Plater's typically good-humoured, humanist instalment regarding the Music Hall Strike of 1907 with the likes of Gus Elen, Vesta Victoria, George Formby Sr. and Marie Lloyd evocatively brought to life. The series also featured episodes on significant figures such as Lloyd George (played by Anthony Hopkins, most prominent on the DVD cover), Horatio Bottomley, Robert Baden-Powell, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

But the programme did give due weight to prominent women: Plater's episode, Daisy and this one - Ken Taylor's episode 'E. Nesbit', with Judy Parfitt as the eponymous author. Parfitt is stunning, an imperious, imposing television actress known from many literary adaptations and superior hokum such as The Avengers and a creepy 1971 episode of Shadows of Fear, where she plays a woman in peril with the confidence and hairdo of an Edwardian.

Taylor is best known for his TV adaptation of The Jewel in the Crown, but also wrote for The Borgias, the suffragettes chronicle Shoulder to Shoulder, Wessex Tales ('The Melancholy Hussar') and contributed the very final episode of the mammoth 26-episode Churchill's People. The episode is ushered in by Herbert Chappell's theme, itself reminiscent of music-hall. The director is James Cellan-Jones, who directed the Henry James adaptation The Golden Bowl - also on the BBC earlier in 1972.

The episode begins with the death of the old king in 1910, with the older Edith smoking and musing sadly as a self-described "fat old middle-aged woman". There is a subtle focus on children just believing while adults want proof.

"It's not so splendid, not growing up."

The episode explores how it was to live within a notably progressive section of middle-class society in London in the late-Victorian/Edwardian era; of her son, Edith comments: "We called him Fabian, because we are". It may help in viewing this to have an understanding and perhaps even a sympathy for the idealistic politics that Nesbit - or Edith Bland as she actually was - espoused. We see the delight she takes in helping the poor children, with a particular present reserved for the one whose 'daddy' is currently on strike.

We get a distinct sense of the tensions between harsh realities and the distinctly twee trappings of the household, with the persistent use of pet names of 'cat' and 'mouse'. Edith utters a veritable smorgasbord of dainty, archaic lexis: "golly", "jolly", "ripping" and, my favourite, "billyo". Like Kenneth Grahame, there is a sense that Edith retains and revels in the matters of childhood to guard against the scarier terrain of adulthood. The episode explores, with candour, what it must have been like to have lived an "open marriage" in the Edwardian era. I take issue with the critic over at DVD Talk; Edith and Hubert (James Villiers) are not unsympathetic - they are only so if you view their past from a blinkered, current-day perspective. Hubert's casual, almost self-admiring attitude to his adultery may strike us as not on, as anti-feminist today, but then doesn't it capture some truth in how many men think and feel, even today? To castigate Hubert is to deny some unpleasant facts.

They make the marriage work, just about, though this TV-play doesn't shy away from showing the hurt that comes with rejecting monogamy - and you do feel the intense anguish of the situation surrounding Fabian's death and Edith's subsequent, tortuous fireside chat with Rosamund. It is ironic for Edith that it takes a child to puncture the charade, the 'sham' that her situation is. There's more human emotion in that scene than in a decade's worth of Holby City.

James Villiers is an expert period actor and possessed an evocative CV: The Strange World of Gurney Slade, Fortunes of War, Hancock, The Avengers, Rumpole of the Bailey, The Ruling Class, Repulsion and Losey's These are the Damned and the underrated social comedy Nothing but the Best (1964). Around this time he starred in TV versions of Wilde and Shaw and impressive horrors such as Blood from the Mummy's Tomb and Asylum. Villiers featured in much notable children's film and television: The Amazing Mr Blunden, Brendon Chase and Richard Carpenter's Dick Turpin. He is splendid here, as the wilful Hubert Bland, making the Edwardian language sound entirely natural. Could any actor quite manage this today?

The doomed Fabian is played by Simon Turner who turned up in an evocative range of 1970s programmes: Tom's Midnight Garden, Softly Softly: Task Force, Churchill's People, Wings and, indeed, Shadows - he plays Prince Milton in the feeble, hackneyed 'The Silver Apple' (TX: 25/10/1978) from near the end of that show's run. His roles dried up by the end of the decade, but I don't think he went on to become 'Simon Fisher Turner'.

The programme briefly conveys Edith's success as the writer 'E. Nesbit' - I have read the charming The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), a stridently good-hearted world-view with an acute appreciation of the complexities of childhood. The magical never-never of Edith's Fabianism - as conveyed in works like Mary Poppins - stands as all the more admirable besides today's conventional Thatcherite 'realism', which is actually just as fanciful in its assumption of mean-spiritedness. The programme alludes to her love for ghost stories and her later delving into poetry - and the melancholy distance she began to feel towards her earlier work. I would have liked slightly more focus on her work at times.

The openness of a progressive woman - who is pro-trade unionism and women's suffrage and gets her children to dress unusually at school - is such that she cannot tell a lie. She conceals by a particular way of language and avoidance of the difficult things. She is idolised by 'Mouse', the maid Alice Hoatson (Jane Lapotaire, subdued, brilliant, northern), but only to a point once things get complicated with their respective children by Hubert.

She realises there is a limit to her idealistic idea that "the love you give comes back to you" and that "it's magic and it really works" - the magic being the charade, perhaps even the illusion that radical political change can come about through genteel people being nice and unconventional.

The climactic scene is moving - the older Edith and Hubert, "the two grand old shams" musing on their idealism ("If ideas could change the world..."), their basic, underlying failures and yet managing to justify their lives.

"But we were beautiful... and we showed them didn't we?"

Overall, an excellent programme, which complements the Plater episode admirably. Banks-Smith approved of this 'bizarre life story' in The Guardian, raising an eyebrow at the Edwardian 'prattle' but basically approved of this 'bizarre life story': 'Like all "The Edwardian" episodes, this life story was made with the most loving and minute care. A most superior series.' It is curious that this interesting Acorn DVD release did not find more favour and comment, in this era of Upstairs, Downstairs revival. It suffers from some spectacularly ill-informed 'reviews' on Amazon, with some fool seemingly decrying it because the majority of episodes were in black and white - and another would-be critic bizarrely saying they chose not to watch the full episode.

Perhaps it is for the better that The Edwardians has not been subject to a 'KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON' reading that whitewashes the complexity of the past with its quaint, reductionist Toryism. With Taylor and Plater's episodes at least, we receive a more open-minded, socialist corrective to all that heritage tat (and the Baden-Powell one sounds interesting; was apparently rather controversial in some quarters!). This exercise in exploring the archive has clearly formed a corrective to the nauseating Jubilee 'festivities'.

An Islington children's theatre contributes some inevitably and unavoidably poignant singing. The same theatre's alumni seems to include about half of the East Enders cast... I wonder if any contributed to this episode? 1980s East Enders certainly shared some of the socially conscious, radical London spirit of Nesbit, though was just a tad grittier than her works. Just a tad.

"Thinking will make it better. Thinking always makes it better..."

10 O'Clock Live (Channel 4, 15/02/2012)

2012-02-18T04:50:00.005-08:00

I reviewed this solo last year; let's see what two of us make of it this time around... (TM)

David Lichfield:

There’s been a long lineage of regular satirical programming on British TV that stretches back through iconic shows such as Brass Eye, Have I Got News For You to the 1960s and That Was The Week That Was. Ten O’ Clock Live, which has recently returned for a second series, is television’s latest attempt to weld current affairs and comedy together. Many said that the first series was an inconsistent affair, with the output of Charlie Brooker, Jimmy Carr, David Mitchell and Lauren Laverne not hanging together entirely coherently. For me, the show was certainly too long and could have benefitted from a more robust editing process. With the Guardian-friendly image of both Channel 4 and the show’s presenters, you could easily accuse 10 O Clock Live of political bias. But then again, right-wingers aren’t known for their riotous and sharp sense of humour, and where’s the fun in pro-establishment comedy?

Frankly, 10 O Clock Live remains something of a mess, with the key highlight remaining Brooker’s own short segment. During the last series, his venom and acerbic wit were largely the only parts of the show that demanded the attention, and because they are placed so early on into the show, it’s still easy to feel your attentions wander as we move from this segment into the largely unfunny Jimmy Carr sketch carried out in full costume complete with equally mirthless accent. When Carr drops the comedy, he can actually be an engaging political debater (he has a degree in political science) but the show goes for the humorous angle too often, particularly when an interesting debate is taking place, presumably just to fulfil the ‘comedy’ aspect of the programme.

10 O Clock Live still feels somewhat confused, and the employment of four presenters with similar political views but somewhat clashing styles makes the show feel rather cluttered. Mitchell’s interviews with important political and social figures can seem rushed, and the presence of an audience somewhat distracting, whilst it’s still difficult to see Lauren Laverne as something other than a music presenter. However, she does perform a pivotal role in keeping things flowing tightly. The show ultimately could benefit from dropping Jimmy Carr’s pantomime monologues and the other sketches that it incorporates into it, emphasising the serious nature of Mitchell’s interviews and trying to move away from the whole area of people talking over each other. Otherwise, I’ll continue to stick the kettle on after crown jewel-type moments like this .

Tom May:

10 O’Clock Live remains a welcome if imperfect stab at topical satire, two weeks into its second series. The rapport between the four seems a bit more natural than in series one; their personalities are coming into clearer focus. Carr is much more effective during the roundtable discussions, displaying a quick wit that belies the often tiresomely predictable ‘shock’ tactics of his solo gags to camera. There was an interesting moment when Brooker got angry at him for a “gross misrepresentation of a fine computer game” as being all about “shooting prostitutes”.

Laverne had the easy target of Republican primary candidates and couldn’t fail to elicit laughs via Gingrich’s “delightful, whimsical ideas”, Romney’s post-death conversion of his father to Mormonism and Santorum’s backhanded compliment to gays, claiming “it’s not man on child, man on dog, y’ know”. American provincialism was easily parodied with attacks on Romney running thus: “Just like John Kerry he speaks French too...” “You sick bastard”, as Lauren said! She could have been more outspoken regarding The Sun’s page 3 girls though; Carr alluded to her dislike, yet she said nothing: missed opportunity for some arse-kicking feminism.

There is such idiocy out there in the media that there should never be a lack of material for programmes like this; e.g. the Aaron Ramsay ‘correlation’: every time he scores a goal, a celebrity dies. Plus, there was lucid highlighting of the ludicrous terminology deployed by the tabloids – ‘boasted’, ‘claimed’; absurdity in the thought of anyone uttering “performed a lewd sex act” in speech!

The guests were not overly memorable; a bland Times journo Hugo Rifkind and the gargantuan ego that is George Galloway, talking smugly about the “delectable” – eugh, what a word! – Argentine PM Cristina Fernández. Mitchell justly pulled him up on this. It is frustrating that Galloway’s message is largely agreeable, but you resent the messenger; he spoke sense concerning Argentina’s greater democracy compared with its days as a fascist junta and counselled against the absurd aggressively rhetoric harking back to the Falklands War. Yet his credibility is undermined by his simplistic, black-and-white stance on the Israel-Palestine problem.

The highlight was undoubtedly Brooker’s poem about The Sun, a withering – and often rhyming – roll-call of the vast variety of people who have reason for grievance against that sordid rag. It echoed Jimmy’s famous ‘forces of anarchy’ rant in David Nobbs’s The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. The paper's stance, going after anyone to sell papers, is reprehensible and has coarsened and soured public life in the UK in the forty-three years since Murdoch’s takeover. He also rebuked David Cameron – with his soft-soap ‘interview’ in Now magazine coming in for suitable ire.

Overall, it was not quite as funny or satirically dexterous as last week’s edition. However, it is at least a satirical programme that can address important issues; though Carr’s skit on the NHS could have been more mordantly funny considering how high the stakes are.

Saints and Scroungers (BBC1, 16/01/2012)

2012-01-18T16:12:00.000-08:00

"Where they belong..."

David: Hello.
David: Trying to get comfortable, whilst enjoying the only source of heat in the house (gas fire)
Tom: Hi. Okay, nearly ready to go - time to switch over from what seems to be a fairly mediocre Griff Rhys Jones sketch show...!
Tom: Okay, some sort of countdown?
David: OK 5...

Tom: 4
David: 3
Tom: 2
David: 1, go
Tom: Yep
David: Oh fuck off about “the taxpayer” already.
Tom: Irritatingly perky-businesslike theme music.
Tom: So, who is the Rugby player-jerseyed, slap-headed host?
David: Dominic Littlewood. He always presents tabloid shit like this.

David: Consumer champion, apparently.
Tom: “They are our saints.”
David: Black and white world.
Tom: This gent, dispensing some sort of vigilante justice in typical tabloid TV style.
David: Ironically viewed in the majority by people on the dole.
Tom: “Earning an honest living”. In what context, Dominic? “Get rich at other people's expense”...
Tom: The standard £53 a week for a single person doesn't really seem like “getting rich” to me. (Of course, this is justifiably assuming that the programme is implicating the average benefits recipient in these crimes)
David: Sounds like good business-sense; their only crime was being caught.
David: I THINK I'm joking.
David: Oh fuck off you judgemental autocue-reading, self-righteous CUNT.
Tom: Those "alarm bells", they start to ring.

David: He's a bit wooden.
David: “Hatched a plot”, “Shady means”.
Tom: I don't believe in the veracity of this, oddly... the conventions of the show are just so ludicrous; it is tough to imagine Courtney Campbell as a reality.

The Guthrie Clan!

David: “Clan”?!
Tom: “CLAAAN”.
Tom: Terrible fucking incidental music as ever with these shows...
Tom: A low-key, Tesco's X-Files (the background music)
David: They're only bitter because they let it go on for so long without noticing.
Tom: “Than ahve ahd 'ot dinners!”
David: What's this, The Usual Suspects?
David: The smugness is unbearable.
Tom: Roll up, roll up! And round up yer Ricardo Guthries. Littlewood is intolerably smug, this would-be hard man peering about righteously, hands on hips.

Tom: “Robbing the system blind” - why blind?
David: 'Greedier'?
David: Fair enough, these are isolated incidents, but the underlying message is: 'We know you're all up to something'.
Tom: Yes, the assumption is to implicate a far greater number of people.
David: Coming from that most-respected and skilled profession, the daytime TV presenter
David: WTF is being blurred there?
Tom: Why the blurry screen?

David: The semi-detached house is innocent.
Tom: Ha-ha, ridiculous!
Tom: There might just have been some random gent on a bike, in the distance there.
Tom: “These GUTHRIES”. Not just “These Guthries”.
David: Approximately 0.00000001% of all fraud
Tom: Yes, indeed - a tiny percentage compared to corporate fraud and, of course, the bank bailout on our behalf.
David: I haven't heard “designer clothes” for a while.
David: The 'saints' segment is even more condescending.
Tom: Ah... those saints! Such lovely people down at The Dell.
David: The saints are coming.
Tom: Heart strings, dog stroking.

ENTER: THE SAINT.

Tom: “So, you're true Londoner.”
David: Well, I wasn't going to mention it... [His disability] Didn't bother our Dom though!
Tom: Making a laboured point about it all, aye.
David: Prying bastard.
Tom: Interesting how little interest he took in the life history and characters of “these Guthries”. Condemn or pry, seems to be the dichotomy according to whether they have been deemed saint or sinner.
David: I forgot 100% of people were exclusively “good” or “bad”.
Tom: It is a childish view of human nature, this...
David: And it is licence-fee payers’ money that pays for this bullshit.
David: A true saint.
Tom: This person seems affable enough but then why should be held up like this on TV...?
Tom: His 'barriers'...? Ill-defined.
David: Why are no disabled people ever in the 'scroungers' camp?
Tom: Yes, but she [concerned woman] doesn't seem to understand how the economy works. IT'S NOT FAIR.
David: Plenty of able-bodied people have just as little luck.
Tom: “Finally, just when it seemed...” Cliched linguistic formulation from Dominic, in his voice-over there
David: “Light at the end of the tunnel”.
Tom: Little devil horns for the Scrounger in the title lettering. Utterly silly, but I suppose summarising the simple moral stance.
Tom: “Put under surveillance” - our genius host.
Tom: “The devious world of the scrounger”. Oh really? I was holding out for The Strange World of Gurney Slade, myself...
David: “Smile, you're on camera”
David: This is making me want to throw the laptop out in the street.
Tom: Scary... Come and 'ave a go if you think you're bald enough.
David: “The claimants they love to scapegoat”, more like.
Tom: Martial arts buffoonery from him now? [Littlewood inexplicably attired in judo gear]
David: “The poor people they love to harass”
Tom: Reconstruction of a woman crawling on the floor – absurd stuff...
David: Who decides on a career path that leads to the coveted position of DWP Fraud Investigator?
David: The ultimate job’s-worth.
Tom: “An anonymous caller”; now they're the "champ"!
David: The anonymous caller has some balls.
David: And certainly wasn't thinking of any sort of fiscal reward.
Tom: Well, they've got Littlewood on side, as some sort of Grant Mitchell enforcer.
David: Gorgeous complete invasion of privacy.
Tom: A doctor studying video footage constitutes a medical? There's not exactly a scientific method there.
Tom: Obviously, I don't want to prejudge the case (!), but the smugness of the programme’s tone is something to behold.
David: Dom starting to rival Kyle for odiousness.
Tom: More on the Guthries, apparently. Later.
Tom: Sensitive. Piano. Music (Sick-bucket, sadly out of reach).
Tom: “David's very own saint”.
David: Stop saying “saint”!!!!
David: This is lowest-common-denominator drivel, isn't it?
Tom: “Damien”? Thought the no-nonsense Estuary tones spoke the moniker “David”...?
David: “Damien”, ironic name for a saint!
David: I wonder if a “saint” is better than a “hero”.
Tom: That’s a tough call for the world of daytime television...
David: I thought the BBC were supposed to be impartial and above this?
Tom: Damien: “Nice hard work 'n' that”. Has he been fed those words?
David: He's had his arse exploited.
Tom: Being fed words by the host, again, there... Littlewood’s interview skills are definitely on a par with Frost in the 1960s!
David: Underlying message: Disabled people should go to work.
Tom: The significant travel issue for a lot of people (not just disabled) is briefly flagged up but NOT explored at all...
David: Acknowledged in passing.
Tom: I've stayed near Finchley Road several times recently - nice part of London. (Irrelevant aside!)
David: Don't worry, there's shite all of note to comment upon that we haven't already.
Tom: The slap-head gives his earnest “Congratulations!” to Damien upon getting a job – after the fact.
Tom: Two years after the fact.
David: Wrapped up in the usual, unlikely, fairy-tale style
Tom: It is repetitive and now utterly saccharine.
David: Bet he wasn't expecting that, certainly not with the camera crew that surrounded him.
Tom: “Mate”, and sundry blokeish uses thereof.

David: Now, Dom's turn to get a proper job.
David: “I liked the way he pronounced 'Guthrie's”.
Tom: Indeed, ha-ha. Who is he anyway? Ex-Rugby player, perhaps?
David: I saw him on The One Show first, but he's also presented things like Don't Get Done, Get Dom and Cowboy Builders on Channel Five, with that well-known consumer champion Melinda Messenger!
David: “Kingpin”!

"Kingpin" Riccardo Gardner

Tom: “Family members”.
Tom: "A minefield of misinformation and multiple identities": a militant milking of the alliteration there.
David: "Empire".
Tom: “Property Empire”, aye... Awww, they were only fulfilling Phil 'n' Kirstie's dream!
Tom: Why the blurring of the left part of the screen again...?

David: The anonymous house is back!
Tom: “Iwl-go'en gains!”
Tom: Criminal empire or property empire? They cannot quite seem to decide.
David: ”Little scam”? I thought this was supposed to be an earth-shattering pyramid of illegality!
David: Why do all job’s-worths look and sound the same?

"We've never dealt with anything this big before at Barnet council... The Niceday box-file just isn't sufficient"

Tom: The lexis used in this programme is often contradictory in the extreme... and yes, the seizers of evidence are incredibly bland.
Tom: “Was there no END to the Guthries' greed...? Apparently not”.
David: How lavish?
David: Cunting Nora!
Tom: “The Kingpin ’imself, Ricardo Guthrie!” This could be the melodrama of a WWF bout or soap-land East End punch-up.
David: “We're paying for it”?!!! You do fuck all, Dom!
Tom: He is portrayed as a moral majority arbiter, on behalf of us all apparently.
David: Autocue readers, the cunting lot of them.
David: Father Todd Unctious.
David: Father Curly Wurly.
Tom: Why do they have this type on the screen? The words are perfectly audible.
David: To make the words hit home with venom.
David: It's like John Stape all over again...
David: It never seems to be the end!
Tom: RECONSTRUCTION. Evil looking gangster types.

David: He really does find punishment rather moreish.
David: I'm just waiting to hear something like “justice is a dish best served cold” etc.
Tom: One of the Guthrie clan will get “160 hours unpaid work” – less than some on the government's "Work Programme" may face!

David: Public purse!
David: CUNT!
Tom: Indeed.
David: Great graphics.
Tom: Unsure how to describe those graphics, but basic – any old font on Word'll do – just about sums it up.
David: I enjoyed that, perversely.
David: Wouldn't want to watch it on my own like.
Tom: No, nor me.

The law is in my hands!

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS:

TOM: The latest UK unemployment figures show a rise to 2.69million (8.4%). This is the highest actual figure of those out of work since August 1994: the month before I started at comprehensive school. In many areas, the ratio of applicants to jobs available is astronomical. Yet the practical difficulties of the jobless are barely acknowledged by government or the media; Iain Duncan-Smith’s welfare reforms, involving unreliable re-classification of disability claimants, seem ill-fitted to real lives and the economy.

Our establishment increasingly undermines the concept of universal social provision, preferring the Victorian moral distinctions of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’. As Mr Doolittle characterizes it in Shaw's Pygmalion (1912): "'You're undeserving; so you can't have it.' But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. [...] Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything." As Colin Kidd argued in the LRB just over two years ago: 'Cameron risks reviving the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, which was hard enough to take when uttered by Conservatives who had risen from the lower middle class, like Thatcher herself or Norman Tebbit, but is impossible to swallow from Cameron and other graduates of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, who carry out acts of vandalism dressed in bow tie and tails.'

The IDS plans to reform our benefits system are being implemented with unseemly haste, with little consultation, while the plans to reform banking are kicked into the long-grass, our hard-pressed bankers given a five-year period to adjust. Cait Reilly, who has had the startling audacity to kick up a fuss about the small matter of being compelled to work full-time - without pay or prospects - for her meagre £54-per-week benefit, is attacked by a petty, mean-spirited, right-wing journalist. The likes of Moir and IDS seem unable or unwilling to explain quite how such reforms might help rather than hinder such people in finding paid work.

As television, Saints and Scroungers is the sort of hackneyed hogwash that should have been long consigned to widespread ridicule by the satire of The Day Today and Brass Eye. Instead, it continues to hold sway with a significant body of mainstream opinion. Its televisual aesthetics are dire: uniformly drab graphics and fonts; laughable reconstructions; the music a form of pathetic fallacy banally shepherding the audience's emotions. In the title, sequence giant letter-S's stalk the landscape like Orwellian censors.

Presenter Littlewood is noted for such feats as 'teaching a vicar how to be a successful salesman in just one month'. His Wikipedia entry baldly states that 'his personality earned him an opportunity in television', which is as blunt an indication of the state of the nation and its broadcasting as any. As with other tabloid-TV straw men, he is presented as a one-man legal system: taking pugnacious umbrage at those deemed ‘guilty’ while showing paternalistic bonhomie towards those saintly folk assessed as ‘innocent’.

There is an irresponsibly limited view of life: giving viewers an excuse to maintain their black-and-white views of society. For this BBC1 show, depicting the complex real lives of typical Britons would probably blur its simplistic concept of responsibility. Extreme cases become the norm in the world as presented – on a grueling, daily (!) basis – by Saints and Scroungers.

DAVID: To summarise, ‘Saints and Scroungers’ is a deeply unpleasant form of ‘divide and rule’ television that serves no non-cynical purpose whatsoever. Despite its supposed intention of merely exposing those who are deemed to be playing the system to their own advantage and garnering praise for those assisting those who enable individuals who are hindered by disability and other obstacles to claim what is rightfully theirs, the implication that what is essentially a safety net is constantly abused and vulnerable to corruption never goes away and it is this school of thought that is exaggerated out of all proportion, leaving a bad taste of guilt in the mouths of those who are able-bodied yet find themselves, through no fault of their own, to be out of work. Unemployment is a soul-destroying scenario at the best of times, and negative, self-satisfied television such as this does nothing to help those stuck in a rut feel optimistic about their chances of escaping their plight. The idea that we live in a meritocracy, where unless severe disability has hindered your prospects, your outlook is completely equal to the effort you have put in is indisputable codswallop, and from the point of view of someone exposed to this utterly depressing form of programming does nothing to help the emotional state of the fiscally desperate whatsoever. Saints And Scroungers is an utterly blinkered piece of televisual output that does nothing to address the economic obstacles that force the majority of people into unemployment, and is delivered with a sense of moral outrage and self-satisfied smugness that is completely out of place on the supposedly impartial BBC. The celestial level of prestige that is afforded to those who do direct the physically-unfortunate to what they are entitled to is totally absurd in that they are merely being paid to do a job, and the division of the individuals that play a part in the welfare system into simple categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is something a toddler would find reductive and simplistic, What the BBC is trying to achieve by commissioning dross like this is questionable, but as a programme that does nothing to add positivity to the world when you scratch under the surface, you’d be far better off tuning to cBeebies when you’re looking for vivid hope and optimism to inspire your day’s fruitful activity. Certainly, the fraudulent claims that colour the ‘scroungers’ element of the programme are outrageous, but this is because they are isolated incidents rather than the norm, and the programme only serves to fuel the urban myth that the majority of people on benefits are workshy subhuman scum that belong in a cell somewhere, by so closely associating the concept of the welfare system with fraud, when 99% of the time, any dishonesty involves nothing more than petty sums of cash and a sense of desperation centred around keeping roofs over heads and food in cupboards.

I think you know what to switch on at 9pm tonight, ladies and gents...

2012-01-18T11:52:00.000-08:00

Far be it from this blog to become mere advertising space, but then this is Jonathan Meades; like Adam Curtis or Chris Morris a truly original voice in television. His new series on France ought to be watched by anyone interested in the medium or indeed European culture. There is an amusingly adversarial interview here. Those who have seen Magnetic North or Off Kilter, his eccentric cultural mappings of Northern Europe and Scotland, will clearly watch this. Those who haven't should discover Meades without delay.

Forgotten TV Shows I'd Like to See... #2

2011-12-24T11:32:00.000-08:00

Arena: Ligmalion (BBC 2, 1985)

'The London demi-monde of hustlers and hangers-on acquired a new generic verb in the late seventies - to lig, which means more or less to be a welcome gatecrasher in clubs, parties and private homes, and thus to be entitled to free board, bed; entertainment and review copies of books and records.' (Celia Brayfield, The Times, 09/04/1985)

Following Desmond Morris and preceding a John Cassevetes film on BBC 2 on Monday 8th April 1985 was this: a musical-fantasy loosely based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. This 'amusing parable' was also likened to Doctor Faustus in a contemporary TV listing. Celia Brayfield describes it is a 'semi-documentary musical'. It is a curiosity, at the very least...

It starts with Gordon Shilling (Jason Carter), a penniless lad from Gainsborough seeking his fortune in London. He is soon taken under the wing of Tim Curry as a Mephistopheles type. Sting as Machiavelli asks if his book is still in print. Style-watcher Peter York points out to the innocent young lad that the pop music world is small-fry and he must aim his sights at the establishment: represented by the City of London. Brayfield refers to the Lincolnshire-born protagonist (Carter was also from Gainsborough) as a 'class-conscious Candide' who is literally stripped of his provincial raiment by a gang of toughs. The Lig of Gentlemen, 'three beady-eyed characters named Sharp, Shifty and Wise', instruct the provincial hero in the seven rules of ligging and send him off to blag his way into a nightclub.

Brayfield is rather positive, describing it as an 'entertaining chronicle of social opportunism, wittily scripted by David Leland'. She describes Sayle as playing 'a creature somewhere between John Bull and the Joel Gray character in Cabaret', demonstrating the telling point that ligging is politically correct in Thatcher's 'self-help' Britain. It isn't just the presence of Alan Price in ITV's schedules (in some supper-club performance alongside Gloria Gaynor) that suggests it could be some sort of 1980s equivalent to O Lucky Man!

The Guardian's Hugh Hebert is not so positive, likening the production to 'an ageing jogger trying to keep up in the cultural race' and bemoaning that its 'fable of the innocent fallen among rogues and con men, and out-conning the lot, is as old as London itself.' He is critical of Alexei Sayle, playing John Bull as a 'dismal imitation of a German political cabaret', and the GG himself - Gary Glitter - who performs a 'feeble shoe fetish number in the gent's bog at the Ritz.' This rogue's gallery is joined by infamous tycoon and crook Robert Maxwell at the end, still in charge of the Daily Mirror at the time and offering to run the protagonist's story in his paper.

Whilst broadly critical, Hebert does praise its great photography and Ken Campbell's mock-archive lecture as Samuel Smiles, father of Thatcherism ("poverty creates greatness") as well as Fanny Cradock's appearance as her 'indomitable and insufferable self'. Campbell was a true eccentric in our culture, who could be compared with Jonathan Meades, Kenneth Griffith and others.

This programme would be interesting to view as a less naturalistic counterpart to David Leland's Tales out of School (1982), released by Network DVD this year (and perceptively reviewed by John Williams and Frank Collins). While likely to be a less subtle and edgy exploration of a culture undergoing its Thatcherisation, historians of the 1980s will want to see its re-release; the IMDb indeed includes a subtitle: 'A Musical for the 80s'. Ligmalion's cast is a kaleidoscopic collection of the enticing (Campbell, Sayle) and the ghoulish (Maxwell, Paul Francis Gadd). The latter may well lessen the chances of it being released, but then the BBC did post this video a couple of years back.

Its context is instructive: Wogan, Monkhouse, Benny Hill, Dave Allen on the most popular channels; Channel 4 wonderfully varied: a documentary on the post-WW2 Cornish artists' colony, 'theatrical tableaux' from the Welfare State Theatre Company, Brookside, Buster Keaton, 28 Up and a Lionel Atwill 'chiller' to round off. The Channel 4 archive clearly needs the sort of attention Network have lavished on the ITV.

Top of the Pops (BBC1, 09/12/1976)

2011-12-21T06:04:00.000-08:00

(TX: BBC4, 15 December 2011)

Now for my impressions of a recently shown edition of TOTP76. Who's presenting? David Hamilton apparently, a long-time BBC radio DJ I have strangely barely heard of.

We start with The Kursaal Flyers' 'Little Does She Know' with its Spectorian cliches given a momentum that might best be described as a Southend-on-Sea chug. We are treated to some ridiculous marching-come-dancing from the front man, with his would-be Little Richard haircut and sanitised teddy-boy attire.

This is followed by 'a song dedicated to the cash registers across Britain', as Hamilton puts it. 'Money Money Money' has never been my favourite Abba song but, in this context, it is a masterpiece. We are shown a typically Bergmanian video, with piercing lights, counterpointed figures and implied silences. Frida is in the shadows, imperiously Faustian beneath large black hat.

perhaps something she had to . . . had to . . . tell . . . could that be it?

Hamilton remarks of money: 'It does enable you to be miserable in comfort'. Interesting to consider in the light of the New Economics Foundation's 2004 report which claimed that 1976 was the year in which the British were happiest, after 31 years of relative social democracy.

Now for the utter oddity of Jethro Tull's 'Bring Out These Solstice Bells'. We are shown Ian Anderson leapfrogging, hand-clapping, leering maniacally like a cross between the pagan Green Man and Edward Thomas's English archetype 'Lob'. What a curious proposition this is: stuttering rock and folk song tropes colliding in a Christmas context. The gent striking the aforementioned bells looks if anything even more weirdly beaming than Anderson, dressed in a red scarf, black hat and sheepskin coat.

He never will admit he is dead
Till millers cease to grind men's bones for bread,

"And now we have a treat for all those fellers out there", Hamilton announces. Legs and Co. dancing to Mike Oldfield's 'Portsmouth', a song featured in Alan Partridge's intended musical accompaniment to his newly published I, Partridge autobiography. A bare stage, a lone, artificial looking pine tree. A parrot (called 'Chalky', Hamilton informs us later). A sea chest. Six 'lovelies' dressed in antic Georgian (?) naval attire - feathered hats, frilly shirts, long boots and the like. It is so oddly unimaginable in any subsequent decade: a leisurely frolic about the place to an archaic, accordion and flute-led instrumental. Yet this was clearly pop of a sort. Many in the 1970s were intrigued by the past: while Oldfield and Legs & Co's 'Portsmouth' is no 'Jarrow Song', Upstairs, Downstairs, When the Boat Comes in or Penda's Fen it is symptomatic.

One of them throws a load of coins at the screen to conclude this brief, bizarre interlude. Money, money, money.

Next is Tommy Hunt with 'One Fine Morning'. This is really quite pleasant soul, if not really matching up to the more intense, ecstatic-melancholy of the best northern soul. This is followed by Hamilton briefly engaging members of 'the Northern Ireland Youth Peace Group' who are over from Belfast, having won a week in London. They do seem to enjoying their time away from the Troubles; we might regard the prospect of watching Dana as akin to medieval punishment but they seem delighted when she is announced.

The erstwhile Eurovision winner of 1970 turns out a tedious, sub-Tina Charles plodder of a record in 'Fairytale' - inevitably accompanied by strangled fiddles and neutered guitars. I don't believe your fairy-tale, Ms. Independent, eurosceptic - and anti-abortion, divorce and contraception - MEP 1999-2004.

A 'Season's Greetings' Christmas card fills the screen, is indeed zoomed into, as emerges the ghastly spectacle of Paul Nicholas's latest attempt to nullify 1976 pop. 'I brush my bowler and I grab my cane' the lyrics go and he actually has the bloody things. As he did in a previous atrocity; nothing special about 'Grandma's Party' then, which represents the deepening of a festering wound. Sub-Monty Python grannies in the background 'dancing', mugging - deserving a mugging. This is strained, soporific shite. And you could have had Kevin Coyne on that stage - shame on you, British public.

As if we haven't been spoiled enough, we are then presented with Showaddywaddy, a perpetual bane in this era of music. Revivalist 'rock and roll' would be more innocuous if this sort of stale retrospection hadn't afflicted us in its various guises in the thirty-five years since. 'Come on little darling take my hand!' could not sound more joyless if it was sung by Hughie Green at a National Association for Freedom shindig. The band sport matching suits, smugly shown in white and black mirror-image variants. A ghastly saxophone rears its head like a somnambulent battleaxe.

This truly is music that people without spirit or shame lapped up for years; that stunted the development of school discos and laid the groundwork for musical dullards to prosper.

Then we finally have a moment of unreconstructed sexism as Hamilton patronises a young lady: "This is a Fulham supporter, I thought I'd tell you that, that's why she's so good looking; that's right, isn't it?" She can only answer: "Yeah". To which Hamilton replies in his smarmy Bill Grundyeseque tones: "Yes, you're not too sure about that!" and "Give them a lovely Fulham smile then, go on!" This is why punk had to happen.

There is focus on members of the audience dancing during the last number, Billy Ocean's 'Stop Me'. An audience of non-airbrushed ordinary people, mainly girls. A few really into it, most moving to an extent but one girl clutching a handbag barely dancing. The parrot present and correct. Jumpers, dungarees and scarves tell of an altogether less homogeneous dress sense than you might see today. The Ocean song slips by without eliciting any tangible response from me; so unremarkable and inoffensive one cannot take a position on it. It may be said to symbolise the era's longing after consensus and agreement. A consensus all the more elusive due to the hard-right insurgency of the NF, the NAFF and newly militant trade unionism.

The font on the end credits is archetypal mid-70s with its yellow type; informal italics: Musical Director and staunch block capitals: JOHNNY PEARSON. Legs and Co. are apparently Gill, Lulu, Patti, Pauline, Rosemary, Sue - again, a 1970s set of names.

This episode is indicative of the good and bad in TOTP1976: the conservatism of the era and also its relative openness compared with our own neo-liberal one. Abba, Jethro Tull, Mike Oldfield and Tommy Hunt are a persuasive sequence, indicating the era's greater openness to the different and the jarring. Yet, that is all only relative; Showaddywaddy are the number one and grinning buffoons like Nicholas represent the staid revivalism of the era. 1976 does not hold the bragging rights to pop cultural complacency, but the need for intelligence, vivacity and invention was rarely more acute than then. Thankfully for us all, music in the 1978-82 period delivered just the shock to the system that was required.

BBC Three, Cultural Snobbery and "Young, Dumb And Living Off Mum"

2011-09-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

Episode Six. BBC Three. 18/9/2011.

It's safe to say BBC Three, much like it's similarly-targeted relative Radio 1, has attracted as much cultural snobbery during its life as any particularly vapid Simon Cowell creation. Accused of being a strain on the BBC's budget, not providing content that isn't covered by its rivals, serving an audience equally catered to by ITV2, E4 and a plethora of other channels, not providing an important public service whilst consuming funds that could be used towards the BBC's more highbrow divisions, and generally being an example of the corporation's supposedly long-standing tradition of 'dumbing down', the channel attracts scorn from both sides of the pro/anti-BBC schism, whether it's being labelled a waste of licence payer's money or simply an unnecessary outlet of the kind of 'Trash TV' that has come to saturate so much of modern culture, or perhaps even more regularly, incurring the wrath of those who would like to see it scrapped simply because they don't like it personally and/or are outside of it's target audience anyway.

Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum, which has just come to the end of its third run, is a reality TV documentary in which a group of idle, spoilt teenagers, having been 'kicked out' of their homes by their long-suffering parents, move into a shared house together and are left to fend for themselves. Each week the group are set a new challenge in order to develop their life skills and hopefully a level of maturity they can nurture and take into full adulthood, as each of their parents group together to assess their efforts and vote out one of their collective offspring on a weekly basis. Narrated by a wonderfully snotty Robert 'Yes, I'll Do It' Webb (whose fees must be quickly becoming as competitive as his comedy partner's), the series culminates with the reward of a round-the-world trip for the eventual winner and a companion of their choice via a narrative wealth of stroppiness, clumsiness, parties, drinking, confrontation, adversity, childishness, tantrums, redemption, poignant passages from contemporary chart hits, personal epiphanies, tears, hugs and climactic triumph.

By episode 6, we're down to the last three contestants, and though they've made it this far, there are still many behavioural creases to iron out. Ryan, 18, considers himself 'too gay to do DIY' and is described as a wannabe celebrity who, whilst flamboyant on the outside is revealed to actually be too shy and nervous to take charge and something of a shirker, although fared best previously when working with children and animals. Temperamental self-confessed 'spoilt brat' Ruby-Jo, 19, (addressing a fellow contestant, 'you're a fucking boring shit') is an extremely gobby, foul-mouthed stick of human dynamite who believes the Blackpool Lights to be one of the 'eight' wonders of the world until informed otherwise by bright but extremely lazy Tom, 19, who describes a typical day for himself as being one that consists of little else but watching DVDs and masturbating. His close friend Jack, with whom he considers himself to be in something of a 'bromance', was voted out from the competition in the previous episode.

For the final task, as always the parents will choose the task, but crucially, unlike in the preceding episodes, the remaining contestants will work separately, each returning to their hometowns to offer domestic help in the form of decorating to initially unknown families that are deemed deserving of assistance ('In the past, you've only ever thought of yourselves, and never done anything for anyone else unless you've benefitted from it', run the parents' joint instructions). For Ryan, he will return to Doncaster, to assist family friend Fiona, who has two children to support, one of whom is Ryan's godchild, as well as being a full-time carer for her mother. Ruby-Jo, whose Stockport dialect is so broad she is regularly subtitled, will return to her cousin's family home, which has been hit by redundancy and limited income, whilst Tom, with no Little Hampton-based family members in such dire straits, is tasked with helping out young cancer sufferer Kirsty's family, whose lives have been taken over by the obvious traumatic obstacles that come with this.

With just two days and a thousand pounds each to complete the task, despite the best intentions of the trio and a promising start, inevitable problems come to the surface. Though the usually negative Tom is noticeably inspired by a mixture of a competitive streak and the touching nature of Kirsty's plight, his initial haggling prowess (though the attendance of BBC cameras on B&Q premises may have been a potent bargaining tool) is thwarted when he realises he has neglected to take measurements for the curtains and carpets, and he spends a vast portion of the two days travelling back and forth between the flat, hardware shops and bedroom showrooms, leaving only vague instructions for his confused mentor and team of volunteers. Ruby-Jo overspends quickly, asking a member of staff if they stock any 'cheap shit', threatening to eschew the whole task in a strop before identifying novel and cheap ways to complete it, whilst Ryan, after excelling with his purchases on day one, spends the early part of day two descending into a bag of nerves, dividing his time between making tea for his team and hiding behind a van, much to the frustration of his mentor. Tom meanwhile, spends so much time rectifying purchasing errors that he declines his team the opportunity of breaks, compelling the fantastically bitchy Webb to comment 'No breaks? That's rich coming from someone whose life has been one big break'. Meanwhile, after one team member points out that Ruby-Jo has inadvertently painted a chest of drawers shut, her response is to berate him for 'talking to me like I'm a fucking idiot'. As things draw to a deadline, and all three competitors begin to make up much ground, Ruby-Jo will open the inevitable redemptive chapter of the show by regretting her recent showdown, solemnly admitting 'I've got to realise that I speak to people like that'. Ryan makes up noticeable ground, delivering a much firmer message of gratitude to his team, than the bumbling pep talk he opened with earlier that day.

And so, after the results are revealed to the emotional, overjoyed families, in that trademark Changing Rooms showdown, the parents club together to assess who has come the furthest, who has worked the hardest, who motivated and instructed their team most effectively and who achieved the best results. It's formulaic stuff of course, and built around a narrative model and genre so tightly predictable and orchestrated you know exactly how it's going to end, but as light-hearted stuff of this ilk goes, it sends out a much more harmonious and humane message to its target audience than you get from the The X Factor's ruthless and humiliating Darwinism, even if the winner does receive a trip round the world at the end that doesn't exactly scream 'altruism'. This is far more acceptable than the capitalist egocentricity of The Secret Millionaire, with its reverence for wealthy businessfolk kind enough to offer up minute scraps of their time and wealth in the interests of their image and self-promotion, and although orchestrated by definition, the scenes of remorse and redemption, in this episode largely characterised through the teenager's letters read aloud from their parents, apologising for past misdemeanours (especially Tom's 'extremely negative outlook on the world') seem authentic, and the participants all seem to be real multi-layered young people, with equal amounts of positive and negative traits. The gimmicks you would imagine to be in a show of this nature are all intact, of course; Adele's 'Someone Like You', the parts where it seems the game is lost, the determination to change, the feeling that everything is harmoniously tied up and the equilibrium restored impossibly perfectly at the end, with the on-screen 'since the making of this programme' messages before the credits (added to these was the sad news that Kirsty has since succumbed to cancer). Yet, you know what you're getting, and somehow the formula never seems to wane if you consume it as part of a balanced cultural diet. It's inevitably warmer and more genuine than if the BBC's rivals tried it, and with its themes of impending adulthood, responsibility and the transition from adolescence to these, it's exactly the kind of programme the BBC should be making for its young audience, who deserve to be catered for and aren't necessarily exclusive from your Radio 3 listener or Newsnight viewer. Obviously the budget should be spread out to proportionally and realistically cater for its audience, but much of the anti-youth/Radio 1 agenda often seems coloured by the distinct sense of ageism and cultural snobbery. Or in 1xtra's case, actual racism.

"ALL GONE TO GURNEYLAND"

2011-09-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

(ATV, 22/10/1960 - 26/11/1960)

"I have hundreds of ladies running through my mind. They daren't walk."

'Thus, briefly, Newley was in time with the ephemera of pop culture rather than show business. Indeed, since his rivals were dismissed as agent-made brain-deads - such as Cliff Richard's Bongo Herbert character in Espresso Bongo - Newley came as near as the trade got to an "intellectual" before the music business developed its self-consciousness and self importance.'
(Nigel Fountain, 'Between Elvis and the Beatles', The Guardian, 16/04/1999, p.16)

The Strange World of Gurney Slade is a DVD release to treasure; ATV's utterly unconventional TV comedy is finally available to enjoy in all its bizarre glory, 51 years after its first broadcast.

The show started out with a large audience yet was moved to a post-11pm timeslot as its viewing figures declined; there were no contemporary reviews in The Guardian or The Times. Despite this critical indifference, it is effortlessly subversive, with a humour that is by turns dry and surreal. Tropes of British television that were already hoary by 1960 are mercilessly satirised, as Newley's agitated Slade walks out of the set of the sitcom he is in. The nascent consumer society of Macmillan's Britain is dexterously skewered throughout, with Newley dancing with a vacuum cleaner and multiple digs at the influence of advertising: 'who am I to ruin the advertising business?'

The series has a leisurely, reflective pacing, with Gurney given to philsophising about marriage, romance and the role of corn in the Napoleonic wars or conversing with cattle. Episode 3 evokes the languorous pastorialism of Powell and Pressburger or, as noted by Frank Collins, the rarefied film The Pleasure Garden (dir. James Broughton, 1953). It can also be considered a sedated, thoughtful development of the Goon Show's madcap anarchism. Newley himself figures as a hipper, yet oddball variant on Hancock's English everyman, as happy going to see French films as is in essaying his skiffle-folk classic 'Strawberry Fair'.

As the series develops, there are pre-echoes of later 1960s exercises in the bizarre: The Prisoner and Dr Who: The Mind Robber; episode 5 takes place within Slade's own bonce: the curious 'Gurneyland', filled with devils, tinkers and children. Episode 6 evokes Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) in its deconstructionism: the previous characters of the series retuning to beseech Gurney, requesting life beyond the confines of the series.

For me, the absolute peak is episode 4, where Gurney - and by extension, the series itself - is put on trial for 'having no sense of humour'. The episode can be considered part of a lineage of absurdist trial scenes that includes Kafka and Welles's The Trial, The Prisoner: Fall Out and Dr Who: The Stones of Blood (and, unwittingly, the misbegotten Trial of a Time Lord). Slade is opposed by a motley array of characters including a hangman, a trade unionist, a prosecuting counsel (Douglas Wilmer) and a sullen, fairy tale princess. He is 'supported' by a George Robey-citing music-hall comedian Archie, his punchlines trailing - notable in the wake of John Osborne's Archie Rice. The Entertainer - first staged in 1957 - was adapted for film by Osborne and Nigel Kneale in the same year this series was broadcast.

The main evidence shown to the courtroom is footage of Slade on TV, delivering a rambling, deadpan routine about a countersunk screw. This is a minimalist comedy of mundanity, with Newley extemporising on the merits or otherwise of the said screw. It is just possible that writers Sid Green and Richard Hills may have been taking notes from Pinter's The Caretaker, which opened in London on 27th April; Slade's routine could be considered an altogether more light-hearted counterpoint to Aston's unsettling dramatic monologues.

Newley went on to considerable commercial success on stage with his collaborations with Leslie Bricusse, though less with his directorial film debut, the supposed grand-folly of Can Heironymous Merkin Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? : 'You may squirm but you will not want to walk out'. (John Russell Taylor, The Times, 26/06/1969). As said, The Times did not review TSWOGS, did but mention it glowingly alongside Newley's appearance in The Johnny Darling Show (TX: 12/11/1961), which itself sounds interesting: 'he regarded a world faced with catastrophe in a programme of uncomfortable but wittily expressed desperation'. (Our Special Correspondent, The Times, 18/11/1961, p.4)

The series is beautifully shot, on film; this is television unafraid to be influenced by innovative developments in radio and theatre, crafted by the future writers of Morecambe and Wise and the one-off talent that was Anthony Newley. The Strange World of Gurney Slade is an example of 'Television of the Absurd' to rank alongside Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Though, in truth, Gurneyland is a whole lot odder. For more thorough and erudite thoughts, read Frank Collins and John Williams, who was one of the people to recommend this wonderful series to me.

Coronation Street (ITV1, 04/07/2011)

2011-07-17T08:49:00.000-07:00

This is the first in an irregular series of posts, carried out as a duologue between two AWOTW writers, Tom May and David Lichfield, whilst we were watching the said programme. It is a format probably best suited to popular successes, and may also work for cult programmes such as Peep Show. Where better to start than with the longest-running British soap opera, set in the bizarre netherworld of Weatherfield.

Owen Jones makes a relevant observation about the way the programme has shifted away from social realism: 'What relationship is there between EastEnders - or Coronation Street for that matter - and the lives of millions of people working in shops, call centres and offices? Indeed, both soaps have a disproportionate number of small business people, like pub landlords, cafe owners, market stallholders and shopkeepers. The soaps compete with each other over frankly ludicrous plots: take the effective resurrection of Dirty Den in EastEnders, for example.' (Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class, Verso, 2011, p.132)

You might just notice that one of us is much more up on recent Corrie developments... though I did see the episode where Corrie became Final Destination 5 with its scenes of absurd tram-fuelled pandemonium trying to out-do EastEnders' earlier fire in the Vic ("YOU WOULDNNN'T DARRRE!" - Peggy tipping hardman Phil Mitchell well and truly over the edge) for pyrotechnics and hyped-up melodrama.

Tom started chat and sent out an invitation.

David joined the chat.

David: Sorted, has it started? I have to watch two 30-sec adverts

Tom: 'The police are heading to the factory in Coronation Street'. Harvey's furniture store gubbins... now we’re on to the credits.

David: And I'm on!

EPISODE 1 PART 1

David: Poor Stella, quite a sympathetic character compared to Cindy Beale (Stella has recently 'come out' as Leanne's biological mother, much to Leanne's chagrin, not long after moving into the street to commence Rovers Return-based managerial duties).

Family strife!

Tom: And we open with a picture of the young Leanne Battersby... enigmatic stuff.

Tom: Was that Michelle Collins?

Square or t' Street?

David: Yep, indeed it was.

David: Yeah, you stand firm Leanne, it's not like you're a former prostitute, who spent the early weeks of your marriage having it away with Nick Tilsley!

Tom: "It's minging...!"

David: He's not bad for a child actor (Simon).

David: Did you know Sophie was a lesbian now?

Tom: No... I didn't know about the Sophie sexuality shift.

Who do you reckon is the Daily Mail reader?

David: I'd hate to be married to a social climber like Sally.

David: Wooden Chesney.

Tom: This is shifting scenes wildly; about 20 characters featured already!! In the first three minutes.

David: Yeah, last year, she lives at home with her girlfriend, Sally, Kevin, Rosie and Kevin's baby who he conceived with Tyrone's dead wife Molly!

David: I really like Stella, ropey accent notwithstanding.

Tom: "It changes everything! You've lied to me, my whole life...!" Classic melodrama.

Tom: Is Stella the non-Cindy Beale?

David: Ex-Taggart actor John Michie (playing Stella's partner Karl) there, also sporting a fake Northern English accent.

David: Yeah.

David: I despise the factory scenes.

It's not Tony Wilson's Factory...

David: Another acting master-class from (Antony) Cotton (Sean).

Tom: Janice isn't really Leanne's mum - cor blimey... that's a development.

David: Did you know Sean was with Jonatton Yeah? (Charlie Condou, playing Marcus)

Tom: Didn't know about the Jonatton Yeah link! Would be interesting to see a Barley and Corrie crossover...

David: Janice was always the step-mum.

Tom: These factory scenes do seem contrived; manufacturing being the utterly thriving thing in the North of England, circa 2011...

David: The gossip industry.

David: No one has to venture further than the end of the street to find a job!

David: David Platt's wife there (Kylie)!

David: Who sold her kid to Becky and Steve.

David: Self-righteous Sally (commenting on Fiz's previous loyalty to John Stape)

Tom: Eh, what's goin' on 'ere! It's the Bureau de Change...

David: Acting master-class, the 'nick' of time!

Tom: And a bearded Phil Brown lookalike appears to stop the fisticuffs...

Phil Brown, aka. D.S. Redfern

David: Where's his headset?

David: Send her down!

Tom: Indeed... Arrested again!?

David: Such a dull character, don't know what the accidental serial killer ever saw in her!

David: And Hayley is left holding the baby!

Tom: Gail acting as unlikely paragon of liberalism: "Everyone's innocent ’til proven guilty..."

David: She's got a vested interest in that school of thought (having previously been charged with murder and later acquitted).

David: Let's count the clichés!

David: Anything need clearing up plot-wise?

Tom: Well... that first segment was a tad bewildering. A near-fight/stand-off that could have appeared in The Day Today's soap-opera spoof The Bureau. The scenes shift about every 20 seconds. No chance to build up any atmosphere or indeed let a neophile to 2011 Corrie know what the fuck was going on...!

David: Always some amusing stuff on here, pretty much the same here. I'm going to look for the best comments so far.

David: If you watch any Classic Corrie, you have whole two-hander scenes going on for three or four mins

David: Gail and Ivy going on and on and on in 1987...

Tom: Indeed, for better or for worse! Though I do think it works for the better for it to play out more like theatre than a film shifting scenes every minute. Or every 20 seconds.

Tom: What is Gail doing now? Is she working at the factory?

David: Well, Gail was sacked for Data Protection breaches at the surgery I think, don't think she's at the factory though, she tried to get a job at Nick's Bistro but he said she had the wrong image!

EPISODE 1, PART 2

Tom: "Mrs Stape"... ominous.

David: They don't half like their miscarriages of justice on Corrie.

Fiz in chokey

Tom: "Maybe John was lying!"

Tom: I can see a 'Free Fiz' campaign on the horizon.

David: A Stape-related storyline without Stape present, zzzzz...

POLICEWOMAN CLEARLY FASCINATED BY BEING IN THIS SCENE

Tom: So Phil Brown is a detective?

David: Yeah, they used to have a mint Scouse one, when Tracey was being sent down.

Tom: “Us?” / “John, I mean!” Ooh, she's getting herself in trouble, that one.

David: Fine time to have a scrap in the factory.

Tom: I remember that brunette factory boss (Carla) ... hmmm, a dull character.

I really want to be on The Apprentice and work for Lord Alan...

David: Carla is on Fiz's side as she was blind to Tony murdering everyone, too.

David: Hayley pronounces it 'Corla'.

Tom: Corrie/EastEnders crossover again here...

Tom: And, again, a brief scene is cut short!

David: Peter Barlow has a mean streak but he's a cool character on the whole.

Tom: Stapey and Fiz were married??

David: Yeah, they were.

David: 'Let's talk about Charlotte, baby'.

David: Charlotte was an 'interesting' character and fellow academic who blackmailed Stape as she knew about the identity fraud. He hit her with a hammer round the head on Tram Crash Night, when she threatened to tell the cops everything, then dragged her body to the scene of the crash to make it appear she had met her end via that means.

Tom: Who's that southerner?

Trust me, I'm a Barlow

David: That's Ken's grandson and son in real life.
David: He's a homosexual too.
Tom: The actor or character?

David: Character.

David: I think he might be a bit of a manipulative fraudster character.

Tom: Ah, a Rovers scene at last.

Newton and Ridley Forever

David: Tyrone's spite towards Kev = ace.

David: I love bitter Tyrone (Kevin Webster impregnated Tyrone's late wife Molly, but this was only revealed to Sally on Tram Crash Night by Molly, just before she drew her last breath from under a pile of bricks. So now Kevin is a lodging in his own house with baby Jack).

Tom: Stevo...

Flippin' 'eck! I'm only in this for fifteen seconds!

David: Finally!

David: 22 minutes of non-Steve banality.

Tom: The majestic eyebrow quivering...

David: Stella gonna abandon Leanne again?

David: Prediction, they leave and Leanne runs along with a "No, wait!!!!" (Continues in half an hour)

David: Is this where I'm supposed to root for Fiz?

Tom: Beaten up in a bookshop? Sounds plausible.

"You're on borrowed time, sunshine!"

David: Free the "Red Gap-Toothed One".
David: Good cop.

Tom: I think we are supposed to feel sympathy, aye! "I [h]am telling the truth!"

David: Is he being good and bad cop (DS Redfern)? The other's doing fuck all!

Directorial vision on a par with Antonioni or Bergman...

Tom: Ah, a classic stand-off across the cobbles there, between Gail and some exceedingly earringed lady (Kylie).

Ken Loach: 'It's like they're the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream when there's always an implied other set of characters who look down on them.'

Tom: Ah, is that David himself? Still the devil incarnate?

David: Yup!

David: She's far worse than him though, I think he knows she sold her son now (to her sister (Becky, who cannot have children) and Steve.

Tom: Who are these brawny male characters? Identikit Simon Cowell lookalikes, speaking with Cindy Beale, ominously...

Trust me, I'm a Barlow

David: Peter Barlow (you take the option).

David: Other one's Stella's boyfriend, Karl.

David: I'm getting déjà vu from previous storylines; we had this with Gail only last year (false accusations of murder)!

Tom: Ah, cliffhanger of sorts as, erm, Fiz whines the same old line AGAIN - 'Burra didn't do anything...!'

David: The Fiz stuff is doing nothing for me.

David: Think I'll have a fag and then we'll have the first post-mortem!

Tom: It is rehashing tens or even hundreds of past Corrie scenarios... Is this one a miscarriage, or merely a meting out of justice?

David: Yeah, she knew about the identity fraud but not the murders until she found him with Colin Fishwick's body.

David: To be fair Colin did have a heart attack, during a showdown with Charlotte and John, but John panicked because of the ID fraud (John 'borrowed' Colin's identity in an attempt to get back into teaching, as his own CRB check was slightly tarnished by the sexual activity with and subsequent kidnapping of his one-time pupil Rosie Webster. Colin reassured him he didn't mind at first, but later turned up demanding him to stop) so they went and buried him under Underworld, then the builders unwittingly buried him under concrete! Months later when the drains needed doing, John realised that the body would be dug up, so went to retrieve it and was caught by Fiz. Fiz panicked, as John convinced her she would be in as much trouble as him if she did not assist him to dispose of the body. She did spend Joy Fishwick's money when John was sectioned out of play.

David: So, in on the ID fraud and not the murders (apart from the body disposal).

Tom: Well, she is surely implicated to a degree, though I imagine it will be a field day for the lawyers on both sides. A tribute to Frankie Howerd on ITV1 now, in-between episodes... Makes one question whether Corrie is actually providing much for its older audience (surely its main demographic). There has been nothing much here with Norris, Roy, Ken or other such archetypes... Of course, the Duckworths are gone, aren't they? Is Jack likely to be popping back into t' Rovers, as was intimated when he left the Street?

David: Unlikely, he died last year!

David: I watched the Kenny Everett one of these The Unforgettable... last week.

David: Very old repeats that belong on G.O.L.D. or whatever it's called these days, but everyone's watching East Enders so a cheap way to kill half an hour, you used to get something regional at these points, but not now ITV is basically one company. Barring the Scottish and Channel Islands versions of course. And UTV I guess.

Tom: Howerd starring in some creaky 1950s British B-movie! How was the Everett programme?

David: I remember watching some early morning BBC1 panel show in the early 1990s presented by Everett, which was ordinary and conventional by his standards.

David: Definitely going for that fag now, and yes this is very old school ITV, rather this than 'What Colleen Did Next' on ITV9!

David: That doc was from 2000!

David: Would have preferred to see more of the Stella and Leanne stuff than the 'I didn't do it, waa-waah!' spiel

David: Wasted on a mediocre actress.

Tom: Ah... there is now ‘no signal’ for ITV1 with my Freeview box... though it has come back on now. The reception was a tad poor in the first episode, frankly...

Tom: It’s gone off again! Do you have a link to watch it online?

David: http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7177581073347880981&postID=7086930591731146179#_blank

Tom: I'm onto the two infuriating adverts. Has it started again yet for you?

EPISODE 2 PART 1

David: Here we go...

David: Just about to, you should only miss 30 seconds, if that.

David: Straight to Fiz action.

David: Can't wait to meet Prisoner Burke.

Tom: Who's the Gervais lookalike?

David: Generic hard-man builder (Owen Armstrong).

David: Bought his business from Bill Webster (now departed).

David: His daughter (Katy, 17?) is pregnant with Chesney's child.

Tom: Ah, the sadly departed old Bill... A stout drinking pal of Big Jim Mc., as I do recall.

David: Not dead, just fucked off quietly.

David: Cindy's daughter's a feisty one.

Tom: So Fiz is an 'exemplary character', is she!?

David: Most ironically named baby in soap (Hope)?

David: They must be hoping viewers have short memories.

Tom: "He doesn't know us from Adam" - what a silly phrase.

David: Who is this "Adam" of which everyone speaks?

David: Gail and Sally in the same scene?!!!

Tom: Gail and Sally planning on making a night of it... Crikey.

Tom: "I prefer to call them displaced people..." - who's the pseudo-earnest young lady in the red t-shirt?

David: Didn't see this coming!

David: Blonde?

David: Sophie's bird!

David: It's gonna be fine, apparently.

Tom: Ah, it was Sophie I meant... It has really been a while since I’ve watched this programme!

David: Who's this ‘Joe Bloggs’ of whom everyone speaks?!

"It's not a handout, it's about mekking a diffrunce!"

Tom: Socialism is alive and well in the personage of Sophie Webster.

Tom: Truculent young colt, that David Platt.
David: David Platt Sex, ominous.

Tom: The Chezzer and the Fizzer against the world?

David: Roy: 'A laudable outlook'.

Tom: And it's... David Cameron entering, to break the bad news (as ever)...

We're in this together...

David: That's an Autumn of courtroom tedium sorted then

Tom: Aye, I wouldn’t bet against it...

David: They really need to give this (semi)-miscarriage of justice stuff a rest.

Tom: Two pseudo 'cliff-hangers' with Fiz in teary despair, following one where she had to be restrained from running riot.

David: What are the chances of a hat-trick?

Tom: As likely as Jimbo McDonald to pepper his sentences with a random “Catch yersel’ on” or conclude them with “So it is...”

David: More Stephen James McDonald after the break I hope.

Tom: Aye, I hope Steve will add to his previous 20 seconds of screen time in tonight's episodes.

David: Anyway, Fiz, I'm not sure the baby understood what you were promising her, anyway...

Tom: What was she promising the bairn?

David: She'd never leave her etc.

Tom: Ah, touching.

David: You noticed that these episodes are only 22 minutes long-ish. Fifteen minutes of ads an hour on British TV!

EPISODE 2 PART 2

Tom: Having probs with watching it online but it seems to be back on my normal TV... Hmmm.

David: Just trying to revive my stream.

David: Refresh, refresh!

Tom: No sound on the TV!

David: Black screen online, I want more ginger whimpering!

David: I'm getting bugger all here!

Tom: I have a silent film on my screen of a bleary eyed Fiz, wearing a yellow bib.

David: And it's burnt into your retina forever.

Tom: And now our supposed ‘do-gooders’.... in their red T-shirts. Moving stuff.

David: If I'm lucky, I may catch a solemn Fiz dropping tears onto a small photo of the sprog, and the credits.

Tom: What is going on with the ITV streaming? And indeed my TV. I don't even have a mute button to accidentally press. I have a picture but no sound, and neither online!

David: We can devote some of this blog bemoaning the shitness of this streaming.

Tom: I can just about make out that Dave Cameron (lookalike of, Fiz's solicitor?) is lecturing the Croppers...

David: Is he saying they're in this together?

Tom: Chez looks put out. Not a happy young gent.

David: It's like being blind.

Tom: David Platt and that ear-ringed young thing are getting intimate; yuck!

Tom: Gail and Sally have spied them over the fence, Gail with a glass of red wine in hand.

David: There can't be this much demand to watch episode 2:2?!!

Tom: A ticking off dispensed by the moral guardians of Wetherfield, methinks.

Tom: Some burly gent and Michelle Collins again.

Tom: Platty and missus are incredibly telegraphed People Not To Be Trusted. Actually, I think I am picking up more watching this silent than with the dialogue!

Tom: Never liked Leanne... Cannot quite put my finger on why – a sort of whiny surliness.
David: [Re: technical problems] I think this happened for the Manics at the iTunes Festival last night too.

David: Can only guess it's about to end?

Tom: Chez is all angry as hell. Hayley with t' baby, and Roy failing to calm things down. Plus a young brunette and another bearded man, unsure whether the Gervais one.

David: No Steve?

Tom: No Steve. Lamentable lack of Eyebrow Olympics.

Tom: Chez head in hands. Yep, it's coming to a close.

Tom: Fiz in tears in a cell, after looking at a picture of her baby.

David: Still think we should do a week of these, even if not live we can just ITV Player them simultaneously...

David: Hang on, did I not predict that ending!

Tom: The end was indeed almost exactly as you predicted.

David: Sound like a shite last ten minutes in all honesty!

David: Hope this makes up for it.

Tom: Ha! There's even one of him post-pulping by Jez Quigley...

David: LEGEND. The second, old school one with a full head of hair and a beard is sensational.

Tom: Yes, that is quite a gurn and an uncannily 1995 beard.

David: You HAVE to watch the scene where he got back from seeing Our Andy last week. And saw all Becky-fuelled hell breaking loose through the broken Rovers' window, comedy gold!

David: Watch it here, from about 20 mins in! I just pissed myself laughing at that again.

Tom: I've tried to fast-fwd and it's taken back to more adverts...................

Tom: Advert 3 of 6!!!

TWO DAYS LATER

David: OK, have a pause on the start of part two, just off to get my glasses.

David: Right, on title card now, tell me when to hit play...

Tom: I'm ready; play...

David: Demon Platt.

Tom: World-weary Gail: "Brainwashed, more like..." Sally talking popular clichés about "rocket scientists".

Tom: Slightly creepy Gervais...

David: "Make sure the teat's full".

David: Creepy Gervais, as he will be known from here on now...

David: Corrie without humour is a bit of a drag.

Tom: Now, riveting Fiz-in-yellow-bib scenes (previously seen in silent mode)...

David: It's like Steve is carrying the comedy baton single-handedly.

David: This is like watching East Enders at its most tedious.

Tom: "Selfish" Kev Webster, according to Sophie?

David: That's a bit harsh.

David: Middle class soap characters = always shady.

Tom: What is their "team"?

David: Tesco Value Salvation Army.

David: Will Roy ever run out of philosophical words of wisdom?

Tom: "I suspect she'd welcome our return", says Roy.

David: Yeah, I'd pass on duties to the Croppers over the naive 17 year olds, to be fair (Owen AKA 'Creepy Gervais) demanded Chesney and Katy relinquished Hope-duties to concentrate on Katy's pregnancy).

Tom: Indeed. Now, for the previously mentioned Platt and Kylie scene... Guetta and Akon - predictable musical backing!

David: That's a bit risqué.

David: She ain't no sexy chick if you ask me.

David: No need!!!

David: Haven't seen Sally and Gail socialise for about 600 years.

Tom: I cannot sympathise with either pair - the young amoralists or the old moral guardians...

David: This Stella-Leanne thing's been so rushed. Storylines either outstay their welcome or have the equilibrium restored in two episodes.

Tom: "Proper man and wife"...

David: "Babes", eugh.

David: What does that entail?

Tom: "I had all these hopes... dreams..."

David: No one talks like this in real life.

Tom: Banal doesn't even cover it; or "touch the sides” as one of them has just said!

David: They'll be out together in the Trafford Centre next week (Leanne still not welcoming Stella's motherly affections).

Tom: Or is banal the word? Heightened, melodramatic banality? Certainly not a Pinteresque mastery of the banal.

David: It's not always this bad, it goes in stages.
David: Usually when one story arc has ended, it takes three months to build back up again.

Tom: "Might I suggest we take stock of the situation" - Roy ever the voice of calm...!

Tom: Very creepy Gervais here.

David: It's the facial hair.

David: I hate the "any idiot/knobhead/cunt can make a baby" line.

Tom: Ah, your predicted ending...

David: Waa! Waa!

David: Rubbish.

David: And no Steve!

Tom: None, and yes, a rather bewildering and dull 44 minutes of television... I imagine it can be more entertaining; certainly the absurdity of the Rovers brawl in that episode you linked to.

David: That was amazing.

David: I think Steve's the only character I have any time for currently.

David: There was fuck all in that episode that made me anticipate Thursday's.

David: Can't believe I'm saying it but, I even miss Liz!

Tom: Perhaps so... Who's the landlady? Becky, I assume?

David: Becky still technically the landlady (still married to pub owner Steve, by a thread), Stella the manager

Tom: With crushingly predictable friction?

David: Yeah, as you may have seen in that brief scene from the other week, when Becky stormed back in and overruled the newly instated Stella.

David: (Referencing afore-mentioned clip) When the two bodies dive out of the Rovers in front of a bewildered Steve: that was fantastic

David: Even Craig Charles is leaving for a year!

Tom: It was... certainly proper Corrie absurdity.

David: I like Peter Barlow though.

David: But he's not on the sauce currently, so, yawn...

David: Cannot be arsed with months of courtroom Fiz-based melodrama.

David: 'AH DINT DO IT!!!'

David: We need a Spider or a Jez Quigley to shake up proceedings.

Tom: The Cuts hitting even the hallowed cobbles...? In that they are saving on new sets and scenarios by wheeling out the same police station, cell and courtroom sets they have always used!

Tom: Indeed, regarding the need for some wild-cards. The 1990s-era Street certainly had a few of those...

David: I'm sure Manchester or Rochdale Town Halls will make an appearance at some point, doubling up as something else!

Introductory post 5

2011-07-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

I arrive at this blog five years after graduating from my ‘Theatre Film and Television’ course and with a couple of years’ worth of music blogging behind me. The reason this appeals to me is largely because of a long stirring desire to move away from the very formulaic and increasingly predictable monotony of reviewing pop and rock music albums and in order to begin to document the whole world around me, in all its unfashionable, disillusioning, stubborn, breathtaking, enraging, corrupt, beautiful, heart-stopping, occasionally wondrous tragedy.

Therefore it is fitting for me mark my appearance here by only travelling so far as a certain cobbled street situated supposedly just over 100 miles away (not as the crow flies). A fictitious street upon which half a century of British iconography and popular culture has been built; a record-breakingly enduring soap opera which has demanded loyalty and devotion through years of ropey storylines, poor casting decisions, inconsistent quality, annoyingly one-dimensional characters, suspensions of disbelief, unrealistic, rose-tinted and dated depictions of working-class life. Corrie has ran harmoniously parallel to my own life in terms of narrative milestones since I first became a 6-year old non-partisan viewer circa 1989 (Alan Bradley, Wendy Crozier era).

I am as likely to remember what Steve McDonald was doing in 2001 as that of own activities (being set on by genuinely terrifying Mancunian drug dealer Jez Quigley - not me, Steve), and for every six-month period spent questioning my loyalties, there’s a reveal or narrative conclusion that repays this dedication in entertainment dividends. Such as: Hillman driving the Platts into Manchester Ship Canal, Tony Gordon torching the factory after holding Carla and Maria hostage after executing Hugo from The Vicar of Dibley and every scene involving John Stape in the run up to his departure. Corrie excels when its balance of humdrum reality and black humour is perfectly aligned, and although it has threatened to slip into Eastenders-esque charisma-free misery recently, this is nothing new. It has always been inconsistent, and when it dips in quality and gripping tension, it’s never long before I’m completely drawn in again. I have always seen the work of Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott as post-watershed versions of Coronation Street; incorporating characters that talk like me, narratives I can relate to, finding engrossing drama in the humdrum and visually depicting a gritty Britain that we wouldn‘t necessarily expect to be able to sell worldwide, yet somehow - and regularly - do.

Whilst it’s true to say that the large majority of my televisual pleasures seem to derive from UK material, it is similar characteristics than inform my viewing across the board. The American comedies I enjoy such as Curb Your Enthusiasm and dramas such as Breaking Bad are not brash, overly wacky, flashy or juvenile, they are instead subtle, clever, knowing and understated pieces that find their appeal in eschewing the obvious, feature multiple-layered characters that are equally capable of both offending gratuitously and charming incessantly. Sometimes when these worlds clash, like in the recent comedies The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret and Episodes the cultural clattering is devastatingly potent, and it is no small fact to note the amount of British comedies and dramas being remade for stateside viewing: Shameless, The Office and Cracker being a few successes amongst a plethora of commissions.

To conclude, my TV shows of the year so gar (though I’m sure I may well have missed some gems) would be The Shadow Line (which made Red Riding look like In The Night Garden, yet a thrilling 7-part BBC2 drama with Stephen Rea as the world’s most mild-mannered and polite professional assassin), Ideal (series 7 and the imagination of Graham Duff just gets more and more hilariously outlandish), Exile (more Northern grim from me I’m afraid, the words ‘John Simm’ are a cast-iron guarantee I’ll be tuning in), Psychoville (basically Corrie via the lens of a bad LSD trip, not that I’d know, but the popularity of THAT Tina Turner scene demonstrated that it’s not just me with the worrying, pitch-black taste in humour) and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle (refreshingly honest as ever, but probably not the ‘comedian’s comedian’, not if you’re Russell Howard or Michael McIntyre, anyway!). I must confess to a soft spot for Friday Night Dinner too, Will from The Inbetweeners being Will from The Inbetweeners, not to mention the recent episode of Newsnight featuring Steve Coogan. There’s no news story I like more than a media-related one, always fascinating to see media outlets relish the misfortunes of their rivals, or even their own. They all (largely) deserve each other anyway.

DISCLAIMER: That last comment was clearly a throwaway one as, for all its faults, the BBC is certainly about 10,000 times more cherishable an organisation than ITV/Sky et al, despite it's huge self-righteous indignation when it's rivals mess up. The supposedly 'leftist' organisation is never shy to document its own mistakes and shortcomings and even invites right-leaning tabloid figureheads like Andrew Neil, Richard Littlejohn and Kelvin McKenzie on board (plus Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, was once the chairman of the Young Conservatives) to offer up their robust, and often uncompasssionate viewpoints (personalities who, whilst seeming to be rigidly against the entirely unevidenced 'leftist agenda' BBC apparently stands for, are quite happy to pick up a BBC pay cheque and use the platform as a soapbox). This all adds to the BBC's integrity and keenness to offer a UK-mirroring plethora of social viewpoints, whilst constantly being at the mercy of commercial organisations keen to pour scorn upon its character, and question its merit, particularly in relation to the licence fee. The reoccuring argument that 'the BBC should fund itself' could not be more flawed. Should this ever come into place, it would bludgeon completely everything that sets it apart from other broadcasters. It is an organisation envied and respected globally, and it is its impartiality, diversity, integrity and quality which explains this.

The Old Crowd (Lindsay Anderson, 1978/9, LWT)

2011-05-16T15:51:00.000-07:00

It’s difficult to write about the films and videos that, for the sake of clarity, we honour tradition in calling ‘television plays’ without falling into a sort of dualism, the video or film so labelled being treated as a production ‘for’ video or film of a text with its own anterior life. The critic racks focus from this text to the production, conceived of as a kind of glaze in which the writer’s intention is suspended, and praises or blames it according to whether it seems to support or hinder an intention that, in most instances, s/he cannot discover by reference to any text but the production itself. Often, an invisible work is called as a witness for the prosecution of the visible one through whose lineaments it has been perceived. My aversion to this mode (for want of a better term) is almost visceral, and I have no intention of practicing it here; my subject is one of its most prominent victims.

The Old Crowd seems to require italics rather than quotation marks; it isn’t an instance of anything extrinsic. Paul Sutton, the editor of Lindsay Anderson’s published diaries, describes it as a film, though it is unique among LWT’s ‘Six Plays by Alan Bennett’ in having been made entirely on videotape. Its proportions are cinematic in a sense inaccessible to the connotations of that word currently in the ascendant in the culture of television production.

The action: a piano is being tuned. George and Betty have invited friends for dinner in a house they moved into six weeks ago: Rufus, Pauline, Stella, Dickie, Oscar, and the young people, Peter and Sue. To wait upon their guests, they have hired two ‘slaves’, Harold and Glyn, ostensibly out-of-work actors specialising in policemen. The house is unfurnished and crumbling, the windows covered in newspaper. The blind piano-tuner, a former policeman, plays a waltz and leaves. The old crowd appear. The young people arrive. Dinner is served. There is a musical performance. Stella goes upstairs with Glyn for sexual intercourse. Dickie listens to his radio. Totty arrives. George shows some slides. Totty dies. Everyone sings.

With only an hour, we think we have a right to know them better, but they have had years, and their opacity is not a style of discretion. The space between Stella and Dickie is plain enough, as plain as the reasons why Totty’s equanimity soothes and Peter and Sue’s disturbs, why Pauline howls, why Oscar is odd rather than Queer; in their company we have the disturbing sensation that where polite conversation peters out, and the speakers refuse to understand, there is not the teeming unseemly life beloved of social realists, but blankness like a lapse in memory, an erased trauma, or the darkness before the front door: incomprehension a protection from the incomprehensible. If they weren’t being looked at, they would be unbearable.

A shot of a wall, cornice and ceiling, an ominous sound a beat after fading up from black, and then a title, ‘The Old Crowd’, in thirties-haunted font at the bottom right corner of the screen, beached by indifferent geometry; perhaps this is our first clue. To image a space like this –socially neutral enough to seem to make a careful word like ‘image’ seem needlessly scrupulous – would only occur to either an unusually curious or unusually interrogatory intelligence, so how could this be realism? A crack, cartoon-quick, across the ceiling. If the limits of their imagination were all, this would be the breaching of a tomb, would stand for “Bourgeois Society” as one critic misread it, but their confinement is not a fait accompli – this is why Dickie has been in Valparaiso. What Anderson opposes always is the will not to perceive – to deceive oneself, to equivocate, to attempt retrospectively to preserve an ignorance that has already been breached. The old crowd are terrified of what they might be about to learn. All definite information is potentially disastrous, so it is scrambled by the receiver; an anecdote of macabre violence is put at a remove by the hearer, assigned to New York; Dickie’s Valparaiso visit draws the laughter of elective ignorance; no-one dares anchor the indeterminate. Throughout Anderson’s work the most troubling figures are not the simply buffoonish or thoroughly deluded, but those who, like Dickie, know precisely how their position has been achieved, and what will be required to maintain it. Trailing behind the tour of the house, he alone notices the cracks appearing.

Something else endangers their confinement, of course. If memory serves, no-one has remarked upon the twinning of the fissures in the house’s structure with the rupturing of the dramatic space by shots that incorporate crew members, cameras and studio space beyond the edge of the sets. In standard accounts of the work, these moments are treated as part of Anderson’s ‘treatment’ of Alan Bennett’s ‘text’: Bennett himself remarks in the introduction to The Writer in Disguise that of all the plays included, The Old Crowd would be easiest to stage, which is inconceivable. In fact, these breaches are integral. Before the death of Totty seems to precipitate the camera’s departure from the dramatic space altogether, the most explicit of them occurs when the characters are most convinced of their seclusion: George and Betty’s dance to the blind piano tuner’s accompaniment; Rufus’s declaration that ‘you’re on your own these days’; Pauline asking George if they’re ‘overlooked’ and receiving the reply ‘there are neighbours, but we’ve never seen them’. ‘Nowhere’s safe nowadays’, Stella remarks at one point; these breaches underscore how much has been done, for so long, to keep the referents of characters like these safe.

It is Lindsay Anderson’s commitment to representational social intervention that gives these shots their disruptive indeterminacy. Conventionally, representational social intervention in British cinema and television has meant realism, and this generally requires of its adherents an elective incomprehension or active mischaracterisation of any technique eschewed by, or developed later than, its brief nineteenth-century heyday. If we think Anderson is a realist, then these shots must be self-indulgence. If we thought Anderson was a postmodernist, then these shots would seem the repetition of a joke, flattening one’s memory of the impact of its first use. It is because the application of either or both of these labels is problematic that these shots retain their disconcerting power, even for a viewer who expects their appearance: when camera 4 rises behind Rufus’s turned head, we are not watching an acting performance in a television studio, but a character unaware he is the product of a television studio. As he is unaware of a newsreader’s autocue later, as he is unaware of the labour making his privilege possible throughout.

Television is also something received. Mother will watch anything - her viewing takes in a documentary on eye-surgery (the video’s second paraphrase of Bunuel), a scene from a film of joyriders driving over a cliff, and an anthropological film of Africa without voiceover. These are included via reshooting from Mother’s black-and-white set. This process is a sort of quotation, but we are not expected to recognise the works on the television as distinct texts, but as examples of types; found footage rather than works cited, their disparate subject-matter is presented as an illustration of banal indifference rather than global engagement - it would be interesting to identify the films excerpted, but it wouldn’t necessarily be illuminating. Their use here could be mistaken for an expression of distrust or contempt towards the medium; in fact, they illustrate the ambivalence of the mode of attention it makes possible. Mother’s reaction to Stella and Glyn’s sexual encounter in her room is not voyeuristic; for a moment she watches them in transfixed dismay, before switching her attention back to the television set. Filtered, magnified and given shape, the representation is seized upon by a blinkered spectatorship grateful for the intercession of another will: the television, like the unread newspapers, keeps the world out.

These two ways of showing - looking at - television, generative mechanism and shuttered discourse, converge during the sequence of Totty’s death. She has been mediated from the beginning, her imminent death the subject of George and Betty’s conversation prior to the arrival of the ‘slaves’, but though regarded and inquired after, Totty, when she materialises, is evidentally real to her own satisfaction. Her absurdity - which is not to be overlooked despite the confidence she radiates and inspires – is the absurdity of an outmoded, outsize grandeur, so confident of mien and gesture as to make the old crowd’s fears seem unfounded. While she illuminates their gathering, it seems cosy rather than claustrophobic; she is almost a medium, viewed from the other side – a conductor or enchanter around whom incomplete and immaterial beings huddle for warmth; though neither Bennett, with his interpretavist attention to the chasm between aspiration and enactment, nor Anderson, with his interrogation of societies as circumstances perpetrated by individuals, allow these characters the postmodern luxury of being merely nexus, memories of the house. Totty asks George and Rufus about their children, but she is the only member of the company who appears as a subject in George’s ‘epidiascope’ show.

This occasion of collective memory evokes, at first, traditional responses – nostalgia, mystification, amusement at an upside-down slide or a trick photograph – before moving from received emotions to texts in quotations, submerged or declaimed; Stella recognises ‘Percival, before he went to India’ – the determining absence of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves – Rufus and Oscar take up quotation of Tennyson and Kipling, arranged between projector clicks. Dickie confines himself to identification of what is within the frame. Totty’s last words are those of a piece of public school doggerel; “this time tomorrow, where shall I be?”

Like a departing soul above a deathbed, the camera, no character at its side, withdraws to see the house in its fullest context, a nest of sets with no defined outer edge, as the party lift Totty’s body to the table, preparing their leave-taking. The question of where they will go from here – it is important that finally, like the ‘slaves’, they do not wish to wait on formalities – may seem, once the camera has reached the gallery, a naïve one, but their fear of being caught, their referents, and Anderson’s commitment, may be thought to invite the question.

Viewers bent on genre classification could call The Old Crowd a dystopia, and with dystopian works the great temptation for the viewer coming to them when they are no longer new is to compare the work’s fear of what could come with our knowledge of what did come. The two most immediately evident problems with this are the assumption that what happened left no mark upon our ability to perceive it, and the assumption that oppositional consciousness exists in a safe zone of imaginative continuity. At this distance, the viewer may be forgiven for imagining that while, when it aired for the second and final time on Channel 4, Dickie would have been a placeable type, Peter and Sue might well have seemed an inaccurate prediction – not at all pushy, callous Thatcherites.

What do the young people know? Their smiling, children’s-television-presenter manner is hardly less ominous than the biker gear in which they first appear; they are genuinely imperturbable where the old crowd are determinedly so. The old crowd’s anecdotes are routines like the announcement of dinner, impersonal, seldom recounted at first hand, a cue for response rather than a cause. All are revealing. A deadly virus is sweeping the country; holes are opening up in major cities; rabies has hit Burgess Hill. When Peter replies to Sue’s anodyne question ‘I’ve never seen anyone dead before, have you Peter?’ with ‘only at school’ he isn’t trying to be facetious or mordant. The capacity for outrage, or horror, or even opposition has been bred out of them; it is they – and not any imagined progeny of Stella and Glyn’s assignation, as one commentator fancifully, perhaps hopefully, speculated - who are the future, analogues of the appalling new life of Britannia Hospital. Peter and Sue will never mind the blood they wade through.

Bearing in mind, as we must, the necessarily provisional nature of any attempt to reconstruct the reception of this depiction by the audience of what is, already, another time – can it ever have been truer than it is now? Unseen, has it been coming truer since?

Introductory post 4

2011-05-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

For a while I wondered if it would have been better had I never encountered television at all. I forgot the footholds it still provided when I first knew it – footholds not entirely of its own making, but neither entirely extrinsic, imported culture. Its own history, not yet corralled into immediately evident strands or channels; old and new programmes placed together for the sensibility to which they were likely to appeal. Television then, still, for a little while, provided one with so many routes out – prospects on its own place in time, its own relation to art, and its role in the world; roads leading towards experiences, works and modes of discourse beyond its borders. Someone said that the point of helping someone is to put them in the condition of no longer needing your help, and television, similarly, seemed to be made by people who believed that the purpose of television was to prepare the viewer for the day when they would no longer need to watch television. Once out, it seemed in memory a very restricted place – like C. S. Lewis’s description of an external observer’s impression of hell – and I felt relief at having kicked its dust off my shoes. Of course, it still had its uses, its place in my life. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As a child, once old enough to make distinctions, I liked little of the television of my own time. Repeats of classic telefantasy – Doctor Who, the Supermarionation shows, to a lesser extent the ITC spy series – were my main focus. The past was exotic. This vanished epoch was the first lost Eden of my acquaintance, and all of it was experienced via public-service broadcasting. Though I would not have phrased it in such terms, it was clear to me that only television unencumbered by the permanent present-tense of advertising could allow itself the luxury of a curatorial intelligence.

Moondial was repeated at the right time for me to have caught it, but I was put off by its VT look. A Pixley and Howe-Stammers-Walker-reading child, I had discovered that the programmes whose ‘old’ look so fascinated me were shot on 16mm. After Pertwee-era Doctor Who, school memories of Dark Towers, and the cannibalised ‘flashbacks’ of Sky Hunter II, Moondial looked like thin stuff to me. Now I prize that aesthetic, but that’s because it is distant enough to have become an aesthetic; then it was just the way telly looks now, too near in time to be of interest.

Then through reference books and television I discovered the Hammer films, followed them back to Universal horror films, thence to German expressionism, and out. The programming at the local art cinema was excellent, and, when I began to go there regularly in my mid-to-late teens, it became a second home, but television’s repertory screenings were still invaluable. Television no longer compared itself to this older culture – aesthetically, a culture of imitation had taken over television drama - but it could still show the films to which it no longer had any address, and that was all I needed it to do. By this time, of course, it wasn’t the same thing at all - the terrestrial and cable channels of 2001 still showed, taken together, fewer silent films than Channel 4 did in 1994 (or so it seemed – it’d be interesting to find out if this is actually the case).

Did I give television up or did it give me up? At some point, in any case, I became aware that I no longer watched it. How I returned to it, as an annex of film history, might be expected to predispose me towards work intelligible in the terms of authorship’s formulation in cinema, and indeed the work I discuss in the following post is an example of this, but although it is unlikely to bear very frequently upon my contributions here, I want to say something about my relationship with television as it now stands. For years, I never watched it. Now, I watch it, but not to look for traces of what it was. Bryan Magee will not come again. But this causes me less concern than many readers might think it ought, perhaps because as someone whose main field of interest is cinema, followed by literature, then music, I spend a lot of time with the dead. I am here not to mourn the television of the liberal consensus, but to rejoice in the number of great works created in its time.

Yes, there is ‘archive melancholy’, which Robin Carmody and I have talked about elsewhere; but for me there is little present-day regret. That television is not now, if it ever was, an artistic medium frees one from the duty to be, provisionally, interested in everything. It concerns me that there are countries I haven’t seen a single film from; it does not concern me that I haven’t yet seen all of Doctor Who, old or new. I will probably never see anything written by Paul Abbott. Generally, I resent programmes that demand I pay attention over a period of weeks, or expect me to maintain interest in a plot-arc, though the annoyance with which Hinchcliffe fans have greeted the new series of Doctor Who does give me a warm glow for old time’s sake – I may even watch some of it.

No longer stuck with its present tense, or what it says about other arts, I have little objection to what the best of television does now. What I have no expectation of liking, I avoid. Television now strikes me as being as good as it can be when one considers the society it is addressing. To attribute its failings to some incapacity of current practitioners has increasingly come, to my mind, to seem naïve – artists are not superbeings who become mortal as you approach them in age – so it was with excitement that I began reading this blog, in which television’s sea-change is rightly laid at the door of the society it was made in, and for.

Forgotten TV Shows I'd Like to See... #1

2011-05-14T12:19:00.000-07:00

Once Upon a Time in the North (BBC 1, 1994)

First in an occasional series concerning programmes I've heard about or come across that seem tantalisingly out of reach. Programmes which have somehow had no DVD release, even in this age of Network DVD. If anyone has seen it and has any memories, please feel free to comment below...

I am prompted to mention this series, as it was mentioned on the same page of an old Observer I was reading today with the original purpose of researching the Eurovision Song Contest. I had literally never heard of this before, and it sounds interesting - and surely worthy of comparison with Peter Tinniswood's Uncle Mort saga, Early Doors (an equally fond portrayal of working-class culture as The Royle Family, but unlike that series, it did not outstay its welcome with endless specials) and the work of Alan Bennett.

This was its preview:

'The Simpsons have been made flesh and transposed to north-west England. This new six-part comedy from Tim Firth is probably the closest British TV has so far got to recreating the grim humour of working-class family strife. It also sees Bernard Hill emerging from the quagmire of poor scripts that have blighted his recent work to play downtrodden Len Tollit, who in this opener uses his redundancy cheque to set up a mobile phone company. Christine Moore plays his West End musical-obsessed wife Pat, Bob Mason his hippie, spirit-guided truck-driving brother, and Susan McArdle and Andrew Whyment his bickering children, whose exchanges could well prove weekly highlights.' (The Observer, 30/04/1994, p.16)

Play for Today #003: The Lie

2011-04-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

TX: 29/10/1970 (dir. Alan Bridges, w. Ingmar Bergman, trans. Paul Britten Austin)

"We have to be able to lie to live together..."

There can be no in-depth study of PfT #002: 'The Right Prospectus' (TX: 22/10/1970), as it has not yet surfaced in the BFI Mediatheque's Play for Today collection. It is apparently 'a satirical piece in which a wealthy couple disguise themselves as schoolboys to infiltrate a public school' penned by erstwhile 'Angry Young Man' John Osborne, known for the feather-ruffling of Look Back in Anger and - for me, more affectingly - The Entertainer. It stars George Cole and Elvi Hale as the couple. Contemporary reviewer Chris Dunkley was very critical: 'he made no attempt to explode the widely accepted myth, and show how truly appalling it would really be to go back to the best regimented days of our lives. In rapid succession he aimed petulant slaps in the general direction of the technological revolution, democracy, protest marches, tradition, co-education, public schools, and a host of other subjects which cropped up too fast to memorize'. (The Times, 23/10/1970, p.15)

Nancy Banks-Smith is fairy noncommittal, highlighting the 'dream-like quality' of a play in which nobody at the all-boys' school bats an eyelid at Mr Newbold's age or Mrs Newbold's sex (The Guardian, 23/10/1970). George Melly, however, is entirely won over; partly as it chimes with his own experiences of public-schools. In particular, he praises Christopher Witty's performance as the Head of House: 'I can still remember boys like that. I still glow when, in adult life, one greets me warmly. I still detest everything they stand for.' (Observer, 25/10/1970, p.32) He acclaims it as a more 'profound' work than Lindsay Anderson's If... 'The Right Prospectus' is readily available in book format, but seemingly not in its televisual version - although it must exist, as some gent on a Minder fan-forum alludes to having seen it. I am sure it would at the very least be an interesting counterpoint to If... and the superb Wednesday Play of 1966, 'The Connoisseur', dissected here.

But now to the main point of this article - a consideration of the following week's 'The Lie', a translation of an Ingmar Bergman play. The Swedish version, 'Reservatet', was directed by Jan Molander and actually broadcast on Swedish television one day before this BBC version. Molander's version features Gunnel Lindblom, Per Myberg and Erland Josephson as Anna, Andreas and Elis; in the British version, they are Anna Firth (Gemma Jones), Andrew Firth (Frank Finlay) and Ellis Anderson (John Carson), respectively.

The story is a classic love-triangle, with plenty of the existential angst one expects of Bergman. It was acclaimed 'best drama production' of 1970 at the Society of Film and Television Arts awards, held on 4th March 1971. On 16th May 1972, The Times reported in its TV Guide that the play was being 'repeated yet again' and was 'a superb if searing production', boasting 'alpha performances' from Gemma Jones and others. Is it worth this acclaim?

It has much to commend it, but is problematic, as one might expect of Bergman being transposed to bourgeois England. The play certainly has its moments but it takes some time to gel, and the translated dialogue is often stilted in the extreme. The music is un-Bergmanian, though this was not a problem for me; Marc Wilkinson's theme is jazzy and sedate, all vibraphone, flute and horns. Wilkinson has an interesting resume of British film and TV music: he composed soundtracks for If..., Days of Hope, Quatermass, Blue Remembered Hills and The Blood on Satan's Claw. This latter soundtrack is astonishingly ancient sounding - a rare piece of music to sound simultaneously of the psychedelic era and the seventeenth century.

The photography from Brian Tufano is exemplary - capturing the staid, stultifying darkness of this enclosed bourgeois world. The couple's house is the most Swedish thing here - all clinical, clean modernism of the low-rise variety, wood and panels - autumnally shot by Tufano. They live in the sort of modernist house beloved of wealthier people, pre-brutalism. It is interesting to consider that Tufano, now 71, went on to photograph one of the greatest of all Play for Todays, Sunset Across the Bay and also over-rated popular successes such as Trainspotting and Billy Elliot.

I am probably harder on 'The Lie' due to my love of Bergman's filmic oeuvre; one Saturday last year, with a friend, I watched Summer Interlude and From the Life of the Marionettes - a double bill of his films spanning nearly thirty years. The former is a gloriously bittersweet reflection on lost love and the time it can take to achieve catharsis and move on. The latter film is an unremittingly bleak exploration of neuroses and psychosis within a faltering relationship, ending in violence - this is all treated as an academic detective case by the psychoanalyst. It really is a despondent, nihilistic film, forming a fascinating contrast to the hard-won, humanist optimism of the earlier film.

This play seems a bit of a rehearsal for the grimness to come in Bergman's work - both in terms of FTLOTM and other 1970s films. Outward respectability and 'normal' routines hide a frightening vacuum, as identified by Nancy Banks-Smith in her review: 'Anna and Frank's [sic] marriage is a very streamlined thing indeed. If you discount the fact that they are both walking dead.' (The Guardian, 30/10/1970, p.10) The play explores the deceit that is necessary to sustain many marriages; this is the case in wider society too, as witness the woman at the party's ironic words to Anna: "Your marriage is the only one I know that's happy".

Artifice and ritual are all in this cold world: Anna's wig, shopping-centre escalators, squash between work colleagues, the banal phrase "Be Seeing You" - possibly used as a nod to The Prisoner. This sense of existence as formulaic chimes with Alan Sharp's 'The Long Distance Piano Player' - though this play has a stronger focus on relationships as ritualistic compared with the earlier play's focus on work and 'leisure'.

The goldfish bowl metaphor is extremely laboured, and 'The Lie' does at times resemble that rather po-faced film, The Pumpkin Eater (1964), with its middlebrow straining after profundity. Such as with Joss Ackland's aspiring writer, babbling on about 'a great silence', 'the approaching twilight' and 'the big lie'; who is predictably enough unable to come to terms with his homosexuality. He appears in one overwrought scene with Anna near the start of the play, never to re-appear.

And yet, there is real pain and feeling in the performances from Finlay and Jones, who make this a domestic drama with more than just a surface iciness. Finlay does a superb essay of middle-class reverse and evasion in his "I'm trying to communicate..." Jones is epically glum and glacial as Anna, a lady who is well connected and guaranteed a 'tax-free grant' to travel on her academic business. These are people jaded with success in their jobs and an inability to touch or talk in their relationship.

There are attempts at rooting the play in 1970 Britain: the play is set around Easter and the General Election is 'coming', the result of which may have a bearing on which building projects get the go-ahead. A Wednesday edtion of The Guardian is visible - with the headline: 'VIETNAM MASSACRES - Trial verdict expected today'. A 'Wonderful! Radio One!' jingle mingles and blurs with Wilkinson's thoughtful vibraphone music. There is a 'man from the ministry' on the way in Firth's workplace. Firth himself is an architect, in what was an era of architectural visionaries and crooks. Finlay cuts a Michael Rimmer-esque figure in immaculate, pin-striped suit, though this TV-play is as far away in tone as possible from that irrelevant film satire of the same year - see my 19/05/2010 review of that here. We are never really shown Firth doing any work, tellingly.

Finlay is fine casting; his distinctly cadaverous features suiting this showroom dummy of a man - no surprise, perhaps, that Banks-Smith misremembered his character name as Frank! The Farnworth-born actor is a malevolent force of nature in so much British television of the past five decades: as the glowering father in Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1976) and Dylan Moran's bête noire in the underrated sitcom How Do You Want Me? (1998-99). He would surely have made a good Heathcliff.

Alan Bridges was a fairly prolific television director, who helmed six Wednesday Plays (including David Mercer's 'On the Eve of Publication', TX. 27/11/1968, which is said to be excellent) and further Play for Todays after this. He also went on to make films, such as the flawed but interesting L.P. Hartley adaptation, The Hireling (1973) - also featuring Marc Wilkinson's music - and The Shooting Party (1984) with James Mason and Edward Fox.

The large cast is peopled by the reliable likes of Alan Rowe, Ronald Leigh-Hunt, Annette Crosbie and that voice of Victorian officiousness, John Nettleton. Richard O'Sullivan, so memorable as the tortured voice of conscience in 'The Connoisseur', is subdued as the walking-suit Whiteley. Noel Coleman and Terence Bayler are re-united after their sterling performances as army officers in the World War I zone within Dr Who's 'The War Games' serial. A year after General Smythe, Coleman's formidable sideboards are still very much intact - and he makes an imposing mannequin amidst the others at the bourgeois party.

Ultimately, this is another imperfect early Play for Today - rather predictable in its depiction of well-to-do middle-class people going through the motions, not helped by an indifferent translation of the dialogue from Swedish to English. However, the core performances ensure that these scenes of marriage do register an impact; as Banks-Smith says of its context as television: 'These things are particularly painful and relevant in the living room'. I cannot pretend that 'The Lie' enthralled me in the same way that his films have, but it is worth a viewing for anyone who cannot get enough of Swedish gloom. And for fans of Frank Finlay, who will delight in the darkness.

Another week at BFI Southbank

2011-04-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

(I must state at this point that I originally intended to write a piece here inspired by my viewing, at BFI Southbank on 21st March, of Alan Plater's Doggin' Around (1994) and Short Back and Sides (1977). It would have dealt with, among much else, the political and cultural flux in which I lived my every moment on the cusp of my fourteenth birthday, the meaning and ultimate failure of the post-war dreams of urban reconstruction, humanism and rugby league. Hyper-carmodism, in other words. I did not write it largely because I was too exhausted, both mentally and physically, and overwhelmed by my experiences; it would have taken too much out of me to get it out. Hopefully these latest BFI impressions will be some kind of compensation for those who would have enjoyed the above aborted piece.)

Rumer Godden (1907-1998) - essentially a storyteller, but very close to the front rank of those - lived the sort of life that I, in my more conservative moments, would have quite liked to live. A child of the later years of the Raj, who determined to break away from the harsh and paranoid separation of her tribe from the "natives" and seemingly could sense the change coming some time before the tide became irresistible - while the dancing school she ran in her early life may seem paternalistic today, it was then seen as daring for children of colonial families to engage with actual Indians, to attempt to meet them on equal cultural terms, in such a way. But her storyteller's approach had a fatal flaw, very similar to that of the Penelope Houston school of film criticism. While her style and that of Renoir fils were a perfect fit, and made The River stand out as one of the latter's most sensitive and fulfilling works, the bold, fearless anti-realism of Powell and Pressburger was a step out of the English tradition too far. She never recanted her dislike for their extraordinary version of Black Narcissus - a middlebrow hack such as Lewis Gilbert, with his wholly un-directed (by any even vaguely auteurist definition of the director) version of The Greengage Summer, was far more to her taste.

Kizzy, a 1976 BBC children's serial based on her 1972 novel The Diddakoi now available in the Mediatheque, shows many of the strengths and weaknesses both of her own professional craftsmanship and the similar virtues of BBC children's drama at that time. There is no doubt that it shows a sensitivity and awareness of the life of the British Romany community that even many supposedly tolerant left-leaning writers have often found beyond them (and still do today - think of the way, so typical of the cultural self-flagellation that gives the Left a bad name, that latterday BBC children's programmes revert to tried-and-tested allusions to clothes pegs and heather when they would never dream of using the equivalent stereotypes for any other minority or ethnic group, and of an otherwise impeccably left-wing journalist shamelessly using the word "gyppo" and suggesting that Tony Martin had the right idea).

Like much other popular art of its time, it expresses a sense of traditions and ways of life crumbling - the lead character's "grandmother" (actually further away in the family line), supposedly 100 years old, said at the start by her younger Romany relatives, ready to go "in brick", to be living in a world that was already gone, and inevitably dying in the second episode. Allusions are made to those, in the wake of the '60s, who'd taken to travelling and given those who had always lived that way a bad name. The petty-minded Little Englander bigotry of some in the village community, and its resident busybody who can never hide her obsessive desire to control and censure, is portrayed with clear disapproval, however consensual and centrist (and thus by that time being attacked from both extremes), and the sheer cruelty of young children (so often ignored in sentimental portrayals essentially aimed at adults, typified by the "family drama" which has largely supplanted series like this) is not ignored or hidden.

The paternalistically tolerant One Nation Tory retired admiral who does so much to make Kizzy feel safe and secure in the wider world - similar in some ways to Desmond Llewelyn's Colonel in Follyfoot - is himself brought into a wider world by his experiences; where at first he does not allow women in his house, he eventually marries the woman who has subsequently taken Kizzy in (when, of course, it could have been and in the 1970s frequently would have been much worse - the dark shadow of a children's home is raised but, probably inevitably considering its post-Blue Peter slot, avoided; the treatment she could well have received in such a place at that time is the sort of thing none of us want to think about, until the time comes when we have to). Still unrealistic in her grasp of life beyond the dwindling world in which she had spent her early childhood, she has poured paraffin over her own garden fire (in a manner momentarily reminiscent of Birdie in Godden's The Dolls' House, whose TV adaptation was the last significant thing either Oliver Postgate or Kaye Webb were involved with, dancing in the flames where she is about to give her life), in hope that it could equal the magnificence of the Guy Fawkes display over the wall, and in the process almost killed her adoptive mother. But the girls who have previously abused Kizzy so aggressively - to the point where they caused serious injury, which as so often in this sort of story has been the turning point - display heroism which confirms their conversion to the cause of consensus society, and it ends with Kizzy and her adoptive parents in the big house, having won over the village and shown that inter-class collaboration and reconciliation can conquer all the prejudice that so often lies behind the myth of the "close-knit community".

This, inevitably, seems unnaturally rose-tinted and quasi-feudal in its organisation of social perfection compared to the advances ITV were making in children's drama at the time, and indeed to Alan Plater and Alex Glasgow's reinvention of the originally Tory wet text of Flambards, and it makes you wonder what would have happened to Kizzy - whose birthday, which in a sign of Butskellite inter-class unity she takes (not knowing her own) from one of the Admiral's ancestors whose name may have inspired hers, is two months after David Cameron's - in the 1980s, when the world of benevolent admirals that has given her a platform of security until she can take to the road again had become utterly defenceless against Kelvin Mackenzie and his vicious bigotry against all travellers of whichever personal history and ethnic origin. How could she have coped when the walls of this village were breached by something even nastier and cruder than the net-curtain-twitching taunts she has already had to face, because not counterbalanced by a benevolent establishment acceptance of the Attlee settlement?

A 2011 adult viewer cannot but wonder (in the same way that the end of Pamela Brown's astonishing 1972 novel Summer is a Festival - the moment where the writer of The Swish of the Curtain comprehensively explodes her own myths and evokes a shire England battered by Bolan and Bowie and fearing Heath and Barber with remarkably incisive accuracy - inevitably makes me wonder what the lead character would do once she'd got off the train she'd jumped on even when it was moving, out into the London netherworld of Al Stewart's "Apple Cider Re-constitution", itself one of the many moments when British songwriters of the pre-neoliberal age tried so hard to imitate the ways and norms of American music that they inadvertently created something entirely new, getting it wrong so they could get it right, and then who knows? Sloane Square or Greenham Common? Take Three Women or Crystal Gazing?). But whatever the weaknesses of what Kingsley Amis (and there's someone whose relationship to the politics of the 1970s could sustain at least one essay in itself) acknowledged in his praise of the book to be its almost fairytale ending, Kizzy is well worth seeing, and is certainly a fine example of classicism in BBC children's drama, a mirror in microcosm of the literary Great Tradition.

My previous post touched on Central Television's exploration of a certain strain of socio-realist drama, which brought some kind of identity and cultural self-determination to the English Midlands at a real low point in their self-esteem and self-regard (from the Nottinghamshire coalfield, alienated from the Scargillite heartlands and eventually having to face the fact that its attempt to reconcile with the Thatcher government had been an utter failure, so ideologically determined was it to get its revenge for 1974, to Birmingham, at that point a standing joke in the London-based media and the most public face of '60s redevelopment going very, very wrong in the '80s). In terms of drama aimed at young people - especially in Dramarama and the schools series Starting Out - much work on that front was done by the producer Geoff Husson, who eventually formed his own production company which took full advantage of the brief island between the old over-protection finally ebbing away and the market removing such things for other reasons, i.e. between one kind of Toryism and another. While one of the two Husson productions shown this past week, In the Pink (the very last Dramarama from the summer of 1989), was merely a well-made issue-led piece, the 1987 production The Halt - wholly different in specific techniques from the contemporaneous Peter, but with a similar look (remarkably cold and austere for something so late, showing how much this was an era of "Two Nations", whose only ever comparative reversal between 1997 and 2010 the Cameronite view of Britain is sufficiently extreme as to see as crypto-Communist). A timeslip one-off, it makes superb use of the vague separation from normal time of an isolated railway station, and is so atmospheric and in touch with real life and the uncontained, uncontrolled nature of the, by then, wholly disorganised working class (which separates it from the Ghost Box axis very effectively) as to wholly offset its hints at mere moralising.

But my most telling experience of the week must have been The Connoisseur, a 1966 Wednesday Play (transmitted while the current Prime Minister was in the womb) which revealed the essentially sadistic and brutal nature of so many elite schools at that time, at a moment when - if anything - they became more paranoid and determined to cling to their insular cruelty out of fear that Labour might use their electoral remit to eliminate them altogether. In its observance of the precise words, gestures and behaviours of such institutions, it had the authentic stamp of genuine experience - not surprisingly so because both its writer, Hugo Charteris, and the strand's then script editor, David Benedictus, were themselves Old Etonians.

Every detail was uncannily evocative of its moment, from the campaigning, popular tabloid (clearly modelled on the Daily Mirror that had room to thrive in pre-Murdoch Britain) for which the sensitive, uneasy house captain - son of the school's chaplain and pretty much trained for the cloth from birth - has written an article attacking the school's hypocrisy, archaic curriculum and endemic culture of sexual abuse, to the copies of Private Eye, radical in some eyes but ultimately the Establishment on its days off, and for all its bravery in investigative journalism as uneasy with the overturning of cultural hierarchies and assumptions which lay at the heart of the decade's popular culture as the hierarchy of the school itself. As the house captain, Richard O'Sullivan gave a performance which made me regret anew his later miring in false and deluded sitcoms, aware that the system is rotten, but unable to admit that he was also sexually attracted to the young choirboy lusted after by the young aristocrat Ballantyne (Ian Ogilvy showing all the vicious anti-humanism reconstituted, in pop-friendly form, within the modern Conservative Party), and finally bought off by membership of the school's elite club, clearly modelled on Eton's original incarnation of Pop. Derek Francis gave a chillingly accurate performance as a housemaster utterly refusing to recognise what was happening around him, and Rosalie Crutchley - so dependable for so long, so undervalued - showed the sensitivity hidden within her own class, and her own archetype, as the house captain's mother.

Most significant of all, perhaps, was a moment where it became clear that Charteris had a far greater understanding of the true cultural politics of the Rolling Stones than most people on all cultural and political sides had at the time. The stereotypical assumption would have been for the "sensitive" boy portrayed in a positive light to identify with Jagger's howls of supposed alienation, and for the aristocratic sadists portrayed in a negative light to disapprove. But here we have the arrogant sons of privilege who, in the house captain's words, have turned the school into a brothel, loudly and abusively singing "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Such was the potency and strength of the Jagger myth at the time - and the related myth of offshore radio as some kind of equivalent of East European samizdata, rather than the traditional elite exploiting pop out of sheer expediency - that this alone shows a rare bravery and independence of thought on Charteris's part.

While the song, inspired by the disenchantment of Jagger's experiences of the real, crudely acquisitive America that was far more prevalent than the imagined land of rebellion and R&B cool which he had imagined before he could have hoped to actually see it in the flesh, obviously shows an awareness that the blandishments of capitalism - then so much more advanced there than here - were essentially lies, it also reveals an appalled, compulsive fascination with the norms of a neoliberal society; Jagger could not keep away, because he could imagine no alternative beyond the scarcity and isolation of his early childhood. He is repulsed at the methods used to sell Coca-Cola, but is not repulsed by the fact of Coca-Cola itself, in isolation from its marketing and advertising, as he is by the fact of Woolton pie or snoek, which is the only alternative he can imagine (not, I suspect, being much aware of the methods of social democracy which had grown over a long period in Scandinavia). Where Charteris's use of the song stands out is that many left-leaning playwrights at the time who had turned away from their own privileged backgrounds would have thought that the song genuinely heralded a rejection of a supposedly over-capitalist British state and a new age of egalitarianism, his awareness that the mass of young conformists, up to and including aristocratic sadists, could and would routinely consume it on a purely visceral level, without any thought of its deeper meaning, anticipates what the Stones were ultimately to mean in the reconstitution of deep-rooted privilege. I do not think, really, that I need to mention Tony Blair here. Charteris's politically predictive use of "Satisfaction" is particularly impressive considering that it was more than a year before the World in Action interview and William Rees-Mogg's realisation that Jagger's politics were "straight John Stuart Mill" (and thus emblematic of the main tendency excluded from the mainstream at the time and allowed back in with a vengeance in the 1980s); could it be, perhaps, that he could sense a residual Butskellism, a gratefulness to the enabling state, within the Beatles and could clearly tell that Jagger, from his impeccably Home Counties Tory background, had no such thing within his life and immediate experience?

It was, without doubt, a week of stimulation. By the time I next get the chance, we will know whether the forces of reaction have trapped British politics in its current anti-human impairment for the foreseeable future, or whether we have chosen the closest thing possible to genuine reconstruction. My visits to BFI Southbank frequently explore past attempted reconstructions, and shed some light on the reasons for their ultimate failure. There has rarely been a better time for us to keep such failings in our mind, and do all we can to make a greater, more profound failing than any in the past comparatively less likely.

Uncle Jim, Uncle Lew, the Muppets and social democracy

2011-04-16T18:14:00.000-07:00

I have written extensively elsewhere of the importance of ATV - the most problematic from a social democratic perspective, because wariest of the consensus of limited capitalism within which it had, unwillingly, to operate, of the ITV companies of the network's first quarter-century - in making the transition from the culture of the British Empire to the culture of the undeclared American one far smoother and easier to take for older British people at the time than it would have been otherwise.

The single most important show in this process in the late 1950s and early 1960s was Sunday Night at the London Palladium, simultaneously the last repository of the British music hall where the Crazy Gang made their final appearance together, and the platform through which Buddy Holly and the Beatles defined their impact, and where the Stones' attack on the certainties of the post-war state found its most perfect definition. But perhaps most fascinating in this context are the strong echoes of the music hall in the format of The Muppet Show - globally, probably Lew Grade's biggest success of all, even though it was made at a time when he had been forced to step down from day-to-day control of ATV by the IBA and when the social-democratic establishment was already closing in on the company, soon to force it to reform into a wholly Midlands-based company with quite different aims - and specifically the fact that, in the early weeks of 1978, the Muppets were in the Top 20 with their version of "Waiting at the Church".

The plot thickens. In the TV Times of 27 January-2 February 1979 - the same issue with Flambards on the cover - the then Prime Minister, in an interview seemingly conducted towards the end of the previous year so utterly inimical to the events of that moment, and weirdly predictive of the distortion of the political process which would do so much damage to another Labour Prime Minister who should have called an autumn election when he had the chance, expresses his appreciation and enjoyment of The Muppet Show. Infamously, he had heralded his fatal postponement of the general election at the TUC conference the previous September by singing the very same song, in a gesture which seems - history has given it this status, however little he could have imagined it - both to end one era (dignified statesmanlike politics, a cross-party agreement on the limiting of capitalism so as to maintain social cohesion and stability) and fire the starting gun on another (the reduction of politics to symbols, gestures, songs). Could it be, perhaps, that it was the Muppets' rendition that had placed the song back in his mind, and convinced him that it might, somehow, be a good idea?

The idea that there might have been some kind of connection between such an omnipresently successful - despite rather than because of the system under which it was created - product of British television as global/mid-Atlantic powerhouse rather than internal public service, and the political decision which opened the floodgates for the lifting of those restrictions on global capitalism which had dogged Lew Grade for so long, is one of the many powerful ironies of those years (if, that is, there is a connection; there may not be, I just like to imagine so). The cultural shame and embarrassment - obviously embedded with a nasty, latent anti-Semitism when held in some Tory circles, but rooted in a basically admirable, however incompatible with the pop-cultural creativity that exploded in Britain in the 1960s & 70s, belief in public-spiritedness and universal obligation when held by Labour supporters - which had been felt across the board about the presence of a company like ATV, trying desperately to juggle the international role it aspired towards with the regional role it had to fit within, in retrospect began to die the moment the nation heard that there would be no general election at this time.

The political legacy of what happened next is defined by the fact that it happened in the first, pre-Falklands years of the Thatcher government, when the ideologues were still struggling to stamp their absolute authority and the less fanatical "wets" still had a stake in the Cabinet. The collapse of the Grade empire due to the attentions of the IBA on one side of the business and the disaster of Raise the Titanic on the other (ITC having moved into films in the later '70s hoping for greater success in a less regulated area, only to be destroyed by the same rules of the market that have undermined so many latterday Tory heroes, not least Bruce Gyngell of Thatcher's own ideal ITV company) was one of two downfalls of buccaneering capitalists in the very early 1980s (the other being the collapse of Laker Airways, at least in part due to the machinations of the still-nationalised British Airways, in the early weeks of 1982) which convinced the forces of Thatcherism that they needed to take absolute control of the party and push out those who still took "conservative" comparatively literally. There is, in fact, a sense in which ATV and ITC died so that Murdoch and Sky could live.

There is no doubt that the Grades fitted perfectly one of the two main anti-Semitic stereotypes, and the Bernsteins the other; obviously, all those who adhered to such stereotypes, however subconsciously and unthinkingly, epitomised the lies and delusions on which Britain was living at the pre-ITV, pre-Suez, pre-Elvis moment, and Britain in 1955/6 undoubtedly needed a bit of what the Grades had to offer, "vulgar", "rootless" capitalism. It just needed the tendencies demonised by old-school Tories as "Jewish Bolshevism" more. In terms of being Conservative without being "Tory" in the then still commonly identifiable cultural sense, with its echoes of backwoodsmen and Victorian diehards, and also calling for an Establishment separated from the old Foreign Office Arabism, the Grade dynasty played a crucial role in the long-term creation of Thatcherism (this is the sense in which Death of a Princess was, perversely, less of a break from the earlier incarnation of ATV than it seemed at the time).

The fact that Central were, only twelve years after coming into being, absorbed by Carlton - capitalism at its absolute crudest, with no hint of the genuine love and enjoyment and care that defined even ATV and ITC's more mediocre efforts - sums up precisely how this story ended. In the brief island between, Central - while still continuing the tradition of IBA-baiting with The Price is Right - also defined their own territory in terms of drama (helped massively, in terms of opening up new ground in the portrayal and stimulation of young people, by Lewis Rudd and Geoff Husson, of whom more soon), and brought a genuine flavour of the Midlands to British television in a way nobody before or since has really shown the desire or inclination to do. The story of ITV in the Midlands begins and ends with out-and-out capitalism, by the end devoid of any of its fresher, more exciting qualities by having become a fat, rotten establishment culture. What interests me most, though, is what happened because it had to happen under a mixed economy, and which would probably not have happened under the neoliberal misinterpretation of freedom. For a powerful depiction of a class lost and isolated amid Thatcherism - the children of the old respectable working class, seeing their parents' routes to suburban respectability closed off and reduced to sheer nihilism, with even the land where the values of "your philosopher Keynes" were surviving only an unattainable mirage in the end - check this for a start. And remember how and why it was able to happen, and how and why it couldn't happen now.

Excuse me if I don't think The Persuaders or The Champions stand any kind of comparison. Out-and-out capitalism was exciting once. But here, now, it can never be again. The Grades, undoubtedly, did much of value in British mass culture in a particular place and time. But their myth is the same myth as that cherished by the offshore radio fanboys, the Jim Slater euologisers, the Jagger cultists (who Peter Hitchens would almost be right about if only he admitted that their crime is neoliberalism rather than socialism), and in the age when a cruder, much less well-made and well-constructed version of what they represented represents the cultural model for Old Etonian Tories rather than anything to be wary of, it has to be opposed. If only Jim Callaghan could have seen that, back in the first week of September 1978.

Desert Island Discs archive

2011-04-02T03:01:00.000-07:00

Not television of course, but a valuable archive of a radio series with true longevity - now in its sixty-ninth year. One of those British institutions, along with Test Match Special and The Shipping Forecast that one cannot imagine not being there on BBC Radio 4.

You can listen to and download - or at least read - the selections of some crucial players in British television; including, of course, profoundly bad influences. Here are some interesting ones:

Sir Hugh Greene
John Freeman
Lew Grade
David Frost
Anthony Howard
Robin Day
Morecambe and Wise
Dr Jacob Bronowski
David Attenborough
Oliver Postgate
John Pilger
Armando Iannucci
Stephen Fry
David Mitchell

10 O'Clock Live (Channel 4, 24/03/2011)

2011-03-30T15:31:00.000-07:00

10 O'Clock Live is now in its tenth week; it is an attempt to make an up-to-the-minute satirical comedy, with a reasonably well selected team of participants. Whilst this is nominally a review of last Thursday's instalment, I have been watching this over a few weeks, so references may cover previous episodes.

The problem for me is not that it is left-wing - which it is, in a lukewarm Guardianista manner - but that it is all so predictable. Brooker's bits are very much News Wipe-lite, lacking the depth of his analysis on that fine BBC4 programme.

His recent BBC2 series, How TV Ruined Your Life, was satisfactory but tended to use very obvious clips. It worked best when he focused on the lifestyle dreams peddled by television, and the illusory view it gives of 'romance'; the public information films episode trod over very old ground without shedding much new light.

Lauren Laverne is okay, acting as a sort of likeably perky straight-woman to the others. She is rarely funny but does make some generally sensible, earnest contributions: the one on public libraries, particularly. As with any thinking and feeling person raised in Sunderland in the 1980s, she is anti-Tory and these views clearly come across. Far better her than Daisy Donovan.

Jimmy Carr is, well, Jimmy Carr - which is to say, smugly 'deadpan'. His contributions vary from the forgettable, to the inconsequential to the crass (making light of postal workers' redundancies). In Carr-world, puns are the height of wit and when the writers do give him some political lines his delivery lacks understanding and conviction. His portrayal of George Osborne the 'toff' is utterly toothless - missing the point and diverting the audience from the real nature of these Tories.

David Mitchell, however, has no end of conviction and displays more intelligence and passion than anyone else in the programme. He handles the largely serious interview sections well, mixing pointed, relevant questions with some barbed asides that are rather less cynical than Paxman's. He makes some sterling comments on housing, debunking the 5-years-out-of-date lifestyle 'aspirations' peddled by the Tory MP Grant Shapps: "Our houses are massively overvalued [....] Shouldn't we get rid of this bloody ladder!?"

Mitchell is excellent in highlighting the absurdity of Osborne's budget proposals, putting public money towards propping up house prices at their current 'value' - encouraging first-time buyers to borrow beyond their means. Politician Shapps is every bit the vacuous television property-porn salesman, an archetype that should be as popularly loathed as the reckless banker:

'People wanna get a foot on the ladder'

He also has Shapps squirming over the issue of elite public schools and their charitable status - effectively receiving a subsidy from the state. His "Eton College is taking the piss" receives gratifyingly loud applause from the seemingly 20-30-something audience. Clearly the Tories will have to face these charges now that they are in power, defending an iniquitous status quo (shamefully unchallenged by the Blair or Brown's Labour Party).

For the self-styled libertarian Tory James Delingpole to describe the programme as 'Maoist re-education' is palpably absurd. So much of the satire, Mitchell's interviews and pieces-to-camera notwithstanding, is relatively apolitical and lacking in bite; it is rather conservative television in how little it uses the format, with its solo-comedian spots and the spartanly garish sets. It would benefit from a more varied approach to its comedy: sketches, songs. Delingpole is wrong that there is no serious debate; in the interview and panel sequences, there is a reasonably high standard of debate - with guests who span the political spectrum. If it tends towards a left-of-centre perspective, this might be seen as a necessary counterbalance to the overwhelming right-wing dominance of the newspaper market - and the BBC, which, lest we forget, employs such left-wing firebrands as Nick Robinson and Andrew Neil.

This show is actually quite valuable in bringing some sober debate on issues like Libya and housing to a young audience. The Libya debate with Rory Stewart was a case in point, managing to convey many different perspectives on a complex issue - see alo the immigration debate that involved Mehdi Hasan. 10O'CL works less well as comedy, however; one can only imagine the greater depths that would be explored by a Stewart Lee. Indeed, this team of performers and writers seem unable to reach the incisive depths and vitality of Chris Morris or Armando Iannucci. Those 1960s-born satirists probe a lot deeper into the human condition and power than the following generation does here.

On balance, it is better that 10 O'Clock Live is being broadcast than not being broadcast, but there are so many missed opportunities that one is left disappointed. It should be urgent and essential viewing, but is only occasionally so. It is a significant advance on Channel 4's ghastly essay in anti-civilisation, The 11 O'Clock Show, but nowhere near the sort of satirical genius of The Day Today or even The Friday Night Armistice.