Culturally Constipated

There’s a fun article here in today’s Guardian entitled “The DVR fodder you'll never watch” by Paul McInnes – essentially how we are all now filling up DVRs “with programmes that sound unmissable when they're recorded but are somehow all too avoidable when it comes to actually watching them.” I for one would not be without my beloved and strangely sexy SkyPlus, but the problem of course is finding the time to watch the myriad amount of programmes that I record on it. The last time I checked it was about 20% free, which means I’m going to have to start watching a lot of stuff pretty damn soon. Stuff like:

Hart to Hart: Two Harts in 3/4 Time: recorded for me as a joke (probably because I do a passable impression of their cigar chomping sidekick Max: (I take care of them, which ain't easy 'cause when they met, it was MOIDER!)), but for some reason I can’t bring myself to delete it.

Shooting Stars Christmas Special: I saw the hour long ‘documentary’ that preceded this and was distinctly underwhelmed, so this looks like half an hour of prime time TV horseshit that’s going to sit there forever, unwatched and unloved.

The Prisoner: Joe Pasquale: Joe somehow finds himself in a South American jail, which sounds fair enough I guess (I will never, ever watch this).

Affinity: looks excellent by the way, and another Sarah Waters adaptation, so it’s got a lot going for it. Problem is: it’s 121 minutes long! Trousers! I haven’t got time for that. However, one advantage with SkyPlus is that you can watch at slightly faster than normal speed, which means you can save yourself about 20 minutes. Result! (Incidentally, Pan’s Labyrinth is a great film, but only when played at slightly faster than normal sapeed).

Time to Leave: a French film directed by Francois Ozon, about a gay Parisian photographer diagnosed with a fatal tumour. Sheesh. I think I’ll put off watching this until my Seasonal Affective Disorder is over and done with for another year. Either that, or tag team it with Hart to Hart for counterpoint.

The Getaway: it seems incredible, but I’ve never seen this. And how can you go wrong with two monumental talents like Jim Thompson and Walter Hill? And Slim Pickens is in it! Zoiks!

Louis Theroux: Law and Disorder in Johannesburg: I saw the first one (shot in Philadelphia), so it seemed sensible to record the second. However, there’s only so much of Louis asking the same inane question over and over again (“Why won’t you speak to the police?”) that I can take.

If I haven’t watched any of these by the end of the month, they’re getting deleted (with the exception of Hart to Hart (probably)). As far as New Year resolutions go, that’s about as good as I get.

Christmas TV Lowlights

At the best of times, my television viewing is random – and Christmas is no exception. Even when broadcasters unleash their promotional battering rams of endless trailers, I just simply forget to watch (it’s the same when my wife wants me to tape her something – she often has to physically write the name of the programme on my hand in felt tip, and even then I usually forget, leading to many a recriminatory bloodbath). Spooks? Caught the first one, forgot about the other six. Wallander? Two out of three wasn’t bad, I thought (forgot about the last one). Doctor Who? Clean forgot. Wallace and Gromit? Nope, sorry. Britannia High? No comment (was I hallucinating when I saw the trailer?). Even with the crazy voodoo magic of SkyPlus with its series links, I forget to record stuff all the time.

All this means is that when I do sit down and watch something, I often end up watching stuff that I wouldn’t choose to watch in a million years as all the good stuff has just passed me by. So, here are a few examples of what I’ve ended up watching over Christmas:

Tom Chambers’s expression on Strictly Come Dancing: the definition of Christmas cheese (that said, I’ve seen bits of cheese that can act better than Tom Chambers).

Murder She Wrote – The Celtic Riddle: the very definition of random TV. Guaranteed, when you switch on the TV and you can’t find anything to watch an episode of Murder She Wrote will be on (either that or Diagnosis Murder, which seems to be some sort of job creation scheme for the Van Dyke family). There’s something strangely fascinating/watchable about Angela Lansbury, inasmuch as she doesn’t do subtle. It’s all mugging, pantomime moves and SUDDEN REALISATIONS. The added bonus with The Celtic Riddle is that it’s set in Ireland – which means a whole skip full of comedy Irish accents! Hooray! Nothing cheers me up more. However, when Lansbury (unintentionally) weighs in with the comedy accent, you know you’re in trouble. Time for the adverts:

That Tractor advert: every year at this time, about a thousand ‘part works’ are unleashed upon the unsuspecting British public who had no inkling that what they really need in their lives is a magazine about farming with a model tractor attached. I mean, the countryside is great, but it’s nothing that a bit of concrete and the odd NCP couldn’t sort out (what exactly are you supposed to do with two dozen miniature tractors? Open a miniature farm?).

Finding Neverland: am I the only person in Christendom who finds this film just downright disturbing? In the same way that animated squirrels freak me out, films about Victorian authors with peculiar notions about childhood tend to give me the screaming ab-dabs. That said, it does feature Johnny Depp doing another comedy accent (Scottish this time), so it’s not all bad.

And er, that’s it. Having to deal simultaneously with a crap memory and manically depressed relatives on Boxing Day (something to do with Indy 4, the poor saps) rather put paid to a lot of my viewing this year. However, one series I did manage to record was Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, which contains a clip featuring Andy Nyman talking about the Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson – along with The Great Rupert, this has to count as the most disturbing (and funniest) TV I’ve seen this year (watch in wonder as Albert Herrmann’s ear falls off and Mr Nyman’s near hysteria about halfway through).

(Sorry, I seem completely incapable of adding this clip, so watch it here - you won't be disappointed).

On reflection, I seem to have spent the whole of Christmas in a permanent state of freak out. To immediately remedy this, I’m off to watch Black Christmas, so pip pip.

Dead Good

Contains spoilers for Dead Set, Hammer House of Horror

Over the last ten days or so I’ve been catching up with various episodes from the Hammer House of Horror series currently airing over on ITV3 – and what a treat they are. The three I’ve caught so far – Charlie Boy, The Thirteenth Reunion and Silent Scream (see here for further details on the series) – have been grim, desolate fun (although they may look a little hokey by modern standards). However, the one thing that these three episodes have in common is that they are all unremittingly bleak, which is a quality I don’t think you see often enough in modern horror.

A little while back I read something (probably on a blog somewhere, I forget) that suggested that all narratives needed to possess a certain degree of hope to make them meaningful and worthwhile experiences, as if drama is some sort of route to 'self-improvement' – this is something that the Hammer House of Horror holds no truck with whatsoever. Each episode ends on a decidedly downbeat note, where hope is taken outside and given a good kicking on the basis that that is where true horror lies: to witness the protagonist of Charlie Boy die through no real fault of his own is both disturbing and unsettling, which is surely what any respectable horror narrative should be aiming for. The Hammer series does this with a frightening regularity, and mostly without any unnecessary gore (which usually isn’t scary in the slightest).

One of my favourite films is My Little Eye, which has an ending so bleak that it made me feel physically unwell – which I think is a good thing. Throw in Session 9 and Blair Witch, and you have a triumvirate of some of the bleakest, most morbid films ever made (is it simply a coincidence that all three films are all shot on video? Maybe there’s something about the everyday, ‘homemade’ nature of the medium that makes these films genuinely unsettling).

So with these films in mind, it gives me great pleasure to announce that bleak is back with a vengeance, in the shape of the Charlie Brooker penned Dead Set, showing on E4 at the moment (last episode tonight). The pilot episode was terrific: unnerving and, above all else, genuinely frightening (again, shot mostly on digital video by the look of things). Like the Hammer House of Horror, Dead Set’s milieu is contemporary Britain, a recognisable scenario to anyone who’s seen more than ten minutes of Big Brother. However, Dead Set doesn’t go out of its way to satirise reality TV – if you’re looking for satire, then no doubt you’ll find it, but there’s more to Dead Set than simply putting the boot into Big Brother and its ilk. Even before the zombies show up (sprinting this way and that in true 28 Days Later stylee), the studio setting is bleak enough: a kind of claustrophobic maze where stressed out producers bark orders at interns, who are only too happy to be involved in the subterranean hell of TV production.

Also, Brooker seems to have got the tone just right – in today’s Guardian, Anne Billson says this:

Because horror movies tend to approach their themes more obliquely than other genres, they often succeed in getting under our skin where more self-consciously "serious" mainstream treatments of contemporary issues fail to cause a dent. Horror films draw on metaphors that are not polished and hermetically sealed, but misshapen or amorphous, like the monsters themselves, which leaves all the more room for individuals to interpret them on a personal level.

Brooker understands this all too well, and that’s what makes Dead Set such powerful viewing. Its narrative doesn’t labour the point with regards to reality TV, but at its core there’s something dark, twisted and nihilistic: witness the treatment of Davina McCall. Rather sportingly, Davina gets bitten in the throat early on by a member of the undead, and spends the first two episodes banging her head unthinkingly on a door in an attempt to get at Patrick the producer. Of course there‘s a certain glee in doing this to a well known TV celebrity, but at the same time, Brooker uses Davina’s familiarity to paint something bleak and ultimately hopeless. Hope be damned - when TV is as good as this, who needs it?

Guilty Pleasures, Part 6 - 60 Minute Makeover

Terri Dwyer (the posh bird of Hollyoaks fame) presents a show on daytime TV entitled 60 Minute Makeover*, which does exactly what it says on the tin: a swarm of builders, painters, decorators, chippies and sparkies (and that bloke from Big Brother) descend upon a house deserving of a little interior design TV magic. The property on Thursday’s show looked like an MI5 safe house; by the time the team had finished, it looked like Joe 90’s crash pad, all dizzying optic wallpaper and retina scorching fluorescence.

Ordinarily, I try and avoid shows like this as they’re all essentially the same: moving wallpaper, I suppose you’d call it. However, what made Thursday’s edition so riveting was that the recipient of the makeover (Umar) had absolutely no idea who Terri Dwyer was or what the hell the show was all about. Terri and her enormous team greeted Umar with a huge banner that screamed ’60 Minute Makeover’ in foot high letters. As Terri gaily proclaimed what they’d all been doing with themselves for the past hour, Umar looked completely baffled: “It’s a programme, right?” he said, wondering who the hell all these people with the cheesy grins gathering round him were. Even when he was treated to a tour of his own made over house he looked as if he’d just stumbled out of a war zone.

Perhaps we are now getting to the point where there are simply too many celebrities. Half the point of a show such as 60MM (which sounds like a sequel to 8MM) is that there should be at least some flicker of recognition as the recipient realises they’ve been ‘had’: much hilarity and realisation ensues. In the good old days of Changing Rooms, this was a given. Nowadays, nobody has a clue who these presenters are.

However, watching good people like Umar struggle to figure out what the devil is going on and who the hell Terri Dwyer is is superb entertainment in my book; it’s similar to the feeling I get when I inadvertently catch CelebAir – I mean, Michelle Marsh? Dan O’Connor? Amy Lamé? Who are these people? Maybe I need to start watching more daytime TV to catch up.
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*Note to self: for Christ’s sake, stop watching so much daytime TV.

Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Length

I’m not sure if I like Silent Witness or not. For the most part, it’s the older brother of Bonekickers, inasmuch as it spins stories out of a seemingly sedentary occupation. Pathology and archaeology both deal (mostly) with the dead, and there’s your challenge: how do you make a drama where your plot is partially driven by people who can’t answer back? Bonekickers continually wrestled with this question, and didn’t altogether do a massively convincing job (mostly because it seemed unsure as to what it wanted to be: teatime romp, or post-watershed ‘issue’ drama). Silent Witness is more assured, as it figured this question out a long time ago. Rather than simply popping up to proclaim foul play and chewing on the obligatory pathologist’s sandwich, Dr Leo Dalton’s team usually find themselves right in the centre of the action – mostly due to the addition of the hard-nosed, no-nonsense copper, DI McKenzie.

Next problem: you’ve got two hours of prime time TV to fill – does a story such as the recent Judgement penned by Christian Spurrier need two hours to tell its story?

I don’t think it does.

It’s been covered elsewhere of course, but Jane Tranter’s parting shot before heading off to LA (which can be found here) seems a hugely strange way in which to talk about the BBC’s ‘single’ drama output:

An audience doesn't think “great, a single drama's on tonight”.

(For an alternative view on this, see a David Hare rant here).

Rather than taking issue with the ‘fetishisation’ of the single drama, perhaps it might be opportune to talk about the fetishisation of the series itself – or, for the purposes of this post, the two-parter. Many ITV dramas (Midsomer Murders, A Touch of Frost) wind up their stories in a single evening – granted, it’s still two hours of prime time hitched to a drama ‘brand’, but at least you don’t have to give up two evenings to catch the whole damn thing. That said, perhaps it’s worth pondering why a drama such as Silent Witness is shown in two halves. News at Ten occupies an immoveable place in the BBC schedule, which means that everything else has to gravitate around it, and the many gruesome autopsy scenes means that Silent Witness is not exactly pre-watershed fare. Regardless of the fact that a lot of TV drama mentioned here doesn’t really justify a two hour running time, this must put programme makers in a bit of a quandary. Judgement certainly didn’t need two hours, but the schedule *sort of* demands that it does. What’s the alternative? An hour one night, followed by thirty minutes the next? That wouldn’t work. Two hours seems to be the default setting, so two hours is what you get, whether the drama deserves it or not.

The other problem is that drama is not immune from branding. Silent Witness is now in its twelfth season and has been on our screens since 1996; in ad-speak, it would be described as a ‘strong brand’, and there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s probably the ‘hook’ that gets people watching in the first place. As with any brand, there are a series of identifying details that should be immediately recognisable: with Silent Witness, this identifier is partially contained within the title itself. The problem is that drama series often seem hampered by their reliance on these ‘signifiers’ – it’s almost as if there’s a checklist of branded bits that have to be ticked off before recognition kicks in. With single dramas such as The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (strangely enough, another two hour drama but one that fully justified its running time) this isn’t so much of a problem, and the drama seems stronger as a result. However, single dramas probably don’t achieve such a high ‘brand recognition’ as series do, which is a huge shame (but not exactly a problem that can’t be remedied, I think).

Perhaps Tranter’s comments come down to nothing more than the holy grail of viewing figures: David Hare’s My Zinc Bed picked up a derisory one million viewers (about 4.5% of the overall audience) when it was broadcast on BBC2 at the back end of August, despite having a cast that featured Jonathan Pryce, Uma Thurman and Paddy Considine – all this says to me is that if you don’t have an instantly recognisable drama ‘brand’, you have to rely upon starry name actors, a strategy that simply didn’t work with My Zinc Bed.

Is the solution more single drama? Probably not. Maybe it’s a question of giving writers greater freedoms in the stories they choose to tell without being constrained by ‘branding’ concerns (and also giving writers other than David Hare and Stephen Poliakoff a crack of the whip). However, given the woeful performance of My Zinc Bed, it looks as if the big drama brands are here to stay (that said, a new series of Spooks starts on Monday, which has at least been one series that the BBC seems to get consistently right).

BBC Mess with Space/Time Continuum

Strictly Come Dancing is doing my head in, but probably not in a way you’d expect...

All filming is obviously done during the course of a single day, but in order to squeeze as much air time out of it as possible, the BBC spread the results of the filming across two evenings (the main ham twirling is done on a Saturday, then there’s the painfully prolonged results show on the Sunday). The only problem is that during Sunday's show, everyone pretends that they've re-convened and that it’s being filmed live (the only non-cunning difference between the Saturday and Sunday shows is that Tess Daly is wearing a different frock).

Now this is hardly a scandal along the lines of last year’s Blue Peter pussy outrage, but it has a peculiar effect inasmuch as it starts to make me doubt my own sanity. That, and the effect it must be having on the space/time continuum. I mean, there are people out there filming a show who are pretending that they’re doing it twenty four hours later than they really are (or maybe they aren’t, in which case I must be mental). Over on ITV, The X-Factor wraps everything up in a single evening, with the results show following hard on the heels on the live show (perhaps the BBC figured that their target audience would all be safely tucked up in bed with their cocoa by 10.35pm, and therefore too knackered to hang about to find out that Gary Rhodes is a borderline psychopath).

The upshot of this is that if the very fabric of the universe is ripped apart in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to blame Strictly Come Dancing (oh, and whilst we’re about it, I’ll blame The X-Factor as well – it gets blamed for everything else, so no-one will notice if we tack the end of the world onto the list as well ;-)).

Austened

On paper, the prospect of Lost in Austen must have seemed like a pretty good bet. Into the ITV marketing blender went Life on Mars, Being John Malkovich and Bridget Jones – add a dollop of high concept and a hugely intrusive voiceover, and there you have it: television for that supposed demographic who gather round the television supping Lambrini and being ‘carefree’. So: obviously not designed for the likes of me (I’m more of a Special Brew and swearing at passers-by type of guy). However, my wife – who laps up any type of costume drama going – avoided it like the plague. In terms of viewing figures for Lost in Austen, this might be prove to be a significant fact as people desert it in favour of more demanding fare, such as Rory and Paddy’s Great British Adventure (that’s a joke, by the way).

That said, at least Rory and Paddy are actually going somewhere. I lost patience with Lost in Austen after forty minutes, as it didn’t seem to be doing or saying anything. Once the realisation struck that there was another three hours of this stuff to sit through, I went elsewhere. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that Lost in Austen isn’t as 'high concept' as it likes to think it is.

Consider the set up: bank clerk Amanda Price finds a portal into the fictional world of Pride and Prejudice in her bathroom – she enters the world of the novel at the start point and immediately begins to inadvertently subvert this fictional world by attracting the eye of Bingley (nice but dim), thereby disrupting Mrs Bennet’s plans to marry off her gaggle of daughters to the first big pile of bank notes that wanders past. The only problem here is that there is absolutely nothing at stake. Price (herself a fictional construct) is fannying about in a fictional world where the worst that can happen is – what exactly? That Mr Darcy ends up marrying someone other than Elizabeth Bennet? Why does this matter, and more to the point, who cares? And if Amanda Price has entered the novel at its outset, who’s writing it? Jane Austen herself? In which case, perhaps she’s having some type of weird Georgian psychotic episode as she imagines a future Hammersmith where people obsess about Jane Austen novels to the extent that they start having their own psychotic episodes where they believe that they are in fact interlopers in Austen’s own fictional world? With this type of brain-boiling logic on show, the more I watched the more I became convinced that the only explantion as to what the hell was going on was that Price was a raving lunatic – and watching what are apparently the romantic delusions of a demented bank clerk does not make entertaining television in my book.

All these meta-questions would be interesting if posed by someone like Charlie Kaufmann, but judging by the second episode preview, we’re going to get more of the same, i.e., Price trying to guide the course of the novel through to its ‘rightful’ conclusion – and where’s the fun in that? Like a great deal of high concept cinematic guff, in pitch format (forty words hurriedly garbled to an ITV executive) Lost in Austen’s premise sounds pretty good. However, in its execution you start to wonder exactly what the point of it is. Perhaps a gallon of Lambrini might have helped.

TAPS - Finding the Writer's Voice: Update

Three months after getting shortlisted (and eight months after my application went in), it transpires that TAPS doesn’t want me or my script – which is quite a relief, as it happens. Although I could have applied for funding through Skillset and/or my regional Screen Agency, the last time I looked at the online forms they resembled a Kafkaesque bureaucratic quagmire, so I ran away and hid. Just the thought of parting with £500 made my blood run cold.

Anyhoo, on the road to eventual rejection, something weird happened. The original TAPS notice stated this:

All submitted scripts are read and assessed by a specially assembled reading panel of industry professionals.

A couple of weeks back, the industry professional who had been allotted to read my shortlisted script e-mailed to say that he thought it was “terrific”, and could I send him a few lines about myself? Done! I have no idea what the TAPS protocol is, but the e-mail seemed completely spontaneous and obviously well outside the usual TAPS channels of communication.

Two weeks later, I get a rejection letter. Are the two events related? Who knows? As David Bishop stated a little while back, having a half decent script is perhaps only half the battle. However, there’s an established producer out there who at least liked my script, so I’ll give him a call once the silly/holiday season is over and see where it goes from there.

Guilty Pleasures, Part 5 - Midsomer Murders

Contains Spoilers for Sunday night's episiode of Midsomer Murders

Demographics – a fascinating subject (which probably means I should get out a bit more).

In all seriousness (well, as serious as I ever get), watching the adverts during the commercial breaks for Midsomer Murders last night, I got a good idea of the sort of people that ITV assumed would be watching: adverts for bladder weakness products, erectile dysfunction, www.southwestobesity.co.uk (now officially my favourite web site name of all time), and glue to hold your dentures in place whilst you go bobbing for apples. What with Songs of Praise and George Gently on BBC1 (not to mention Last of the Summer Wine when it returns for its eighty ninth series), Sunday night television is a veritable feast of coffin dodging that assumes every viewer is actively thinking about installing that long overdue chair lift. Gentle, non-threatening television that doesn’t shout ‘BOO!’ or stray too far from the demands of it supposed demographic.

Or does it?

Last night’s Midsomer Murders was solid enough without being particularly surprising or adventurous. That doesn’t mean to say that the three murders weren’t carried out with a Friday the 13th type of sick glee. One old dear got a wobbly hat pin forcefully inserted into her ear (I half expected to see an advert for hearing aids during the next break), a maid of honour got a huge knife jammed into her sternum, and an estate manager got an arrow in the heart. There was a lot of coming and going Upstairs Downstairs style, but not a whole lot of tension, as you know how the whole thing is going to turn out anyway: just as well, as the Sunday night TV audience is more susceptible to cardiac arrests brought on by sudden movement and/or too much excitement. In this case, John Nettles is ideal in the role of DI Barnaby, as he doesn’t exactly move very fast these days. I mean, last night’s episode saw him partially solving the murders with the help of a crossword puzzle. Next week there’s a breakneck Zimmer frame chase and a duel to the death with sharpened walking sticks.

That said, I’ve seen episodes of Midsomer that were positively demented, especially when Anthony Horowitz was at the helm. As soon as I saw his name on the opening credits, I would breathe a sigh of relief, as his name was a guarantee that what you were going to get was bound to be more than the usual police procedural and suspect quiz that Midsomer has become. It’s still weirdly enjoyable in a laid back, somnambulistic kinda way though, even if its two hour running time makes me feel like I’ve been drugged with cocoa and Werthers Originals.

And with that, it’s time for my slippers and milky drink. Pip pip.

Let's Hear it for the Scriptwriters

An article in yesterday's Guardian here from Mark Lawson that might be of interest. What's more, a link in the comments section will take you here, where Donna Franceschild talks about Takin' Over the Asylum - there's also an intelligent debate further down the page that is well worth checking out as well.

Exposition Man

Drama was busting out all over last night, what with The Invisibles (Last of the Summer Wine with cheeky cat burglars), Heroes (saw the first three episodes of series one, then forgot all about it), and Midnight Man. Since ITV are down in the dumps after a record £5.68M fine for letting Robbie Williams appear on the British Comedy Awards*, I went with Midnight Man – ITV need all the viewers they can get, bless ‘em. Not that I think I made the right choice, mind you.

Given the stellar bunch of talent involved (David Drury, David Kane, Gareth Neame), the whole thing was about as subtle as a brick – and that was only once you’d gotten past the vast swathes of clunky exposition that stomped about the place like a hormonal teenager. Exposition is not a bad thing – after all, any writer has to impart a certain amount of information so that the audience know what the hell is going on at any point: but doing it well (i.e., not drawing attention to the technique itself) is difficult. For example, it’s all very well for a character to suffer from phengophobia (fear of daylight), but having somebody else tell him this because he ‘might have forgotten’ just seems silly. I suppose broad brush tactics such as this may work if you want to get to the crux of the story quickly, but I can’t help thinking that there’s a more dramatic way to impart information than just ‘casually’ dropping it into a conversation with all the subtlety of a shovel round the back of the head.

Lack of subtlety aside, Midnight Man cracked along at a decent enough pace, even if the whole thing did seem overly familiar. A troubled protagonist with marriage problems? Tick! A conspiracy that goes right to the heart of government? Tick! This is a template that’s been used before by TV drama to much greater effect than this, which is a shame as you know exactly how everything is going to turn out. I think next week I’ll have to try The Invisibles, but somehow I'm dreading it already.

Another interesting story is here in today’s Guardian, which details the abysmal first week’s box office for Three and Out. The marketing push behind this film has been phenomenal, to the extent that you couldn’t move without seeing some mention of it somewhere. Unfortunately, this huge push has not translated into box office moolah, probably because of two things: the subject matter (or more specifically, how the producers have gone about publicising it), and the absolutely horrible poster used to promote it. One look at Mackenzie Crook’s depressed boat would be enough to put anyone off, I think: couple that with the fact that Three and Out has been sold using an apparently lethal cocktail of suicide and the London Underground (not hugely cinematic concepts, I'd say), and there you have it – a first week take of £189,454: a sizeable lottery win, but not a figure to get massively excited about if you’re a film producer.

* Not strictly true, but hey - if you're going to fine ITV for something, it may as well involve Robbie Williams.

Voiceover Kicking

Gareth McLean went for the jugular in Friday’s Guardian here about how TV is “falling back on the tried and tested devices of flashback and voiceover.” TV seems to be more culpable than film at the moment when it comes to shoehorning in such extraneous narrative devices, but in all honesty, I can’t really see what the problem is. The first episode of Pushing Daisies was funny and inventive, and Jim Dale’s voiceover simply added to the kooky charm (the only problem I have with the show is that ITV will not be showing the second episode as they apparently have to cram everything in in time for Euro 2008. So, guess what? If ITV can’t be arsed to show the whole series, I can’t be arsed to watch it. Besides, they could always turf off barrel scraping crud such as Teenage Kicks to make way for it).

That said, I still think voiceovers should be used sparingly, if at all. In Full Metal Jacket, Private Joker’s voiceover is used so little, it’s difficult to remember that it’s there at all – its function seems to be to demarcate act breaks, but even so, if it’s good enough for Kubrick, it should be good enough for the rest of us.

However, the best example of voiceover I can think of is American Psycho – Patrick Bateman’s various voiceovers throughout the film impart information that would be impossible to get any other way. As the entire film is about Bateman’s own peculiar brand of internalised madness, a voiceover is probably the only way to do it. For instance, during a pedicure, Bateman stares impassively at the beauty therapist as the voiceover states:

I have all the characteristics of a human being: flesh, blood, skin, hair – but not a single, clear identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me, and I don’t know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflowed into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.

If you can’t think of any other way to get imperative information across, go for a voiceover. There’s nothing wrong with ‘em in my book.