LoveFilm? Then Don’t Rent DVDs

Arrrggh! I’ll say that again just for emphasis: Arrrggh!

Deep breath – and relax.

There. That feels a bit better.

Right. LoveFilm. Arrrggh!

I was going to wibble on pointlessly about I Am Legend, but the disc conked out after 45 minutes* – either this is shortest Will Smith film on record, or I have been dealt a shonky DVD by the evil fiends at LoveFilm. Don’t they know I suffer from an acute time sickness? I mean, Christ, I could’ve done something productive with those 45 minutes, like browse Amazon for a copy of this CD that doesn’t cost over £50. Sheesh.

So, I rang up and cancelled my subscription, which was starting to become dangerously random anyway. For instance, I’ve been looking forward to seeing the original version of Funny Games for ages now: instead, I get Barbara Taylor Bradford’s Hold the Dream, starring Jenny Seagrove. Where the dickens did that come from? And after watching Death Proof (how can a film featuring so many gorgeous women be so thoroughly boring?), the twisted freaks at LoveFilm go and send me the bonus disc, which for all I know is stuffed with a landfill’s worth of talky old bollocks. Arrrggh!

That said, maybe it’s something to do with my over sensitive DVD player: nothing but the very finest, shiniest brand new DVDs will do. As soon as a disc that has been played in another machine goes anywhere near it, it shuts down and sulks like a Big Brother contestant until I am able to feed it something shiny and new again (even SkyPlus is rebelling against me: I set the series link to record the second season of Dexter on ITV1; except that the damn thing didn’t record the second episode. My wife: You don’t need to watch the second episode, do you? I mean, you can still follow it, surely? Me: Arrrggh! Don’t you understand! I – have – to – see – it! At which point I stopped talking as I was coming across like a petulant Big Brother contestant).

So, to summarise: technology – when it works, it’s great. And when it doesn’t: Arrrggh!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* Which was pretty good, I thought.

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.

I Bin Bizzy

I’ve neglected the blog for nearly a week now, but I have some absolutely sparkling excuses:

* It’s Christmas – which means I have to do a lot of obligatory last minute shopping (have you any idea how difficult it is to buy a hat for a dog?), and then get bladdered at a variety of respectable locations. The best was a couple of years ago, when I got completely soused on free Champagne here (rumour has it that if the Champagne is good enough, you won’t get a hangover – a rumour that, I can report from extensive personal research, is a complete falsehood).

* Last night I found myself here. Why? Difficult to say really. As I tried to figure out exactly why I was surrounded by 3,000 hippies, Hawkwind came on. I was still none the wiser.

Here’s a picture of Huw Lloyd Langton, possibly the skinniest support act I’ve ever seen.


* Man flu, which as everyone knows, is probably the debilitating disease on the face of the planet.

* This.

* Trying to decide what to finish watching/reading first: the first season of Homicide, or the book Homicide by David Simon. That said, I have the first season of The Shield to watch, plus Dexter and the fourth season of The Wire. There’s just too much good stuff out there that needs to be watched right this very minute.

* Inbetween all this assorted nonsense, trying to find some time to rewrite my Red Planet misfire following some stellar script notes from Script Doc. The problem now is that – even after going down the route of writing a detailed step outline – two of my characters have now decided to sleep together, the bastards. How dashed inconsiderate of them.

What with shopping for dog hats, the odd bladdering, a bout of man flu and standing in huge rooms full of hippies, I’m all tuckered out. Time for another episode of The Shield.

A Bit on the Slow Side

Contains spoilers for Survivors

I was going to wibble on about Survivors for a bit, but Rob Stickler has beaten me to it here (and in typically erudite fashion as well – I quote: “The apocalypse has been a slight inconvenience mainly manifesting in an inability to text.” Arf!).

Even so, there were a few things that bothered me, not least the issue of what appeared to be a weird structural decision on behalf of the programme makers. Survivors is of course a TV show, which means it should have different structural concerns than film. Arguably, TV should provide a broader canvas, which means that everything has more space to breathe, for characters to develop, for themes to expand; after all, a ninety minute opening episode is a lot of televisual space to fill up.

So, how did Survivors choose to do it?

Mostly by elongating twenty minutes worth of story into ninety minutes.

If Survivors was forced at gunpoint to shrink its six and half hour running time into a ninety page screenplay, then no doubt the first episode would be concluded well inside the twenty page mark. And if it was, would you have lost any significant scenes from the remaining seventy pages?

I don’t think you would.

It’s not that Survivors was particularly slow as such; it just took its own sweet time in getting to the point – probably a consequence of the realisation that there was ninety minutes to fill (I haven’t seen the original series, so I have no idea how the respective first episodes stack up against each other). A case in point was when Abby awoke after being in a coma to find her husband dead in the front room. If this scene had been designed for film and not TV, it probably wouldn’t have been longer than a page. Such as it was, we saw Abby do a huge variety of things before discovering her husband’s body, none of them particularly interesting or essential to the narrative. But then, don’t forget: there’s a lot of time to fill here. And if you’re not going to fill it up with honest to goodness story, you’ve got to fill it up somehow: watching characters eat, take showers and wander around deserted suburban streets is probably as good a waste of time as any.

The other strange phenomenon that came to mind watching Survivors was the fact that it’s essentially a re-make (yeah, OK, so the BBC describe it as a ‘re-imagining’, but that still makes it a re-make in my book). Add to this news that Day of the Triffids is to get a makeover next year, and you have to start to wonder what’s going on in TeeVee land at the moment (even Wallander was in effect a remake – BBC4 handily showed the original Swedish series for comparison the other night).

I’ve always (probably naively) assumed that the BBC doesn’t have to chase ratings in the same way that their commercial rivals do, which surely means the Beeb is able to indulge in a certain amount of risk taking. What you seem to have is the opposite: remakes aplenty (wasn’t there a rumour recently about a Reginald Perrin remake? Yikes!), Andrew Davies writing every costume drama in christendom and ‘single drama’ relegated to the seldom watched margins of BBC2. In comparison, ITV looks like a veritable hotbed of originality. And that’s a scary thought.

Wallander Again.

Contains spoilers for Wallander

Bearing in mind that at the moment I’m attempting to outline a 60 minute detective TV pilot (effectively an attempt to resuscitate my sadly flatlined Red Planet script), I tuned into Wallander on Sunday for some inspiration: how does our eponymous hero keep the narrative moving? Given that even most basic screenwriting ‘advice’ states that your protagonist should be above all else proactive, how does the genre address this when all your hero is doing is essentially reacting to events? Notebook in hand, I settled down on my chaise longue with my novelty pipe and deerstalker.

Wallander is an anomaly in detective fiction inasmuch as the protagonist doesn’t really do anything you could readily describe as Poirot-like 'pure' detection. He follows up leads, interviews witnesses, talks to people, tits about with his PC, mopes around his house, forgets to shave, and glares intently at the odd corpse or four. Even Wallander’s modus operandi consists of following a series of leads that tend to go nowhere. In fact, it was this bit of the narrative make-up that I was most interested in: if you’re heading down a potential dead end lead-wise, how do you make the protagonist do a swift 180 about face, i.e., how do you make him take control of proceedings, instead of being sidelined by a bunch of unreliable witnesses and his uneventful personal life?

Uh, you don’t. And I’m not entirely sure that you need to.

If you’re looking for a detective with a serious case of the smarts, Kurt Wallander is not your man. An internet date quizzes him on details of his current investigation, and he’s more than happy to tell her what he knows – which isn’t a lot, but still. Just to rub it in, the grand conclusion to Wallander’s case comes by way of a flash of intuitive realisation; nothing to do with any elegant piece of deduction or intelligence on Wallander’s behalf.

So, all in all, Wallander didn’t really give me what I was looking for. In fact, the detective work it features is probably a lot like real life detective work: dull, time consuming, occasionally random, plagued by elementary mistakes and IT disasters – which is of course the whole point. And with that in mind, Wallander was by far and away the best thing I’ve seen on TV for a while. I wasn’t massively enamoured with last week’s episode, but Sunday’s was a real improvement on a series that’s shaping up to being a right little cracker by doing everything you’d least expect.

And my script? Back to the drawing board with it. At the risk of upsetting Paul Abbot, perhaps I need a maverick cop after all.

Scenes from The Wire

I’m currently re-watching all five seasons of The Wire via the gift of the DVD box set (I’m generous to myself like that). Problem is I get all obsessive-compulsive about it and watch an entire season over the course of 48 hours, which means I forget to do essential household chores such as watching Apparitions or anything currently emanating from the Jungle (saints preserve us).

My favourite scene from season 2 comes in episode 8, Duck and Cover. After being thrown out of the marital home, McNulty (since demoted from detective to harbour patrol) goes on a monumental bender. After promising a bartender that he has no intention of driving home, he does just does that. Swinging round a corner, McNulty completely misjudges it, and slams his car into a concrete underpass support. He gets out, and drunkenly tries to figure out how he didn’t make the corner. He gets back in the car, backs it up, and has another go. This time he hits the concrete support with much greater force than before, smashing the passenger side window and cutting his hand.

If all the scene did was to demonstrate McNulty’s pig-headedness, it would still be great – but it does so much more than that. It almost serves as an overarching metaphor as to exactly how McNulty lives his life: first time round, McNulty can’t help but fuck things up. Second time round, he simply repeats his previous error, which makes his fuck-up even greater than before. The metaphor is underlined by the fact that this scene sits slap bang in the middle of an attempted reconciliation between McNulty and his wife and a drunken shag with a waitress. This is superlative writing (by George P Pelecanos) that makes its point without resorting to heavy handed exposition or even a great deal of explanatory dialogue. The sequence of events spells things out just enough.

I love The Wire – then again, it’s a hard show not to love.

I'm Confused (So No Change There Then)

At the risk of sounding like a doofus, didn’t Apparitions seem, well, you know, a little bit complicated?

Perhaps it might help if I tried to summarise what the devil (see what I did there?) was going on:

A young sufferer of leprosy, Vimal, prays to an image of Mother Theresa at the same time as the little saintly nun shuffles off this mortal coil. And whaddya know, hallelujah, he's cured! At exactly the same time in London, Liam and his wife conceive their daughter, Donna, who, ten years later, seeks out the exorcist Father Jacob (Martin Shaw). Liam is nuts, a fervent atheist who just happens to be possessed. In turn, Liam believes his daughter is also ‘possessed’, but by the spirit of Mother Theresa, which makes Liam froth at the mouth a bit. Meanwhile, Vimal has now ended up in the same seminary as Father Jacob, where he is taunted by a homeless man, who informs him that it wasn’t Mother Theresa who cured him of his leprosy – it was Satan. Cripes! Vimal is eventually relieved of his skin in a sex sauna after helping Jacob with his exorcism of Liam.

Got that? Good. ‘Cos I didn’t.

It’s not as if the basic premise is difficult to understand. It’s just that the two main narrative threads – Jacob’s run-ins with Liam and Vimal desperately trying to hang on to his Devil-donated skin – didn’t really seem to be related. In fact it was like watching two distant cousins in blindfolds blundering about and occasionally smacking into each other. It didn’t help that Apparitions started with Vimal’s story, which was little more than a sub-plot. Still, it gave an excuse for a truly gruesome skinning at the episode’s conclusion.

I can appreciate that many narratives might sound daft when reduced to a summary, but Apparitions truly is completely bonkers. Is it frightening? Not really. And that’s mostly because I found it too complicated, due to the fact that there was too much flippin’ plot. If you’re going to saturate a 60 minute drama with two significant narrative strands, it would be handy if they actually ran into each other every now and again.

Or maybe I’m just a doofus, who knows?

War on Reality

Contains spoilers for Spooks, Series 7, Episode 1

Don’t get me wrong, I love Spooks – I love it so much I’ll even watch it in French (and my French is notoriously rubbish). But as Adrian Reynolds has pointed out in insightful fashion, there’s something a bit ‘smoke and mirrors’ about the new series - and I can see what he means. This resides predominantly in the ever-so-slightly clunky plot mechanics. Hmmm – thinking about it, perhaps that’s a little unfair: ‘clunky’ is the wrong word. When you consider the way that writers Neil Cross and Ben Richards handle the various thorny problems that a Spooks narrative throws at them, you start to realise what a finely tuned machine the whole thing really is. It may well all be smoke and mirrors, but you don’t actually realise until way after the closing credits – which in my book, makes it a pretty major achievement.

Let’s face it, most narratives are going to contain some stray thread of implausibility or lapse in logic that, once worried and pulled at, means that the whole thing is going to unravel like a demented cat’s cradle. However, Spooks seems to be a special case. Last week’s opener started from a point that could have easily been totally implausible, but - due to some superlative writing - didn’t feel artificial or contrived: well, not that much.

Private Andy Sullivan is kidnapped by an al-Qaeda cell and threatened with a spot of decapitation unless Remembrance Day is cancelled. In a show of ballsy Brit bravura, Sullivan refuses to read out his captors’ pre-written statement, forcing them to read it out themselves. Once in receipt of the offending broadcast, the Spooks team is able to match the voice pattern of one of Sullivan’s captors against ones they have on electronic file – this inevitably puts them on the trail of the cell and its nefarious backers.

Taking this at face value, there doesn’t seem to be much wrong with it – and indeed, there isn’t. But the logic Nazi that resides deep in my psyche couldn’t quite shake the thought that it just seemed a teensy bit contrived. The fact that one of Sullivan’s captors is forced to read out his own written statement direct to camera is the conceit that essentially sets the narrative in motion – without the voice to match to a suspect on their spiffy CGI database, the Spooks team would have been on a hiding to nothing straight from the off. I’m not a connoisseur of kidnap videos by any stretch, but I can’t imagine there’s any way on god’s green earth that any self-respecting al-Qaeda member would read out his own list of demands on a video which every security service in the western hemisphere would be queuing up to analyse with one of those weird toothcomb things.

Like I said – I’m a logic Nazi. It’s a problem – unfortunately not one that can be treated with any known medication (I’ve tried the odd anti-psychotic, but they don’t work either).

However, all credit to the writers – at least they get this little implausibility out of the way quickly.

Which then neatly leads on to the next teensy tiny problem:

Even though Spooks is grounded heavily in an instantly recognisable world, it’s almost as if that world is too real. So Spooks compensates for uncomfortable reality by giving everything an overwhelmingly positive spin, and throws in a bit of wish fulfilment to boot as well: kidnap victims are rescued unscathed, terror plots are successfully foiled with no civilian casualties, and MI5 agents have the public’s best interests at heart. Reality itself is far more horrific, random and mundane than anything Spooks could throw at us. But then again, it’s just fiction - right? Why would anyone want pesky reality playing a part in proceedings?

At least Spooks has the good sense to up the ante every now and again and kill off one of its main characters - which sort of begs the question: how much reality can we really take? I love Spooks, but every now and again, it would be nice to see how the team deal with the fall out from a full-on terrorist outrage (inasmuch as terrorist outrages can ever really be described as ‘nice’) ;-)

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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
*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 ;-)).

Writersroom in Brighton

Many thanks to John Soanes for informing me about this – the last time I was in the Sallis Benney theatre, Steven Berkoff was getting all unnecessary about skinheads (which he used to do with frightening regularity). So, see you down the front for a spot of heckling (joke).

That said, these events usually attract the odd crackpot or two, so hopefully the entertainment value will be quite high!

Return of the X-Files

For all you young whippersnappers out there who don’t remember The X-Files – fear not! JJ Abrams has re-made it for you in the shape of Fringe. He’s also stolen some of the sillier bits of Flatliners as well, but to be fair, there’s quite a lot to enjoy here – explosions! Joshua Jackson! Anna Torv in her underwear (black and functional, in case you were wondering)! A constant recurring sense of refrigerator logic!

However, do we really need a re-tooled X-Files?

The X-Files of course was phenomenally successful, running to over 200 episodes (something I can’t quite see Fringe doing) and still spawning the odd, uneven film (I Want To Believe). Fringe has a slightly different initial focus inasmuch as there’s a great deal of pseudo-scientific babble floating about the place, but essentially it possesses the same DNA as The X-Files, as both narratives share many of the same underlying building blocks.

Perhaps there’s some merit in re-tooling old(ish) TV shows for today’s audience, something that JJ Abrams seems to be doing more and more these days, what with Star Trek due for a 2009 overhaul (perhaps Lost is an exception. That said, check out Jeffrey Lieber’s – the co-creator of Lost – story here; it really is a fascinating read). And whilst we’re on the subject, how about Cloverfield? A real hoot, but essentially a remake of every Godzilla film you’ve ever seen.

In comparison, perhaps it’s more interesting to look at where X-Files writers such as Vince Gilligan have ended up. A couple of posts back I wittered on about Breaking Bad, written and directed by none other than Mr Gilligan himself – to say it’s the diametric opposite of The X-Files would be a drastic understatement. Fringe, therefore, can’t help having a little bit of a retro feel. Sure, it goes ‘Bang!’ quite a lot and it certainly holds your attention – however, its many plot holes are more reminiscent of cinematic narratives rather than a carefully crafted TV drama such as Breaking Bad.

Seems to me at the moment that all JJ needs to do to re-tool a much loved show and/or concept is to give it a great big ‘War on Terror’ spin – which is fine, until you come up against Star Trek. I have no idea what he’s going to do with it, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s going to look and sound strangely familiar.

Sherlock ‘Chip’ Holmes to the Rescue

Over the last couple of weeks or so, there’s been an interesting mini-debate of sorts taking place via the Shooting People Screenwriting bulletin along the lines that exposure to film and TV images can have (supposedly) a corrupting influence.

Here’s Alan McKenna:

It seems exposure to violent images predisposes us to greater tolerance of violence. Not a lot of doubt I'm afraid.

And here’s Allen O’Leary:

I've come across some interesting research lately about TV watching and behaviour. Take a read of this http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/09/25/risky.behaviors.tv.may.be. (...)

Precis: If you haven't had the experience of a risky sexual behaviour and you watch programs that show that risky behaviour you are more likely do it later REGARDLESS of whether the consequences of the behaviour are shown to be bad in the program.

That's very interesting indeed and implies there is a critical failure in programs that supposedly model bad behaviour as an 'educational' device - they could back-fire horribly...

And here’s Elisabeth Pinto:

My conclusion... was it was nigh-on impossible to make an anti-war film even if the film explicitly set out to do so. Not for physiological reasons per se but because of the nature of film narrative (which may amount to the same thing). By giving a sense of control over events (A happens, followed by B, followed by C etc), it is only too easy to project yourself into the action in a positive way. Which you end up doing because film romanticises and mythologises everything. And we all know how human beings yearn for myths...

With all due respect to these good people, I’m convinced that they are all totally, utterly wrong. But instead of merely stating that they’re wrong and leaving it at that, armed with my Psychology A level, I’m going to dig about and unearth some evidence as to why. In the meantime, here’s I.C. Jarvie from his book Towards a Sociology of the Cinema:

While people believed (believe?) that film and television do influence their children, and that if the programming is bad, then their children will be, too. Studies such as those done by Himmelwit (TV and the Child, London, 1958) and Schramm (TV in the Lives of Our Children, Stanford, 1961) reveal that this is untrue. Film may influence us toward good or evil, but if it does, then the way we are is much more complicated than what it seems to be on the surface, and it could even possibly be counterintuitive.

Broken?

Contains Spoilers for Breaking Bad

Stevyn Colgan’s blog steered me in the direction of the first episode of Breaking Bad, a new US import currently showing on FX. And it’s utterly fab. But don’t take my word for it – the first episode is available as a free download on iTunes (what a relief that Apple didn’t carry through their threat to shut it down, eh? The greedy, bluffing tossers).

In the same post, Stevyn says this:

Yet again I find that I'm praising an American show when I want to be praising British shows.

Which is when it struck me: there has to be a reason as to why we don’t generally see drama of this quality in the UK, and I’m struggling to figure out why. Perhaps it might be worth looking at Breaking Bad’s narrative for some clues:

* The protagonist of Breaking Bad is Walter H White (an almost unrecognisable Bryan Cranston from Malcolm in the Middle), a fifty year old part time chemistry teacher with an unexpectedly pregnant wife and a teenage son with learning difficulties. Walter’s part time teaching job isn’t enough to keep the wolf from the door, so he also works part time in a car wash, where his extravagantly eyebrowed boss harasses him into working extra hours cleaning cars, which isn’t really Walter’s job.

* After collapsing at the car wash, Walter is informed by his doctor that he has inoperable lung cancer, a fact that he keeps from his wife and son.

* Through his brother-in-law (a dumb, bullet headed cop), Walter becomes intrigued by the money that is made by the town’s drug dealers. Accompanying his brother-in-law on a drugs bust, Walter spies one of his ex-students sprinting from the scene. He collars the kid later and effectively blackmails him into becoming his new partner.

By now, great big fluorescent alarm bells should be ringing. Right off the bat, the protagonist of Breaking Bad is fifty years of age. Fifty! Man, that’s old! Not exactly your key BBC3 demographic there. Is that a significant fact (as an aside, I sat down and watched the superb Dad’s Army last night and wondered if someone would have the nerve to pitch it today)?

If relative old age is a demographic turn off, consider what else could make Breaking Bad a UK commission disaster zone: learning difficulties! Lung cancer! Drugs! Guns! Taken as standalone issues, I’m sure we can all name at least a couple of UK dramas that have taken these subjects as their main dramatic focus, but maybe that’s the problem: perhaps we treat subjects such as old age, learning difficulties and cancer too much as issues that need to be discussed ad infinitum rather than simply as factors that help establish milieu and character. And Breaking Bad is all about character – is that the difference?

Breaking Bad doesn’t do anything tricksy – there’s no intrusive voiceover, no smart ass structure, and its exposition is handled beautifully. Its moral universe is grey at best, as Walter wants to use the gains from his drug dealing to provide a financial cushion for his family, which means that there’s no cosy, Inspector Gadget-like ‘message’ tacked on – with a story this strong, you don’t need it.

It’s not as if the UK doesn’t produce quality TV drama, but the balance has been skewed in recent years in favour of the US. And there’s got to be a reason for that – right?

Moan-a-thon

Now that my Red Planet and RISE submissions are out of the way, I can get back to doing what I do best: watching a whole load of really crap TV. Hooray! And first out of the blocks is Hole in the Wall – the ‘gameshow’ where celebrities have to force themselves Tetris-like through a variety of holes or risk being dunked in the drink. I lasted five minutes before I became acutely aware that the show is merely a ploy to drain your IQ so you are mentally unable to switch channels, thereby ensuring that you stay tuned for Strictly Come Dancing (or Celebrity Ham Twirling as it’s known here at Chipster Towers). Shows like Hole in the Wall make you yearn for the golden age of television, where Mr Blobby and the malevolent evil that is Cilla Black presided colossus-like over the Saturday night schedule. As Dale Winton says, “Join me next week for more celebrities and more holes.” Can’t wait.That said, Hole in the Wall wasn’t the stupidest thing I’ve seen on teevee recently – that honour goes to Guy Richie’s Revolver, which wasn’t of course made for television, but hey, who's splitting hairs? The only essential difference between Hole in the Wall and Revolver is that Hole in the Wall is knowingly dumb, whereas Revolver is dumb masquerading as clever, which is in fact even worse than plain old dumb (with Luc Besson contributing to proceedings, you know you’re in for a veritable festival of stupid anyway). Quite what the screenplay is aiming to say is anyone’s guess: characters supposedly inhabit each other’s heads to the point of mind numbing existential tedium, ill-thought out symbols litter the film like so much landfill (twelve dollar bills, half a crucifixion, endlessly boring games of chess), Ray Liotta chews up the scenery (in his underpants mostly, not really my definition of viewing pleasure), and there are swathes of entirely pointless pieces of animation. I was going to mention the long and pointless voiceover and the acres of repetitive dialogue, but I simply can’t be bothered (is it just me, or does the lost art of the voiceover seem to be making a resurgence of late? Most everything I see at the moment features a metric tonne of the stuff: Lost in Austen anyone? The major unifying thread of all the shows I’ve seen recently to feature voiceover is that it’s just not needed).

So, to summarise: Revolver – the only film in living memory that would have been improved with an appearance from Andi Peters in a skin tight Lycra bodysuit.

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.

Spooks en Français

It’s reassuring to know that the BBC is able to flog a show like Spooks to our continental chums, thereby assuring that Auntie has more money to throw at quality drama (and I’m not being sarcastic). Problem is, I didn’t see much of the last series first time round, so now it appears that I’m doomed to catch dubbed re-treads in a variety of continental hotels. So, Spooks – in French (and eventually with the sound muted, as my grasp of French is tenuous to say the least): what can be learnt from it with the sound turned off? (by the way, I was watching this episode).

Locations: the first thing that becomes apparent is that the location budget is not exactly generous. A huge country pile, a cornfield, a cemetery, and the by now familiar Spooks operations room, a dim cubbyhole in which various furrow browed boffins tap at keyboards and look perplexed. Oh, and a smattering of satellites rendered in some pretty impressive CGI (the type of satellites that can be controlled by a laptop placed on the tailgate of a Land Rover – I’m not making this stuff up, honest). A fairly limited locational palette, I’m sure you’ll agree, which is why we need:

Visual Style: decidedly angular, with a big side order of wobble. Every now and again, things would tilt dramatically as if someone had dropped the camera on the floor and had forgotten to pick it up. Either that, or it was a series of high powered kinetic wobbles as a couple of slapheads in rather fetching military fatigues chased our heroes through a corn field.

Dialogue: sorry, all in French! I gave up after ten minutes and turned the sound off.

Narrative: without the aid of dialogue, the narrative was remarkably easy to follow, which has to be a good thing. The head baddie (D(F)uckface from Four Weddings) had somehow received a rather stellar promotion which meant she found herself heading up a sinister terrorist group who had a nefarious scheme for taking over the world via the power of CGI satellites (don’t know why though). What’s more, this sinister terrorist group were nicely headquartered in a huge country pile (surrounded by cornfields, always convenient for a quick spot of running about). After a contretemps with Adam (who is armed with a syringe full of nastiness), Ros gets herself captured by the bad guys. Unfortunately, Adam is captured as well and Duckface proceeds to inject the contents of the syringe into Ros’s neck, despite Harry’s protestations, killing her stone dead. The bad guys make their getaway, but the day is saved by Malcolm, who turns up with his magic laptop. The team gather for Ros’s funeral, but – hold on! – she’s not dead (either Adam was bluffing with his syringe full of nastiness or he switched them). Ros miraculously comes back to life and is exiled to the anonymity of civilian life by Adam. All is well. Phew!

So: did I learn anything? Hmmm - given the fact that Spooks is what you might term 'event drama', I was surprised to discover the paucity of locations on display: a globe trotting budget was obviously not available for this episode, which means that even flagship shows such as Spooks have some severe budgetary constraints imposed on them. And as much as I love writing dialogue, the thing that should come first is the visuals, even if in this episode everything did look decidedly wonky.

Apart from the visual jiggery pokery, watching Spooks with the sound down was tremendously satisfying and actually pretty good fun. I think I might start doing this with Doctors.

Linkage Mania

Loads of good stuff in yesterday’s Guardian, here’s a round-up of notable links:

An extensive Paul Abbot interview, writer of State of Play and Shameless here.

Nicolas Roeg interview here, director of Performance and Don’t Look Now.

A pragmatic Susan Hill here on why more people write short stories than read them.

Iain Sinclair here on Wyndham Lewis at the National Portrait Gallery until October.