The two words of doom
Apologies for the slight lateness in posting my review this week – various reasons mean I’m spending the week in the Midlands, so finding the time to sit down and write has been hard. However, the silver lining is that I now have access to the full delights of cable television, so next week’s review will feature much of the bizarre, the wonderful and deformed that fill those obscure channels.
Two words that normally strike fear into the heart of hardened TV watchers are ‘ITV thriller’, and the captive audiences of the autumn provide the evil geniuses at Network Centre the opportunity to unleash wave after wave of them at us. The formula’s quite simple – take one major (in British TV terms, at least) star, cast them as a cop, give them a troubled personal life and a series of crimes to investigate and serve over at least two nights. The formula proved successful with Prime Suspect, so why shouldn’t it continue be to successful when the police officer is played by Robert Carlyle and the murders he’s investigating are all connected to the Class of ’76, goes the thinking.
And yes, Carlyle was impressive, even if seeing him as a cop immediately makes me pine for him to return to being Hamish Macbeth, his acting managing to drag his character out of the mess of dedicated cop cliches the writers had saddled him with, but unfortunately even he didn’t have the skill to lift the rest of the script out of the mass of coincidences that seemed to take the place of a plot, coupled with direction that was the equivalent of having someone sitting at your shoulder whispering ‘ooh, this is all a bit spooky, isn’t it?’ every five minutes. Not that I’m against the use of direction to indicate atmosphere, but it tends to work best when it’s telling the story, rather than an attempt to pad out a script that underruns dramatically. But given that ITV were plugging the DVD of this – with Monroe – the name of Carlyle’s character – in bigger and bolder type than the name of the story itself, I suspect what we were actually watching was a pilot for a whole sequence of thrillers. Hopefully, Carlyle will get the sort of script he deserves next time.
On the subject of direction, I have to mention Jeremy Loveridge who directed last week’s episode of Spooks and showed ITV just how to use a camera to tell a story without having to draw attention to it. Whether emphasing the idea that everyone was under surveillance by shooting from unusual angles or the superbly shot, lit and choreographed gunfight in the dark (set just up the road from my old office in Charterhouse Square), it was proof that one can still take risks and do something different when directing TV drama.
Another two words to fear in television are the disturbing pairing of ‘international co-production’, which normally heralds a project that’s worthy and laudable but from which all the areas of potential interest have been smoothed away to nothingness after passing through multiple production meetings in several languages. So, my hopes weren’t high when BBC Two began broadcasting Space Race, a British-Russian-German-American joint telling of how we went from global war to the surface of the Moon in just 25 years. Rather than a full documentary, it followed the approach, perfected by the BBC with their Days That Shook The World series, of combining archive footage with dramatic reconstructions of events in the US and Soviet space programmes. While this did soapify the story slightly, taking out much of the global perspective and framing the story as a battle between two men – Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun – it’s worth noting that many of the sharp edges weren’t removed. Von Braun’s Nazi past wasn’ skimmed over, with even Tom Lehrer’s song about him getting an airing at one pont, and the black irony that Korolev spent years in the gulag yet perhaps gave the Soviet system its greatest triumphs with Sputnik and Gagarin wasn’t ignored either.
It wasn’t a perfect series, especially as the focus on manned spaceflight and the race to the Moon meant that some of the bigger advances of the period – the discovery of the Van Allen belts, communication satellites, the strides the Soviet space programme made in human endurance in flight – were all barely mentioned, but it was a interesting overview of a remarkable period in recent history and one that will no doubt fill many hours on cable channels in various countries for years to come.
One headline that won’t be appearing in the Sun this week: Sick TV Show Glamourises Drug Dealing. While the pride of Wapping are never normally shy to jump on any passing bandwagon of moral panic, the fact that Showtime’s Weeds is getting its first UK airing on Sky One means that their urge to cross-promote their own company will win out over outrage just this once. Which is good, because it’s one of the better series to come out of the US in recent times, managing to tell an interesting story of a widowed mother having to resort to selling marijuana to make ends meet and delivering some good laughs along the way. Beyond that, it’s also an interesting look at life in Californian suburbia where conformity is pushed like a drug, making life easier if you succumb to the pressures dragging you in.
Despite the allegations that the Sun won’t make (but several rent-a-quotes in the US have), it doesn’t glamourise drug dealing. Indeed, while it is shown as a source of useful income, it’s shown to not be free of the drudgery that characterise any small home business with long hours and competitors that don’t like people encroaching on their income streams. Indeed, one would expect dealers to criticise it because of how dull it shows how their life can be. But, beyond all the issues, it’s also entertaining television and I recommend giving it a try. Only time will tell if it’s a gateway to a full Sky One addiction.