The bleak shall (not) inherit the earth

So British drama controllers are planning a shift away from the 00s 'bleak paradigm' to return us to the programming which prevailed back in the days when Tony Blair was a wisecracking ingénue and foreign policy meant, and only meant, 'Maastricht' or 'Sarajevo'.

It might be a stupid question, but can't we have both kinds of television? I've been happy to avoid the torrents of Tunbridgian disgust that have no doubt accompanied Channel 4's somewhat risky decision to adapt Red Riding, but I also accept that there is a significant sector of the audience demographic who will always be a little bit more Hamish MacBeth in their tastes, no matter how hard the expensively-denimed advocates of broadcasting edginess try to convert them. Unrealistically sidelining financial questions for a moment, surely there is another form of programming which could be downsized to make way for more drama and, since we're being utopian now, more intellectual content of the John Berger/ Kenneth Clark/ Death of Yugoslavia mutant Reithianist school (the one that educates the viewer but probably in a way incompatible with Reith's ideology)? Come to think of it, are the light entertainment/ reality TV hybrids that are so common now actually any cheaper to produce than some sexily conscious Play for Today type material?

Alright, I'll stop fantasising and return to my lesson plan. Sorry.

The So-Called Thirty-Nine Steps, Pt. II

My Mum sent me a press clipping about the Rubbish Thirty-Nine Steps: apparently it's caused all kinds of furore in England. Unfortunately, said furore seems to have mostly occurred on the part of people who read the Daily Mail, which I worry exposes some unconscious right-wing proclivities I might have. The BBC have attempted to justify the manifest inadequacies by arguing that the novel is 'far-fetched' anyway, claiming that the adaptation is 'faithful to the spirit and period of the book' (it isn't, actually) but liberates the writer to 'feel free to re-imagine it for a modern audience'.

All of which begs the question: what is the historical 'grain'? Surely fidelity to the (bad) ideology in the novel would not have seen Penry-Jones's Hannay profit from a learning curve in gender relations - as soon as the protagonist becomes progressive, we stop seeing the rude actualities of the era as Buchan inadvertently exposed them. Surely it's better for a modern audience to have a genuine grasp of the ideological realities of a moment in time so that a genuine sense of historical distance can be created? I'm not sure I agree with the political redemptions or mollifications of characters like Hannay: do we need him to develop in order to become the mouthpiece for a liberalism which we already (and problematically) take for granted? Isn't that just a sop to the vanity of our own moment's self-awarded notion of 'progress'? Does the drama become better when Hannay becomes more likeable?

Rubbish Thirty-Nine Steps now has its own Wikipedia entry.

As an addendum to the below, I just watched the BBC and Rupert 'Adam from Spooks' Penry-Jones make a complete hyperexpository (yet wildly unfaithful) hash of John Buchan's The 39 Steps. Speaking as a massive, massive Hitchcock fan, I thought the Robert Donat version was bad enough, but this little travesty was up there with that woeful Dracula the Beeb did a couple of years ago.

2009 - The End of the (Literary) Affair

So, I noticed that my good friends at the Guardian Guide gave David Peace, longtime head whippet of contemporary British fiction as far as I'm concerned, the entire 'D' section in their 'things to watch 2009' listings, only they were talking less about the writing itself than forthcoming film and TV adaptations of 'factive' football parable The Damned United and Doomsday-by-white-dogshit crime sequence the Red Riding quartet. In protest, I'm re-reading TDU so I can be especially pernickety and cranky when the big screen version comes, but I think it's RR I'm dreading more. I just know that this will go one of two types of terrible: Scenario 'A' see it hammered into the Prime Suspect slot, with the result that it solicits thousands upon thousands of complaints from the Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells demographic and any aesthetic merit of the programme will go undiscussed due to the resultant controversy. Scenario 'B', which is, now I come to think about it, the more likely, will see the writers doing everything in their power to turn it into Prime Suspect, only set in the 1970s and in Leeds, so it'll be more like Prime Suspect with additional Life on Mars.

The third scenario is that it is absolutely brilliant and everyone responds to it with the same gusto that has hitherto been reserved for The Wire, only I won't be able to see it, with the result that my totally puerile 'I liked it first' gene will kick in. If this is the case, I apologise inadvance...

Frightening

Title credits for typically morbid Kennedy TV fave The World at War

J.G. Ballard on the South Bank Show

Watched this last night. I really don't know who Martin Amis thinks he is. Ballard was very good, though.

Pt. 1



Pt. 2



Pt. 3

A Trawl through the Annals of the Televisually Terrifying

A few clips from Youtube to watch alone in a thunderstorm...

Firstly, from Jonathan Miller's Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad:



Next, from the BBC production of A Warning to the Curious:



Thirdly, an exercise in abject terror with TV's most pant-shittingly* fearsome revenant:



* CF the Viz Hallowe'en special, 2006. I would never use so base a phrase as this without it being made acceptable by such an august publication.

Rain

Richmond looks good in it, better than Norwich at least.

I've spent the last two nights watching a programme in which Michael Palin wanders non-plussedly around the 'New Europe', AKA those countries east of Vienna which never featured in an Only Fools and Horses 'holiday' plotline (though 'Cassandra gets kidnapped by the Ingushetian mafia' would have put Del and Rodders in a scrape with undoubtedly hilarious consequences.) Interesting things I've learnt so far:

- Now the bridge in Mostar (written 'Mocrap' in Cyrillic, according to Wikipedia) has been rebuilt, people use it for a diving competition.
- Croatians don't like to be hurried, especially when cooking Michael Palin elaborate cuttlefish-based meals.
- 'Enver Hoxha' is pronounced 'Enver Hodger'.
- The BBC have got so into showing programmes portraying the painful deaths of farm animals that they need neither Jamie Oliver nor a cookery show to do so. In this case, Palin finds himself halfway up a mountain with some Raki-sipping Sufis as they sacrifice a sheep.
- The mayor of Tirana doodles on his minutes in council meetings, which possibly explains the fact that Tirana has the most inefficient traffic management system in Europe.
- If you sit alone at a restaurant table in Istanbul, musicians will sit down and serenade you to cheer you up, even if you weren't miserable in the first place.
- How to stun the biggest Monty Python fan in Bulgaria: send Michael Palin around his house to ask about distillation techniques for plum brandies.
- Michael Palin seems to spend an awful lot of time chatting to attractive women.
- The only available journalist to show Michael around Chisinau (Moldova) was a twenty-something blonde called Tatiana.
- The military costumes in the breakaway republic of Transnistria look like Jean-Paul Gaultier designs.

More as discovered. I'm of to get wet now.