Mad Conspiracy

Of the new series that started on telly this year so far I only stuck with 2 to the end. I watched a couple of episodes of BBC1’s period police drama, Ripper Street, but it wasn’t for me, and as for comedy, BBC3’s Way to Go and BBC4’s Bob Servant Independent were not amusing enough to watch more than the first programme. Much to my surprise it was 2 Channel 4 dramas that I found entertaining. I say surprise because I don’t watch Channel 4 very often these days as it and its sister channels E4 and More 4 schedules generally seem to be made up of US so-called comedy imports, life-style programmes and slightly exploitive ‘reality’ shows. Anyway for lack of other things to watch I decided to give 2 programmes a go.

My Mad Fat Diary, shown on E4, was the story of Rae Earl, a 16 stone, 16 year old girl, who had just been released from a psychiatric unit after 4 months. Rae had been admitted for self-harming and the 6 part series charted her struggle with not only returning to the ‘real world’ and her therapy but all the usual trials and tribulations of being a teenager.

Rae’s therapist asks her to keep a diary as she leaves the unit and this provides the backdrop and voice over to what happens to Rae over the summer. On the way home she runs into Chloe, a childhood friend, who has acquired a small group of friends that Rae becomes part of. Having friends is great for Rae but there are all the problems that come with it. Like her jealously of the thin and attractive Chloe and wanting to be more than friends with certain boys in the group. However Rae learns that she is not the only one with problems; Archie is closet gay, Chloe has an abortion after getting pregnant by a teacher and even her therapist’s marriage breaks down, while back in the unit her anorexic friend Tix nearly dies because of her illness.

But like everyone in therapy insight into what got you to the place where everything collapsed is hard and frightening. Rae is full of self-doubt and self-loathing and every set back means she struggles not to harm herself again.

It’s been a long time since I was a teenager yet I recognised in Rae all those emotions and self-righteous, know it all traits, that you have at that age, as well as the fear of being ‘different’ and alone. Sharon Rooney, who played Rae, was fantastic at expressing all these complex emotions and often conflicting emotions, from teenaged frustration with adults to pure joy at those moments of happiness that friendship can bring.

With self-harm being an increasing problem among adolescents and horror of how conservative teenagers can be this series although aimed I think, at teenagers would be ideally shown in schools but probably won’t be because of the swears and sexual references. Hey ho.

Utopia, a conspiracy thriller, shown on Channel 4, was a rather different series and definitely ‘adult’. How I did I reach this conclusion? Not so much because of the swearing but the extreme violence. In every of the 6 episodes someone (usually more than one person) died violently and bloodily.

Adult then, but was it ‘grown up’? Well a good conspiracy should make you think, wonder and even get a little paranoid. Not sure Utopia did and I think its weakness was the myriad of characters that were thrown together by the plot, most of whom I didn’t care about at all.

Jessica & Arby in family reunion

But leaving that aside for a moment the plot of Utopia was as follows:

A shadowy and all-powerful organisation called the Network is in pursuit of a graphic novel manuscript written by a mad-man who happened to be one of their former scientists, which holds the secret to their diabolical plans and the identity of their top man Mr Rabbit. This organisation was born out of the Cold War and allies attempts at biological warfare. The end of the Cold War did not end the Network’s ambitions. The Network can act seemingly with impunity, tracking people, killing them or framing them for heinous crimes as well as manipulating and blackmailing government officials. It has its own assassins, including the slightly podgy and perpetually breathless, Arby. Unwittingly falling foul of the Network are 4 comic-book geeks, Ian, Becky, Wilson and Grant, who soon find themselves on the run with Jessica Hyde, who is also being sought but knows what to do to lie low and is the daughter of Utopia’s author. At the same time civil servant at the Ministry of Health, Michael Dugdale, finds himself in serious trouble after getting his Russian sex-worker girlfriend pregnant, and victim of the Network’s blackmail. While the others stumble about trying to find ways to expose what’s going on, Dugdale tries to get his life back.

Like all conspiracies the plot was somewhat far-fetched in places and you didn’t always know what some of the characters motives and there was enough going on to keep my interest up but as I said I didn’t care much for the characters. Other than the children, Grant and Alice, I wasn’t really too concerned what happened to the rest; though I was sad at Arby’s demise after discovering his origins. If there is another series might give it a go…

Violent Entertainment

Once upon a time my Saturday afternoons were often spent watching some of the finest acting on telly - Wrestling. The BBC4 Timeshift documentary When Wrestling was Golden shown last night didn't tell me much more than I already knew about the wrestling TV heyday (fixed not 'fake') and the company that controlled it all. But I didn't know about how it all came together in the post WW2 years and the clips and interviews were revealing and nostalgic. Simple entertainment and good fun that was dropped by Greg Dyke, probably because it was seen as too 'low-brow' and common. Which is a joke when you consider what passes for entertainment these days. US wrestling is not the same as the home-grown heroes and villains. Sigh.

Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner

Being as I am completely indifferent to the Olympics the only good thing about it coming to my home town has been the programmes about London that BBC2 & BBC4 broadcast in recent weeks. In particular  The Secret History of Our Streets, a 6 part series using Charles Booth’s 19th century social maps (Charles Booth Online Archive) as a starting point to chart the ever-changing character of London streets and its residents.

Starting with Deptford High Street SE8, once described as ‘the Oxford Street of south London’; a sorry tale of decline, a community broken up and officious local authority figures deciding the fate of residents with little regard to what people wanted. This was typical of many experiences of ordinary people particularly in the post-World War II years of ‘scum clearance’.

Staying south of the river the up and down fate of Camberwell Grove SE5 was a tale of property development and well-meaning folk wanting to preserve fine old buildings. Here developers built fine houses for the well-to-do who wanted to escape the rapidly growing city in what was then a semi-rural area. However the city soon caught up with Camberwell Grove and as the well-off moved on landlords rented out the houses to families who occupied rooms rather than the whole houses and the properties began to fall into disrepair. In the 1960s things begun to change as young middle-class people bought up these run down houses. And now the street is up-market again.

For the Caledonian Road N1 there was never such grandeur. A road leading up from King’s Cross with its railway station, the area was and is still considered ‘rough’. But here too residents fought to preserve what there was when British Rail threatened to destroy the community. And since the programme was aired there has been much controversy regarding the local landlord featured who boasted about his disregard for planning and building regulations. ‘No milk left in the Cally’

Property speculation in west London’s Portland Road W11 told a very different tale. Built with the well-off in mind Portland Road however soon was notorious as a slum. Again it was not until the 1960s that the street saw a turnaround in fortune; and what a turnaround. Now a banker’s enclave, the street has some of the most expensive property in London – with a council estate at one end.

Returning south of the river Reverdy Road SE1 was perhaps the least changed of the street featured, although here as everywhere changes were happening. Home to the ‘respectable’ working class in the 19th century this was a story of Bermondsey’s local politicians and for want of a better description, their Christian / Socialist sense of duty to the local people. When the now defunct Bermondsey Council bought up Reverdy Road and the rest of the West Estate properties they modernised them and ensure local people had priority in renting the houses, keeping the community together. Now however with the changes to housing policy and the ‘right to buy’ local people are not so dominate as they once were.

Finally the first council estate opened in 1896 in east London. Built by the long gone London County Council, the Boundary Estate around Arnold Circus E2 was to replace the overcrowded slums in the area. By today’s standards the flats would seems substandard with only some having indoor toilets and none having hot water, but in comparison to the buildings they replaced the flats were palaces. Trouble was at 10 shillings a week the people who had lived in the slums demolished to make way for the estate could not afford the rent them. Those that could afford it soon built up a sense of community; a mixed community with a large number of residents being Jewish. However in the post war years people wanted more than these neglected flats could offer and the community began to dissolve as they moved away to more modern homes. In the 1970s a very different movement to those seeking to preserve changed the fortunes of the declining Boundary Estate – squatting. This area of the east end was now home to many Bangladeshi families who were living in squalid and overcrowded conditions. Encourage to squat in empty properties belonging to the LLC’s successor, the now also defunct Greater London Council, the GLC ended up rehousing the families in the area. Of course now while the estate remains a council property (Tower Hamlets) many flats are now privately owned and overpriced.

This series was on the whole very good; with no ‘experts’ just commentary and interviews with former and current residents it gave a fairly rounded view of the social history of these streets. My only criticism would be that the role of poor and / or exploitative landlords, whether they be private or local authority, in the creation of slums was not given enough attention (though Peter Rachman was briefly mentioned) and it was implied that rent control (something desperately needed) was to blame for the fact that landlords let their properties decay as was the often asserted assumption that all council estates are poorly designed slums full of the ‘undeserving poor’.

The 70s

BBC2 has been running a 1970s season. This has meant the airing of some classic 70s cinema; One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; Mean Streets and Cabaret, but also the documentary series by Dominic Sandbrook called 'The 70s'. 

 

As I grew up in the 70s I thought I'd give this 4 part series a go, if just for the nostalgia. There was that aplenty in the soundtrack but other than that it was a deeply unsatisfying in format and content. Made up entirely of archive clips and Sandbrook's voice over and to camera commentary, it gave a broad sweep of the decade under the premise that the 1970s shaped the world we live in today. Well duh! You could say that about any past decade. Society is not static and is forever changing; old traditions and ways of life fall away and new ones take their place. There was certainly some significant shifts in British society in the 70s. 

Consensus politics were on the way out, global economics began to bite, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and Race Relations Act 1976 were to start to change the lives of millions (though sexism and racism are still with us). Yet there were no interviews with the people involved or affected. The whole series was just Sandbrook's personal view - a view which seemed to come from the middle-class right and say 'no wonder Thatcher came to power in the end'. And that was about the sum of it.

In contrast 'The Lost World of the Seventies' presented by Michael Cockerell, an hour long programme which focused on 4 'characters' of the 1970s, was far more satisfying. Using archive footage and interviews with people involved at the time, these snapshots gave a far more interesting perspective of the times and in a way was more convincing about the changes the 70s made. 

 

Starting with General Walter Walker, who sought to protect Britain from 'the enemy within', the archive interviews show a man with genuine fear of the 'Red Menace' and who was trying to gather around him like-minded individuals that would, if necessary, take over Britain to save us from Marxists. There were many who did fear such a thing. In the end though even the Telegraph undermined him and the old general with his paper army faded away. In Britain we don't go in for coups. 

Next up was Lord Longford aka Lord Porn and notorious visitor of Myra Hindley. Longford headed a campaign against pornography after the Obscene Publications Act had been amended to allow more salacious material to be published. An old school moral campaigner his investigation and report was ignored by government. 

Next was Jimmy Goldsmith, billionaire financier and tycoon, who's business dealings were subject to scrutiny and criticism by the BBC's Money Programme and by Private Eye. Goldsmith went on to try and use the criminal libel law against Private Eye, which though in the end only cost the magazine a full page add apologising and retracting its allegation that Goldsmith had helped old friend Lord Lucan flee after the murder of his children's nanny, all Goldsmith actually achieved was dislike and increasing the sales of Private Eye. 



Last up was Robert Mark, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1972 to 1977, who came to fight corruption in the CID. Corruption, was rife especially in the Flying Squad and Obscene Publications Squad and Mark was determined to root it out. Several high profile arrests followed. Mark in the end resigned though when government sought to make an independent police complaints authority. He had kept his investigations 'in-house'.

 

The world has changed since these characters were in  the news. You can't image some old general now talking about the need to fight any kind of menace if government fails nor some old lord campaigning on such controversial issues. No, too campaign now and be listened to means you have be a celebrate chef and/or have lots of followers on Twitter and Facebook. Goldsmith's story though perhaps does have more of a parallel today; no doubt now he'd have taken out a super-injunction. Big business men still don't like to be criticised - look at Murdoch. As for Mark's crusade against police corruption, it was long over due and still with us - Murdoch again - though not so rife as failure to make timely investigations (see this)

This post has kind of got away from me a bit but I guess the point of the comparison is that when it come to making programmes about recent history it's the documentary maker not the historian who wins hand down. 

Monsters – or can a TV series go on too long?

Last week Being Human series 4 ended on BBC3 and Dexter series 6 started on FX and I asked myself can any long running TV series really keep fresh?

Of course there have been and are long running TV series but generally they tend to be soaps or soap like dramas like Coronation Street on ITV or Casualty on BBC1 and these are popular and successful programmes, although not my personal cup of tea anymore I watched them and others like them in the past. Likewise I watched the hugely successful US imports like CSI and House – for a while. But in my opinion they got stale several series back. I don’t bother with them anymore.

The trouble with any successful TV programme is that those that commission and broadcast them want to milk that success for all its worth and care not if the standard falls as long as people keep watching. And of course if a series keeps going long enough it becomes a habit to watch for some people, which is why soaps generally do so well.

I was surprised when a new series of Being Human was commissioned. At the end of series 3 arguably the main character, the vampire Mitchell, was killed off and although the future was uncertain for the remaining characters as well as an introduction to a new threat, the Old Ones, I couldn’t see where the story was going to go next. This however was quickly answered in the opening episodes of series 4, killing off the next major character, the werewolf, George, leaving only one of the original cast, the ghost, Annie, and this was swiftly followed by replacements for the characters, Hal, the vampire and Tom, the werewolf (who had featured in series 3) and the story line of George and Nina’s baby, Eve, who may or may not be the saviour of humankind in the face of the vampire hoards.

This story line, with its prophesy element, reminded me of the excellent Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a programme that ran for 7 series by the way). There was also a bit of Blade going on with the vamps trying to take over the world. But as ever at the heart of Being Human was the struggle of the characters to live in the human world while being outsiders, monsters even. Annie has to become mother to Eve; Tom still has to find his way without his werewolf father McNair and Hal, who is an Old One, who has fight the urge to drink blood and kill by being OCD. Practicalities have to be dealt with while hiding their true nature and fighting off threats from their own kind.

But how long can a series run of one underlying theme?

Dexter is a very different kind of monster and as series 6 begins everyone’s favourite serial killer is also still learning to live in the human world. His issues are similar to the characters in Being Human; he has to hide what he really is, live in a world he is not really a part of but he has to also sate his ‘dark passenger’, that part of him that has to kill.

Of course Dexter has an advantage over Being Human; it’s also a cop-show. There’s a race between Dexter and his colleagues in Miami homicide to catch a killer. And his colleagues give another dimension to the story line in each series outside of Dexter’s world. Even so can we keep going along with Dexter in his seemingly unending task to learn how to live in the world? There has to be an ending sometime before we tire of his world view.

I believe the reason that Being Human and Dexter are successful is because the characters speak to us about our own isolation, our own difficulties sometimes in connecting with those around us, of living in the world where other people can seem unfathomable, different from us. I just hope these programmes end on a high and not dragged out till no one cares about the monsters anymore.

The past is another country - is Bradford?

Last week, for want of anything else to watch on TV, I ended up viewing 2 programmes I hadn't planned too. One was the first episode of new BBC2 drama 'White Heat'. In this one of 7 former flat mates has died and as the survivors begin to gather at the London flat they once shared their stories are told in flashback. So far so unoriginal. But that's not the reason I wasn't going to watch. The flashbacks start from 1965 and as the last 20th century historical piece on BBC2 'The Hour' was did not work either as a thriller or a docudrama I was wary. And going by this first episode I was right to be so. The character's are cliched and were introduced against a backdrop of social and political events of the period. This was to be expected; we all must be constantly reminded that the 1960s was a period of GREAT SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGE and don't you forget it! As if no decade has ever been as important. Obliviously nothing of significance ever happened in the 1950s, 70s, 80s etc. One thing this consistent referencing of events in 1965 did do however was reinforce the cliched characters.
There's Jack, whose daddy owns the flat. He thinks he's a revolutionary and can afford to be because daddy is a MP and can and does pay off his debts. 
Charlotte, a naive, virginal nice middle-class girl from the suburbs who has to leave home to realise her dad is having an affair and her mummy drinks so much gin because her miserable life as a hausfrau and absent husband. Charlotte reads DH Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', gets the Pill and has sex with Jack, only to find out he's got no emotional feelings for her at all.
Alan is from t'up North. He thinks he's better than those he's left behind but is still deferential to the old order.
Victor is a law student from Jamaica. Home sick and subject to racial prejudice, he fancies Charlotte. 
Lily is an art student, already seduced by her tutor and under pressure from her parents to give up art and return to the 'real world'. Alan fancies her
Jay is a medical student and closet gay. But his secret is out to the final flat sharer, Orla, who sees him with another boy at a party. 
Orla is the only surprise in this mix. A frumpy catholic girl from Belfast, not attractive and very different from the rest - she's the only reason I'd keep watching as I'd like to see where her story is going.


After seeing 'White Heat' I decided to watch Channel 4s 'Make Bradford British'. What's the connection? Well in 'White Heat'  Alan says that Jack choose them all to share the flat as a kind of social experiment. And what else could you call sticking 8 people from different backgrounds into each others lives to see what happens? I didn't see the first of this 2 part docu-reality programme but I had read that it caused some outrage by groups in Bradford who saw it as provocative and made the town sound so divisive. The 8 were chosen from a group of Bradford residents who failed the citizenship test and I gather in the first episode the 8 were all living together. In this second one they were paired off to spend 2 days living in each others homes to see what makes us British. 
What followed in it's abbreviated and edited way was a short insight into prejudice and preconceptions that reflect on us all I guess to some extent or another. 
Jens, retired policeman and pillar of this almost exclusively white community, was like a throw back to another era. Paired with Desmond, Black British, born here of Caribbean parents, Jens at first cannot see past Desmond's colour and makes continue remarks about it until Desmond takes him to a pub where as a young man he was attacked just for being black. For his part Desmond is impressed by the charitable and community work that Jens does. Both do seem to learn from each other.
Pub landlady Audrey, whose dad was black and mum white, has Sabbiyah as her partner. We don't see much of her at Sabbiyah's but at her pub Sabbiyah is exposed to a truly unpleasant tirade from a white customer that reduces her to tears. Maura is not as understanding as one might have expected her to be but reflects on her own past experiences of racism and comes to realise that she, as she puts it, is racist and uses her colour to argue that she can't be.
Damon, young, white and recently split from his girlfriend and mother of his child is with Rashid, who is welcoming and takes him to his local mosque, where Damon discovers Islam is not about terrorism. Damon is impressed by the way the local community and Rashid's family take care of each other and when Rashid reveals that he has a broken marriage and children the two men realise that they have more in common than they thought.
The last pairing went very wrong. Taxi driver Mohammed and former magistrate Maura are just too different. Maura is appalled at the way Mohammed treats his wife and daughter and he sees her as bossy. Briefly when Maura goes out with him to work she sees how he could view white British society in a less than favourable way. But at Maura's house Mohammed snaps at being asked a question about his daughter bringing home a white boyfriend and walks out not to return. 
I wasn't surprised at this. Of all the participants Mohammed looked the most uncomfortable and probably regretted ever getting involved. Sadly though he also confirmed a stereotypical view of an Asian man, marrying off his daughter as a teenager to someone back home and having a house bound wife who doesn't speak English.
So did this social experiment achieve anything? Well it showed to some of the participants their own prejudices and perhaps makes us all reflect on what makes us the same and not different - family and belonging. But the title of the programme was meaningless and I can't help feeling it was just there to provoke. The only thing that can make people feel British is the feeling that they belong.

What I've been watching on TV this week

What I've been watching on TV this week.

Very few new programmes that's for sure. If like me you have cable or satellite TV there is, in theory, loads of choice. In reality there are just lots of channels showing the same programmes over and over and over again. Sigh.

Still there were a couple of interesting programmes this week.

On Sunday 25th July 9:00pm BBC1 showed the first episode of Sherlock. Being co-written by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, I was hopeful rather than confident I would enjoy this programme. I'm a big fan of Mark Gatiss' 'Lucifer Box' novels and Steven Moffat had written some of best revived Doctor Who episodes such as 'The Empty Child' and 'Blink'. I won't comment on the latter's take over of Doctor Who, which had long been ruined by Russell T Davies' sentimentality. One can only hope he eventually shakes that off. Thankfully Sherlock was free of any sentimental tosh.

I've never read any of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and can only reference Sherlock from ITV's series with Jeremy Brett. A series I loved and is frequently shown on ITV3. I was told by a friend who does know the books that when Sherlock and John Watson first meet, John was a military doctor who just had returned wounded from Afghanistan. And this is how we met Martin Freeman's John Watson. A man that has seen and experienced terrible things, as Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock rapidly deduces. 'Do you want to see more?' he asks; 'God, yes!' exclaims John and so begins their first adventure together.

The outlandish plot mattered little in this fast paced 21st century version of Sherlock Holmes. A serial killer under his own death sentence was beside the point. This is the story of two men looking for adventure and danger. For Sherlock his superior intellect means the boredom of ordinary everyday life terrifies him in a way that risking life and limb could never do. For John the return the civilian life is equally awful. Being Sherlock's partner will be anything but dull and John's sense of loyalty and indeed concern for this weird man who describes himself as a high functioning socio-path, quickly manifests when he shots the serial killer to prevent Sherlock going too far to prove his brilliance.

If Sherlock and John are fictional danger addicts Dan and Ian, the base jumpers featured in the Cutting Edge documentary 'The Men Who Jump off Buildings' shown on Channel 4 9:00pm Wednesday 28th July, are real life addicts. Anyone who's afraid of heights would find these men completely insane as they scale tall buildings and leap off. The voice over tells us that 1 in 6 base jumpers die participating in their 'sport'. Russian roulette without the gun.

The main focus of the documentary is Dan, a roofer by day, adrenalin junkie by night. Indeed he acts like a junkie, sneaking out of the house so that his girlfriend doesn't know he's going to get his fix. He admits in front of his girlfriend that sometimes as he is on the edge about to jump he wonders if this will be it, will he die. Yet he does it anyway.

 

Ian, Dan's base jumping partner is not his first. Dan matter of factly talks about his previous partner who died and other friends he has lost. And after Ian was injured in a jump Dan finds another partner. Ian comes along too though. To assist with the planning. He comes across as a little more wary than Dan but part of his addiction is the planning which often involves breaking and entering and trespass. 'Like being a master criminal without actually doing a crime' he says.

Once recovered enough from his injuries Ian travels with Dan to the Alps to jump off cliffs. As they wear cameras during their jumps we are witness to the hideous accident that befalls him as his parachute becomes twisted and his hits the ground. Next scene he is in hospital with Dan cataloguing Ian's injuries with a kind of amused indifference that makes you glad he has found an outlet for his frankly psychotic tendencies that mean he's the only one at risk of death.

Dan says that he does base jumping to help him deal with his 'ordinary life. Sherlock would understand even if the rest of us cannot.