Category: Television

Tuesday, July 18, 2000

It’s 7:30pm on a Wednesday, and on television the theme from the English soap Eastenders starts up.  Then Ballykissangel comes on, with its gentle humour and relaxed Wicklow pace. Nothing strange there, then. 

Except that I’m watching these familiar programmes in my apuartment on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, and I’m not sure it’s a very good idea.

It’s not really the characters and plots that threaten to rupture the divide between my life here and my former life in England and Ireland – although the storylines are a bit less clumsily uplifting and the actors a little less perfect-looking than their American counterparts. 

What really matters are the incidental details – the idioms, the streetscapes and even the products on display.  When Niamh goes to the (suitably small) fridge and comes back with some Avonmore milk my heart was tugged very firmly.Who knew I was so attached to dairy products? 

The narrow streets, the dirty cars, the flat grey light (even though they shoot BallyK in the summer), the way everyone looks a little ill . . . these are things I have no protection against. 

Especially when they creep up on me in the completely different surroundings I thought I was comfortable in. That’s partly physical environment – the ridiculously beautiful fog-bound San Francisco mornings, or the high blue sky and gentle 70-degree breezes of an afternoon on the Peninsula. 

But it’s also the televisual surroundings. I can now find my way around the 60 or so channels that muscle their way into my living room. On the at the same time as Eastenders was ‘How to Get What You Really Really Really Want’ – a self-actualization, self-help, self-development special on PBS (shame on them); next as I zap through is the news in Mandarin, next the US version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, then a buxom Spanish language drama and elsewhere 3 baseball games (go Giants), 2 shopping channels, the Sci-Fi Channel, Animal Planet, the Weather Channel and all the rest. 

Most of the time I pick my way between these in the same way I do my food choices here – choosing each one on its merits, and embracing the local options. I don’t pine for Marmite, Barry’s Green Label or batch loaves over here (nor will you often find me in Irish bars in the city) – I’m too busy eating veggie burritos, sushi and knocking back double lattes and Anchor Steam. 

I’ve gone native – the only way to go. Similarly, most often my tv diet is made up of local good stuff too – Will and Grace, the late lamented Sports Night, baseball, the guilty pleasure of Survivor, good documentaries (although I did get a shock the other day when my lake monster-hunting housemate from Dublin was beamed into my living room in a Discovery Channel show). 

So when I stumble across shows that so abruptly drag me back into my older life, I feel at once happy and regretful. They remind me that however comfortable I am here, there’s a home that has a claim on me I can’t shake. 

It’s much easier to live a new life here without being nudged into thinking about what you’ve left behind, especially when you least expect it. A little like coming across photographs of old girlfriends – you get some pleasure from recalling a your past, but when you return to the present you’re not quite as confident of your place in it any more. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, July 2000)

Friday, January 16, 1998

Opinions vary wildly on the subject of relationships in the workplace, from ‘Don’t crap in your own nest,’ to wedding day ‘I do’s’ between work colleagues. But there’s definitely a difference between the real world and the world of tv. 

On TV, relationships in the workplace are a perfect way to build suspense and excitement – you don’t have to introduce any new characters, and the audience know both protagonists equally well.

Medical dramas use this device all the time – Doug and Carol in ER have waxed and waned, and while Doug was out of the picture, Carol and paramedic Shep were seeing each other. Even mild mannered Mark has ended up in bed with the odd nurse or receptionist (sometimes very odd). 

The BBC’s Casualty has an interesting spin on this Mills and Boon storyline, with Holby boasting two female doctors who are seeing male nurses. 

Top of the list of other professions blessed with a proclivity for intra-office athlectics are lawyers. This Life saw Anna, Milly, Miles, Joe, Ciara, Ferdy and Warren exploring each other’s briefs with pneumatic regularity, and US legal shows are little different. 

(In police shows, however, we’re mainly presented with dutiful wives or girlfriends who put up with the neglect from their men – until they can’t take it any more. ‘This isn’t how I wanted it to be,’ she laments.  ‘Well, when you married me, you married the job,’ he says grimly.)

Compare this extracurricular use of the office desk to reality, and what do you find? Apart from a lawyer friend of mine who assured me that her life was nothing like This Life before confessing she was seeing her boss, in my experience there’s very little going on in the office. 

It’s been suggested that I only took the job at an Internet company for material for my forthcoming blockbuster airport novel about the sexy high-flying computer industry. A cross between Jackie Collins and Micholas Negroponte, the gold-embossed tome is to be called ‘Web of Seduction’ or ‘Net Assets’ (or something similar). 

Were this the case, I’ve been sadly disappointed. There are lots of single people in the office, of both sexes, but give or take the odd aberration (and even here no-one will give me the full story), there’s been nothing to get the internal email buzzing. 

That’s not to say that there aren’t people who find others in the building attractive, it’s just that they don’t seem to be acting on it.  This is partly an Irish thing – ‘I wouldn’t kick them out of bed for eating biscuits, but, you know yourself, I’m not going to actually do anything about it.’

The closest I came to a workplace romance was years ago at college while I was revising for my exams. I’d sit in the same place in the main reading room in the University Library, a towering hall, with warm pools of light cast on the huge tables by the low brass lamps. Across from me on another table was another regular, who pored over weighty art books while her blond hair fell over her face and shone in the generous glow. 

We’d smile as we arrived and left, and eventually I slipped a note into her book on Versailles and we went for a coffee. Nothing really came of our relationship, but it was made by the place we were in – an impressive and elegant space in a 600 year-old university. Cube farms don’t really have the same ambience. 

Aside from this I’d be very happy if life started imitating art a little more. Even if I weren’t directly involved, it would spice up discussion round the coffee machine. But I’ve a feeling I’d stand a better chance in a different job – is that why my parents always wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer? Surely not. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, 16th January 1998)

Friday, January 09, 1998

Cooking programmes, I love ‘em. As if we weren’t stuffed enough already, over the holiday period, British TV was full of food being prepared. 

It used to be that cooking shows were just cooking shows – Delia Smith, the 70s queen of the kitchen – just gave it to us straight. ‘This is what I’m going to cook,’ she’d say, ‘And this is how I do it.’ We watched and learned, but we weren’t entertained. 

That was fine, if a little pedestrian, and heading into the 80s cooking as a spectator event faltered a little, being relegated to slots on daytime shows like This Morning or the fondly-remembered Pebble Mill at One.

It soon became apparent that the food was often of secondary interest to the chefs – we tuned in to watch the banter as much as the bain-marie.  The man who exemplified this shift was Keith Floyd. 

Keith was a larger than life character who constantly berated his cameraman, slurped at a big glass of red, and got huge viewing figures. 

As well as Keith’s personality, the show also had great locations going for it – France, Africa, Australia – and this marked another important shift, as we got into the cooking show as travel programme. 

Cookery started its move into other tv genres with this, and soon there were several imitators. Rhodes around Britain saw Gary Rhodes cooking lunch for the Manchester Utd squad, and cakes for a monastery in Northumberland. Gourmet Ireland gave us Paul Rankin getting a similarly good gig closer to home. 

But Gourmet Ireland also crossed into another genre as Paul travelled and cooked in tandem with his wife Jeanne. Here we had real-life family drama, as chef snapped at his talkative spouse sous – ‘C’mon, c’mon, I need the coulis now!’. 

Now we have cookery as game show as well. Masterchef rules early Sunday evening with its combination of preposterous menus from real people, and preposterous vowels from its presenter Lloyd Grossman. We marvel at the civil servants and schoolteachers who can create warmed woodpigeon salad with lemongrass and shitake mushrooms on a bed of rocket and organic watercress, with a balsamic vinegar and coriander dressing. 

Junior Masterchef is too scary to watch, however, as ten year-olds come on like they’re Marco Pierre White when they should be tucking into Jaffa Cakes and peanut butter sambos. 

Ready Steady Cook is another culinary gameshow with the perfect format – personality chefs, celebrity guests, genial host and a stern time limit.  The show wisely adheres to Aristotle’s dramatic unities, all events taking place within the actual time of the show (none of that, ‘and you just leave that to reduce for half an hour’). 

So we’ve had travel shows, real-life drama and gameshows. There are also magazine shows – the aged Food and Drink, RTE’s bootlegged Consuming Passions, and Channel 4’s recent cool upstart. 

There have also been culinary drama shows (Chef!) and even culinary detective shows – Pie in the Sky, anyone? Soon we’ll be getting the early evening news brought you by the Roux brothers, and a cookery-meets-Casualty show, where patients are delivered into the kitchen for some quick restorative work with a bouquet garnis. 

I’m just waiting for the time I can send my intelligent agent out over the Internet to get me some of the dishes created in the programmes – being so close to this stuff without able to taste it is proving too damn hard. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, 9th January 1998)

Thursday, November 06, 1997

TV Drama shows have to move comfortably in two different scales.  Firstly, the small circles of the hour, with the plot coming to a reasonably conclusive end after each episode, giving the audience a satisfactory feeling of closure. Secondly, they also have to play the long game, with events building up episode by episode so the major characters develop over time.

This is why medical dramas work so well. You can bring in new characters as patients every week to power the plot for that particular episode. At the same time, the fortunes of the staff fill out the longer-term plot needs. Interlacing the two makes the whole experience much more rewarding.

Cop shows follow a similar logic, with crimes being solved in the space of one episode, but other events in the main characters’ lives stretching over whole seasons.

As we commit to watching every week, we get to feel like we’re growing with the show in the same time frame – what happened several weeks ago to Dr Ross happened several weeks ago in our memory.

All this assumes a narrative order – watching one show after another in succession. So what happens when this order breaks down?

In Ireland this occurs when different stations show the same programmes.  In any week you can watch the X-Files three times, with Sky One being quickest out of the blocks, then RTE and then the BBC.

In practical terms, this is great if you happen to miss an episode, but the question is whether you start watching on one channel and stick to it, so as not to interrupt the flow, or whether you get your promiscuous kicks anywhere you can.

The problem with this is that one channel might be leading up to a big climax, while another is way past it and into the (less suspenseful) aftermath.

In America the problem is exacerbated by the fact that popular shows are on daily, or even more frequently. Don’t ask how I know, but in New York you can watch Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman once in the afternoon, and then again at 2.30 in the morning (and some days in the early evening as well, I think).

So without trying too hard you can see Dr Mike single, happily pregnant and living with Sully, and then unhappily separated from him – all in the same day.

On the one hand, this mightn’t matter too much, as each episode has its own internal flow, and looked at one way, it’s a suitably postmodern way to watch tv. Questing for a narrative order and logical progression is considered so 19th century in critical circles.

To misquote Truffaut, watched in this way a tv series has a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

Personally, I have a compromise option: I try and watch new episodes in order, and use the range of stations to make sure I don’t miss one. This means I have some linear sense of the big picture, and don’t get any nasty surprises.

Once I have that shape sorted out, I’ll watch as many reruns as I can stumble across (unless it’s an episode I really didn’t like the first time round). This way, watching the old ones is like looking through a photo album, remembering how things used to be and contrasting that with the sense of the ‘present’ I get from the new ones. ‘My, how Scully’s clothes have improved since the early episodes.’

We all like to think that our lives make some narrative sense, that there is some reason to things, some sense of cause and effect. Watching shows in order plays to that view of the world. Arguably, of course, people’s lives don’t make any sense seen in any way, they just happen – like drama episodes watched out of order. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, 6th November 1997)

Thursday, September 18, 1997

You switch on the TV to see a camera follow a policeman as he chases down a corridor and kicks in a door.

‘LAPD! Stay where you are!’ he bellows, as the flashlights play around the room.

Is this real drama or is this drama real? It’s hard to tell, until you see that the suspect’s face is pixellated out – it must be real.

I’ve had lots of detailed comments from readers on the subject of tv cop shows of both a fictional and a real-life nature, and so this week, I’ll leave most of the talking to you all.

The almost anonymous ‘rlittler’ from the UK gives us the British perspective on the shift from fiction through re-enactment of real crimes, to the showing of real police work:

‘Crimewatch UK was one of the first shows to smudge the boundary between fact and fiction with its reenactments of real life crimes – in my mind an insane cocktail for a nation of television watchers who write to characters in Coronation Street, unable to distinguish between character and actor. (An actor friend of mine who appeared in a Crimewatch reconstruction as a rapist was beaten in the street after one broadcast.)

‘Now, with Murder Squad and Police, Stop! et al we have spurned the reenactment for the actual crime itself.

‘Of course, the relevant production companies will deny any charges that their programmes are intended to either amuse or shock with gratuity. .  . [but] whatever the intention of the programmers . . . can the ultimate question be pointed only at ourselves?

‘Are we enraptured by seeing a police chase through the streets? Are we glued to the screen when the graphic account of a murder is outlined?’

This question of our own complicity is very valid. Why do we watch this stuff, and what might we be getting out of this voyeuristic experience?  Teddi Dempner from Lincoln, California has some blunt ideas:

‘. . . these “real life” shows indicate to me that America is growing numb to the “pretend violence” of movies and TV shows and they want to see REAL violence. I feel like we’re moving towards shows that will be the modern version of the ancient Roman gladiators – people must REALLY be dying before our eyes before our bloodlust is satisfied – these actors pretending to die just isn’t enough.’

Jennifer McAllister from South Carolina raises some interesting questions on our expectations of the police as a result of this confusion of fact and fiction:

‘As the adult daughter of a policeman, let me join all of the other families of the men and women who actually are law enforcement officers in crying out:  “Please, no more cop shows.”

‘. . . Despite the fact that society tries to teach children that police are our friends and are trying to protect us, it’s hard to convince anyone that real police are not always the hard drinking, hard loving, trash-talking bullies portrayed on tv.

‘My 3 year-old nephew expressed it best.  Due to even his overexposure to TV law enforcement, he just can’t be made to believe that his granddaddy is a policeman. After all, how can he be a real policeman if he didn’t shoot anyone at work last night?

It might be argued that the real life cop shows redress the balance, showing us how the police really are. But what we’re given is carefully-edited highlights and excitement (chases and nocturnal raids) rather than balanced journalism.

There’s always been a certain celebrity to being on either side of the glamorous cops vs robbers divide, it’s just that now you don’t have to wait to be played by Warren Beatty – you can be caught in the act yourself (so to speak).

Maybe, as a result, we won’t need the fiction any more. But with real crims and cops knowing they’re going to be on TV, the fiction must have an influence on the fact. Picture policemen practice in front of mirrors, saying ‘Go ahead, make my day,’ and hoods rehearsing their Oscar acceptance speeches.

On the one hand, this is classic postmodernity – it hasn’t happened until it’s been on tv, and we’re consumers before we’re citizens.

But while real life is dished up as entertainment, and entertainment affects the way we see real life, the result could be criminal.

How a country polices itself is a valuable marker of its maturity and well-being, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get a clear picture of what’s actually happening – the truth is being pixellated out. 

(First published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, 18th September 1997)