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Bowled Over – TV sport

Friday, May 25, 2001

My summer is shot to pieces: just when I thought I was regaining some control over my time with the end of the football season, televised sport has claimed me entirely again with the knockout combination of cricket and cycling. These events go on all day, for weeks – I am so screwed.

It’s my curse to be fascinated by sporting events that take a long time – sometimes I wish I was more into the 50m freestyle. First there’s cricket. I know this is something of an acquired taste – for example, try telling an American that the games last five days, have frequent tea breaks and can still end in a draw – but it’s something I was born to.

In the summer holidays from school, I’d drag the TV half out the door to the garden so I could watch Test matches while sitting outside. And of course I’d turn the TV commentary down so I could listen to the ball-by-ball on Radio 4. I’d wake up at 10:30, just in time to have a shower and settle down with my breakfast for the opening overs.

And even though nothing very much seems to be happening, there’s always some delicate drama being played out to keep you entertained. A dull spell of negative bowling and straight bats can be redeemed either by a flashing cover drive, or by some bewildering discussion of bowler’s body language.

(If one of the fielders has just dropped a difficult catch, the bowler might put one hand on his hip and stare ruefully at the offender – ‘giving him a teapot’. If it’s a particularly easy catch that gets dropped, then both hands are on the hips – ‘a double teapot’.)

Having been out of range of cricket coverage for three years (during which time baseball served as a very good substitute), I’m back just in time for England to be hosting both Pakistan and Australia this summer. The home team are pretty good at the moment, which is going to take some getting used to.

If that weren’t enough, there’s a great of cycling that also requires my attention. Eurosport rightly has its detractors – although its curling coverage is second to none – but they’ve got more lycra than a DuPont warehouse. 

The early season Classics are one-day races, so you don’t feel too bad devoting a few hours of your time once a week to watch unpronounceable Flemish riders perform superhuman tasks on muddy cobbles. But now the Giro d’Italia’s started we’re into the realm of long stage races.

The Tour de France demands the ultimate commitment both on the part of the participants and the viewers. Three weeks, over 150km every day – that’s a lot of television. I work from home, so despite my best intentions, the TV’s always calling me.

Fortunately, the quality of the commentary on Eurosport is so bad that your attention can stray during a long flat stage where there’s not much happening. With luck, these stages will coincide with good days at the cricket, so I’ll be able to see Goughie skittle out the Australians in time to switch over and watch Lance putting the hammer down as he drops the field on the Alpe d’Huez.

Of course, with this gargantuan consumption of sport, I’ll be an etiolated specimen by September, only seen vertical in the rare dashes round to the Spar for more Kettle Chips. But every now and again I might even think it’s worth it.

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Reheated Leftovers – The Dish reviewed

Friday, May 18, 2001

Early on in ‘The Dish’, the lads running the radio telescope start playing cricket actually in the dish, and I realised I’d already seen the film.

It was called ‘Local Hero’, or ‘State and Main’, or was it a TV show called ‘Northern Exposure’, or ‘Hamish Macbeth’ or ‘Ballykissangel’? Either way, it was clear that I was being manipulated in a pretty crass way, and I settled down in my seat knowing there weren’t going to be any surprises from here on in.

For all those working on their own similar gentle comedy screenplay, here are a few elements to include.

Crucially, you need an outsider who arrives in a backwater place full of whimsical charm. It’s best if the blow-in’s an American from a big city, because then we’ll expect him to be curt and annoying, and it will be so great when we realize he’s actually a nice bloke (by the way, everyone in the film’s a nice at heart, just hang on to that, and you’ll be fine).

Then there’s the outspoken local who has a short temper and a chip on his shoulder and doesn’t like taking orders from the blow-in. But he’ll soon learn that it’s different strokes for different folks, and that deep down, sure, we’re all the same aren’t we?

We also have to have the shy but handsome guy who wants to ask out the prettiest girl in town, but get this, at the start of the film he’s _too shy_. No prizes for guessing what happens by the end, then.  Think John Gordon Sinclair in ‘Local Hero’, Lachlainn in ‘Hamish Macbeth’ or Glenn in ‘The Dish’.

We also need the wise figure who’s a bit too urbane and talented for the surroundings, but he likes it there because it’s out of the way and quiet; he helps the shy bloke, and gets on well with the incomer. This is the Sam Neill character in ‘The Dish’, but the archetype is in some ways Chris from ‘Northern Exposure’. Part of their role is slightly to stand back from the proceedings and tell you what the drama’s about.

So listen carefully when Sam Neil says, ‘Failure is never quite so frightening as regret.’ An easy to digest homily, and (in a cunning device where the two plots parallel each other) it applies equally well to putting a man on the moon, or asking out the prettiest girl in the town. Strewth, these Aussie film-makers are no dags. Ripper.

Which brings me to another crucial element – language and culture confusions. So have the incomer look mystified when a colourful local tells him something he doesn’t understand; you can then reverse this later on as a sign that the incomer has been accepted.

You need to show that the rural community is both remote and a community. A good bit of violent weather underlines that this isn’t’ some safe urban environment, and a big dance or party in the village hall shows the community spirit. You can kill two birds with one stone and have the big dance affected by the big weather, if you fancy it.

Throw in some entertaining secondary characters, like someone stupid but likeable, (or a pompous local politician), and make sure everyone all lives happily ever after, and you’re away on a hike.

‘The Dish’? It’s well done, tender, and served with some relish. But I’ve already had my fill, thanks.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • Film

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The real deal – Faking It reviewed

Friday, May 11, 2001

There was a great moment in this week’s ‘Faking It’ (Channel 4, Tuesdays), when Alex, the frightfully posh, 5’6”, gay student from Oxford University, looked straight to camera and said in his new bouncer brogue, ‘I AM a doorman’. He wasn’t faking it any more.

The format is brilliantly simple – take an unlikely candidate, give them four weeks’ training in a new discipline, then set up a competition where experts try and spot the imposter. So we’ve had a classical musician taught to be a club DJ, a painter and decorator taught to be an artist, and the fey student taught to be a bouncer.

There are echoes of any number of other shows (anyone remember ‘In At the Deep End’?) but the show triumphs by getting real people rather than journalists to undertake the challenges.

For the first 15 minutes, the audience is convinced that it will never work. Sian the musician asks the cool DJ if you follow sheet music while working the decks, and Alex arrives at an estate in Hackney wearing a Barbour jacket, tweeds and a tie. Different sort of estate, mate.

But the intensity of the work then involved is immense – the fakers live with their teachers and have to transform their appearance, their accents and their back-stories as well as learn the craft they’re supposed to be faking.

Watching Sian emerge as a club kid was fantastic – the scene when her movement coach has her dancing round the room shouting ‘Coxie took the ROOF off last night!’ will live long in the memory. And Alex going to the barber’s for a number 1 complete with Nike swoosh shaved on the back of his head was the start of an amazing transformation.

The teachers deserve a great deal of credit. They offer support and encouragement, but they also offer friendship and are completely delighted when their charges fool the experts. ‘It’s like seeing your little brother take his first baby steps,’ marvelled Chris, the huge kick-boxer that looked after Alex.

If the mentors get a lot out of it, then the effect on the fakers themselves is amazing. At some point during the preparation, the fakers get so into their new life that they stop faking. They still have to concoct a plausible set of lies, but when it comes to performing their new skill, all of them actually mean it.

Sian’s growing sense that she genuinely enjoys this new form of musical expression was borne out by the set of decks sitting behind her when she was interviewed at home after the test was over.

And Paul felt early on that his immersion in the art world chimed with something that he’d sensed was already in him. He had something to say in his painting, and watching this self-discovery was deeply impressive.

Being a bouncer might not be so creative or obviously fulfilling, but even this got Alex in touch with a part of himself that he scarcely knew was there.

There’s also a class angle that makes the program very British. Sian and Alex were decidedly posh, and part of their training was to lose their plummy accents. But in the course of the four weeks, the bonds they built up with their teachers show an impressively healthy attitude on both sides to take people as they find them. 

Paul didn’t have to lose his Scouse vowels, but he did have to learn a new vocabulary (his use of the word ‘serendipity’ in the final test was masterful), and also a new way of thinking about himself.

You might expect ‘Faking It’ to be merely a diverting hour’s TV which tells you a little about a range of professions, and lets you laugh at an amateur making a hames of it. Instead we get to watch brave people learning valuable lessons about themselves and about the good people who take them under their wings. ‘Faking It’ is for real.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • UK • Television

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Those who can’t – Teachers reviewed

Friday, May 04, 2001

Earlier this week Tony Blair announced to the world that he needed glasses for reading, and would be wearing them in public from now on. He explained when it was he realised he couldn’t go on bluffing in his speeches any more. 

In one address he had got to a line which went, ‘There’s been a huge increase in problems of drugs, social exclusion and crime amongst teenagers.’ But instead of ‘teenagers’, he said ‘teachers’. He doesn’t need glasses – he’s just been watching Channel 4 on Wednesday nights.

After the earnest school-based dramas like ‘Hearts and Minds’, ‘Teachers’ instead uses the staff room as a basis for comedy and character, not posturing and politics. So a real teacher might not often smoke dope with their pupils, or get down and dirty in the stationery cupboard, but so what? I’m not sure how many Boston lawyers see dancing babies or have sex with complete strangers at carwashes, but we don’t criticize ‘Ally McBeal’ for not being realistic (in fact, recently, we criticise ‘Ally McBeal’ for just being crap, but that’s another story).

‘Ally McBeal’ and ‘Teachers’ both give us ensemble playing and fantasy elements (brilliantly done in ‘Teachers’, by the way) and they both show us that people in apparently responsible jobs are just as unreliable and flaky as the rest of us. In fact, they act just like big kids.

In the legal profession, authority is hedged about with smart suits, mad hourly rates and all the trappings of the judicial system. Teachers might appear a bit more lowly, with their poor wages and clapped out cars, but parents entrust their little darlings into their hands every day, and might expect a bit of maturity.

Not when you’ve got Egg as your leading man. A while ago Andrew Lincoln played a teacher in the costume drama ‘The Woman in White’, and it looked all wrong – all I could think about was him in ‘This Life’ lying in bed moaning about something while Millie fussed around getting ready for work.

So it’s good to see him back where he belongs. Lincoln’s mastered the portrayal of charming but feckless young men who are fighting against growing up and all that it entails – responsibility, commitment – that stuff he’s supposed to be teaching the kids, of course.

Hanging out with his two fellow teachers in a sty of a flat, going to the pub straight after classes, and scrambling around at the last minute to get stuff handed in, Simon is still a student at heart. Just in case we haven’t sussed that, he still rides a bike.

This creates the perfect opportunity for the fun and frolics we saw in the early episodes, especially when Lincoln is supported by tight writing, a good cast, smart direction and a class soundtrack (pun absolutely intended).

But in the last couple of shows, the writers have wisely decided to try and force the character to grow up a bit. Simon’s problem is that he has no problem being self-centred and unreliable, but he does have something of a conscience. So when he finally realizes that his laziness can cause problems for other people he likes (namely his best friend Susan), he gets all confused and uncomfortable. Like someone’s given him a huge bag of sweets and he’s discovered to his horror that he doesn’t actually want to eat them all in one go.

What I think is happening (and here I could be completely wrong) is that the stage is being set for Simon to wise up enough to stop his juvenile fantasies about Jenny, and prove himself worthy of Susan, who’s conveniently just left her man, and is far and away the most likeably together character in the show.

As if to underline his character arc, Jenny’s been softening, Brian’s been wanting to ditch his tracksuit, and the mute secretary’s begun to speak. Things will get worse before they get better – big fight between Simon and Maggie of course – but underneath all the swearing and juvenile humour, I think there’s some old comedic conventions about to fall into place. Can you say ‘happily ever after’?

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • UK • Television

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Build your own TV station

Thursday, April 26, 2001

TV schedules, who needs them? Shouldn’t I get to decide when I want to watch my favourite programmes? In the last week, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing and it’s been great.

Using the rather low-tech method of an aging VCR, I’ve been creating my own schedule, working my way through series one of ?The Sopranos?, plus all my current favourites whenever I felt like it. Need a bit of Tony S to start the day? I got your episode right here, buddy. Want to watch Simon and Jenny in the ‘Teachers’ stationery cupboard instead of Richard and Judy? Go right ahead.  I don’t think I’ve watched a programme in its own timeslot all week. I feel liberated and in control of my addiction.

And this is how it should be. With the exception of live sport and news, all the good stuff is sitting around on tape at the TV stations, so wouldn’t it be great if we could gain access to a pile of shows all in one go, letting us have at them when we’re ready?

No more missing programmes because you also have a life, or because your video recorder refuses to obey orders. And if you came into a series halfway through by chance, you could go back and watch all the earlier episodes to catch up. If you can’t wait to see how Dr Green’s brain tumour works out, you can watch a dozen ?ER? episodes in one go. I dare you.

And once we’ve got beyond the idea of TV as a push medium, all sorts of opportunities open up. If it’s a pull medium instead, then you’d obviously need a menu structure to help you navigate through the options. And once you have a menu structure, then you can create collections of related shows – a season on particular actors or themes, for example.

And since this menu would be linked to the Internet, then think of the surrounding materials you could provide, with the shows embedded into a range of resources, links and interactivity. TV would become another form of media accessible from the Web, with all the flexibility and creative chaos that implies.

Of course there are moves towards this. TiVo systems allow you to dump your favourite shows onto a hard disk and watch them at your leisure. Tell it that you like Frasier, and it will record every episode on every channel without any further prompting. It also cunningly lets you pause live TV, caching the show to disk – perfect for when the phone rings during a penalty shoot out. Or if you want to take bets on whether Beckham’s going to score with the next free kick, or hoof it into row Z.

And digital TV also offers a limited range of options – movies on demand that start at a range of times during the day, for example.

Look at how Napster and CD burners are changing the way we use music. Now imagine a similar freedom with relation to TV and films. I can’t wait, but in the meanwhile I think I’ll just dash downstairs and watch half an hour of ?The West Wing?. So long as my housemate hasn’t taped over it.

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Forever England – Bridget Jones’s Diary reviewed

Wednesday, April 18, 2001

What are the hallmarks of an English person? Ask the English and they might say a stiff upper lip, a sense of fair play and a gutsy determination to get the job done. Ask other people from around the world, and you might get hypocrisy, bad food and imperialism. (Here, in the interests of full disclosure I must tell you that I was born and raised in England, but I’m feeling much better now).

But as the film version of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ shows us, the real attributes that describe the nation are embarrassment, understatement and friendship.

The film is less a slavish representation of Helen Fielding’s book and more the conclusion to Richard Curtis’ loose trilogy that started with ‘Four Weddings’ and ‘Notting Hill’. Essentially the same premise is observed in all three films – a good-hearted, slightly clumsy, rather under-confident main character gets put through the mill of love before living happily ever.

Let’s look at those attributes – first, embarrassment: as a people, the English are hyper-sensitive about appearances and hate standing out – it’s just so undignified. (On the other hand, there’s something so liberating about just doing what you want to, and not giving a shit, which is one of the many reasons that English people have a grudging but definite respect for the Irish).

So Bridget spends most of the film being mortified in various ways. It’s bad enough that she has to dress up in the outfit her Mum has laid out for her, but it’s so much worse when she overhears Mark Darcy slagging her off, since the rules say that everyone has to try hard to avoid embarrassing everyone else – so even if someone is wearing curtains, it’s very bad form to mention it.

Then she turns up to a garden party dressed as a bunny girl, when everyone else is in civvies, and later reveals her shapely backside to the world while sliding down a fireman’s pole.

But it’s not just Bridget who suffers from this. In the most convincing fight scene I’ve seen in ages (compare and contrast with the Nietzschean self-belief of ‘Fight Club’), the two leading men apologise profusely to disrupted diners as they tumble across their tables during a brawl. You also get the sense that being thrown through a window actually hurts.

Of course, if you’re afraid of being embarrassed all the time, the you’re automatically very suspicious of love because it makes you do stupid things. Which is where understatement comes in, offering a roundabout route to avoid saying anything so clumsy as ‘I love you’. As Anthony Lane in the New Yorker points out, when Colin Firth says, ‘I like you very much,’ that’s ‘Englishman’s code for uncontrollable lust’.

And even getting that out of him is a real effort – it’s not that he doesn’t have the feelings (Colin Firth is excellent at showing himself suprised and uneasily amused at what he feels for Bridget), it’s just that he’s incapable of revealing its true depth.

Of course Bridget undestands this code and uses it herself, ‘If you wanted to pop by sometime, that might be nice,’ is her deepest profession of love for him.

(Of course sometimes this understatement is entirely appropriate. For example, when it allows for one of the few good anal sex jokes in modern cinema.)

The final characteristic on display in buckets in ‘Bridget Jones’ is friendship. Richard Curtis has a very good line in sketching in a set of supportive and understanding friends, who are always there to give advice, and act like a Greek chorus in the proceedings. If you’re constantly embarrassing yourself, and can’t quite say what you mean when it matters, then you certainly need a good set of friends who don’t care about any of that, and will love you even when you serve them blue soup.

So apart from a few missteps – like the excessive use of fake snow in the climactic scenes, the film is a success. Rene? Zellweger masters the same middle class South East accent that Gwywneth Paltrow aced in ‘Sliding Doors’, Hugh Grant shows that he can convincingly cross over to the dark side and use his charm and floppy hair for evil, while Colin Firth reprises his stern but upright Mr Darcy role from the TV version of ‘Pride and Prejudice’. He even has the big house (but we didn’t get to see if he’s got a lake round the back).

Of course, Colin Firth’s character in ‘Bridget Jones’ being called Mr Darcy is no accident. Not only did Andrew Davies share screenwriting credits on both projects, there’s another Jane Austen reference thrown in, when Bridget remarks at one point, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged . . . ‘

This depiction of English life, with embarrassment, understatement and friendship playing crucial roles is as much a part of Jane Austen’s world as it is modern London, and seen in this way Bridget Jones comes across as quite old fashioned. 

The rigid set of acceptable social behaviours and expectations that power the humour in ‘Bridget Jones’ is a world away from the good-natured anarchy of ‘Teachers’ or ‘Spaced’, for example. And while it’s only a certain type of modern Englishman who would wear a reindeer jumper with the same degree of pained perserverance shown by Colin Firth, the world would be worse off without them.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • Film • UK

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Forgive us our trespasses – review of State and Main

Wednesday, April 11, 2001

In an early episode of ‘The West Wing’, a character remarks, ‘There are two things you don’t want to see being made – laws and sausages.’ It’s a nice line, but I’d add a third thing – films.

David Mamet’s ‘State and Main’ is a satire on movie production, and he shows us underage sex, rampant egos, bribery, towering hubris, incompetence and more scheming than the average GAA Congress.

Of course, this is Mamet’s territory (the nastiness, not the GAA), but his story of a small Vermont town overrun by a Hollywood film is also surprisingly warm and tolerant. There is the usual rapid-fire dialogue and spiky characters, but we also get a sweetly natural romance and more compassion for people’s faults than you might expect.

The performances are excellent. William H Macy plays the director who simultaneously wheedles and cajoles on one phone while berating and bullying on the other. When he’s trying to persuade the shallow starlet (well played by Sarah Jessica Parker) that she doesn’t need an extra $800,000 to show her breasts in a scene, you know he’s lying like a carpet, but for as long as it takes him to say the words, he entirely believes them. It’s not a lie, he argues, it’s ‘a talent for fiction’. And what’s a movie anyway, if not a big lie?

Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, also shines as Annie, the local bookshop owner who falls for the movie’s writer, combining grace and intelligence with a good-natured wisdom.

The scenario is hardly original, and there’s more than a nod to Frank Capra and Preston Sturges – the Mayor of the town is named for James Stewart’s character in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’, and just like that George Bailey, a lot of the characters get second chances.

Alec Baldwin (reprising his obnoxious film star cameo from ‘Notting Hill’) escapes the consequences of sleeping with Carla, the underage waitress from the hotel, but Carla was intent on giving him more than a tuna BLT anyway, so they probably deserve each other.

The writer Joe White almost quits the movie but returns with Annie’s help, and also gets two attempts to do the right thing in court. Annie herself gets a second chance at romance with Joe, ditching her ambitious politico fianc?, who’s made so little impression on her that at one point she can’t even remember his name to introduce him.

Her relationship with Joe is one of the quiet delights of the film. Joe has very little choice in the matter, underlined by the way he’s hooked and burned while Annie looks on with kind amusement. 

The small touches show Mamet’s personal experience of life on the set. Nobody gets to finish a conversation without being interrupted by news of the latest crisis, and quality and commonsense are sacrificed for expediency. Crew members run tap water into the stars’ Evian bottles before melting the seal back together with a lighter – a perfect symbol for a shoot: subterfuge and behind the scenes trickery, but it looks like the real thing in the end.

In true comedy style, everything works out fine, and as they finally start shooting the film you see that Mamet has managed a deft maoeuvre with his gentle satire. He’s shown the film people as selfish, unfeeling, arrogant and corrupt, but we already knew that, so he also makes us forgive them their trespasses. 

Movies revolve around the suspension of disbelief, and the process of their creation seems to demand a suspension of normal rules of behaviour. So we give them a second chance to make the same mistakes again.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • USA • Film

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sex, lies and mobile phones – UK advertising

Friday, March 23, 2001

An approachably handsome young man sits on a tram in a snowy city. With a friendly English accent he tells us that in Helsinki it gets very cold (no shit, Sherlock- he’s wrapped up nice and warm, anyway). 

Finns embrace new technology, he continues, and HP are working on a wireless system that will let people know exactly when their tram is coming so they don’t have to wait outside in the cold (we cut to a bunch of blond kids checking their mobiles indoors).

It’s small scale and personal – a practical use for new technology. The ad closes with a nice twist when the kids rush out just in time to throw snowballs at our hero’s tram; he modestly concludes “It’s pretty cool.”

This ad isn’t selling us anything tangible. A project in Finland isn’t going to help me, and if I didn’t already know that HP are Hewlett Packard, formerly humble makers of printers and large bits of hardware, the ad isn’t even going to tell me much about what the company does.

Instead, it’s trying to sell me a company’s changed mission statement. HP are now moving into the services side of IT (for example, they made an unsuccessful bid for PricewaterhouseCoopers’ global management and consulting organisation last year), and this ad tells us about their new direction.

It works pretty well – we don’t see any physical products (the mobile phones on view aren’t made by HP), instead we see HP people and ideas, which is what consulting’s all about.

The other ads in the series (mountaineers watching daytime soaps and an Internet guru not being accorded the fame he deserves) also try to show us that the company is clever, witty, globally attuned, human, and quietly confident – ‘pretty cool’. This is a big change from the old HP image, which was steady, workmanlike and absolutely not cool.

HP have altered their product, and so they’re advertising this. Guinness, on the other hand, haven’t changed what a pint tastes like, but they too are trying to change their image.

Faced with younger drinkers who like Red Bull and vodka, alco-pops and Belgian wheat beers (just not all in the same glass), St James’ Gate is trying to tell us that the old blond in the black dress is really sexy too.

We’ve had suicidal horse-riders racing passionately off cliffs, and a feisty couple stripping off their clothes in a rain storm (if they’d had their Finnish mobile phones wiith them, they could have stayed dry and still caught their bus in time). Now we’ve got a sweaty, moody fire dance. (They’re going through the elements, as it was pointed out to me: water, fire . . . clever, huh?)

The ads are brilliantly shot, with great soundtracks, and you do indeed think ‘passion’. Just to underline this, they finish with a coda that shows the couples in the pub all over each other and their pints. The fire-dancers ad overdoes this slightly, when in a passionate embrace the guy spills his creamy white love juice on the floor. (I can just see him sheepishly explaining, “This has never happened to me before. Really. I must be tired.”)

But Guinness just isn’t that sort of drink. It might mean many things – quality, tradition, integrity, humour, even – but however sexy the ads they produce, none of the sexiness rubs off on the product.

Change your advertising if you’ve really changed what you do. If not, don’t bother. A sheep in a Prada dress is still a sheep.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • UK • Television

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Celebrity Confusion – UK reality TV

Thursday, March 15, 2001

If ordinary people are on TV, does that make them celebrities, or just the subjects of documentaries? What about famous people doing ordinary things? Or people that start out ordinary and become famous?

It’s been quite a time for celebrity confusion. First ‘Popstars’ showed us ordinary folks being turned into celebrities with dramatic success, culminating in their number one single in the UK over the weekend. Then ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ sought to turn famous people into ordinary folks by allowing us to see what they looked like in their dressing gowns.

A lot has been written on the explosion of reality TV shows recently – from the scheming and salacious American offerings like ‘Survivor’ and ‘Temptation Island’, to the more character-driven and prosaic British programmes such as ‘Airport’ and ‘The Hotel’. (As a quick aside, has RTE done one yet? I’ve been away for a while, so might have missed it, but given their penchant for plagiarism it seems a startling ommission.)

Even knowing what to call these things is actually quite hard. The original ‘Big Brother’ had real people in it, but everything else was completely unreal – even the house was designed for the purposes of the show. It came off like it was adopting a fly on the wall approach, but of course deep down it was a gameshow, with the contestants asked to do artificial things to try and win the money. Much more ‘Generation Game’ than Nick Broomfield.

But if that’s a docu-gameshow, then some of the others have been more like docu-soaps, which are a little truer to the tradition of documentary, since in theory the people are doing their regular jobs, and the camera crew just happens to be there to capture it all. 

But ‘Popstars’ was a particulary weird amalgam of the two forms. It was a gameshow in that people entered a competition, and the winners got a prize – a recording contract and all that. But then it turned into a docu-soap, as we followed their adventures in the real world (well, as real as the music business can ever be), as they set about their new jobs.

I found myself completely hooked on the show, mainly because I grew to like most of the people in the band. Myleene came across as a calculating bundle of ambition, but the others had their redeeming features, with mouthy but warm Kym being the star. 

The best of the reality dramas are character driven – Nasty Nigel supplanted Nasty Nick in the popular imagination, and we recall the spiky hotel manageress, and the cruise ship cabaret singer with a heart of gold. But these people are shown being themselves, with no script or expensive production to hide behind. They might become famous, but they’re famous for being real. 

We already knew the people that entered the ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ house as celebrities. Here was the process going backwards, and we had the opportunity to see them as they really were – was Jack Dee really funny, was Chris Eubank as mad as we thought, and was Anthea Turner as annoying as she seems?

In truth, Jack turned out to be both funny and have a warmth beneath his curmudgeonly exterior. Eubank really was hat-stand, Keith a salt of the earth lad who really couldn’t sing, and even Anthea came across reasonably well. 

Always assuming they weren’t faking it for the cameras. That’s the thing about famous people apparently being real – they’re experienced enough in the medium to fool us. Which is why I’m sorry the ‘Popstars’ kids are now off to go and be real celebrities – I liked them much more when they were just ordinary people on TV.

But of course this is the irony of it all – you want to see real people on TV, but the process of being on TV means they stop being ordinary, and we need new blood. Maybe Andy Warhol was right after all – just don’t bother me when my turn comes for the 15 minutes, because I’ll be too busy watching you guys.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • UK • Television

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Touching Evil

Thursday, March 08, 2001

It’s a staple of the police drama on TV that the hero has some flaw in him – he drinks too much, his marriage has broken down, he’s jaded by the crap he deals with every day.

But in the end he gets the job done, and in doing so acts as a necessary buffer between polite society and the more disturbing world of crime. He might be tainted by the work, but it’s a dirty job and someone’s got to do it.

But ‘Touching Evil’ (currently reprising on TV3 on Mondays) doesn’t leave us with the same warm glow of achievement put out by regular police dramas. Its subject matter is grim enough – serial killers, paedophiles and various other frightening criminals whose hearts are as dark as night – but we’ve seen this aleady (remember Robert Carlyle in Cracker?). Where the show shines is in having the hero as messed up as the people he’s chasing.

In these days of psychological profiling, a good TV detective has to understand some scary minds, but Dave Creegan (played with a sad intensity by Robson Green) seems to empathise with the suspects a little too well.

In a recent episode someone was killing women and putting their hearts in bin-bags. So the heart is rubbish, huh? This isn’t ‘Dixon of Dock Green’, that’s for sure.

The uneasy camera is never still, it’s always raining, and even the most mundane of items can appear menacing. In a quiet moment, Creegan’s sitting in a greasy spoon cafe and we see a normal refillable red ketchup bottle on the table in front of him. The stains of ketchup around the nozzle at the top look for all the world like dried blood. And you know that’s how Creegan sees it.

Even the normal witty comebacks among the cops here take a pretty grim turn. When a colleage comes round to see Creegan at his house, she’s taken aback by the state of the place. “I don’t want to upset you, Creegan,’ she thoughtfuly says, “but the last time I saw a bedroom like this, the bloke in it had just shot himself.”

And Creegan’s not too far from this. Joyce Millman in Salon magazine lists his problems: “Shot in the head in the line of duty, he returned from his near-death experience with a scar on his forehead and a case of the heebie-jeebies that nothing except a brisk walk on the wild side can temper . . . Bad things keep happening to Creegan: His marriage failed because of his work; his girlfriend was murdered by a serial killer he was tracking; he had a nervous breakdown; he came back to work just in time for a squadmate to be murdered by a different serial killer; [next] he was set on fire by yet another serial killer.”

This all sounds a little too much but Green’s performance is riveting, at least partly because he knows how close to the edge he is. The title of the show spells it out – if you touch evil, you will be touched yourself.

Rather bizzarrely, his closest comrade might be Sonny Crockett from ‘Miami Vice’. Quite a few episodes of this better than average police show (overseen by Michael Mann) end with some expendable cops killed and the bad guys getting away. It’s at times like these that Sonny gets into his car and goes for a moody drive.

What both cops share is an awareness that there’s no-one who understands them better in the world than the scum of the earth they’re chasing. This was also the issue driving Mann’s movie ‘Heat’.

It might seem a long way from Al Pacino and Don Johnson to Robson Green, but in their different ways all the dramas look at the price you have to pay if you choose to immerse yourself in a world of cruelty and pain. Even just watching Touching Evil makes you feel like you need a wash afterwards. But you’ve got to love TV that takes you to grim places and doesn’t leave you with a pat happy ending.

Posted by David in • Square Eyes • UK • Television

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