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Dramatic commitment or promiscuity – the rhythm of TV drama

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)

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The High Life – what’s wrong with flying

Thursday, October 23, 1997

Much of contemporary life would be hard to explain to earlier generations (it’s hard enough explaining what I do to my parents), but air travel is so spectacular that sometimes it’s difficult even for us to cope with. 

You get on a metal tube in London, sit down, have something to eat, maybe watch a movie, snooze for a while, and then when you wake up you’re in (say) Tokyo. 

In the face of this miracle, we have become so blas? about things that all we do is moan about the plastic food and the lack of leg room.

If you wanted to be grand about it, you could reflect that you are among the first set of people ever to travel so far so fast, and that this privilege is hard to quantify. 

However, if you wanted to be practical about it, you could consider techniques to fill the time available on board. The Australian cricket team, for example, hone their competitive edge on the flight to England by seeing how many cans of lager they can drink. I don’t have the exact figures in front of me, but we’re certainly talking dozens of tinnies each. 

Alternatively, you could try the film, but there are usually two problems – you?ve either seen it before, or the sound is so bad you can’t follow it. 

The famous exception to this is Virgin Atlantic, who give you your own screen with a wide choice of films and comedies, but then they also provide video games for those in first class. A nice idea, but those people who can afford to travel expensively are just the sort who wouldn?t know what to do with a PlayStation. Networked Quake throughout the plane would be better – ideally us plebs travelling economy against the fat cats up at the front. 

Another technique to pass the time that is more honoured in the breach than the observance is talking to your fellow passengers. Like most people, I harbour a devout hope that the person sitting next to me on the longest flights will turn out to be that attractive art history PhD and part-time model we feel we deserve. 

Until this happens, though, I have a different approach. Air travel is so artificial and preposterous that any attempt to distract yourself from it just doesn’t work. It’s the ultimate man-made environment – timeless, placeless and completely enclosed – you’re doing something the human body was definitely not designed for (unless you’re extremely lucky in who you get sitting next to you). 

In the face of this assault, I switch myself off for the duration of the flight. Propped up against the window, I doze and wake up, day dream and drink water, and not much else. Like your PowerBook screen dimming to save power, you?re still ticking over but you don’t look it. 

This may sound like wimping out, but I’m just giving the abnormal experience the respect it deserves. The English travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin tells the story of native bearers who after a few days of constant travel refused to carry some Victorian English explorer?s stuff any further. 

The explorer demanded to know why they’d stopped. They calmly said that they were waiting for their souls to catch up. How much more time does it take for ourselves to recover after we?ve crossed the Atlantic? We’re not jet-lagged, we’re soul-lagged. 

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, 23rd October 1997)

Posted by David in • Modest Proposals • Life

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Travellers’ Tales

Saturday, September 27, 1997

The way you see the world largely depends on the stories you’ve been told about it.

Places you’ve never seen exist in your head as reflections of the things you’ve learned from tv or films or books or magazines.

While we in Europe might be sitting down to episodes of ER and Seinfeld, we are watching them in a completely different way from our American cousins.

There are arguments that if we don’t see ourselves on TV, then we lose some sense of who we are, and it’s certainly odd that more Irish people watch British soaps than our own (admittedly dodgy) home-produced fare.  The current furore over the portrayal of the Irish in a British soap shows how much this matters.

This cultural schizophrenia affects the way we see our own country, but the major effect is in the way we see America – a culture to which we do not belong, and yet in which we feel so comfortable.

When I first went there, there was a curious feeling of homecoming. As I wandered around, I recognised the telephone booths, mailboxes and even the fridges from staying up on childhood Saturday nights to watch American shows like Starsky and Hutch.

My experience of the country, even having spent some time there, is conditioned by the stories I watched as child, and those I continue to watch.

However, while today many of these stories come from pop culture, this is just the latest incarnation of a much older story-telling urge.  Travellers’ tales, complete with weird and wonderful creatures, fantastical cities and their exotic inhabitants are as old as language.

My favourite uncle was a sailor, and his postcards from far-off places showed us that there was a world out there. During his stays with us on his way to or from his ship, he’d tell us of restaurants in Genoa, or driving trips across the desert in Saudi Arabia. He’d travelled to cities that were only names on the map for us, and his brown eyes twinkled as he recalled another scrape or adventure.

His stories brought the world alive for us – we’d picture him sunburnt in Sydney or shivering in Stockholm, drinking in a harbour bar in Tokyo, or buying a little keepsake for us in Cape Town.

Watching NYPD Blue might not seem to have much in common with this, but in fact it serves the same purpose: from it we learn both how different people are in different parts of the world, and also how fundamentally the same.

This access to other cultures (however it comes to us) does not dilute our own, but rather enriches it – for example, Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and the music of U2 both show Irish people’s ability to take the influence of American music and make something uniquely Irish out it. Combining ideas and values is the only way to keep a culture alive.

So while the tv schedules might smack of cultural imperialism, and another McDonalds opens in Shanghai or Moscow, I’m still optimistic about the survival of a range of ways of looking at the world. The tv shows are like my uncle’s travellers’ tales: helping us to learn about ourselves through glimpsing a different life. 

——— In Memory of Ray Dinsmore, 1946 – 1997 ————

(First published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, 25th September 1997)

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Caught in the Act – Reality TV

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)

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Camomile Tea vs Motorbikes

Thursday, September 11, 1997

‘Those who go through life prepared for every eventuality do so at the expense of much joy’, runs the (half-forgotten) quote.

Camomile tea has with it the air of preparedness. For some (few), there’s an immediate attraction in the taste, and for most, a welcoming calming effect, but it still smacks of being over-cautious.

You’re not living in a great big way drinking the stuff – it’s not shots of frozen vodka or even a good nerve-tingling espresso.

As such, it ties in with other obviously healthy elements to make a lifestyle that is faultless in its logic. But not smoking, going to the gym and eating the right food all express a certain degree of fear: it’s a tough world out there, and you have to look after yourself, and you’ll be in better shape to cope with life if you’re in better shape yourself.

This is not to deny that there isn’t an inherent pleasure to be gained from staying healthy. Both the endorphin rush of pushing yourself hard on a run or on a bike, and the more measured feeling of waking up and not feeling like death are worthy ends in themselves.

It makes sense, but how does it fare when stacked up against the glorious nonsensical nature of life, not to mention the platitudes of teenage rebellion – ‘burn out, not fade away’; ‘live fast, die young’?

What camomile tea is to the careful approach, the motorbike is to this more expansive way of life. Freedom, danger, life on the edge – it’s all encompassed by the two wheels and leathers. As reader Paul Sotrop from Florida remarks: ‘There is no visceral thrill in tea. It reminds you of the times you were ill. A really cooking motorcycle reminds you of a totally kinetic existence. How many webpages out there wax about the joys of tea?’

All those years spent living within safe limits, preparing yourself for events, looking after yourself – how much are they worth when compared to getting out there and experiencing a visceral thrill? Excuse the literary quotes, but D H Lawrence’s argument was designed with bikers in mind: ‘Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.’

And this gets to the heart of it – if you live too carefully, you might wake up one day to realise that you’ve been waiting around for your life to start, and all the camomile tea in the world won’t help calm you down then. Live too big, however, and you might not wake up at all one day, just when it was dawning on you that dying young was losing its appeal.

The lesson of The Who should be remembered – no doubt Roger Daltrey believed it wholeheartedly when he shouted: ‘Hope I die before I get old’ on My Generation. But now he’s running a fish farm in the countryside, wearing green wellies and doing ads for American Express.

He was lucky enough to live big first and survive the excesses, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do things the other way round, if that’s what takes your fancy.

A recent UK newspaper article on the increasing sales of motorbikes to people of more mature years included the statistic that more than 70 per cent of people who took their motorcycle test last year in the UK were over 30.

These are guys with cars, who are buying superbikes to ride at the weekends, and while this might smack of mid-life crises, at least they’re doing something.

Ideally, though, we should be able to combine the two approaches to life concomitantly. Live in a reasonably prepared fashion, while at the same time allowing room for immediate joy. 

While that sounds like deciding to be spontaneous, it also sounds like Aristotle’s golden mean. So make mine a camomile tea as I storm off on my Harley. 

11th September 1997

Posted by David in • Modest Proposals • Life

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Live music vs. Playing sport

Thursday, August 28, 1997

U2 are playing back here in Dublin over the weekend, and the town is buzzing with people desperate to get tickets. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who might be able to get hold of a couple, and expectation hangs in the air like Michael Jordan above the hoop. But I won’t be going.

When you’re ten, choosing a career is easy – there are only a few options. Children want to be astronauts and deep sea divers and sports stars and doctors. Test leads, fulfillment agents or (heaven forbid) Internet content editors don’t figure much.

In the teenage years, some of these ideas fade, and others come to prominence. It’s crucial to be in a band, and being the next Otis, Elvis, Janis or Jimi seems an attainable goal.

When we’re children we think as children. But when we become adults, we put away childish things. We shouldn’t want to be pop stars any more; nor should we dream of winning Wimbledon. And it’s true that quotidian concerns about work and money keep these thoughts at bay most of the time.

However, there are two occasions when we revert to our younger selves.  Seeing a good band play live has always been and remains a troubling experience for me. As much as I enjoy the performance, the community and the time-altering effect of a great set, I can never be wholeheartedly enthusiastic – it should be me up there.

It’s not that I think I’m a great songwriter, or as good a guitarist as The Edge – I know my talents lie (or rather sleep) elsewhere – it’s just that I’ve wanted to be a pop star for so long now that I don’t know how to stop wanting it.

Rationally I know it won’t happen, and that the whole music business is full of egos, greed, suicide, depression and broken dreams. But emotionally, I’ve not got too much further than playing my tennis racquet in time to ABBA records.

The other time we relive our childhood aspirations is when we’re playing sport. My similarity to a top-class footballer (that’s football as in soccer) is pretty limited, both in ability and vocabulary, but when I’m having a kick-around with my mates, that doesn’t bother me. I know I’m not very good, but every now and again I can fool myself. A swift turn, or a volley into the corner of the net, and the commentary starts in my head – ‘Oh yes, he’s done it! Moore has scored!’

There’s no getting around the fact that this is deeply sad behaviour for a grown man, but I’m not alone. Nick Hornby describes this phenomenon frighteningly well in Fever Pitch with sport, and High Fidelity with music, and the success of the books show that it’s a common malady.

Of the two problems – not being a pop star and not being a professional footballer – the first is harder to cope with. My sports craving can be satiated with my amateur sporting endeavour, where the team spirit and element of contest mirrors the real thing whether the venue is the local park or the San Siro. (Nike’s current advertisement with famous stars playing in pub-team matches on Hackney Marshes makes this point.)

But there’s no getting round the pop star thing. Maybe it’s not too late to start. But I’m still not going to see Bono and the lads this weekend.  And it’s not that I can’t get a ticket or anything. Oh no.

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, 28th August 1997)

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Vinyl vs. CDs

Wednesday, July 09, 1997

Let’s see now – sound quality vs coolness quotient, durability vs authentic wear and tear. Despite the megastore’s embrace of CDs, vinyl refuses to die – is this just nerdy affectation, or is there something wrong with those shiny silver discs?

CDs are like the vision of the future we used to get on Tomorrow’s World, the BBC TV show that optimistically heralds technology’s ability to improve everyone’s life. They were supposed to be better at everything – indestructible, gorgeous and with a sound quality that meant you could hear the rustle as the guitar player’s shirt rubbed against the bridge of his guitar.

In this bright new future, vinyl was overly fragile, had sound quality that was never great and deteriorated rapidly, and came in sleeves that disintegrated with use.

So why don’t we all feel enthused now that record shops don’t deserve the name anymore? Maybe it’s because CDs are just too squeaky clean. You want your music collection to age with you, so that the time you’ve spent with an album is reflected in the dog-eared sleeve.

Just as owners and pets start to resemble each other, so a control freak’s pristine record collection starts sporting protective plastic sleeves, while the relaxed and generous person ends up with a dishevelled collection containing about half the records they’ve bought, and a vague idea of all the people that have the other half.

There’s also a sexual frisson to using records. As well as the whole Freudian stylus and groove thing, the virginal tightness of a new record’s sleeve (and inner sleeve) is an evocatively suggestive thing.  CD cases (even the slick green Rykodisc jewel cases) can’t match this.

However, a more persuasive (and frankly less weird) reason for favouring vinyl is that vinyl offers the capacity for production while CDs only allow consumption. DJs create new music from vinyl records – the deck has become its own instrument – while CDs just sit there being annoyingly immutable. Technological developments are starting to change this, but we’ll never reach the stage where DJs can gouge their initials into their CDs.

It’s possible to compare audio CDs with CD-ROMs. CD-ROMs looked to have everything sewn up, but their read-only nature means that for all their strengths, they’re being sidelined by the fragile and clunky Internet.  Just like the Internet, vinyl’s more inclusive approach guarantees its continuing life into the future.

Of course, as things stand at the moment, there’s a lifestyle choice involved. As reader Jan McIntyre points out: ‘the rarity of vinyl (supposedly) singles out its owner as discriminating and aloof from the mass market.’ Buying vinyl asserts your identity as the sort of leftfield person that either listens to things that aren’t on CD (increasingly difficult to justify), or the sort of leftfield person that still has a record player that works (increasingly easy to justify).

Maybe with time we’ll come to love our CDs, but I somehow doubt it. If and when we rely on our computers for the latest tunes streamed instantaneously over the Net, the appeal of the low tech records will be enhanced even more. Records are very like their owners – fragile, a little worn and easily marked but also valuable, individual and perfect for combining with others to create new stuff.

(first published as a Modest Proposals newsletter, 9th July 1997)

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David Duchovny vs. Gillian Anderson

Wednesday, June 18, 1997

Discussing The X-Files on the Internet is like being English and talking about the weather – it’s so common as to be stereotypical. However, keeping banality at bay, there are some crucial things to say.

Firstly, the show is deeply manipulative, working on us in a very skilful way. This is done partly by a tight and recurring pattern for many episodes – a precredit sequence gives us an insight into someone we know to be weird, and ends in a death. Then we have a brief piece of investigation, and an autopsy (oh, Scully in her surgical scrubs). By this stage, the viewer is required to have recoiled in horror at least once – uuuuugh! – we say, as someone spontaneously combusts, instantly suppurates or loses a crucial limb.

Scully comes up with a plausible explanation, then looks in increasing disbelief as Mulder starts a speech with, ‘What if . . . ‘, in which his mad explanation is first expounded. The duo split up and Scully rings Fox, saying ‘Mulder, it’s me.’

His suggestion almost invariably proves to be correct, but at the end of the show there’s still a suggestion that this might not really be the end of the matter. Perfect postmodern balance between closure and being left deliberately unsatisfied. The pacing of the series reflects the pacing of individual episodes, as we’re giving hints and suggestions about the big story of abduction and colonisation, but never feel like we really know what’s going on.

The storylines play on our pre-millennial tension – our loss of faith in big government, big religion and big ideas is exemplified in the perfect combination of aliens and conspiracy theories.

However, other shows before and after have tried this – The Twilight Zone and Nightstalker before, Dark Skies and Millennium after. The difference is that in the X-Files, the relationship between the two leads powers the show as much as the weird stuff.

It’s become a given that the show reverses the normal power relations between the male and female leads. Before, the ditsy woman would be convinced there was something odd going on, and the big logical man would get to the bottom of things and reveal the logical explanation.  Now Mulder is the passionate believer and Scully the hard-headed scientist.

This sounds great, but as has been remarked, in the value system of the show, Scully is still the weaker partner, as her explanations are shot down by a credulous but correct Mulder. The X-Files are his baby, and he gets to discover things, shoot things, storm off in huffs, and look troubled.

Scully meanwhile gets cancer, abducted, and her family members killed while she’s chasing around after the big kid Spooky. Unsurprisingly, she’s been branded a saint in some circles.

Then there’s the Moonlighting-style sexual tension element. If ever we were being manipulated it’s over this. All the hints about Chain-Smoking Man and the big colonisation plans pale beside this blatant piece of titillation. Take two attractive leads, and simmer them gently, always threatening to bring them to the boil.

So up until recently I’ve let myself be led, and enjoyed the trip, still knowing that there was something hollow at the heart of the show. The duo have been through so much, but little of it seems to have left a mark. Scully’s hair and suits are better cut, and Mulder is a bit more wisecracking, but that’s been it.

Thankfully, this is changing, with Scully’s attitude to her cancer lending her a certain grace and dignified fragility, and Mulder’s self-obsession leading (possibly) to his downfall.

The show’s always been good, but now it’s shifting from being knowingly manipulative to genuinely moving as it explores the internal lives of the two leads. The truth is in there.

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The Empire Strikes Back vs The Bible

Wednesday, June 04, 1997

Your modest proposer is not normally given to self-revelation, but this week we come to a topic that warrants some autobiography. When I was ten years old my older sister and I went to see The Empire Strikes Back.

I enjoyed the film in a ten year-old way and spent the whole summer playing with an imaginary light sabre (not the dodgy plastic ones you could buy in the shops – they were bobbins).

It was not until I saw the film again earlier this year that I was suddenly struck by the scary thought that my moral view of the world might have been shaped by a 3-foot high muppet with a croaky voice.

Of course, it’s not news that the Star Wars trilogy is steeped in mythic grandeur. George Lucas knew Joseph Campbell’s work on the monomyth, and it’s clear that the reason the films are so powerful is due to the ancient archetypes and tropes they invoke as much as the special effects.

Look at even the most obvious literary, mythic and psychological borrowings. Luke’s journey from farmer’s boy to Jedi knight is a classic medieval quest for identity. Then there’s Luke’s Freudian desire to kill his father, his descent into hell to rescue Han from Jabba, and all those suggestions of incest with Leia. Add the Jesus, Hamlet, Odysseus and Gary Cooper parallels, and it’s a very heady brew indeed.

Critics have long been wise to this, from Roland Barthes to my breathless undergraduate essay about Thomas Malory and Star Wars, but this is of more than academic interest, at least to me.

Sitting in the dark watching The Empire Strikes Back again, I began to realise that in some deep way, I agreed with all of Yoda’s exhortations about the Force. Maybe it’s the way it recalls many Eastern belief systems. The mix of physical and spiritual effort required of a Jedi parallels Buddhist monks learning karate, and the Force binding everything together sounds like Shinto animism to (ignorant) me.

When Yoda says, ‘A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack. . . For my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is.  Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us.  Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter,’ I found myself thinking that, give or take the odd name, that doesn’t sound too weird.

Against all this, The Bible didn’t stand a chance in my house. It didn’t really speak to me in the language a ten year-old would understand. The merchandising was rubbish, for a start. A 3-inch plastic John the Baptist was never going to be as valuable in the playground as a Boba Fett First Edition.

One scary site, ‘The Force is a Tool of Satan’, acknowledges that Jesus might be losing souls to X-wings and Ewoks, but the Church of England didn’t put up much of a fight in early 80s Buckinghamshire.

It could be worse, I could have taken my moral instruction from ET or Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, but I’m still a bit concerned. However, while she mightn’t admit it, my sister has been affected at least as badly. She’s now a yoga teacher (yoga/Yoda, a coincidence?), and when she says, ‘Be calm, at peace. Passive. Now, nothing more will I teach you today. Clear your mind of questions. Mmm. Mmmmmm,’ I wonder if she knows who she sounds like.

(first published as a Modest Proposal newsletter, 4th June 1997)

Posted by David in • Modest Proposals • Film • Life

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Friends vs. This Life

Tuesday, May 27, 1997

You live with or near a pile of friends in a big city, you’re in your twenties, your problems revolve around relationships and your career, and you spend lots of time in bars, cafes or pubs.

The description applies both to Friends, the ubiquitous US sit-com, and to This Life, the rather more low-profile BBC2 drama-cum-soap. Throw in the tension of a couple of the protagonists going through an on-again off-again relationship, and you might be wondering if there are any differences at all.

You live with or near a pile of friends in a big city, you’re in your twenties, your problems revolve around relationships and your career, and you spend lots of time in bars, cafes or pubs.

The description applies both to Friends, the ubiquitous US sit-com, and to This Life, the rather more low-profile BBC2 drama-cum-soap. Throw in the tension of a couple of the protagonists going through an on-again off-again relationship, and you might be wondering if there are any differences at all.

Unless you’d actually seen the two shows. Friends is bright, comfortable and safe, for all its lesbian couples and ‘commando style’ suggestiveness. They live in nice apartments, look gorgeous, are funny and almost always sort things out by the end of the episode.

Most of the Friends are likeable – except Monica, who’s hateful, one-dimensional and sour (or is that just Courteney Cox?). Ross is affable in a whimsical kind of way, Joey foolishly dishy, Rachel gutsy, Phoebe ditsy and Chandler vulnerable and inimitably pithy.

In contrast, everyone in This Life is horrible. There’s the arrogantly snobby careerist Miles, the earnestly well-meaning control freak Milly, Anna, the vampish sex-bomb past her sell-by-date, and Egg the ineffectual blokish bloke who’s too wimpy even to be a New Man. The new member of the house, Ferdy, might be alright, but he never says anything and it’s hard to judge his true worth by watching him step out of the shower.

The atmosphere surrounding This Life is suitably grimy and unpleasant.  The rooms are all small, it’s never sunny and London’s dirt seeps into every shot. The editing and NYPD Blue-style camera work jar and each episode is full of drinking and swearing. It feels like real life.

Friends on the other hand, feels like a sit-com – but a very well-written one. The pacing of the episode is perfect, and the comic threads are skilfully interwoven. You get the right combination of main plot, subplot, observational humour and one-liners, but it never feels like it’s reality.

So which works better? The full-on gory details approach of This Life, which confirms your expectations about how unbearable it would be to live in a house full of unpleasant lawyers, or the soft-pedal warmth and comfort of Friends’ neverland, in which a waitress and a short-order chef can live in a New York apartment that size?

Friends is sharp without being pointed, while This Life is accurate without being honest. With its journalistic style, This Life appears to be more realistic, but in going for the details they’ve missed the universal verities that Friends confirms every week. When it comes to describing life, a good piece of fiction often tells more truth than a hundred documentaries, or a thousand would-be documentary-style soaps.