INFORMER: “God didn’t save the Queen — Charlie did!”

INFORMER

TX: BBC1, Tuesdays, 9pm, 16/10/2018 – 20/11/2018 (six episodes)
w: Rory Haines & Sohrab Noshirvani, d: Jonny Campbell, p: Julian Stevens, m: Ilan Eshkeri (Neal Street Productions)

Informer is local, national and specific. It is the alternative to some of the more transnational tendencies – common, for better and worse – in recent TV dramas. In their tough script, Haines & Noshirvani address the thorny issue of national identity; they are also singularly successful in rooting their drama in the atmosphere of 2018 Britain: a place fraught, boisterous and unstable in a way a 30-something like me has never really previously experienced (though this situation has gradually revealed itself ever since the onset of austerity in 2011).

Yes, Informer is mostly London-centric, but it at least feels genuinely of a London which the drama defines in contrast to the bleak “Other” of the more fleetingly depicted North. The setting is manifestly East London, around Brick Lane and Whitechapel. Central to this geographical dichotomy are revelations of policeman Gabriel Waters (Paddy Considine)’s previous double-life: in contrast to his suburban family life in the South, his undercover work is as the self-styled “Charlie”, infiltrating far-right circles in the North. Considine – channelling some of the disturbing force he conveyed as the avenging ex-soldier Richard in Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) – is adept in the role of Gabe, trying and often failing to separate his two lives. Edgy performances rooted in social realism are Considine’s stock-in-trade and he is given fascinating material here and is well balanced by the perceptive, acerbic Bel Powley as Holly Morten.

In contrast to Bodyguard, Haines & Noshrivani present a whole Muslim family, in depth and warts and all: no idealisation or demonisation here. Heading an impressive ensemble cast is Nabhaan Rizwan as Raza Shar, a second-generation British Pakistani hairdresser who is mercurial, street-smart and basically decent but roped into deeply questionable activities as part of his new role as police informer. His family life is troubled and all members are presented as flawed human beings – not as driven ideologues or dupes for Islamist ideas as so many other dramas present Muslims. As I previously argued, Bodyguard does the Muslim community a grave disservice in its simplistic fictional representations of them.

This drama is keener to display how individual foibles can lead to a tragic, inexorable sequence of events and also sets up the intriguing subplot of Gabe’s double-life as “Charlie”, keeping open until the last episode the sadly all too realistic possibility of far-right terrorism in Brexit-afflicted Britain. The characters in this northern world, like Sharon Collins (Rachel Tucker), are not ogres, but nor are they shown to “have a point” in their core views. Sharon is distinguished from the rest in seeming less passionate in her politics, but nor does she seem to countenance leaving the group: she is of their world.

The world these particular Northerners exist in is clearly shown to be limiting and limited – indeed, they celebrate the legend of Charlie as the socially-mobile one who “escaped” – genuinely neglected by the metropole but also self-defeating in their closed attitudes. “Charlie”, when he encounters Nigel “Nige” Briggs (Richard Glover) who lays bare the geopolitical divides when Charlie asks him “What are you doing down here? I thought you’d never set foot in London”: “I still stay out the PC swamp as far as I can. But, you know, when duty calls.” As Gabe explains to Holly, “He [Charlie] was a hero to those people – the one that got away”. But, in his fiction, he didn’t escape to London but to the dreamland of Florida.

In a taut, frightening scene in episode 5, “Charlie” has returned in character to a working men’s club type venue where friends of Nigel Briggs (Richard Glover), implicitly of the far-right, gather to celebrate Nigel’s life following his death, which, in a dramatic irony unknown to them, was linked to his encountering Charlie again. Gabe as “Charlie” shows himself to be an expert rabble rousing MC, and is announced as “the master of disaster himself”. His rhetoric is inch-perfect in its rough sentimentality and incitement: “I know that Nige is up there, watching us. And he’d want us to have a fucking riot!”

“Charlie” is a performative, masculine Nazi, not with swastikas but a Burberry-style Mod jacket and who has the pogoing audience as putty in his hands, sharing in a love of their retrograde Oi brand of punk music. And then, there is the more disturbing turn when a pizza delivery man of Asian ethnicity appears to deliver food and “Charlie” apparently loses control of his persona and appears to side with what is an overtly racist mob against him. This scene, while clarified in episode 6, is not robbed of any of its stark power. It is violence and bigotry distilled; as Dennis Potter said of David Edgar’s ‘Destiny’ in 1978, this is ‘malignancy charted’, the malignancy of 2018 that has been gestating for a long time.

In Gabe’s assuming of this alter-ego ‘mask’, nothing is dressed up: he is shown to have a conflicted love and shame for being “Charlie”. Being “Charlie” seems to give him some greater adrenaline, ego boost and sense of belonging to this dangerous world, which holds greater excitement for him than his family life with Emily (Jessica Raine) and children. You get a sense that he might actually want to, as he says, “glory-days it” with Nige. This drama exposes the real and actual corruption of undercover police work, while also not necessarily denying its necessity.

Roger Jean Nsengiyumva is brilliant as Dadir Hussain, a roguish drug dealer who is nevertheless far from a stereotypical Black Briton; family life is more important to him. There is a brilliant scene where social worlds collide when Raza and Dadir encounter middle-class students in a local art college; this conveys something of East London’s distinctive and diverse social milieu. Raza also has a great, taut scene in episode 1, where he meets some middle-class London hipsters and rebukes them for their patronising, hackneyed attitudes and demonstrates he possesses cultural capital they don’t expect: knowledgeably mentioning photographer Robert Capa.

This is a defiantly uncomfortable drama of Britain in 2018, which centres on the mundane realities of multicultural London. It also conveys a tellingly nightmarish vision of the North, seen as if in passing via the cult of “Charlie” that hoodwinks the downtrodden, self-excluding group who put their faith in flags more than people. Best of all, it gives voice to a range of men and women and race is only centred on by the racists, whose stories are rightly given less time.

Brexit Britain: Day #1040 – Mass-Observation and Dream Diaries

From the 25-27 April, I attended the seventh annual conference British Association for Television and Screen Studies; the first I had attended and at which I spoke.

On Friday 26th, during my panel, the preceding speaker talked eloquently about a long lost BBC TV series EAST END, broadcast in 1939. This was an anthropological insight into the subject of Jewish and Cockney life in the East End of London, presented by Tom Harrisson, one of the founders of the Mass-Observation movement. More than a decade ago, David Attenborough presented a documentary on Harrisson, entitled Tom Harrisson: the Barefoot Anthropologist (BBC4, 18/01/2007). After our panel, the speaker JJ told me how easy it was to get sidetracked in the M-O archives: for example, getting engrossed in the dream diaries participants were asked to complete in the early years of the Second World War.

On Saturday afternoon, I made my way back from the conference on the Cross Country train to Newcastle. While there was excellent free WiFi access for the whole journey, and I spent much of the time typing up my handwritten notes from a fascinating documentary on Italian genre cinema of the 1970s, I couldn’t help observing some of what was going on around. The woman next to me was older middle-aged, serious but fairly cheery when she struggled to locate the right ticket. At Leeds, the train emptied. At York, it filled up again. A hen party, and nearer to where I was sat, a group of young women – very Geordie and working class. The sort of people Rod Liddle might patronise or, even worse, claim to speak for. The announcer on the PA system chummily advertised alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages on sale.

This group was loud, on a generally noisy carriage. At a few points they had current popular “tunes” on, as I heard a passerby say. They went out of their way to be polite. One of them needed a tissue or something and a fellow passenger gave one and was thanked profusely: “You see, I’ve got manners, me!” It could have been an encounter in Lynsey Hanley’s book Respectable: The Experience of Class (2016).

This was far from the threatening raucousness you can sometimes get on a Saturday train from tanked-up average geezers. Their dialect was interesting – the Geordie usage of “grief” as a verb. Moreover, they did not just speak about their own lives but about the varied (and none too promising) job prospects in areas like nursing. One of them in particular had strongly held views, critical of people in their own generation who seemed to want to earn their money via Instagram, in some way… They were critical of people being “obsessed” with social media and discussed what they saw as the bad pay and conditions of being a nurse today.

After mentioning the difficulties the Health Service is having in providing care for certain conditions, one said: “I don’t think there’ll be an NHS in ten years’ time.”

These aren’t the sort of people, in age, class or geography, whose voices we hear much, except if they are ghettoised in reality TV or entertainment or mediated by journalists of left, neoliberal or right wing persuasions. (Most commonly, the latter two) It made me think of the folly of scrapping BBC3. It also made me think: why on earth doesn’t the BBC make a current affairs equivalent of Gogglebox, based in the likes of trains, bus queues and shopping centres? Unmediated by voice-over.

I had a dream, yesterday morning. The Prime Minister was holding a press conference. This was seemingly being broadcast to the nation. Yet instead of the usual sort of media set up she was sat on the floor. Beside her was a pile of books. After making a very cursory introduction, she picked up one of the books and began reading. The contents were baffling: nothing seemed to make sense.

It seemed she was somehow trying to be “authentic”. Yet, she was completely failing to connect and seemed utterly oblivious to how it was all coming across.

She abruptly abandoned the first book and starting reading from another, which again made little sense. The gathered journalists were scratching their heads and began muttering, uncomfortable at the non sequiturs. The PM’s delivery was as prim and Sunday school teacher patronising as usual, but it seemed she hadn’t learned the content beforehand. It seemed to me that these were books that had meant something to her in the distant past, or to someone else…

I was in the midst of the group and, somehow, a book appeared in my hands. I turned the pages, it was an old book, its contents were obscure. Its texture as a physical object particularly struck me as I turned its dusty pages; whole chapters were marked with soot. Yet, I was able to detect amid its antiquity that its subject was English culture and in particular English seaside resorts.

I suddenly felt that a sense of epiphany, as if it was being provided by a film voice-over: that I was aware, at least in part, of what she was getting at. Yet, I kept my silence and the broadcast continued.

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL – “Who started it? The British”

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL

TX: BBC1, Sundays, 9pm, 28/10/2018 – 02/12/2018 (six episodes)
w: Michael Lesslie & Claire Wilson; John le Carré (novel – 01/03/1983), d: Chan-wook Park, p: Laura Hastings-Smith, m: Yeong-wook Jo (The Ink Factory & AMC Networks & BBC & Endeavor Content)

Yep, us British, we started a lot. As well as apologising for our role in the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, we should recall that we instigated the military-led coup against the democratically elected PM Mohammed Mosaddegh in Iran which strengthened the monarchical rule of the shah and backed the dictatorship in Brunei in its inception in 1959, enabling it to stamp out democracy in that country too. Thus, we bear some historical responsibility for a country whose laws currently punish homosexuality with death by stoning.

Recent dramas, too, have portrayed the after-effects of the British involvements in history. The Little Drummer Girl is a rich, engrossing version of a JLC novel, previously and less sure-footedly adapted for film by director George Roy Hill in 1984. This is another drama that explores the tensions and dangers of leading a double-life and develops at leisure JLC’s J.L. Austin and Erving Goffman influenced preoccupation with the performativity of language. What’s more, Park, Lesslie & Wilson ambitiously create an even-handed portrayal of the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict, sadly every bit as relevant in 2018 as in its late-1970s setting.

Florence Pugh is one of a formidable phalanx of women who head the casts in 2018/19’s BBC drama season. Insouciant, idealistic yet at times devil-may-care, her Charlie feels right in a way that Diane Keaton’s rendition of the part just didn’t. With the story crammed into a 130-minute duration, Keaton is forced to become more of a passive object and loses control with several instances of hysteria. Pugh neatly creates an intelligent and slightly hedonistic Charlie, who moves in left-wing circles not that far from the 1970s milieu of Howard Schuman’s Rock Follies (Thames, 1976-77). Charlie performs a radicalism that is perhaps only partially faked; her divided loyalties and angst cut a bit deeper than some of JLC’s more standard Cold War characters, with their ultimately hegemonic pro-deterrence Atlanticist stances – as identified by Toby Manning.

There is an attention to detail in the trappings of tradecraft – bugs such as a rigged-up radio – that evokes The Americans (2013-18), and this is much closer to that programme’s murky tone than to The Night Manager (2016). That significant Eminent Dragon-packed hit drama featured to an embarrassing extent in The Guardian and other publications’ lifestyle, fashion and holiday sections. The Little Drummer Girl’s inability to attract the same sort of ‘soft coverage’ was reflected in its lower ratings and, while Florence Pugh’s background is fairly elite – independent boarding school St Edward’s School in Oxford – she shares this with none of her fellow cast members. As well as Laurence Olivier, its alumni includes figures like newsreader Jon Snow and the late, defiantly anti-establishment art critic, novelist and broadcaster John Berger.

Naxos, Greece. Vini Reilly. Vistas. Bottles. Pebbles. Words.

Like Killing Eve, there’s a relish in selecting unfamiliar music tracks – presumably to most British ears – to signify a cosmopolitan connoisseur-ship absent in TNM and Bodyguard. This is part of how these programmes are attuned to different audiences. As well as vintage Greek disco and the like, there’s The Durutti Column’s ‘Sketch for Summer’, perhaps mildly anachronistic as a January 1980 release being played in the summer of 1979 when it was recorded, is nevertheless wonderfully evocative of euro-romanticist radicalism. Vini Reilly’s band’s very name alluded to both anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the Situationist International. Situationist theory enabled links between the 1960s-birthed ‘Psychedelic Left’ that Charles Shaar Murray was proud to be part of (as Mark Sinker’s A Hidden Landscape Once A Week details) and the Post Punk underground from 1978.

Unlike the film version, we are also shown Gadi Becker reading a book about Salvador Allende on the beach, notably in the same scene as we hear Reilly’s plangent music. Presumably such explicitly political touches would have been too close to the bone: the film was released in the UK in July 1985, not long before the Iran-Contra affair began. Referencing Allende implicitly anchors the TV version in justified left-wing outrage over the US backed coup against an elected socialist government in Chile in 1973.

From early in The Little Drummer Girl (d. George Roy Hill, 1984)

Hill is also much keener to show the Palestinians as a fearful ‘terrorist’ threat, using the iconography of the black balaclava used in so much 1970s-80s news footage. Park shows us proportionately much more of Khalil’s visage and other Palestinian faces. Park’s version is also repeatedly explicit in highlighting British culpability and, like detached BBC journalists in the Falklands War, ‘we’ are designated as ‘The British’: ‘The British always have the solution to other countries’ problems’, ‘The War of Independence, 1948. What do they call it? The Catastrophe. Or… Disaster. Who started all this? The British.’ It’s notable that the drama is set in 1979, a ‘theatre of the real’ that evokes the docudrama Death of a Princess (ATV, 1980) and Hanging Fire (BBC1, 1981) – controversial television addressing Saudi Arabia and Israel respectively, which JLC might have been aware of while writing his novel. Middle east controversies were definitely utmost in British news and culture of the early 1980s, along with the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Over six episodes, Lesslie and Wilson are able to give much more time to the Israelis, the Palestinians and Charlie’s urban, left-wing drama milieu, who barely appear at all in the film. We also have more time given to the British intelligence establishment and its distrust of the Israelis, through Commander Picton (Charles Dance, evocative of two facets of 1980s ITV drama, having appeared in bothThe Professionals (LWT, 1977-83) and The Jewel in the Crown (Granada, 1984)). Like Killing Eve, this is a plush transnational drama, just as rooted in European signifiers; the eclectic soundtrack also includes the European Classical canon. The architecture includes not just the Parthenon but 1960s-70s brutalism which grounds us in ‘grim 1970s’ terrain, especially with the last episode’s associative use of it as a staged terrorist incident is manufactured by the British and Israelis.

Both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict have a point from their own perspectives, rooted in historical circumstances; in this drama, both are shown to commit objectively bad, subjectively understandable acts. Which is maybe a bit much for complexity-averse British audiences in 2018. As well as its many incidental pleasures, this drama does far more to immerse us in unpalatable realities than the 1984 film version did.

Brexit Britain: Day #1023 – Basil Fawlty to EU: “Give us a No Deal or you’ll be CRUSHED!”

So, the Brexit soap opera – series 4 is it, or 41? – has drawn to a close. Pleasingly, there has been much compelling television which engages with not just metropolitan London (the engrossing, zeitgeist-chasing Fleabag on BBC1) but also: down-at-heel Bognor Regis (the aptly discomfiting, sour Don’t Forget the Driver on BBC2), 1990s Northern Ireland (the magnificently refreshing Derry Girls, on Channel 4), 1970s-80s Yorkshire (Liza Williams’s astute, damning record of a society’s grim misogyny The Yorkshire Ripper Files: A Very British Crime Story on BBC4; why not BBC1?) and our very own Newcastle upon Tyne (David Olusoga’s A House Through Time, on BBC2, tracing a representative our-story of class, power, knowledge and culture).

It has also been a week when the Radio Times has proclaimed Connie Booth and John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers (BBC, 1975-79) as the UK’s favourite sitcom, which has also been interpreted as a warning about the isolated Little England mindset. One that wasn’t heeded. Somehow, many people have clearly overlooked Booth & Cleese’s encoding: laid-back liberalism and open-mindedness about women, the working class, the Irish, the Germans, black GPs and other professionals (not of the Bodie-Doyle kind!). Instead, they have aberrantly decoded Fawlty Towers as meaning that a besieged island mentality, angry paranoia and obsession with class status are desirable ends.

Speaking of Fawlty’s influence, what about that long-time MAY’S BRITAIN… favourite Mark Francois? This abuser of Tennyson and the English language (Europe will be “facing perfidious Albion on speed”, apparently), has not been tipped for the knacker’s yard of clapped-out Gammonry but for the Tory leadership…! By Telegraph columnist Charlotte Gill, who seems to have a latent desire for Tory oblivion, which would be just about the only positive by-product of an actual No Deal scenario. “A No Deal”, planning for which has been finally halted this week, is manifestly not the most popular option for the public, whatever IDS and Boris Johnson have claimed this week.

Gill’s unhinged punditry arrives amid inconveniently cautionary voices about the whole “Brexit” enterprise; not from usual suspects but from the Daily Mail‘s Peter Oborne on Open Democracy and James Kirkup in Brexiter-haven The Spectator. Oborne stresses the threat to the UK and regrets his lack of consideration for Northern Ireland back in 2016; Kirkup assiduously dismantles the myth that we would have ‘control’ or ‘freedom’ if we “go WTO”. Both reflect on actual scenarios we face now, not on the illusory fantasy Brexits that were hatched in many bonces in June 2016.

These were fantasies ludicrously indulged by the Prime Minister, as this January 2017 rhetoric captured on the front-page of The Times attests:

Somehow, the innate glory of Britain as a country put us in the driving seat, in a negotiation ‘against’ 27 other nation-states working in tandem and supporting each other… Somehow, for Brexiters, EU claims about not doing a trade deal without the backstop are bluff, yet a self-harming No Deal is not a bluff, but a desirable end!

As the second “Brexit Day” passed with barely a whimper; instead of mass public discontent, I sense rather tired annoyance and indifference. There was a whimper, an “off-grid”, “blackout” protest of maybe 3,000 (at best) social media diehards. Do they actually believe their propaganda that staying off work and sitting in the house with the TV off for one day could “bring the country to its knees”?

They exclaim: “No cars, no shopping, no TV, no phones!” Until we get our way and we get No free roaming on holiday, No EU food imports, No jobs from companies who have settled here over our 46 years of membership! No United Kingdom!

Well, I’m sitting in the house now, writing this and listening to house. Through the TV is playing ACID: MYSTERONS INVADE THE JACKIN’ ZONE, a compilation of Chicago Acid & Experimental House from 1986-93. A CD I bought in London two Saturdays ago. After having listened to Jens Lekman & Annika Norlin’s epistolary album Correspondence via the internet. I have played Mr Fingers’ ace ‘Washing Machine’ and also used a washing machine. Beat that! While they are free to listen to their Arthur Askey and Strawbs records on gramophone or vinyl and re-read Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech for the thousandth time without so much showing a leg… I think my activities will have as much effect on the world as theirs.

I seriously hope that this is my last Brexit post for a while, and the “Francois for PM” and “Blackout” incidents constitute an appropriately hapless, desperate damp squib with which to end this series of the Brexit soap opera. Sadly, I fear “Brexit” is going to be with us for at least the medium term. A nation has grown used to shouting at itself for three years, and, bizarrely, it likes it! Or, many do: especially those Leavers who like saying “get over it” and claiming to speak for “the 17.4 million”, but also that curious niche of Remainers who are desperate to rewind the clock to Cameron-Osborne’s neoliberal political programme of 2015/16.

As we enter a “Brexit Lull”, desired by all but those true believers in traitors and betrayals, there are other issues we might consider important. Greta Thunberg’s Friday climate change protests continue; David Attenborough is to broadcast on the subject on BBC1 next week. We might focus our minds on what happened one hundred years ago today in Amritsar, India, and while welcoming the fact that the Prime Minister raised the issue in Parliament, we should all urge her to apologise on behalf of the UK for what we did.

In writing about the 1978 Play for Today ‘Destiny’, I noted that the scene from David Edgar’s earlier stage play mentioning the killing at Amritsar of 400 unarmed Indian protesters by British troops ordered by Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer was excised from the television version. This showed a certain historical timidity in the BBC, which, while backing the play’s complex and even-handed dramatisation of many political voices, and showing the poignant death of Major Rolfe’s son in Northern Ireland, excised the historical facts concerning many more deaths in India in 1919.

We must remember, we must apologise. We must see ourselves as others see us, whether we want to do free-trade deals with India or Europe, or both or neither. I believe in the choice of a new generation and insist that we can leave Powell and Francois behind and heed the lessons of Fawlty Towers.

MRS WILSON: “March for Victory!”

MRS WILSON

TX: BBC1, Tuesdays, 9pm, 27/11/2018 – 11/12/2018 (three episodes)
w: Tim Crook, Anna Symon & Alison Wilson, d: Richard Laxton, p: Jackie Larkin, m: Anne Nikitin (Snowed-In & PBS Masterpiece & All3 Media – for BBC One)

Mrs Wilson is the only docudrama among these BBC dramas I’ve addressed, being based on real events, with Ruth Wilson playing her own real-life grandmother. It is, to refer to Derek Paget’s definitions in his excellent No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/docudrama on television (2011), very much a docudrama rather than a dramadoc, with the facts informing a drama that attempts to get to deeper emotional truths.

As Joseph Oldham has commented on Twitter, ‘It is like James Bond but as seen from the Bond Girls’ perspective’, with the shadowy Alec Wilson seen as charming rogue but only seen partially and with the roguery not passed over. Iain Glen is excellent as the dubious spy and novelist (24 novels, 1928-40), coming across as like a corrupted Roger Livesey. Ruth Wilson is exceptionally engaging as the tortured, betrayed Alison Wilson, equally able at suggesting her severity and plausible emotional repression as well as the necessarily volcanic eruptions as she comes into greater knowledge of her husband’s bizarre life.

Patriotism and its associated myths are seriously questioned, as we see things from Ruth’s perspective and Alec’s genuinely held patriotism may just be a desperate cover for his myriad infidelities. We see a “maverick” from the perspective of her wronged wife, and the precise nature of his dealings in the likes of Egypt and India in the 1930s and 40s remains opaque, even mystifying. Is he even an Oscar Wilde style ‘sphinx without a secret’? He definitely is a father whose guidance cannot be trusted, as in the repeated scenes of him reading one of his patriotic adventure stories to one of his sons: “Gordon was a brave soldier. He wasn’t afraid of the enemy, was he? No! He was going to win the war for his country. He led his soldiers over the highest mountains, across the widest rivers, marching onwards — march, march, march! March to victory!”

Episode 3: Alison, very impressed with her husband’s jingoistic bedtime story…

This scene is a more naturalistic docudrama variant on ‘Once upon a Time’ in McGoohan and Markstein’s The Prisoner (TX: ITV, 1967-68) with its pay-off that James Bond style escapist adventure that we have just watched is just a children’s story, used as diversionary propaganda to indoctrinate children in the Village. Compared to Bodyguard, which does have its scene of Budd harshly remonstrating with his child – “Don’t show weakness!” – it is a deeper questioning of “Sturdy Oak” masculinity and traditional militarism. Ruth Wilson, interestingly enough appeared in several episodes of The Prisoner’s 2009 revival, the same year as appearing in the adaptation of the late Andrea Levy’s Windrush narrative Small Island.

We have the now relatively rare case of a TV drama engaging with religion – these aren’t the days of Adam Smith (TX: Granada, 1972-73)! Though I am aware of Jimmy McGovern’s Broken (TX: BBC1, 2017), which I haven’t seen. Ruth finds faith as a way to come to peaceful terms with her shattered life – caught in the maelstrom of Alec’s labyrinthine existence, it seems to make perfect sense, as well as emphasising religion’s relatively greater centrality to British life in the 1960s, where the ‘current day’ scenes are set. Mrs Wilson does veracity well; the period décor, costumes, furnishings and hairdos are all present and correct and this explicitly feels like a plausible version of the 1940s and 1960s, with no transplanted 2018 dialogue.

The focus is on the domestic, cast into doubt and mutilated by the glare of the public world. This sense of disruption is conveyed by the intrusion of Alec’s past into Ruth’s present, following his death. We are treated to visitations from recent Terrorscapist TV fictions: Keeley Hawes, much more incisive as the luminously bohemian actress Dorothy Wick than as the Home Secretary in Bodyguard and Fiona Shaw conveying enigmatic gravitas as Alec’s snaking intelligences services “handler” Coleman, much as she did in Killing Eve. Dave Hill, always a welcome presence, is a Landlord, and has form in terms of appearing in film and television that interrogates national identity: A Day Out (1972), Bill Brand (1976), Britannia Hospital (1982), Remembrance (1982) and The Monocled Mutineer (1986) are just some of his previous credits.

Mrs Wilson is exactly right at three hour-long episodes, it doesn’t outstay its welcome or become overstretched. The ending, with its shift to the real descendants, speaks of a pragmatic decency in our national character that seems all the wiser in this age of inflated culture wars between liberalism and conservatism.

Now, to examine, after Raymond Williams and John Ellis, its place in the British television flow of 2018: after its end we are immediately told that ‘Poirot is here’. Following trailers for the now-traditional BBC Christmas Agatha Christie of The ABC Murders (BBC1, 2018), as well as Death and Nightingales (BBC2, 2018) and Luther (BBC1, 2019), we have grim-faced Huw Edwards reading the BBC News at 10 O’Clock on Tuesday 11 December.

The soap opera just keeps going… Unlike Mrs Wilson

This was the day that there was supposed to have been a vote on Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement with the EU, but the Prime Minister had bottled it, fearing a heavy defeat. Edwards speaks about a possible vote of no confidence by the Tory Party in May’s leadership – which later happened, revealing a fraught 63-37% split. There is a trailed story about lowering unemployment figures, but most prominent is domestic gloom (BBC London reporting more train fare increases) and international realpolitik through the EU spokesperson on the WA: “It is the best deal possible. It is the only deal possible.”

You are left wondering about the enigmatic, adventuring Alec, but far more about the consequences of his actions, and, inevitably, thoughts are drawn to many current day would-be British “buccaneers” and the likely consequences of how they wield power.

Brexit Britain: Day #1016 – Ever Decreasing Tory Circles & the Boothroyd-Ardern antidote

So, we are now six days away from a possible “No Deal” that would represent a colossal failure of governance. May cosmetically opens talks with Labour without seemingly being willing to give an inch.

Mark “French Mark” Francois leaves us in no doubt that Brexit is on the side of the angels by appropriating the language of the “good book”: “Forgive them, father, they know not what they do”, implying very ironically a lack of epistemological awareness on the part of MPs with a different view to him.

Meanwhile our favourite “haunted Victorian pencil” shows his mettle:

So is the Mogg-man an obstructionist happy to forever snipe and undermine the EU from the sidelines? Or, is he the ambitious would-be Tory power-broker feeling he has to look like he supports compromise and gesture towards economic realities by backing May’s deal at MV3? He is now trapped between these two stances, but instinctively veers back towards his comfort zone.

At least the army are all well behaved and not in any way evoking memories of GB75!

Whenever anyone claims that Labour are “just as divided”, show them this fascinating graphical representation of the voting patterns on Brexit, from The Economist magazine:

It shows that the Tories now consist of at least ten significant caucuses (maybe 13, if you count a 5-6 MP cluster as a caucus!). None of which has enticed a single MP from another party to join it other than self-styled “maverick” Frank Field.

The Tories move in ever increasing numbers of ever smaller circles. Apologies to Esmonde and Larbey!

Who should we listen to and learn from? Jacinda Ardern, in her response to recent events in her country, showing compassion and leadership. Betty Boothroyd, Dewsbury-born former Labour MP and Speaker of the House of Common, who was 21 days old at the time of the Wall Street Crash, quoting wise words here from Harold Wilson on the European question in British politics and using some of her own regarding Boris Johnson.

PRESS: “Our front page may have been a contributing factor…”

PRESS

TX: BBC1, Thursdays, 9pm, 06/09/2018 – 11/10/2018 (six episodes)
w: Mike Bartlett, d: Tom Vaughan, p: Paul Gilbert, m: Natalie Holt
(Lookout Point Ltd. & BBC Studios & Deep Indigo Productions & PBS Masterpiece – for BBC One)

A steady grower of a series, Press was pleasantly verbose and took its time in exploring the particular milieu of journalists on two papers: the Sun-style tabloid The Post and the broadsheet The Herald – Guardian-esque, as strongly implied in episode 1: ‘The Herald started in 1936 as the Yorkshire Herald’. Writer Mike Bartlett was unafraid to expose the particular venal nastiness that has been increasingly prominent in our tabloid media discourse since Rupert Murdoch took over The Sun in 1969. David Suchet does a good job as George Emmerson, The Post’s owner and CEO of Worldwide News, suggesting the transnational power behind the scenes, exerting control over even his very self-possessed editor Duncan Allen (Ben Chaplin). Chaplin is the stand-out performer, wringing an uncertain note of pathos in his portrayal of Allen’s private life, as well as his monstrous marshalling of his newsroom. Wisely, Bartlett complicates his amoral ruthlessness by creating other characters who seem to possess even less of old Gordon Brown’s compass.

It has its flaws. The This Life-style private life entanglements of the work colleagues across both papers are far from riveting. Paapa Essiedu does his best with the amoral reporter Ed Washburn. Ellie Kendrick is lumbered with the stereotypical hapless liberal Leona Manning-Lynd, a journalist air-headed enough to leave her notes and phone around when out for a drink with rival reporter Ed, when she goes to the toilet. Brendan Cowell – Steve Pemberton would’ve been better! – and Priyanga Burford have a relationship that I couldn’t care less about. Things are much more interesting when revolving around the idealistic northern tough nut Holly Evans (Charlotte Riley) and Duncan Allen, who encapsulates the broiling, manipulative cynicism of 2018 Britain’s true elite: the right-wing press. Riley, so adept at deadpan comedy in Swimming With Men (2018), is as good here playing grim tenacity.

Compared with the warm, northern provincial newsroom of Arthur Hopcraft’s Play for Today ‘The Reporters’ (BBC1, 1972) or the bustling Junior Gazette in Steven Moffat’s Press Gang (Central, 1989-93), Press suggests it’s a bleak time for “Fleet Street”, besieged by social media and dwindling circulations – as well as being physically dispersed beyond its Fleet Street locale for over thirty years. In the last episode, in a bid to persuade him to do the right thing, Evans reminds Allen of his old editor and mentor, who Allen then reveals was very much part of the fabled drink-sodden culture of old Fleet Street.

The people aren’t as stupid as he thinks…

The contemporary newsroom is presented as either mildly dysfunctional and reactive (The Herald) or ruled on fear and proactive (The Post). Allen’s attitudes are shown in his patronising of his Geordie assistant Lucy Redford (“She’s not the sharpest”), who in a notable scene in episode 5 breaks cover and reveals sardonically to Holly: “There was a reporter here who started leaking stories to other papers. When Duncan found out, he put the reporter’s mam on the front page. Labelled her “benefit scum”. (Quietly) He thinks I’m stupid. That’s what I want him to think.” It’s a shame that Lucy (Laura Jane Matthewson) doesn’t get any further truth-telling opportunities, but maybe that is the point: such voices are closed down. With such newspapers, you only really hear one voice – Emmerson, mediated by Allen, who discourages any distinctive voices among his staff.

Bartlett negotiated such ground successfully in his TV play – formerly on stage and radio – King Charles III (TX: 14/05/2017), which portrayed a fair few commoners’ outlooks alongside the dominant royals, even if it did have tendency to portray a baying mob rather than a passionate crowd.

The best episodes were 5 and 6, with the intertwining plots around terrorism – as symbolised by MI5’s shadowy “Resonance” surveillance project – and the suicide of school bully Danny Lyons, 17, who it is implied was hounded to kill himself by the paper’s disproportionate coverage of him as a ‘MONSTER’. The drama becomes less predictable; the scenes in the newsroom become ever more charged, after earlier episodes resembled a rather pedestrian equivalent of The Hour (BBC2, 2011-12).

Mercifully, Press never seems to see itself as a film, but a leisurely, unfolding television text – and the final episode bluntly dramatises the increasingly hysterical tenor of our baying press since 2017. It is a gripping, ethically engaged intervention against the terrorscapism of Bodyguard, rubbing our faces in the frightening world Paul Dacre and the Mail’s political editor James Slack have helped to mould.

There’s a nobility in standing against this tide; remember which paper broke the story of the Windrush scandal and consider this: would the likes of Duncan Allen have gone anywhere near it?

RIP, Scott Walker: the Outsider’s Champion

RIP, Scott Walker (1943-2019).

He was a transformational voice and exploratory musical modernist; no one has gone further into the ugly and beautiful. No other musical oeuvre has spanned ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ to the 22 minute-opus of oddity ‘SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)’. Only Bowie (and maybe Hollis) is remotely comparable, in making “the journey of a life” in music so fascinating. In the 1960s, he popularised Brel and chanson and produced some of the best music to listen to for heartbreak; I’ve lived through it with Scott 3 (1969), believe me…! Later, he detonated the ‘song’, culminating in the wondrous masterpiece Tilt (1995). His music is immersed in history and humanity, in its horror, ribaldry, melancholy and humour.

In addition to Bowie and Hollis, he stands beside Leonard Cohen, Robert Wyatt, Peter Hammill, Sun Ra, Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush as a musical force that will endure.

‘Bouncer See Bouncer’ is at the summit of where music can go. It will resound in 200 years’ time. ‘Cossacks Are’ is the avant-pop cut-up of our dreams, Burroughs in the age of the Iraq War:

“A rare outcry makes you lead a larger life”
“You could easily picture this in the CURRENT TOP TEN”
“Medieval savagery, calculated cruelty”
It’s hard to pick the worst moment, it’s hard to pick the worst moment

Here’s a current top ten, nah twenty, of my favourites by Scott Walker. Bit pointless as you really need to listen to it all…

‘Jackie’ (1968)
‘Cossacks Are’ (2006)
‘The War is Over (Epilogue)’ (1970)
‘It’s Raining Today’ (1969)
‘The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime)’ (1969)
‘The Electrician’ (1978)
‘Butterfly’ (1969)
‘Montague Terrace (In Blue)’ (1967)
‘Plastic Palace People’ (1968)
‘Boy Child’ (1969)
‘Farmer in the City’ (1995)
‘If You Go Away’ (1969)
‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ (1966)
‘Epizootics’ (2012)
‘I Don’t Want to Hear it Anymore’ (1965)
‘The Seventh Seal’ (1969)
‘Tilt’ (1995)
‘Blanket Roll Blues’ (1984)
‘Lullaby’ (2014) (w/ Sunn O))))
‘Bouncer See Bouncer’ (1995)

Brexit Britain: Day #1009 – Red Ed versus the Eton Mess

So, how’s Brexit going? We’ve had Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door trying to save us (from what?), we’ve stockpiled the ginger beer and sparkling water. Yet, a day after the fabled, written-in-stone ‘Independence Day’, we are ever less certain what is going to happen…

The Prime Minister has managed a successful… mutation from a robot into a zombie. When asked why the Prime Minister was holding a third vote this week, which she knew she was going to lose, one cabinet minister this week was reported as saying: “Fuck knows. I’m past caring. It’s like the living dead in here.”

You are seeing the bizarre spectacle of brass-necked Tories trying to blame Labour when they themselves are the government, and, at third asking, 28 ERG “Ultras” rebelled; if all Tories and the DUP had backed the Deal it would have passed.

You are also seeing the right, finally, turning on their ‘own’. James Forsyth in The Spectator claimed that this was likely to have the cataclysmic impact on the Tories’ reputation for competence that Denis Healey’s going to the IMF for a loan had for Labour in the winter of 1976 – which, as Forsyth rightly notes, was based on a miscalculation and needn’t have been done. If it’s a “No Deal” or a supplicant Brexit – with a Customs Union, or such – they are going to carry the can with both Remainers and disappointed Leavers. For different people, both options have the ring of “national humiliation”.

For the Tories, it will be deeply worrying that The Spectator is turning on them, as it didn’t just back Brexit in 2016, it backed withdrawal from the EEC in 1975.

When the supposed “centre” represented by May has failed to be in the least bit competent, then, in the words of W.B. Yeats, “the centre cannot hold”. Which may not be so good for the public – both Leave and Remain – if it leads to a Canada or Singapore style free-market Brexit seemingly desired by most Tory leavers. It will be a bit more bearable for all but the ERG & Tim Martin cult if it leads to a Norway style arrangement with a socialist turn in domestic policies and a proper end to austerity. Which could happen, if Remain ‘liberals’ and Corbyn supporters can find a workable alliance.

Ah! But it is alright for us, the British people, as we’re keeping the Tory Party together, which is what really matters…! Aren’t we?! Witness events in Beaconsfield. While another Tory austerity backer, Dominic Grieve is obviously far preferable to those who have forced him out of the Beaconsfield Tory party by 51 votes (only 313 voted). These are people presumably happier to stand alongside Stephen Yaxley-Lennon than an intelligent and serious MP who they disagree with on one issue. They are obsessed with this one issue and the man who proposed Grieve’s de-selection stood for UKIP in 2017.

Which brings us to… Erm, Change UK. Anti-system? They sound like some sort of soulless and convoluted public-private finance initiative! If they are the answer, I am really not sure what the question is. Maybe: “Do you feel nostalgic for the bland corporate aspect of the late-1990s?”

Didn’t quite think I’d ever really be saying this, but the DUP come out of Thursday’s events with credit compared with a certain two leading Tory Brexiter politicians… If you cannot base your vote on principle in something as important as this, then when can you? We knew already, but it gives final confirmation that they cannot be trusted.

I know Labour have been vacillating madly over this, but they’ve just about held the central line for a customs union style Brexit… Which only got five fewer votes than May’s deal in MV2.

The two sons of journalists and newspaper editors have just ceded their principles for pure (hypothetical) personal gain. This situation is so blindingly obvious that the penny has even dropped with Piers Morgan, perhaps the last man in the UK to realise that the de Pfeffel one is a **** and deserves all the articulate ire he got from Jonathan Meades. Now, the penny is dropping even with fellow shallow, power chasing fools! (albeit one who can get it right very occasionally, see his editorial stance at the Mirror over the Iraq War).

Think of that, these Tories are giving Piers Morgan the chance to pose as a sage commentator on events… Ed Miliband, meanwhile, has the last laugh.

KILLING EVE: spying as psychopathic screwball comedy

KILLING EVE

TX: BBC1, Saturdays, 9.15/9.25pm, 15/09/2018 – 03/11/2018 (eight episodes)
w: Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Vicky Jones, George Kay & Rob Williams; Luke Jennings (novella series), d: Harry Bradbeer, Jon East & Damon Thomas, p: Colin Wratten, m: David Holmes & Keefus Ciancia (Endeavor Content & Sid Gentle Films – for BBC America)

It is no surprise that Killing Eve has become a major cult; it is just a shame that we don’t live in a Britain where its playful absurdities are more widely enjoyed than the po-faced actioner Bodyguard. It is deftly attuned to our age of minutely demarcated tastes in music, fashion and pleasure. If he was still around, Bourdieu would no doubt have much to say about its lively parading of high European bohemianism and plush bourgeois trappings. In the LRB, Alice Spaws had wiser words than I could offer about clothing, noting Villanelle’s ‘Miu Miu bomber jackets and pink tulle dresses, power suits and Doc Marten boots and turquoise pussy bow blouses. They’re models’ clothes, worn with insouciance: the kind of clothes women pay attention to, rather than men. They’re sometimes sexy, but mostly as performance. Sometimes they’re very masculine. Villanelle’s naughtiness, her eccentricity, seems modelled on a modern sort of model, Cara Delevingne perhaps.’ Killing Eve has more strongly etched, materially notable characters. The difference between Villanelle and David Budd is like between those contrasting prose stylists Charles Dickens and Iain Duncan Smith. Or should that be between Angela Carter and Barbara Cartland?

Waller-Bridge is an excellent writer, as we are currently seeing with the impressive series 2 of Fleabag (BBC1). Jodie Comer’s Villanelle is an amoral puzzle for our times: deadpan, wry, sensual; enriched by a sense of the absurd. This is a staggeringly good performance from Liverpool-born Comer who uses a stylised, fatalistic Russian accent and deploys unpredictable, compelling facial gestures. This is the most fruitful Scouse association with Russia since Film On Four’s Letter to Brezhnev (1985). Beside the picture of an opulent mise-en-scène under attack and Comer’s domineering performance, the plot and its details barely seems to matter. There are particularly able supporting performances; for example, prolific TV spy Fiona Shaw and David Haig, retaining some of the rattled quality he had in The Thick Of It, but more urbane. There are especially tense and riveting moments such as the rural pursuit in episode 4 and Villanelle’s stint in prison in episode 6 – by which time we are firmly rooting for this screwball psychopath.

Its focus on lifestyle and interchangeably plush locations means this lacks detailed social specificity or attention to the local. It reflects the limits, but also the possibilities of transnational, co-produced dramas in the Netflix age. It doesn’t say an awful lot, there are few ideas, but there is a veritable smorgasbord of incidental delights. It goes further than The Night Manager (2016) in poring over the rich’s conspicuous consumption and their living for style, but has a more mocking edge. It could go further in its rightly inevitable subsequent series’.

There’s something of a ‘feminist James Bond’ ethos about Killing Eve, a gambolling Tarantino flippancy that works very well in small doses, but cumulatively you want a bit more geopolitical importance and thematic heft. Ultimately, though, it is no bad thing to have such a lively, unconventional re-framing of the spy genre away from tropes of grim bleakness and portentous gravitas. Its offhand sass and an invariably well-selected eclectic soundtrack offer considerable pleasures, along with, above all, Jodie Comer’s magnetic, askew performance. Despite its lack of overt social significance, it would be folly to deny the life and zest that pervades this series: amid increasingly fearful parochialism its transnational pleasures are not just desirable but necessary.