Book review: David Stubbs (2023) DIFFERENT TIMES: A HISTORY OF BRITISH COMEDY

Different Times is a mammoth compendium, attempting to provide a vertiginous range of snapshots of all of what was going on in British comedy, inevitably gravitating towards television, but there are also judicious references to the stage, radio and film mediums.

The book’s opening wisely focuses on the misuses of comedy by Boris Johnson, a man grotesquely ill-equipped to be a Prime Minister who governed in an inept and corrupt fashion from 2019-22. Stubbs’s thesis is that there has been a tendency for humour to be used to keep power relations squarely as they are, with certain forms of humour ‘sending things up, but keeping us down’. (p.8)

He quotes Billy Connolly at length from a 1970s TV appearance, such a vital perspective that I’ll quote it fully now: ‘The British people are not overtly racist, but given the opportunity they switch on to racism very quickly. You know, they listen to so many broadcasts on the radio about how desperate the situation is with Pakistanis and West Indians flooding into the country – a total lie – and then mohair-suited comedians pouring out racism to the extent that Black comedians are doing it, which I find desperately dangerous. I feel dirty. Comedians play a very important role in society; you should see things that the average guy in the street can’t see and point out the absurdity in something that’s just accepted.’ (pp.233-4)

Connolly wisely explains the responsibility of independent comic writers and performers to observe us, make us laugh at ourselves and steer us away from the baser values and actions. In a time when a Telegraph article (02/12/2023) claimed, notably, that ‘working class’ viewers see the BBC as being too PC, it is vital that British comedians are diverse truth tellers about Britain’s complex realities.

Now, such an ambitious volume can’t help but have its limitations. Several of the gazetteer capsule comments on specific programmes feel like they need deeper exploration – I Didn’t Know You Cared (1975-79) (p.165), Dave Allen at Large (1971-79) (p.165), A Bit of Fry and Laurie (1989-95) (pp.287-8), Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) (p.299) and The Rag Trade (1961-78) (p.205). Furthermore, I feel that Northern comedians Robb Wilton and Frank Randle need more than three sentences between them, given their copious respective influences on Dad’s Army (1968-77), Manchester band The Fall and Gethin Price in Trevor Griffiths’s stage play Comedians (1975).

Such exclusions are clearly inevitable in any book aiming at a vast historical coverage like this. I’d personally have loved to see references to: Attention Scum (2001) and Early Doors (2003-04); the baroque force of Natasia Demetriou as a writer and performer; or, indeed, Him and Her (2010-13) and Mum (2016-19), Stefan Golaszewski’s tremendous duo of sitcoms infused with intelligence and awkwardness. These shows are like refined Ayckbourn and Esmonde and Larbey refracted through a contemporary Mass Observation lens, with an underlying deep warmth.

While Stubbs draws deft attention to Peter Terson’s Play for Today (PfT), The Fishing Party (1972) as a bridge between the wonderful Jane Freeman’s performances in that and in Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010), he does not even mention Trevor Griffiths’s PfT version of Comedians (1979). This is a gap, as he touches on the vast significance of how comedy arises from and shapes the everyday, in terms of responding to and constructing norms of language and behaviour. This is one of PfT’s most searching dramas, about how what’s behind the jokes is important and who is being targeted, and pointing the way to the Alternative Comedy movement that Stubbs extols. This is an even greater omission given that Stubbs is yet another writer to quote David Nobbs’s brilliant writing of Jimmy’s paranoia in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976-79), a litany which includes PfT at its epicentre (pp.188-9).

Stubbs claims that The Good Life (1975-78) shied away from race; it did not entirely. As, at the close of a series 2 episode, Tom and Barbara effectively mock Margo’s apparent, real racism, drawing it out from her when they claim people with an Asian name are moving in next door to her. Their ‘superior’ liberal stance in regarding this all as a source of uproarious merriment is, of course, just as crass as Margo’s reaction, and is a very telling moment concerning the paradoxes at the heart of 1970s comfort. This elision suggests the difficulty of taking on such a vast terrain within 400 pages, which Andrew Male adroitly demonstrated in Sight and Sound when giving far more detailed, fairer attention to ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982-92) than Stubbs does here.

I feel that the sections on Peep Show (2003-15) and Ever Decreasing Circles (1984-89) needed exploration of the central relationships, having watched those both again relatively recently. In Dad’s Army, Sergeant Wilson’s lack of concentration and persistence with career paths seems to me to strongly foreshadow that of Paul Ryman in Edmonde and Larbey’s latter comedy.

These minor quibbles aside, Stubbs provides a heartening and well argued historical analysis. Stubbs persuasively claims, via Alexei Monroe, that, for all its evasions of the serious issues of the Second World War, Dad’s Army provides a far less apt path towards Brexit than Are You Being Served? (1972-85), with its episode ‘Camping In’ (04/04/1973) resonating with pinched nostalgic conservatism (p.176). By and large, Stubbs rightly extols the beloved trinity of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son (1962-74) and Fawlty Towers (1975-79), while being even more fulsome about Victoria Wood, Reeves and Mortimer and The Royle Family (1998-2012), wherein the family ‘say but don’t say, ‘Here we are, this is who we are. And we shall not be moved.” (p.319).

There are also brilliantly incisive evocations of language and performance: ‘Harold Steptoe’s wonderfully idiosyncratic accent is a comic exaggeration of this tendency, attempting to take flight like a clumsy fowl, in stark contrast to the unapologetic bog-coarseness of his old man’ (p.103). There’s a wonderful judicious section about Laurel and Hardy and also an evocative account of Ealing’s film comedy cycle (1948-55), with an especially vivid, memorable account of its musical underscores. Stubbs advocates for unique talents like Tommy Cooper, all childlike universality, and Les Dawson, especially a memorable passage on Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s Cissy and Ada sketches in Sez Les (1969-76) (p.153). He also points out how so many of the classic British sitcom characters are lads not men, epitomised by Clement and La Freaks sitcoms… (p.186).

There’s a superb vignette about Liz Smith (p.318) which captures some of the essence of a brilliant serio-comic performer who was strongly associated with the Play for Today tradition. Regularly, he alights on pearlers of the absurd, like in the film Carry on Cleo (1964), with the dialogue “Sinister, dexter, sinister, Dexter!” (as in left, right, left, right) (p.114). Stubbs unearths unusual, odd details; like Les Dawson’s novel of a socialist dystopia, A Time Before Genesis (1986) (!) or how the now fairly righteous socialist firebrand Charlotte Church blacked up as a male DJ in the cultural desert of 2006.

The book explicitly celebrates the 1980s Alternative Comedy revolution and how it subtly infused much 1990s comedy which was, on the face of it, far less political. He makes a compelling, cumulative case that the 1990s was a golden mean, reflecting its fairly benign geopolitical temperature, with an unprecedented diversity in the voices and perspectives in comedies like The Day Today, The Fast Show, Father Ted, Goodness Gracious Me and dinnerladies. This moment was replaced by an abyssal decline into crueller comedy in the Noughties, which totally lacked the intellectual precision and absurdism of Chris Morris’s work or the underlying jocularity of many of the aforementioned 1990s shows.

The heart of the book, which was neatly contained in a trailing Guardian article, concerns the move back towards a gentler, more humanistic form of comedy during the 2010s, much of it rooted in diverse places. Detectorists (2014- ) and This Country (2017-20) are the emblems here, plus Derry Girls (2018-22), and Ghosts (2019-23); plus, the skilled dramedies Back to Life (2019-21), Don’t Forget the Driver (2019), In My Skin (2018-21) and The Outlaws (2021- ).

The Stubbs argument about the cruel turn of the 2000s – developing from Jason Okundaye’s 2020 article in Tribune – is compelling but needs a little fleshing out. However, Stubbs does well to draw the links with Reality TV as it developed, which engendered a desensitizing hardness which prepared people for and justified austerity, building on Phil Harrison’s fine book The Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain (2020). In a book rightly extolling the gentleness turn and Hylda Baker (pp.168-170), Different Times is perhaps surprisingly lenient on Russell Brand, an exemplar of the nasty Noughties and its string of lairy chancers who polluted culture well into the next decade: Dapper Laughs, anyone?

There’s an astute reference to how much The Office (2001-03) led the way towards the increased kindness in the 2010s, but oddly no mention of how this is affirmed by Brent’s redemptive actions near its end and his rejection of the toxic masculine Chris “Finchy” Finch. But these are minor gripes, given the broad historical truth that Stubbs is articulating. This book is a more mass market complement to strong academic books about British comedy from Andy Medhurst (2007) and Jürgen Kamm and Birgit Neumann eds. (2016).

The book’s only real limitations are due to its vaulting ambition: there are always going to be some omissions to disappoint everyone. It is, however, a powerfully argued book assessing the waxing and waning of different forms of British comedy over time, which argues boldly for the 1980s-90s era as offering a great improvement, while still paying loving homage to earlier eras. Above all, Stubbs asserts that what lies underneath the jokes matters, rather than simply eliciting laffs. However fitfully, we are making progress towards kindness over cruelty.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Brexit Britain: Day #1003: Patients revolt, Portillos dance

So, how is Britain readying itself for Brexit, now possibly postponed to 12 April rather than in five days? Just how is the great, patriotic rebirth and throwing off of the ‘totalitarian’ foreign yoke going?

Well, we have seen Mark ‘French Mark’ Francois misunderstanding Will Self when Self had the temerity to claim, feasibly, that ‘probably all racists and anti-Semites’ voted for Brexit. In the context of hate crimes having more than doubled in five years, it is incumbent on the many decent Brexiters to disown and condemn their fringe ethno-nationalist element. Self only faltered in not adding Islamophobes to that list.

Even absurder than Francois’ umbrage, was noted Brexiter commentator @PrisonPlanet with this bombast:

“Activate the Queen”! This theatre of the absurd is just getting out of Beckett gear, and heading towards Ionesco… I’ll get the chairs…

Well, we do live in a country when 8% or so in polls claim they will back UKIP, a now avowedly Islamophobic party led by Gerard Batten, who claimed the Queen committed treason against herself in 1992 by signing the Maastricht Treaty, in a bizarre act of lèse-majesté…!

On Friday, as part of a dozen-‘strong’ pro-Brexit protest in Plymouth – that bizarrely aimed to disrupt the 8.30pm arrival of the Brittany ferry – 62-year-old spokesperson Karen Gadd was disheartened enough by the reality that followed promised social media ‘support’ to advocate a very patriotic flight from the country: “People on Facebook were saying they’re coming – but they haven’t turned up. I feel sorry for people having to to grow up in this country. I’m advising my kids to leave the country – to go to Greece or somewhere.”

A return to the sort of 1960s/70s ‘brain drain’ that provided ballast for our entry to the Common Market, anyone? I’ll get me coat.

Gadd also bemoaned Remainers getting “very nasty” while presiding over a protest that included the burning of EU flags. A day later, death threats to Margaret Anne Georgiadou, who founded the popular ‘Revoke Article 50’ petition were reported.

In Sunderland, there have been sightings of A4 bits of paper attached to walls claiming that if we don’t get Brexit on 29 March, then the anonymous scribe won’t pay his or her council tax.

Amid such banal absurdity, what better than scenes Michael Portillo, Andrew Neil and Liz Kendall engaging in a ‘Brexit danceathon’ on the BBC’s bastion of political analysis: This Week? That the great veteran reggae DJ David Rodigan decided to involve himself, and reggae music, in this spectacle is genuinely baffling.

SINKING GIGGLING INTO THE SEA (c) Jonathan Coe

You can feel that this is the twilight of the No Dealers not just in the drenched squib of Nigel Farage’s march – as drolly assessed by Hannah Jane Parkinson – but also in the fact that the pro-No Deal petition is outscored by the Revoke Article 50 petition by a factor nearly 10:1: 519,942 to 5,097,195, to be exact (as of 3:16pm, today). In Boston and Skegness, Lincolnshire, the strongest ‘Leave’ bastion of 2016, only 1.42% of constituents have signed the pro-‘No Deal’ petition, while 2.18% back revoking Article 50. I am not saying there has been a massive shift, but there has been some and Remain opinion is getting more deeply entrenched – and is slowly growing – the longer this process goes on.

Even by most Tories, ‘a No Deal’ is seen as a necessary ‘bargaining chip’, not as a desirable way forward. Maybe only 20 ERG-ultra MPs are sufficiently headbanging to want it. Others know their party’s reputation would be widely destroyed by presiding over at least a decade long economic decline and the national enfeeblement of No Deal. WTO terms would be an act of self-relegation comparable to exchanging a well-stocked, reliable emporium you’d been using for decades for Del Boy’s stall on the market. A stall manned by an 80-year-old Del Boy who should have retired years ago.

No Deal tends to get around a quarter of public support when the three options (May’s deal, No Deal and Remain) are given. It loses by 14% when it is just Remain v. No Deal (57% to 43%) protests don’t gain traction because it is a ‘way forward’ of masochists, desiring pain for intangible gains such as ‘taking our country back’ and blue passports. Never do they actually engage with or address the valid concerns itemised across 29 areas by Swati Dhingra and Josh De Lyon here.

We have witnessed Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Xavier Bettel aptly diagnosing that Brexit was like waiting for Godot “and Godot is never coming.” For the sort of Brexits many were imagining in 2016 simply are not coming, as they were far-fetched pipe dreams planted by a populist anti-immigration campaign. They rule out misguided but actually feasible Brexit plans like Richard North’s ‘Flexcit’ plan (2013), because that plan involves compromise, the EEA and the recognition that any divergence has to be long-term to have any chance of ‘success’.

Frankly, we are in a pitiable state. And the public can see it; only 7% – probably UKIP and ERG ultras – blame the EU for what are self-inflicted wounds. Objectively, we can all see that it is May in the driving seat, who has been pandering to Gove, Johnson, Davis, Fox and Farage with ‘red lines’. The British government have achieved the unlikely and brought Viktor Orban closer to the EU consensus, giving the authoritarian Hungarian leader the chance to pose as a sage moderate. As reported by Rankin and Boffey, they have enabled one EU head of state to say the UK needs to be taken care of, “like a patient”.

A patient who might be better treated by EU doctors than by certain British journalists.

BODYGUARD: A terrorscapist drama of our times…

BODYGUARD:

TX: BBC1, Sundays*, 9pm, 26/08/2018 – 23/09/2018 (six episodes)
w: Jed Mercurio, d: Thomas Vincent & John Strickland, p: Priscilla Parish & Eric Coulter, m: Ruth Barrett & Ruskin Williamson (World Productions / Netflix Distribution)

“Whose ideology will really win out, the Prime Minister or the Home Secretary?” – Laura Kuenssberg, Bodyguard, episode 3, 02/09/2018

Bodyguard was by far the most successful British television drama of the autumn 2018 season in terms of viewing figures; its significance is in its popular reach and how we see the world through this drama serial. Bodyguard is a hi-octane Bourne and Bond-style thriller which is deliberately foregrounded in political consciousness today. This review recognises the popular as important, perhaps even more so, as Mercurio’s British outlook is being projected internationally via Netflix.

Bodyguard is successful at retaining interest and generating excitement through the first five episodes; it contains suspenseful plotting and nurtures the sort of establishment conspiracy narrative that British television drama was especially good at in the 1980s. However, this troubling vortex is forsaken in episode 6 for a pat resolution, revealing one single bed egg in the police force was behind it, in league with petty criminals. We’ve landed adrift in Touch of Frost (ITV, 1992-2010) terrain, not the sort of current-day take on Edge of Darkness (BBC1, 1985) or A Very British Coup (C4, 1988) that was potentially suggested.

Lead character David Budd is also a sphinx without a secret; a sort of everyman come ‘troubled family man’, showing little inkling of Scottish identity despite his accent. He lacks the depths initially suggested through his friendship with the maverick former army Sergeant and member of ‘Veterans for Peace’, Andrew Apsted (Tom Brooke, giving one of the best performances). Afghanistan is simply where Budd and Apsted served together and the cause of Budd’s PTSD. The complex geopolitics are elided as Mercurio provides us with a straightforward dialectical binary of the arguments: bad politicians led us into it for ‘nothing’ (Apsted) vs. ‘I can’t see any justification for believing the Taliban would govern Afghanistan in peace and harmony, or Iraqi insurgents would ever have formed a stable democracy, or Isis would ever form a state with which the world could have diplomatic relations. And, Andrew, I certainly do not miss the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.’ (Budd, who could be Alastair Campbell’s latest mouthpiece). In addition, the resolution, wherein it is proved that Budd simply needed to open up about his feelings and admit weakness in order to re-join the nuclear family, is too simple by far.

While the trope of using actual BBC journalists within a fictional drama was fresh and amusing in Russell T. Davies’s revival of Doctor Who (BBC1, 2005-), it is here deployed with a routine, annoying inevitability.** Witness the roll-call who appear in image or voice: Laura Kuenssberg, Sophie Raworth, Martha Kearney, Nick Robinson, Andrew Marr, John Pienaar, the absurd John Humphrys. This BBC drama’s use of BBC journalists is seemingly to create verisimilitude, appealing to the ‘real’, in an era when the Corporation really is being assailed from the left for being too close to the Conservative-DUP government. Former BBC employee Owen Bennett-Jones is right in the LRB to characterise the BBC’s actual position as: ‘We can’t afford to tell the truth if it means alienating a politician who could in the future have power over our funding’ – which he evidences by BBC journalists’ lack of serious questioning or correcting of Brexiters’ erroneous on-air claims. The BBC has, for better or worse, a role in promoting consensus about national identity and tends towards the ‘received wisdom’ and ‘centre ground’ of the day – making its job all the harder in polarised times.

When the actual UK Prime Minister now is the former Home Secretary, Mercurio and the BBC’s blending of fact and fiction becomes concerning. Indeed, the only ideological divergence depicted is within the governing party, as Kuenssberg asserts. The opposition may as well not exist in this ‘family quarrel’ between PM and Home Secretary, as no dissenting individual voices or characters are presented – instead, the civil liberties protesters are presented as an angry mob and are merely given a glib and not so catchy chant: ‘RIPA-18! No police state!’ Ominous shots of everyday London locations are backed by the familiar voices of the BBC journalists, delivering portentous ‘news’:

NICK ROBINSON: We’ve had confirmation this morning from the Home Office that Home Secretary Julia Montague will go ahead with her speech at St Matthew’s College.

MARTHA KEARNEY: Civil liberties groups plan a major protest outside St Matthew’s College later today.

JOHN HUMPHRYS: Julia Montague was, of course, the target of a recent assassination attempt and she’ll use today’s platform to address the challenges in the fight against terrorism.

It is easy to imagine founding Director-General John Reith’s incensed bafflement at the casual, glibly relativist involvement of this roster of BBC journalists, whose already battered credibility is not exactly enhanced by their insertion into a sensationalist fiction. The BBC doesn’t just have to fear its perception by the political right as hapless, ‘inclusive’ liberal-left bureaucrats (W1A) but how the political left perceives its cautious cleaving to an unstable “centre-ground” rather than its former – broadly Suez-Secret Society era – spirit of independence, inquiry and truth-telling to power. Unfortunately, the BBC has been ‘brought to heel’ too many times – the sackings of DGs Milne (1987), Dyke (2003) – to give us any confidence that it’ll start standing up for genuine plurality and truth above following the power.

Bodyguard’s cavalier use of the journos-in-fiction trope is part of its terrorscapist essence. Terrorscapism is a new sub-genre of sensationalist topical drama based around exploiting fears of terrorism in the collective unconsciousness for the purposes of vicarious entertainment. In it, morality is usually painted in broad brush-strokes. Hare’s relatively successful, if more infernally plodding Collateral (TX: BBC2, 12/02/2018-05/03/2018) is merely a more liberal-left variant, with its more ‘concerned’ portrayal of Syrian refugees and shadowy MI5 dealings. Terrorscapism tends to eschew overt, complicated politics, with caricatured figures like Collateral’s John Simm playing David Mars MP (a Peter Hain-esque exemplar of New Labour’s liberal side) and Bodyguard’s Keeley Hawes playing Tory Julia Montague MP (a composite of Theresa May and Amber Rudd’s authoritarian stints in the Home Office). These figures are presented as ‘above’ the fray in being more ‘principled’.

This terrorscapist drama’s most entertaining and tense sequence is its first: the attempted suicide bombing of the train, a crisis shrewdly defused by the empathetic Budd. His human interaction with would-be bomber Nadia is compelling while we feel the latent threat of horrific pyrotechnics. Unfortunately, the silent, scared Nadia is about the best that we get from her character. As the series progresses, too many scenes revolve around the dull likes of Anne Sampson (Gina McKee), Counter Terrorism Head in the Met, speaking in clipped terrorscapist clichés. We hear much of “national security” (9 mentions), somewhat less of “civil liberties” (4), which is admittedly a good measure of where our political discourse is at.

Worse, Bodyguard lacks ideas. It gets by on thrills and suggested depths for five hours, but the final 75 minutes amounts to one ponderous, drawn-out ‘spectacular’ set-piece, followed by banal ‘revelations’ of ‘culprits’. A disgraced police officer is cuffed; conferring retribution. Nadia is revealed, in hackneyed ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ style, as an ‘empowered’ Islamist mastermind behind the terror attacks; confirming prejudices. This is unforgivable not just for its self-congratulatory smugness, but for its irresponsibility in the current political climate of Islamophobia and increasing far-right terror activity, given that she is the primary Muslim woman in the drama. One other particular drama in BBC’s Autumn 2018 season does it significantly better, and avoids such easy Other-ing. We will come to it later.

This absurd ‘surprise’ revelation functions as a comforting sop to our all too sour Britain of 2018 – and even more so, six months on. Yes, Jed, challenge the stereotype of the submissive Muslim woman victim, but not in aligning her with Jihadi ideology without there being any additional in-depth individuation of Muslim characters. The Muslim terrorist is thus affirmed in a certain viewer’s mind as a quiet, but definite threat to British values and security.

Ultimately, Jed Mercurio had 375 minutes which he could have used to explore a few ideas alongside the suspense and set-pieces, or engage with political complexities like W. Somerset Maugham, Eric Ambler or Graham Greene or John le Carré. However brilliant much of it is a thriller, episode 6 leaves a profoundly nasty taste in the mouth as a drama of today. In a documentary on radical television drama, Jimmy McGovern once said, semi-jokingly, that he hoped that, on Judgement Day, God would let him into heaven, “but that bastard over there who wrote 282 episodes of Casualty with his talent, and counted the money, he can go down there…”

Now, where does that leave Jed Mercurio?

*Episode 2 was on Monday 27/08
** Conspiracy drama academic Joseph Oldham has rightly told me that Spooks (2002-11) uses this device three years before RTD: Joanna Gosling appears in series 1 episode 4. Also, Lez Cooke’s history of British television drama has reminded me that an actual TV journalist appears within the fiction of Edge of Darkness (1985), interviewing Craven on TV, as well as pro-CND Labour MP Michael Meacher, which rather reflects that drama’s greater political radicalism compared with Bodyguard.