Living in the Material World – Scorsese’s Harrison documentary triumphs

I was very pleased when I heard a few years ago that my favourite Beatle, George Harrison, was to be the subject of an extensive new documentary for HBO. However, when I heard that it was to be helmed by Mr Martin Scorsese, then fresh from his hugely and justly acclaimed documentary on Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, I was overjoyed and have spent the last couple of years very much looking forward to this production reaching the screens. With preview screenings hitting selected cinemas, followed by the American TV broadcast last week and a UK DVD release this week, we now know that the faith of Beatles fans, music fans and fans of documentary making around the world in Scorsese has been justified – it’s a winner.

It is, of course, a tired old cliché that George was the “quiet one” of the Beatles. Overshadowed by the songwriting and lead singing of Lennon and McCartney in the group, and grabbing fewer headlines beyond the break-up of the band by leading a more relaxed and less public life, it would be easy to see this as being the case. However, Harrison’s own personal journey within the Beatles, from shy and awkward teenager deported from Germany as being too young to play with the rest of the band, to becoming, by the time of their last studio recordings, for the Abbey Road album, arguably the best songwriter in the group, is fascinating in itself. Throw in the fact that beyond the Beatles Harrison managed to top the album chart just months later with an expensive triple album box set while simultaneously topping the singles charts (and with songs that Lennon and McCartney had clearly not felt good enough for Beatles albums) before going on to produce Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Withnail and I and almost single-handedly keep interesting British cinema alive through his own Handmade Films and you’ve got a post-Beatles career that I would argue is easily the most interesting of any of the four members.

While an overview of Harrison’s life post-Beatles break-up is an interesting enough proposition in its own right the problem for any potential director would be on how to tell the story of Harrison’s 1960s career in a way which seemed fresh. After all, the Beatles must be one of the most analysed bands of all time and it would be easy to finish up presenting us with something we felt we’d seen many times before. Thank goodness then that Scorsese was at the helm. As well as having recently tackled Bob Dylan with some skill and handled a Rolling Stones concert film with Shine a Light, he made quite a name for himself as a music documentary maker back in 1978 when, sandwiched in between classic movies such as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, he took time out to document The Band’s farewell concert The Last Waltz. Even as far back as 1970 Scorsese’s name was rolling up on cinema screens as an editor on the seminal fesitval movie of its time, Woodstock. Quite simply, there’s absolutely no one in the business better qualified to do this subject justice than the man we got.

Any documentary project from such an old master is guaranteed to be well edited and this is very much the case from the word go as, following the quietness of a shot of Harrison filming himself behind some flowers in his garden, we journey back to the Second World War and the time of Harrison’s birth with archive of warplanes and blitzed streets cut together to the title track of Harrison’s stunning debut solo album, All Things Must Pass. Among the first interviewees to appear on-screen soon after are Harrison’s brothers – people I hadn’t even previously been aware of – as they talk about George as a child in Liverpool and, while the presence of McCartney and Starr is welcome and pretty much unavoidable it’s one of the few mis-fires of the documentary that more of the brothers’ thoughts weren’t utilised beyond the opening segments as their “ordinary” non-celebrity musings would certainly have been of value in analysing the most grounded and “ordinary” of the Beatles.

As you would expect, this first part of the documentary has a frenetic pace – something which is entirely impossible to avoid given the pace of the Beatles’ rise to the top and the musical changes they went through in such a short period of time – producing twelve UK albums in an eight year period when any major band today would struggle to produce that many over twenty five years. The period in Hamburg emerges well from this maelstrom as some of the major players in the Beatles’ circle of friends from this period come forth to speak including Klaus Voorman and Astrid Kirchher, the latter providing some stark and moving photographs of Harrison and Lennon’s visit to the art studio of her lover, and ex-member of the Beatles, Stuart Sutcliffe, after his tragically premature death.

Harrison visiting India in 1966

In fact, images are one of the strong points of this documentary, particularly the wealth of rare and unseen stills which have been unearthed. Just when you think you’ve seen everything there is to see about the Beatles, and seen it a thousand times to boot, it’s a pleasant surprise to see home movie footage and superb photographs emerge to make the well-trodden story of the Beatles seem fresh. My particular favourites were those taken by Harrison himself on a visit to India in 1966 shot in glorious colour with a fish eye lens and featuring George with a short haircut and moustache – something very unusual as this brief period between his early mop top and later long-haired look is rarely documented.

Another success for Scorsese is his use of Harrison’s letters to his mother to give us a real feeling of reaching back into this period in its proper context, unsullied by later reinterpretations by those involved. To be able to listen in on one of the world’s most famous celebrities and musicians at the pinnacle of his fame in 1967 writing a letter to his mum while in a religious retreat with the Maharishi and telling her not to worry about him stealing his money, while also assuring her that the spiritual side to him which has opened up allows him to love her even more is quite touching. It’s also indicative of the fact that for all the Beatles’ fame and subsequent elevation to icons almost without equal they were just four humble lads from Liverpool who had grown up surrounded by the bombsites of the war.

Harrison’s droll humour pops up throughout the two parts of the film with many examples of his dry wit. For instance, as we start to examine the growth of Harrison as a songwriter as he takes his first faltering steps into contributing his own songs for Beatles albums there’s a quote from him saying, “Well, I thought if John and Paul could write songs then anybody could”. When persistently questioned by a journalist about whether he would be writing a revenge song against Eric Clapton for stealing his wife away from him the journalist is amazed when Harrison says that he is fine with Clapton and elaborates by saying, “I’m far happier that she’s with him than with some dope”. And he has a nice line in put downs for McCartney when the latter turns up for the recording of the Beatles Anthology project during the 1990s wearing an expensive leather jacket which provokes Harrison into asking, “Is that a vegetarian leather jacket, Paul?” There is even a brilliant excerpt from Harrison’s diary which lists the filming dates for the argument-strewn and stress-filled Let it Be movie. Following a couple of these entries detailing the filming one of them just casually mentions, “Filming at Twickenham, left The Beatles, came home…” before detailing the rest of his evening as if leaving the biggest band there had ever been at that point was a mere trifle in the day’s menu.

It’s at this point that we are treated to the depressing footage of McCartney treating Harrison with pure condescension during the Twickenham sessions with Harrison famously replying that he’ll play any way Paul wants and that he won’t play at all if that’s what it takes to keep him happy. McCartney in his interview does his best to rewrite this period of the group’s history as the fault lines are exposed and they begin to fall apart by saying that they could argue but still loved each other. However, I’ve watched Let it Be and it is an unpleasant viewing experience exposing why Harrison would want to escape from Paul’s increasing control-freakery and do his own thing, having built up a huge backlog of quality songs which the other Beatles didn’t seem to be interested in at all, passing even on a stone cold classic like All Things Must Pass. The photos in this documentary of Harrison relaxing with Bob Dylan at his Woodstock retreat are in sharp contrast to the bickering he was forced to endure during the latter period of the Beatles and it was time he proved to them just how much potential he had on his own.

Bob Dylan and George Harrison in an iconic image from the Concert for Bangladesh album booklet

Of course, one of the real stars of this film is the music and if you hadn’t noticed it already during the Beatles sections – where Harrison’s songs prove that his hit ratio of memorable tracks was equal to that of Lennon and McCartney – then you certainly get the point driven home during the feature on the making of Harrison’s first, ambitious solo album. I was fortunate enough to see the documentary on a big screen at a preview in a local cinema before its broadcast on HBO and the music sounded stunning over the theatre’s sound system. One of the men responsible for this sound though was also the catalyst for a round of spontaneous laughter throughout the cinema as Phil Spector, a genius in his time, but now a tragically foolish-looking man (and a convicted killer to boot) made his screen entrance. Nevertheless these are interesting sections in the proceedings as we deal not only with the landmark songs of this period but also with Harrison’s attempts to raise money for the beleaguered people of Bangladesh in 1971, an effort which was very much the precursor to Band Aid, Live Aid and subsequent charity appeals and which was immortalised in a famous boxed set album and movie.

One of the performers at this concert, Eric Clapton, is candid throughout the film, never ducking away from the elephant in the room which must be addressed – that he stole the wife of his best friend and somehow managed to remain friends with him. Remarkably Patti Boyd herself is also interviewed, which is something I certainly wasn’t expecting, despite her recent breaking of her vow of silence on the subject in her autobiography. However, when it comes to discussion of leaving George for Eric she is represented with a rather stilted audio reading which I assume to be a recording of her book rather than her answering on camera.

Despite Harrison’s assertions to Clapton at the time, and the interview from the period I mentioned above, it’s clear though that all was not entirely well for George in the years following the break-up. One of the most cringe-inducing moments of the documentary is when we see an extremely thin and unwell-looking Harrison taking to the stage in the US for a truly dire version of Wah-Wah, his voice croaking all over the place and bedecked in a hideous pair of dungarees. The footage of him backstage afterwards is clear evidence of a man with a cocaine problem and it seems a sad contradiction of the man who turned his back on LSD in the 60s deciding that he didn’t need drugs and would instead alter his state of mind through spiritual pursuits.

However, whatever happened in his life around this time seems to have settled when he met up with his future wife, Olivia, and by the time we see him becoming involved with the Monty Python team he is once more back to his old self. Harrison was a huge fan of the work of Python and he has been quoted as saying that the spirit of the Beatles inhabited Python back in 1969 with one group ending as another began. He was an unashamed fan who idolised them  and wanted to hang out with them, something which seems incredible for one of the most idolised men in popular cultural history. This friendship though would bequeath the world a lasting legacy in the form of Life of Brian when Harrison stepped forward to help finance the movie when other film companies began to get cold feet over what they regarded as the potentially blasphemous content of the script. As Eric Idle tells the camera, Harrison re-mortgaged his house to the tune of several million quid to help make the film because he “wanted to see it” which Idle quips is still the most anyone has ever paid for a cinema ticket. An entire documentary could have been made about Harrison’s Handmade Films and the British film industry of the time so it’s a shame that his involvement with Time Bandits, Withnail and I, The Long, Good Friday and various Michael Palin projects is glossed over. However, without turning this documentary into a series it’s understandable that, even with a running time of nearly four hours, Scorsese is pressed for time.

These later sections also suffer greatly in terms of the soundtrack as Harrison’s output declined both in terms of quality and quantity at this time. There is a brief comeback for the musical side of things being discussed when Harrison’s collaboration with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne as the Traveling Wilburys is featured for a few minutes but the end of the film is dominated by the Harrison’s fight against cancer and the awful events surrounding the final days of the last millennium when he almost became the second Beatle to be murdered as he was attacked and stabbed in his own home by an idiot looking for the same sort of notorious immortality bestowed upon Mark Chapman. Fortunately, Harrison survived so the name of this waste of space has already slipped from most people’s minds but Olivia gives a harrowing and detailed account of the attack to the camera. George’s son Dahni confirms what most of us must have thought at the time that the senseless and violent attack upon a peace-loving man who was fighting cancer took years off his life and Harrison was gone less than two years later. Ringo recounts his final tearful meeting with Harrison in the hospital room where he died and starts to break up at the memory, but he gets the biggest laugh of the entire film when he suddenly straightens himself, turns to the camera and announces, “It’s all getting a bit Barbara fucking Walters”, as he references his similarly emotional display with the American interviewer in the wake of John Lennon’s death.

In all, Scorsese succeeds admirably in condensing into four hours one of the most famous lives of the twentieth century. There’s little doubt that the pace of the two parts is very different but that’s because no one can keep up the pace of life of being a Beatle across their entire life. The Beatles footage has an energy and life all of its own but Scorsese skillfully weaves it in a new way or, as a friend of mine put it, shifts the centre of gravity of the Beatles back in the direction of George and away from the two front men where we’ve always been used to seeing it. Through home movies, letters, interviews with Harrison himself and those closest to him a fitting tribute to Harrison is pieced together which doesn’t attempt to shy away from awkward subjects such as Harrison’s eye for the ladies – something I hadn’t even been aware was a problem before this film was completed. The second part necessarily has a different job to do but it does it well, outlining his life beyond the Fab Four, making music, making movies, making friends or just pottering about in his gardens.

Fittingly, the film ends with George in his beloved gardens with the same shot as we began with. George hiding behind a clump of flowers, filmed by himself. It conjures an image of Harrison being just slightly out of sight, slightly beyond our reach, but still there. For millions of fans of the music he made and the films he financed his presence will continue to be felt and his legacy is intact, a legacy which is undoubtedly strengthened by this timely and skillful tribute.

Podcast on The Killing

With the forthcoming debut of the second series of The Killing on BBC4 set to become the event of the year on British television myself and Colm Hackett have been interviewed by Brian Henry Martin for a podcast looking back at the superb first series. For those who love the series, or those just masochistic enough to listen to Colm and myself natter on, you can check it out here.

Appropriate Adult – where flirting with danger pays off

These days, ITV1 is normally the last place you would expect to find some decent drama on TV. Too fond of pumping out pantomime soaps, bland detective series and vehicles for ex-Eastenders and Corrie stars of varying abilities who they’ve managed to sign up with golden handcuff deals, they seem to have fallen very far indeed from the days when they were a genuine alternative to the BBC. However, they seem to save their best efforts for one particular genre – true crime drama – and this challenging production on a charged and emotional subject hints at how much better they could be if they focussed themselves on items of similar quality.

It would be impossible for an announcement on the production of a drama based around the murders committed by Fred and Rosemary West not to gain a lot of sensational column inches. One can almost imagine the entire Daily Mail staff spluttering white foam from their mouths while spinning round like whirlwinds in their swivel chairs. Of course, such a subject would need to be handled very carefully indeed lest any accusation of trampling over the graves of the murder victims or exploiting the grief of the families purely for cheap, voyeuristic reasons while chasing ratings be levelled at the producers. The subject is so sensitive due to the sheer notoriety of the perpetrators that, even with twenty years passing since the case stormed the national consciousness and nearly forty years since some of the murders took place, the producers could have been easily forgiven for walking away from the project as too difficult to get right. How do you find drama in this sordid subject of sexual torture, murder and garden burials without reducing the proceedings to the level of a thriller or a detective show aimed at entertaining people and offending those who still live with the consequences? Fortunately, ITV have assembled a team behind the scenes with experience on such tricky subjects and managed to find perhaps the only way into the dramatic proceedings that could work.

Writer, Neil McKay, is no stranger to drama based on real life murder stories, his most recent work before Appropriate Adult being the true tale of Victorian infanticide, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. But it’s on the controversial edge of crime drama that he has really made his mark penning both the excellent This is Personal: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper in 2000 and facing a barrage of criticism for tackling the almost no-go area of See No Evil: The Moors Murders about Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in 2006. McKay is exactly the man you want on board for this project and in my opinion he has come up trumps by providing a thoughtful and humane way of dealing with so much inhumanity. Add in a very competent director in the shape of Julian Jarrold, fresh from Becoming Jane, Red Riding and the feature film version of Brideshead Revisited and you can be sure that a certain quality is guaranteed and fears of an exploitative piece of trash can be allayed.

Trying to make a drama which any way showed the victims being enticed into Fred West’s world or being killed would have been so distasteful as to – almost certainly – ensuring that the production was blocked at an early stage. Focussing on the relationship between these two appalling people, Fred and Rosemary, might also have strayed over the line. Even just following the police procedures may have resulted in accusations of trivialising the crimes by reducing them to the stuff of entertainment so legion are the number of detective dramas on British television. Fortunately, for the producers there was a way in to the story which offered the chance to not only study the awful hold that Fred West exerted on people but to sidestep the actual killing and start afterwards.

By making the character of Janet Leach the centrepiece of the drama, McKay pulls off a triumph. Leach was the social worker who was asked into the police interviews of West as his “appropriate adult” – someone who could be called upon in cases involving children or adults with learning difficulties to ensure that things proceeded as they should without any undue stress to those being interviewed. Unfortunately, for Leach she ended up being emotionally manipulated by West who would only reveal clues to his crimes in her presence and who started to worm his way into her psyche in a disturbing way. This ordinary person who was only trying to do some good in society, but who ended up being badly burned by the process with all sorts of damage to her health and family life, would therefore provide the angle required to make a drama about such a monstrous person worthwhile rather than a cheap shocker looking at his crimes.

With Leach co-operating with the production to tell her story it now looked viable but there was never any doubt that the casting of the two leads would prove pivotal to the success of Appropriate Adult and on this front they’ve definitely succeeded. Superb female lead required for the role of Janet Leach: Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves, Gosford Park), check. Superb male lead required for the role of Fred West: Dominic West (The Wire, The Hour), check.

Of course, it was perhaps a risk in a way to attach an actor like West to his horrible namesake. Given that West is seen as something of a hunk by the ladies gambled adding some unnecessary glamour to Fred West which is clearly lacking in every single photo I’ve ever seen of him. However, rather like giving someone a slicked side parting and a Hitler moustache instantly transforms them into something quite sinister, the curly hair and Christmas jumper combo Dominic West has to sport here does a similar job and, with some wonky teeth to complete the uglyfying transformation into Fred, we can rest assured that no one will be finding him too attractive and we’ll just be getting his fine acting skills instead.

You’re always going to be on safe ground with Emily Watson and she’s great as the mousey mother social worker who has got herself wrapped up in something much bigger and more nightmarish than she could ever have known. As she is called in on what is her first case as an appropriate adult she’s proud to be helping and Watson plays her with a little glint in her eye and the merest trace of a smile on her face as she marches down the corridor to the fateful interview room where the police and Fred West are waiting for her. It’s a wonderful little scene which contrasts greatly with the proceedings she’s thrown into where, after giving her a friendly greeting, West plunges into a rather jovial and friendly description of how he strangled his daughter, dismembered her and buried her in his back garden. The look of panic and horror washing over Watson’s eyes is well played indeed and perfectly conveys someone who has suddenly found themselves several leagues out of their depth.

The remainder of the first episode sees the game of cat and mouse develop between West and the police as he toys with them, taking them to his back garden and pointing out graves, only to tell them later he’s got the wrong location or that there are more than he originally said, sometimes co-operative and others times extremely unhelpful. And all the while he uses Leach, enjoying the power he has over her by telling her things which he knows she is legally unable to pass onto the police. It’s an interesting journey into West’s mind and you begin to see how he exerted influence over people in real life. Dominic West gives a great performance – at turns amiable and pyschopathic - and Watson matches him as Leach displays revulsion towards West while, at the same time, finding herself compelled by some force to stay on as his appropriate adult, unable to break free, despite the strain it places on her family as she becomes part of a media circus.

There are fine supporting roles too in the midst of this with Sylvestra La Touzel as the world-weary female detective keen to finally put the West case to bed and Robert Glenister (Spooks, Hustle) as the slightly more ruthless cop alongside her who seems happy enough to exploit West’s control over Leach. And then there’s the rather chilling portrayal of Rose West by Monica Dolan who manages to transform herself into something truly malevolent and wicked.

It’s in the second and concluding episode where the drama moves up another few notches. With Leach now taken out of the interview process and with no further obligations to the case she finds herself travelling to Birmingham and visiting West of her own free will in prison after he acquires her phone number. Her motives are good in that she believes there are other murders she can get West to confess to but there is little doubt that she has succumbed at least in part to his influence. As West confides in her that she is the image of a previous love of his who has met with a tragic end you squirm as you sense that this is much too dangerous a game for this decent and ordinary woman to be involved in.

Leach was criticised in real life for selling her story of her involvement with West to the Daily Mirror and this is dealt with here as her partner urges her to get something back for all the turmoil that the case is causing them, which ends up having disastrous effects upon her health when details of this emerge towards the drama’s conclusion at the trial of Rose West. Of course, by this stage, Fred himself is no more, neatly sidestepping justice and having to face the shame of his crimes in court by hanging himself in his cell. Although the drama does miss Dominic West’s portrayal of him during its final half hour his presence is still very much felt by the mess he has left behind in Leach’s life. Even when she is finally free of the events in her day-to-day life and enjoying a walk in the countryside with her family she remarks that there are certain things that you can’t unlearn and that once someone has put something in your head it will stay there forever. In Leach’s case it’s not just the knowledge of his appalling crimes but the feeling that there were more, and of an even more sinister and horrific nature involving both his wife and brother, waiting to come out and which will now remain buried.

I can understand how the family of victims might not have wanted this drama to have been made, let alone shown, and even Leach’s own son has spoken out about revisiting the events which brought disorder to his home. However, it’s hard to fault the way in which everyone on this production has pulled together to produce an intelligent piece where something shocking and tawdry could easily have been made instead. This isn’t a drama about Fred West killing people or exerting some dark influence over his victims. It’s not even one about his dysfunctional relationship with his wife. It’s a superb piece about one last victim, an ordinary woman drawn into his world, too far, and being damaged by the process and having the to live on with the repercussions. Carefully scripted, directed with a minimum of fuss, and perfectly acted out by two well-chosen leads it emerges from this controversial topic with honour. One has to salute the bravery of the production team for daring to tackle this subject, confident that they had the personnel with experience of similar dramas to pull it off. It’s also evidence that beyond the lowest common denominator chase for ratings and advertisers’ approval there still exists within ITV a core of people who dare to challenge the viewer and who happen to be bloody good at their jobs. More of this, please.

The Story of Film – when nerdishness has never been better

I normally make a point of not commenting on a new series until it’s a few episodes in as first episodes can often be deceiving and series often need a few weeks to find their feet. In the case of Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film: An Odyssey, however, I’m going to jump straight in, the reason being that I wouldn’t want people missing out on catching up with its excellent premiere before the second installment airs this Saturday night.

It’s also the case that I simply don’t need to see another episode of this series to know that the long-lost art of finely crafted multi-part documentaries has been restored to our television screens – that much is abundantly evident from this week’s offering. And how refreshing it is to see a documentary maker and a broadcaster treat its audience as intelligent creatures capable of tuning in each week for a period of several months instead of assuming that we have such limited attention spans that information must be crushed and condensed into standalone programmes, and where even a three-part series such as Mark Gatiss’ very good recent History of Horror can be considered somewhat epic in length. Thank goodness for Mark Cousins and More4 who have decided that a subject matter as deep and far-ranging as the entire history of world cinema be given the number of episodes that it deserves in order to do it justice.

The story of The Story of Film is that Cousins approached the BBC about turning his 2004 book of the same name into a series for TV. They were prepared to commission it but not at anywhere near the number of episodes that Cousins felt he needed in order to say everything he needed to say. Bravely, perhaps insanely, but certainly commendably, he walked away from the offer and instead took it to Channel 4 who found a home for it on their More4 digital channel and who were – amazingly in this day and age of shallow television and fickle viewing habits – prepared to offer it a run of twelve hour-long programmes. During the course of the making of the series, however, Cousins decided that even twelve episodes wasn’t enough to tell the story in and so he went back to More4 and made the case for the series being upped to fifteen episodes. Fortunately, they agreed and we, the viewers, look like winning hands down.

There have been some other fine documentary series of late on various genres of cinema, many of them focusing on cinema in the early part of the twentieth century. In addition to Gatiss’ horror series mentioned above we’ve had thoroughly decent efforts from Paul Merton, including his series on Silent Clowns and The Birth of Hollywood, as well as an interesting standalone documentary of the early British movies of Alfred Hitchcock. However, there can be no doubt that the time has now come to take a broader view and to attempt to complete a grander, more audacious look at the entire history of cinema, from its earliest and humblest beginnings, and taking in the output of all the world, instead of merely focussing on the US and Europe with a brief nod to Japan, as is usually the case. This is such a series with its entire raison d’être being to shine a light on works of significance from around the globe while weaving them into an over-arching fabric of cinema development as a whole. An almost frighteningly ambitious task to set oneself. Time will tell if Cousins succeeds over the course of the series but the evidence of the first programme is that we can be confident he does.

Familiar to fans of quality movies on television from his stint on Moviedrome, where he took over from Alex Cox, and from his own series Scene by Scene, there can be little doubt that Cousins’ presentation style is rather unique, bordering on the annoying. His softy spoken voice is full of random inflections which sound like deep affectations and each and every sentence is peppered with unnatural-sounding enunciation. However, his precise diction is almost laid over the images like a caress, such is the obvious love of the subject in his tones and you soon find yourself able to deal with the manner of delivery and concentrate instead on the enthusiasm and the pearls of information instead.

For the first programme in this long and incredible journey Cousins takes us right back to the genesis of the moving image with Edison and the Lumière brothers before moving through those final few years of the nineteenth century, when the process of filming was in its infancy, and through the first decade and a half of the twentieth century as a series of techniques in both shooting and editing allowed the medium to develop and evolve rapidly. Very clearly and concisely, and illustrated perfectly with examples from cinema’s first decade of silent movies, Cousins takes us through these innovations, the kind of things even a kid would take for granted in children’s television but which at one time had never occurred to film-makers until someone first had the idea. And so we see the development of film from static shots from an unmoving camera of single scenes to the first close-up to show more detail and how the close-up has since been utilised for dramatic effect with an example of the master of close-ups himself, Sergio Leone. The first edits, the first cutaways to different scenes and back again to develop a storyline, the first parallel storylines of two scenes happening simultaneously with cuts between the two: all these things and more are demonstrated in a way which neither treats the viewer as idiots nor presents them wrapped up in the kind of indecipherable terminology that would alienate the casual viewer. Cousins doesn’t come across like a Film Studies lecturer waffling on and he doesn’t even come across like a friendly and eager schoolteacher sharing his enjoyment with his pupils. Instead, if anything, he comes across like a proud father looking back through a photo album of his firstborn’s early development and sharing that love. These were the first faltering steps of cinema, the first half-formed words, and you can tell that Cousins is as proud of these simple advancements as everything which came after. And just right too.

Interesting little snippets of information are dotted along the way such as the fact that Hollywood developed as a major centre of film activity because of a patent for film projectors which had been registered in New York but which could be used on the distant west coast in the hope that it was too far away for anyone to bother tracking down for payment. And there’s the prominence of female script writers in the early days of cinema, which rather bucked the trend of women’s role in society in general during that period. This is the kind of stuff which perhaps students of early twentieth century silent cinema may well know but to the average viewer, including even most film fans who haven’t embarked upon studies of this era as students, it’s all fascinating material.

We wind up the first episode in the period of the First World War with Hollywood already established as a major industry, able to create stars who commanded salaries which were at the time astronomical, and with cinema already being used by some fine but misguided directors such as DW Griffith to push ideas of repellant propaganda onto a mass audience. Future installments look set to provide even further interest as Cousins will begin moving away from the nuts and bolts of film-making as cinema technically advances and into the realm of ideas and storytelling devices. We can expect to see established household name directors alongside the arthouse ones we like to pride ourselves on knowing and also alongside the ones we’ve never heard of at all, and that mix of all three is what excites me so much about the rest of the series.

One of the major soundbites to come out in the pre-publicity for this series has been a line from the opening episode where Cousins declares that the history of cinema we have previously been presented with is “racist by omission”. He’s right. Of course, I don’t think anyone has ever set out to omit movies from the history of the form based on racial prejudice, but at the same time we have clearly been too Western-centric in our appreciation of cinema in the past. Again, this isn’t down to racism in trying to bury works from other countries but down to practicalities and distributions. As Cousins points out though in a Radio Times interview accompanying the first episode, today we have access to works through DVD and the internet that we never had previously and so now is the time to highlight these forgotten or overlooked pieces.

I must say that the idea of being shown something new is an attraction with this series. While I’m happy to have my Truffauts, Kieslowskis, Kurosawas et al nestling happily on my DVD shelves, pretending that I’m culturally open, there’s a whole world out there I know nothing about and we, as viewers, stand potentially like those who stood on deck with Columbus all those centuries ago with new continents of opportunity opening up before us. And good old More4 are going to help us all by screening a series of movies in conjunction with The Story of Film so that some of the titles Cousins uses to illustrate his programmes can then be seen in their entirety by those eager to learn more.

So what is the litmus test for the success of this series? Well, speaking personally, after just one episode, I’ll drag my good wife’s name into this article. Saturday night presented options for viewing of The Story of Film on More4 and, simultaneously, a repeat of the French crime drama Spiral on BBC4. Tired, she decided to opt for neither and announced her intention to retire for the evening while I plumped for More4. Hanging around for the first few moments she was complaining loudly about Cousins’ inimitably aggravating intonation asking how I could bear to listen to it. After ten minutes she was still intermittently complaining but had been drawn in by what was on screen and what was actually being said rather than the way in which it was being said. After an hour and twenty minutes as the credits rolled she was telling how much she was looking forward to seeing the next fourteen programmes. Despite not having previously shown any inclination towards the world of Film Studies she was hooked.

It is the ultimate holy grail for any documentary maker to produce something which both aims high and yet never alienates anyone. Few achieve it and yet Cousins succeeds admirably. We live in an age where so much is dumbed down to the masses and where so much highbrow art is pitched to the other extreme. To carefully tread the tightrope of making an intelligent, thought-provoking series which both educates and entertains while never talking down to its potential audience or excluding those not already in the know is difficult and yet here it is, a series made in the old style of having enough episodes to breathe and really take us on an epic journey. TV isn’t supposed to be made like this any more, but thank god, in this case, it is and perhaps the wave of critical acclaim being lavished on this series will help the age of the documentary series to come again.

An Odyssey, you say? Tell Ulysses that I’ve signed up as a shipmate and am preparing to sail. I can’t wait.

The Killing – where the USA takes on Denmark and gets brutally murdered

What is the meaning of life? Where do we go to when we die? What is the point of getting up in the morning? Throughout time these have been the big questions mankind has posed itself over and over again. But, now, a new and important question joins their hallowed ranks to be echoed down through the millennia for generations to come and it is this: Just what on earth is the point in this American remake of The Killing? I fear we may never know the answer but I’ve done my best to, ultimately fruitlessly, shed some light on the matter.

Of course, I do know the economic answer to this question, which is simply that American audiences much prefer to watch English language dramas to subtitled foreign imports and if the locations can be transplanted across the Atlantic so much the better. Another Scandinavian thriller in the shape of Steig Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about to get the Hollywood remake treatment, although with the excellent choice of David Fincher at the helm it looks like being a pretty good decision. Given the choice between simply showing the original Danish TV series of The Killing (or Forbrydelsen, as it is known in its native land) or remaking it, it was always going to be an easy choice for the AMC channel and its sponsors. However, on any artistic level the question still remains – why do it?

That’s not to make any sort of a jibe at all towards American drama which can surely be said to be the finest in the world bar none at this moment in time. A look down the recent list of HBO dramas shows that some the best writers and directors in the history of medium have been working their trade on a purple patch of drama that we may not see the like of again. The AMC channel, makers of the US The Killing, are no slouches either having offered up the glorious Mad Men as well other acclaimed hits in the shape of Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. However, it should also be pointed out that production on Mad Men has recently been held up by AMC’s demands to reduce the running time by inserting an extra ad break, cut the budget by removing a main character and insisting on greater product placement – all resisted by the series’ showrunner until a compromise was reached. In other words, do they really know what they’re doing when they’ve been prepared to mess with a winning formula such as Mad Men?

Sadly, you have to ask if anyone really knew what they were doing when remaking The Killing. Almost immediately you question the point in the exercise due the sheer number of things which are identical to the original. While they may have moved the action from Copenhagen to Seattle you could be forgiven for feeling a certain sense of deja vu as you watch the opening scenes of the victim running frantically from the killer in a forest and then see moody aerial shots of the Seattle skyline shot and edited to closely resemble those of Copenhagen in the original with – wait for it – the exact same incidental music playing over the top. Time and time again it’s easy to believe you’ve slipped on a DVD of the Danish version by mistake with some locations looking identical to the originals, interiors looking like carbon copies of those broadcast in Denmark, and even actors in the new version closely resembling the Danes who made the roles so successful.

It’s hard to imagine the thinking behind this. Surely the makers would want this to stand or fall on its own merits. Surely pulling off the achievement of putting your own unique spin on something already acclaimed and making it acclaimed again in a different way should be the goal for AMC and all concerned? Not so, it seems. Instead, we’re treated to scenes played out during the first episode that are almost word for word recreations of what we’ve seen before, shot in an almost identical manner with the director not seeming to care about stamping his own mark on it and being quite prepared to lazily ape someone else’s work. This is never more the case than the wonderful montage endings to each episode of Forbrydelsen as we see what each of the main protagonists are up to and which has been copied lock, stock and barrel for the US version. The opening chase scene of the Danish version was gloriously cinematic and looked like something from the big screen and yet the US version looks just like what it is – a made for television copy of it.

Sofie Gråbøl as Sarah Lund in the original version

It’s not just in copying the dialogue, music, scenes and direction where this remake falls down but it extends even to the casting. While some actors have been cast very much against the type from the original, others seem to have been chosen just for their physical resemblance to the Danish actors. This is most noticeable with the casting of the murdered girl’s father with Brent Sexton playing the part almost as a parody of Bjarne Henriksen who first played the character, copying his clothes and even adding facial hair in the spirit of the original character.

Of course, much must rest on the shoulders of the actress playing the lead investigator. In Forbrydelsen Sofie Gråbøl gave a simply stunning performance as Sarah Lund. In many ways her character almost didn’t have a character, being economically written and with no hints of “big character” traits normally pinned onto a lead in a crime drama. Gråbøl’s performance is all about subtlety and as much about what she doesn’t say as what she does. She is calm and yet driven, not very sociable and yet you instantly like her. Mireille Enos on the other hand is passable enough as Sarah Linden, as the character has been renamed, but she’s a lot more easy going and therefore much less interesting as a character. She’s just a dull everywoman who’s likeable enough and therefore less engaging than the truly enigmatic and inscrutable Gråbøl. An okay performance following in the footsteps of a truly wonderful one is very disappointing and symptomatic of the producers of the remake rather missing the point that the viewers were drawn towards the understated rather than the obvious. In another of those baffling decisions they’ve even elected to force Enos to wear the same Christmas jumpers that Gråbøl made famous in Denmark as if the jumper somehow defines the character and it can be replicated by just putting on an identical costume. You may as well say that the important thing about playing Henry V is to make sure you have a crown on your head. Deary me.

Enos is far from terrible in the role and her character as written in the remake is equally far from being poor, but she doesn’t have that indefinable magic that Gråbøl and the writers and the directors combined to bring to the screen. You can see this clearly in her opening scene on AMC. While we feel we’ve dropped in on the character in Denmark we are force-fed some exposition in the American version which is truly amateurish info-dump. A friend of mine said that he turned off at this point and could continue no further so I was prepared for it, but I was still slightly bowled over by the Beginner’s Guide to Writing style of the dialogue as Linden’s husband-to-be fills the viewer in on Linden’s past, and hopes for the present, in a clunky series of lines which would have almost been better set as scrolling subtitles across the screen saying, “This is Sarah Linden and she’s about to move house, get married, get a new job and move to a new city”. It’s the sort of thing which tells you almost instantly that the cryptic skills of the Danes haven’t been matched by the Americans. Given that it’s from the channel home of Mad Men, which takes subtlety and makes it into an art form, it’s even more perplexing.

While the multitude of things which they have copied from the original are disappointing the real disappointment comes when they change things. If that sounds like I’m trying to have my cake and eat it in attacking the production I’ll explain. I’d have been very happy for AMC to almost completely change every aspect of the series – completely new dialogue, a different tone, new music, characters recast in new and interesting ways – just go for something totally fresh while still keeping the same central plot. However, the producers slavishly copy so much of Forbrydelsen that when they do actually make a few minor tweaks and adjustments they stick out all the more and you sit up at home thinking, “Oh, they actually changed a bit there”. The one scene which actually manages to surpass the original is that of the Larssens telling their two young sons that their big sister has died. It was excellent in the original but is perhaps a notch better in the remake and is handled in a different way in a different location. However, this is very much the exception and each change introduced in every other aspect is very much for the worse.

Take three characters who have been changed. Most characters come across as photocopies of the originals but three have been substantially altered. One of these is Jamie Wright, played by Eric Laden (Mad Men, Generation Kill) the right hand man and spin doctor of the series’ main political character. In the original his character is called Morten Weber and you like him. He’s fiercely loyal to his political employer and he comes across as a man of integrity. In this version we hear him say in the first episode, “better still if the girl is dead” in relation to how they can turn the missing girl to their political advantage. He comes across as a hateful little creep, which exactly how he looks.

Another example is the politician – Troels Hartmann in the original and Darren Richmond as he is renamed here. This is a politician who wants to sweep a corrupt old mayor from office and is determined to present a new kind of politics to the people which is beyond reproach. You want to believe in him in the original through all the trials and tribulations of his campaign but in this version, as early as the second episode, he is shown offering lucrative local government contracts to the husband of a political rival whose endorsement he is after. In other words, he’s corruptible himself.

The final example is Linden/Lund’s police partner who was Jan Meyer in Denmark and Stephen Holder in the US. Meyer is a flawed but good cop who sometimes lets his emotions spill over but who is a very sympathetic character. Holder, on the other hand, is played as some sort of white homie boy full of “Yo brotha” attitude who is instantly aggressive to the point of idiocy in questioning any and all suspects or witnesses and who uses smoking joints as his method of hanging out wit da kids to get the lowdown on the murdered girl and her friends. Basically, he’s a rather difficult character to care about.

What’s important about these three characters is that on the long and emotional journey of the original series we felt for these people every step of the way, were shocked when they were shocked and felt their pain and anguish. In this version what reason is there given that we should worry about what happens to them? What series like The Wire have done is to make sure that even characters who are out and out bad ‘uns are filled with likeable attributes to make us empathise with them. All we have here though are people who aren’t very interesting and who aren’t someone we can engage with and to take three central characters from the plot and make us switch off from them is something of a special skill for the producers of this remake.

If you were coming to this series never having seen the Danish original you’d probably think it was competently made, paced and acted with the majority of the performances being good (Michelle Forbes – previously of Star Trek: The Next Generation – as the murdered girl’s mother and Kristin Lehman as the politician’s lover and aide suggest that they could shine almost as strongly as their Danish counterparts). However, for anyone who caught the original on BBC4 or upon its first outing in Denmark then the question of what is the point just won’t go away. The series appears as a curious mixture of elements which are copied, only not as well, and new elements which fall a long way short indeed of the standard set in Denmark back in 2007. When I heard that the American series was a mere thirteen episodes of forty-five minutes duration compared to the original’s twenty hour-long episodes I was prepared to forgive them the compression which was going on as whole sections of the plot in the second and third episodes were jettisoned and two characters would be crushed into one who would do the work in the plot of the two originals. However, I’ve now heard that this thirteen episode run on AMC is only the first half of the story and that it is returning for a further thirteen episodes to wrap the story up. Perhaps, given that they’ll have even more episodes than the Danish version, rather than the previously suspected less, they’ll actually start doing a lot of new things with the plot, otherwise why cut out whole chunks in the early stages?

Perhaps more baffling though than AMC’s remake is Channel 4′s decision to buy it. Surely the majority of people interested in it in the UK will have already sought out the far superior version shown recently on BBC4? However, if you’re not one of them and you’ve come late to the party let me advise you that you’ve wandered into the wrong house. There’s a much better party next door and you don’t need to stay in this one to follow it through to the bitter end. Just make your apologies and nip next door. It doesn’t matter that you’re four or five episodes into this disappointing retread - just stop watching. You’re not so far into it that you’ve had anything ruined in the original yet. Just hire or buy the DVD box set of Forbrydelsen or simply download it (from legal sources obviously…) and catch up with that version and then keep going. You won’t want to stop and you’ll not even once be pining for the American version. There’s no point in watching the Danish version at a later date as you’ll have ruined all the surprises for yourself, whereas watching the American version later, if you insist, will just demonstrate that you made the better choice.

Before I belatedly caught up with Forbrydelsen, just as the BBC4 run was finishing, I asked a friend how good it was. He replied that if there was a World Cup of modern drama then it would be in the final, it was that good. My eyes widened and I suggested that no matter how good it might be that perhaps Mad Men and The Wire would need to be drawn together in the semi-finals to give it a clear run into the final. A short time later, having watched it, I began to think that perhaps it did indeed have the beating of those two illustrious series, perhaps on a good day with the pitch conditions suited to Forbrydelsen and Mad Men‘s goalkeeper sent off early on for a rash challenge. But before I strangle the World Cup analogy to death I’ll add that while Denmark march on towards that final the USA have long ago exited the tournament grinding out three goal-less draws and failing to qualify from the group stages having failed to demonstrate any original tactics and being booed and bottled off the pitch by an angry group of Danish Television-supporting hooligans.

The only thing left to say is that while I’m urging anyone watching the American version to stop and stop now, I myself am probably going to persevere with it. It’s not so bad that it’s good, it’s merely okay sprinkled with moments that are copies of the good that has gone before and new decisions which are rather poor. However, I’m actually slightly fascinated by the way it reveals itself at every turn to be an inferior version like some sort of visual manual of how to make mediocre television. Perhaps that’s how they should have marketed it: “See how to take something brilliant and dilute every aspect of it”. And perhaps I’m still hopefully searching for the answer to the question at the top of this article: just what is the point of this?

The Apprentice Series 7 – The Verdict

As the dust settles on another series of people with bloated opinions of themselves demonstrating beyond any doubt that most of them wouldn’t be worthy of being hired for a Saturday job behind the sweet counter in the local newsagent’s shop let alone being selected to set up a joint company with Lord Sugar, it’s time to have another look at The Apprentice and measure its highs and lows. Among the various questions I’ll be asking there’s one which is quite simple to answer so I’ll get it out of the way first, namely, is the series still excellent entertainment? Easy one – yes. The show continues to hit the spot because it’s still impossible not to loathe these disgraceful and vile little capitalists who sum up just about everything wrong with the business world. Watching them flounder and get fired by the pitiless Sugar as they expose themselves as being idiots rather than the cold, ruthless entrepreneurial machines they would have us believe never ceases to be absorbing and gratifying in equal measure.

Does the show work any better though as a business programme designed as a competition among an elite band of young on-the-up people to inspire others? In my original review earlier in the series (which you can read here) I was of the opinion that it didn’t work on this level as the contestants were usually revealed to be not very inspiring and the lessons learned from the tasks not relevant to real life, with Sugar often rewarding teams with victory who produced awful products just so long as they took the most money in one day, even if was obvious that the other team had a better product that would ultimately have done better in the long-term of the real world. Sadly, in this series it all seems to have got a little more detached from reality. With the ultimate aim of the series changing from gaining employment with Sugar to going into partnership with him it meant that the previous eleven weeks of tasks before the final essentially counted for nothing. It was all about the business plan they handed in to Sugar, a business plan which they had already produced before the series even began. So, while the eleven weeks of tasks provided the usual thrills of gaping at people’s stupidity and some genuine punch-the-air moments as particularly nasty pieces of work got the boot, it ultimately didn’t mean anything which is why we ended up with the situation where perhaps the most perfectly organised and level-headed candidate the series has ever seen, in the shape of Helen who scored ten victories out of eleven, ended up losing to someone who seemed to be nearly always on the losing team. And quite rightly so.

While the new format of the series makes even further nonsense of any claims of it being an examination of the candidates’ skills (those weekly tasks were obviously just there for entertainment and the candidates may as well have handed in their business plans during week one to decide the winner) it was actually the most heart-warming moment the series has ever produced when the geeky but thoroughly nice Tom was told that he had won. Tom had floundered throughout the series but in the end his likeability and the fact that in the past he had invented a genuinely great product won the day for him. Under the old rules the automaton that was Helen, who wasn’t exactly a bad person compared to most candidates but who even confessed herself that she had no social life outside of work and no desire to even have one, would have won easily. Under the new rules the weekly tasks may have become irrelevant but at least someone with an idea won because they had an idea and not because they promised to ruthlessly destroy all opposition to Sugar in the global marketplace.

Tom’s win was a win for humanity and, despite my denouncement of all the candidates a few months ago, there are normally a few decent (or, at least, less hateful) individuals who sneak through the process each year but who get chewed up and spat out by the ogres around them and then shouted at by Sugar that there’s no room for niceties in the world of business before being fired. However, by changing the rules this year, it opened the door for a genuinely lovely bloke like Tom to win because, when it comes down to it, the ruthless, heartless androids who normally do well in the series usually have no ability to actually think or create – it’s outside of their programming – and Helen’s idea for a business ended up being laughably bad. Tom showed the ability to think and create. You could almost see Sugar amazing himself that he had let an actual human being win this year but it was such a relief to see a guy who never bad-mouthed his fellow contestants once win through. While others in the boardroom facing the sack tried to fight their way out with a mixture of bullshit and hot air (hot bull or airshit, whichever you prefer), promising to give 110%, 200%, a million per cent, or just say and do anything at all to avoid being fired while blasting all those around them, Tom would always meekly accept every criticism thrown at him by Sugar and nod his head while taking it on the chin. He even put his hand up to speak every time there was a discussion with his fellow candidates on tasks and would keep it up until he got a chance to speak. Good god, manners from an Apprentice candidate. They’ll have pigs reciting Keats’ love poems on stage next.

And so to that final, different this year from all six previous series in that it wasn’t a final two posed with a really big concept-task helped by a motley assembly of returning failures who had been fired earlier in the series. This year, the gruelling interview stage (normally the penultimate edition of the show) was reserved for last, but instead of it being merely an analysis of the guff they’ve written on their CVs followed by a verbal evisceration of everything they stand for, as even they themselves finally realise that they are talking buzzword bollocks just as Sugar’s attack dogs rip their teeth into them and laugh in their faces, this year we got to see their business plans shredded before their eyes. And then the pieces of shredded paper gathered up and set fire to. And then the piles of ash scattered to the four corners of the earth. And it’s at this point that you realise that even the four finalists, who are supposed to be the cream of the crop, are a clueless bunch who all deserve to be shown the door with the final cancelled and the competition declared null and void.

As Sugar sat in the boardroom and read through the four plans before him he must have been scrabbling frantically through a fifth document – the one containing his BBC contract and stipulating that he had to stump up a quarter of a million pounds to one of the bozos with the lamest of ideas in front of him. Can anyone really imagine Sugar deciding that after all these years in high-powered business he wanted to become a partner in a company which sorted out dentist appointments for people too busy to do it themselves? Helen thought that he might and staked her whole business future on it. As one of the interviewers pointed out, it would take just as much time, if not longer, to phone her up and explain it and get her to do it as it would for him to do it himself. Lunacy. Then there was Tom who, despite being a worthy winner of the series compared to those around him, decided to invent a chair, which he admitted that he hadn’t actually made yet. Or costed. Or pretty much done anything much to do with it. And all his figures added up wrong. Lunacy. And then there was Jim who was going for some sort of e-learning project for schools but was finally forced to admit that he hadn’t done any kind of research on the project at all. Lunacy. And, finally, there was Susie, never the brightest in the weekly tasks (she was the dolt who famously asked in the Parisian task “Do French people like their children?”), who managed to extrapolate from selling some home-made perfumes at weekend markets that if she scaled that up to a national level she would have a £4.5m turnover in Year One with £1m profits. You might as well say that you sold a DVD once on eBay for a 50p profit so, if you went and bought two million DVDs, you could make a million pounds profit. She was rightly torn to pieces and it was revealed that she didn’t even have any idea of the actual legalities of selling cosmetics with regards to testing and had woefully underestimated the cost of this in her proposal. Lunacy.

What you’re left wondering after all this is how four contestants who were in a competition to come up with a business plan to draw a quarter of a million pounds out of Sugar’s wallet and who knew that their plans would be subjected to microscopic scrutiny couldn’t even be bothered conducting one single, solitary piece of market research or costing exercises between them. It beggars belief. In the end, Sugar did the only thing he could do and awarded the prize to the one person who at least had proven that he could come up with great ideas in the past before quickly telling him to dump his new ideas about chairs and go back to working on curved nail files, where he had success previously. So even the winning business plan got instantly binned, which says it all really. Nevertheless, it was good to see that the four least despicable candidates made their way to this year’s final. The inclusion of Melody and Natasha in the final six put this very much in danger at one stage but these two scheming harridans ultimately failed to hide their own patent lack of ability, sense or decency to those around them and were thankfully dispatched.

While it was pleasing to see the charming and gracious Tom win there’s little doubt that this year’s star was Jim. From the moment he cowed Leon into changing his mind about nominating him for the boardroom in the second episode he seemed to connect with the viewers and he even managed to repeat the trick without speaking when the vainglorious Vincent was incapable of bringing him into the boardroom despite the fact it was obvious that he should, despite the fact that the other candidates and Sugar were telling him he was a wimp who was in Jim’s pocket if he didn’t, and despite the fact that it was very clear indeed that he himself would be sacked if he didn’t bring Jim in. While there’s little doubt that Jim was probably one of the most buzzword-heavy and cliché-ridden candidates ever to step into the series he gets away with it in my opinion by being genuinely charismatic and by actually having more common sense than most behind his bluster. It was an odd sight indeed to see the Sugar Stormtroopers that are his four interviewers struggle to pin him down on almost anything they asked him. I’ve seen candidate after candidate, year after year wilt under the first question from these savage and brutal assassins and yet Jim just kept coming back at them time and time again, talking his way out of trouble like a boxer dancing around the ring. At one point I even thought he was going to survive them and emerge unscathed but in the end it was the sheer weight of their attacks, the sheer number of arrows they fired in his direction that broke through the defences and pinned him bleeding to the ground. It was almost with a sense of regret that they finally breached his barricades and over-run him and you can almost imagine that they saluted his back as he limped out through the door.

I said in my first review that I don’t watch the follow-up programme where each fired contestant is interviewed as I don’t like to see people who have been stupendously unpleasant in the series get a chance to laugh it up with the audience and put their own spin on things. I always make an exception for the final though and this year, despite the appearance of Michael McIntyre on the panel (a blow I felt it would be almost impossible for the show to overcome) it was well worth watching with an excellent little montage of Jim’s finest moments of mind control over the other candidates and members of the public being the particular highlight. What it did really enforce though was that Tom is that most unusual and unique of all Apprentice candidates – a thoroughly splendid chap. He emerged smiling from the process with his dignity and honour intact, never debasing himself by pointing out the faults of others and elevating himself by calmly accepting their belittlement. I’m not sure if he has it in him to make a successful business with Sugar but, unlike most of the others who are plainly unemployable agitators, I’d certainly employ him if I had the opportunity, just because he seems like a nice person. And his win is incredibly refreshing to see on this series. I wish him well.

Camelot – when boring is even worse than bad

I wouldn’t normally go near a show like Camelot, the latest historical sword-and-sex-fest from the Starz channel in the US. Something drew me in though. Perhaps it was the enduring magic of the Arthurian saga, of growing up as a huge fan of the John Boorman masterpiece, Excalibur, and wanting to see how a modern spin on the tale would play out. Perhaps it was a fascination with the work of Chris Chibnall, the series’ head writer whose work now has a sore tooth fascination for me where I continue to stick my metaphorical tongue into the pain to see if it still hurts. Perhaps it was the connection with Starz and a desire to see if this could be as bad as their other recent fare. Whatever it was, it dragged me in. Regrettably.

I had begun to think there was some sort of hope for Mr Chibnall, normally not only a rather uninspiring hack but one with a tendency towards rather juvenile delusions of “adult” writing involving lots of sniggering references to sex. It seemed he had turned a corner by providing us with the rather thoughtful and reasonably well crafted United (see my review of it here) but sci-fi and fantasy are his real pitfalls and it seems that once he has left the grounding of reality in a drama he quickly darts offs in a direction which leaves the characters shouting a lot – usually about things he presumes schoolboys will find sexy.

Of course, I should have realised that the teaming-up of Chibnall with the Starz channel would multiply these problems further (their most recent fighting historical production being the lamentable Spartacus, which has become a byword for puerile raciness mixed with over the top violence) and that the addition of Michael Hirst’s name to the list of executive producers and writers would send the whole thing spinning out of control with his career nosediving from the promising beginnings of screenplaying Elizabeth to overseeing the not-so-joyful hokum that was The Tudors. This unholy trinity brought together is something of an anti-pedigree in TV terms and so the warning signs were there to be seen. Written in mile-high letters of fire, in fact. But still I was attracted to it, kicking all sense of reason to the wind.

First of all, it’s only fair that I point out that it would be unreasonable to damn this series by comparison to the movie version of the Arthurian tale, Excalibur. Boorman has given us what is perhaps the definitive reworking of these familiar tales where Alex Thomson’s majestic cinematography combines with a cast including Helen Mirren, Nigel Terry, Patrick Stewart, a young Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Cherie Lunghi and, best of all, Nicol Williamson, as the perfect portrayal of Merlin, to produce an epic which seems only to grow in reputation as the years pass by. It’s unlikely we’ll see a better version but new attempts are always welcome, just as the forthcoming BBC/HBO reworking of I, Claudius won’t detract from the original and is worth looking forward to in its own right. Recent versions of the Arthurian legend have included the American Mists of Avalon, based on the women in the tale, and the British Merlin, aimed more at a Saturday tea-time family audience. Tellingly, Chibnall had apparently been trying to develop an Arthurian series for the BBC which ended up being rejected. After going their separate ways on the project the BBC opted to greenlight Merlin while Chibnall took his efforts to Starz and, while I wasn’t hugely bowled over with Merlin, I do think the BBC chose the better part on the evidence of the first few episodes of Camelot.

You can see the kind of series that Camelot is trying to be from the pre-credits sequence as Uther Pendragon meets his returning daughter, Morgan, and we discover that this is going to be a show with people engaging in lots of macho snarling. Before Morgan has got very far with confronting her father he has already punched her in the face and then attempts to do so again before she predictably catches his wrist and snarls something back at him. This meeting is all the incentive Morgan needs to engage in a little regicide/patricide by taking on the form of a serving girl and poisoning her father, the king. This is intercut with footage of Merlin haring across the countryside to meet the king before he dies and, because this is an Arthur myth for the 21st Century, he isn’t some wise old mage leaning on a staff but an action man leaping over rivers and ditches. And because it’s made by a channel which places more emphasis on style than substance he doesn’t just leap but does so in the slow motion favoured by so many shallow dramas of today accompanied by “whoosh” noises. An inauspicious start then before we’ve even hit the credits.

The casting of the two regular characters we’ve met so far is typical of the failure of this production. On paper they’re big names – Joseph Fiennes as Merlin and Eva Green as Morgan. They’re not even particularly bad actors, serviceable enough and commanding of big Hollywood contracts. However, they just don’t inhabit the roles in any meaningful way that particularly makes you care. Green is more at fault here, giving a pretty clichéd evil villain performance which makes you suspect at any stage that her next line might be “Har! Har! Har! Nothing can stop me now!” and whose screen presence also seems to rely too heavily on her copious eyeliner for support. Fiennes is alright, but alright isn’t really what we’re looking for in a drama like this. Merlin is, in many ways, the central character, guiding and shaping Arthur and events at every turn. I said at the start that it would be unfair to compare Camelot to Excalibur but when Nicol Williamson brings to the screen a portrayal of Merlin imbued with energy and character it’s rather hard to watch Fiennes half sleepwalking his way through this with a slightly blokey take on the character being the only thing worth noticing, and even then it not being particularly welcome.

These casting mistakes don’t help the series but they were certainly capable of being overcome. Green’s Morgan may be a little hackneyed but there have been plenty of enjoyable adventure series featuring larger than life, OTT or moustache-twirling villains which succeeded not only despite such characters but because of them, with Robin of Sherwood springing readily to mind. No, the real damage is done by the casting of Arthur. Even if the rest of the series was some sort of masterclass in every department (and it’s not) it would no more be able to overcome this handicap than a wonderful footballing side like Barcelona would be able to win anything if they went out and played every match without a goalkeeper. There are many elements to creating a successful drama but one of them is obviously to “get your central casting right” with a weak script or lacklustre production values often being well hid behind a truly magnetic performance from a central lead. It’s truly staggering to believe that anyone could therefore have cast Jamie Campbell Bower in such a crucial role.

It’s hard to know what was going through the executives’ minds at the casting sessions but perhaps they wanted some sort of boy band pop-rock star look for Arthur to engage with a new generation and reach out to a particular demographic. If so, then he appears to foot the bill with his wispy bum-fluff hairs around his mouth and his flowing blond locks hanging over slightly startled eyes and vaguely elfin features, but only if young girls also enjoy wet blanket acting into the bargain. His portrayal of Arthur is wimpish and crushingly disappointing as you know from very early on in the proceedings that Bower lacks the screen presence, clout or anger to do the role any justice or pull the show along through sheer force of will. You’re not going to squirm in your seat as this character faces a terrible foe in dreadful circumstances as you just won’t be able to care what happens to him. While some sort of snarling, yelling, snorting He-man was to be avoided at one end of the casting scale, surely it should have been obvious that this rather sapless and insipid version with slightly bucked-teeth was as equally undesirable at the other.

Despite appearing rather like a very unmemorable minor character in Neighbours Bower would probably be fine in a teenage angst drama along the lines of some kind of Dawson’s Creek clone and I can certainly see what they’re trying to do by having Arthur filled with moments of doubt about his kingship after having being plucked from obscurity to unite his nation, but he just looks lost, adrift in a production where the producers have written and cast the character terribly wrong. And it doesn’t help at all that he is made to look even more ordinary every time he shares the screen (which is often in the opening episodes) with Peter Mooney as Arthur’s brother Kay, who doesn’t have half as much to do but does it twice as well with a stature that would have made him a much better pick as Arthur. But he doesn’t have blonde hair, which was presumably important. It’s actually easy to believe that the wrong scripts were handed out on Day One to these two actors resulting in them playing each other’s parts and everyone being just too embarrassed to point it out.

It’s not all a disaster on the casting front though, to be fair. Tamsin Egerton (who, strangely enough, was also in the American Arthurian series, Mists of Avalon, playing Morgan as a young girl) is an enchanting Guinevere, more at the beautiful and girly end of the scale than the beautiful and noble we might have expected in the past, but she’s fine enough and probably ticks all the right boxes for Starz in their bid to get teenage boys watching, wasting no time at all in removing her clothes and cavorting naked on a beach even before she properly appears on-screen, achieving this through a dream sequence of Arthur’s fevered imagination. Similarly, you can imagine that Eva Green’s contract probably stipulated a certain minimum number of nude scenes when she signed it and handed it back into the sweating hands of the Starz executives.

James Purefoy is the other wise casting move with his excellent performance as Mark Anthony in HBO’s Rome obviously allowing the production team to believe that he could bring a certain number of viewers with him, confident of enjoying another heroic but slightly arch interpretation of a fighting political schemer. Purefoy was wonderful in Rome, a leading man with real poise who sent the character up but never made the mistake of falling to the wrong side of the tightrope walk between knowing and pantomime. He certainly gives it his all here but, sadly, Purefoy is wasted on the material he is given as the oafish King Lot. Regrettably, his character is a brutish and misogynistic fool whose purpose seems to be partly to up the quota of sex scenes Starz seemed to demand. One can only imagine Purefoy rolling his eyes while reading the script before doing what was required and getting the hell out, especially when King Lot witnesses an argument between other characters and grumbles, “Aww, fuck this!” before getting up and storming off. Real life probably mirrored fiction. Other dialogue beauties from the pen of Chibnall include a bed scene between Lot and Morgan where the sorceress asks him if he was there at the death of his parents to which he replies, “Yes, I killed them”. At moments like this you almost wonder if you’ve strolled by mistake into the classic episode of Blackadder where a group of evil super assassins all boast about how they’ve killed their own parents. One of the two series is actually intended to be funny though.

It’s not just the casting though which lets down Camelot. Far from it. Just (as I mention above) a bad production can hide behind some great performances it’s also true that some dreadful casting can hide behind a superb production and still make for a watchable show. Once again, Robin of Sherwood springs to mind where Jason Connery was so badly mis-cast in the title role as to almost evoke pity for him every time he appears on-screen, and yet the series remained essential viewing. While the production of Camelot looks nice enough and the scenery of the locations in Ireland is well used, it’s the writing and the whole direction of the show which really crucify it and combine with the casting in a one-two combination punch to floor the viewer.

Chibnall’s dialogue is rarely one of his strong points (witness some of the examples above) but even his basic plotting of key moments in the opening two parter are nonsensical to the point where it actually manages to take any thinking viewer out of the drama. Two examples: firstly, Chibnall attempts to put a new spin on the sword in the stone myth by not only having Arthur pluck the sword from a rock but doing so from a rock at the top of a raging hundred foot high waterfall with water cascading all around him. When shown his task Arthur has his brother impossibly throw a rope up almost the entire distance of the rocks and then climbs up into the waterfall risking death at every second while the viewer sits at home and asks why he didn’t just find some gentle walk up to the top of the waterfall and swim across? The answer, obviously, is because it wouldn’t look as good on TV, but for the character of Arthur it makes no sense whatsoever.

Secondly, and much more inexplicably, King Lot and Morgan turn up at Camelot with all their savage warriors, storm in to see Arthur and execute someone very important to him in front of him. They give him an ultimatum and tell him he must relinquish the crown within five days or they’ll come back and kill him. But the unavoidable question is why not just kill him there and then? He’s a wimp, he has very few men, they’ve already stormed his castle, he’s defenceless in front of them, killing him would be to their advantage and allow them to realise their ambitions, they’ve just murdered someone in front of him so they’re not particularly respectful of life, and they’re going to kill him anyway in five days’ time. So why not just do it now? Why give him time to raise an army, or get Merlin to magic something up, or barricade Camelot, or think of something else? Furthermore, Morgan has already killed the previous king, who happened to be her own father, so she has absolutely no qualms about killing either royal personages or family members and actually seems to prefer it if they’re both. Of course, the five days thing is the undoing of King Lot and you’re just left shaking your head at home asking yourself, “Why did he do that?” Again, the answer is because the writer thinks it is more dramatic, but from the point of view of the characters issuing the demand it makes no sense at all.

It unquestionably does look visually dramatic to have the famous sword scene located at the top of a waterfall so I can see why they’ve done this. I can also see that there might be some dramatic mileage in having the most famous magician/sorcerer in all of folklore not actually perform a single act of magic over the three episodes I’ve watched. It is hinted that using magic comes at a great price and that Merlin has now moved beyond magic while Morgan is caught up in its thrall. You’ve got to imagine that we will see terrible consequences of its use for her later in the series or that Merlin himself will be tempted back into the ways as a major plot point in some future storyline. However, one area where it’s hard to fathom why they’ve changed the original and familiar story is in the startling non-inclusion of Lancelot.

I’m not against myths being retold in new ways. These tales have evolved over hundreds of years already and it’s good that they continue to do so. To yet again use HTV’s 1980s drama Robin of Sherwood as an example, that show introduced a new element to the Robin Hood myth in the form of a Saracen warrior amongst his band of freedom fighters. So successful was this move that most subsequent retellings of the story have incorporated a Saracen into the proceedings as if that had always been a part of the story. So, it’s always possible to put new spins on old tales and get it right. However, by dropping Lancelot, one of the most famous names in the whole Arthur myth they’ve done something fundamentally stupid. The story of how Lancelot, Arthur’s best friend and champion knight becomes seduced by the beauty of Guinevere and betrays his friend before ultimately redeeming himself is so strong that you would need to be almost wilfully sabotaging any production of a new version in ignoring it. Instead, Chibnall serves us up a twist on this by having the King’s champion renamed for no apparent reason as Leontes and it is he who is betrothed to Guinevere and who marries her in the third episode, but not before Arthur has decided to do the dirty behind his newfound friend’s back and have his way with her first. It comes across more as sordid soap opera than some tragic and eternal tale of messed up love between friends and it just provides you with even less reason to actually like or care about Arthur when he is shown from the off to be so dishonourable and ignoble. Also, fans of Shakespeare will know that Leontes is the name of a character in The Winter’s Tale who becomes obsessed with a belief that his childhood friend is having a relationship with his wife before attempting to kill him and imprison his wife, so I guess we have an unsubtle hint from Chibnall about where this is heading and there can be no other reason for giving the character such an un-Celtic name.

With mistake after mistake in the creative decisions I found myself floundering badly by the end of the rather uneventful third episode. The two best actors in the opening episodes had killed each other by the end of the second so the third was always going to be choppy water for me and the ludicrousness of Arthur and Merlin accepting an invitation to have dinner with Morgan and stay alone at her castle following her mass murder of half of Arthur’s army and friends just days earlier (unsurprisingly she drugs their wine!) left me questioning if this was a series I wanted to continue with. In the end, the dullness of the episode made my mind up for me even more than all the poor dialogue, gratuitous sprinklings of sex for the teenage boy market or the continual appearances of a few seconds of slow motion dropped into a scene to make it look “cool” (if you’re an easily impressed idiot). I bailed out and have had little reason to regret it. I’ve since heard that Camelot has already been cancelled by Starz despite garnering very impressive initial viewing figures. Perhaps they just got bored with it as well.