Mr Pye DVD Review

This was actually an an unwanted DVD review for something or other and I can see why it wasn’t wanted. I disliked the series so much that I found it hard to summon up the energy to either savage it or laugh at it. Instead I was merely bored by it. I produce it here on the blog just in case anyone should ever be tempted to watch it!

I’d been looking forward to watching Mr Pye ever since it was drawn to my attention a short while ago. The combination of Derek Jacobi, the fact that it was an adaptation of a Mervyn Peake novel, contained an offbeat plot about a man growing angel’s wings and the fact that it was shot entirely on location on the Channel Island of Sark seemed to suggest that it had a lot going for it. Add to that the fact that its director, Michael Darlow, although less associated with drama, had made his name at the helm of impressive documentaries notching up episodes of series such as The World at War and, most famously, Johnny Cash in San Quentin and it looked like a winner. However, if anything can ever have been said to be less than the sum of its parts it’s Mr Pye.

Adapted by Landseer Productions for Channel 4 and shown back in 1986, it is very much a product of its time in a number of regards. Like many 1980s productions shot on film it looks rather faded in colour and this Network release doesn’t appear to have accessed the original film prints for a new transfer and grade which it sorely needs to inject some sense of vibrancy rather than the slightly washed out look we are served up here. Ironically, while the picture quality now looks decidedly cheap and grotty it would have been an expensive production at the time when many dramas were still shot as a mixture of film and video.

One benefit though to having been made when it was is that it got made at all. The days when genre pieces were being produced were rapidly drawing to a close, with science-fiction and supernatural dramas being consigned briefly to history before being revived in more recent times. It’s hard to imagine a four-part miniseries being commissioned much later than this when the television landscape of Britain had somewhat turned against dramas like this which engage in both fantasy and whimsy.

However, it is very much of its time and it would be difficult to see how a piece as slow and aimless as this is could be commissioned at all in the drama landscape of today, let alone do well. Its problems begin almost immediately and the production serves us up a first episode which is entirely at odds with the remaining three but which could have been so easily avoided by a better screenwriter, script editor or director to ensure that there was some reason for the viewer to tune in again the following week.

As the first episode begins we are introduced to the rather fuddy-duddy, clappy-happy Mr Pye arriving by ferry to the island, apparently to bring “love” to its inhabitants and being met by the landlady at whose house he will be staying. He aims to bring the islanders closer to “the Great Pal” – his term for God – and although it’s slightly quirky to hear this term the first few times it does begin to grate somewhat by about the five thousandth instance in Episode Four. For the remainder of the opening episode he potters about being chatty to people and greeting them pleasantly, singing jolly songs and carrying out the occasional minor good deed on the level of fence painting.

And this is where it all gets a bit difficult to understand where the production team and screenwriter’s heads where at. I’m guessing that this series was probably marketed as being one about a man who grew angel’s wings through doing good deeds – it’s right there on the front of the DVD cover for modern audiences and I’d imagine any pre-publicity at the time would have drawn attention to it. Any modern production… actually, scrap that. Any sensible production of any age would surely have the big reveal of the first signs of his wings starting to poke through the flesh on his shoulders as a cliffhanger at the end of the first episode, acting as a major hook to the audience to tune in again. However, in Mr Pye the episode ends halfway through his attempts to stage a beach party and winch an old woman to the proceedings. In other words, we’ve endured an episode of mildly whimsical antics from a dottery old busy body with absolutely no indication at all that the series is indeed something else entirely. Why tune in again? If you didn’t already know about the twist in advance you would have absolutely no reason to as it had been fairly aimless stuff up to that point. When the reveal comes it’s about ten minutes into the second episode. It’s almost as if they didn’t break the script into episodes and just shot pages and pages of script and then, when they got into the edit, they just said, “Oh, that’s fifty minutes. Just stop there”. “But it’s halfway through a scene and doesn’t make much sense”. “Doesn’t matter – that’ll do”.

Given that we’re led to believe that the sudden sprout of wings from his shoulders is due to Mr Pye’s good deeds the viewer is also left scratching his or her head as to why, given that one of his supposedly good deeds was winching an old woman in a homemade device over the edge of a cliff, despite her protests and screams, leaving her terrified and bed-ridden after the event and hating him forever. What must the rest of the islanders be like if this is considered to be a good deed? In fact, we actually see him taking a horse whip to the same old woman in an earlier scene to encourage her to get out of a horse-drawn carriage!

Of course, the real meat of the story is in the conflict in Mr Pye’s mind caused by his wing growth and his attempts to undo his good deeds, which results in him growing a pair of devil’s horns. Some of his acts of wanton naughtiness do bring a chuckle, such as gleefully kicking over a sandcastle belonging to some children on the beach, but they are a rare relief in what is a very wordy script full of soliloquies and very un-natural performances. This is never more the case than when Mr Pye takes his wing condition to Harley Street and embarks upon a pantomime routine with a doctor in which he somehow manages to avoid just showing the wings, convincing the doctor he is mad before rather predictably being dragged away by two men in white coats.

For all its faults throughout the early episodes you do feel a certain sympathy towards the unfortunate Pye who is eternally caught between growing wings and growing horns, unable to find any balance that will leave him with neither, so it’s perhaps the biggest failing of all that the series ends with such a damp squib of a final episode, dreadfully padded out even before a never-ending chase scene is added before concluding with probably one of the most disappointing endings I’ve ever seen committed to the screen.

Whimsy certainly has its place, and I’m not averse to its charms, but there’s little else on offer from Mr Pye. Jacobi does his best with the script but it’s a poor screenplay, meandering aimlessly around for at least an episode too long before ending inexplicably. The location filming is fair but it doesn’t really sing in the way that it should and Sark doesn’t shine as another uncredited lead in the way you know it would today, or if someone with a more cinematic eye for beauty had directed. Instead it seems a bit listless. And, sadly, the whole thing seems a little lazy as well, as if the unusual element of the story was considered enough of a draw with other considerations such as characterisation deemed surplus to requirement.

As expected though, Jacobi emerges from it all with distinction, a solid performance pretty much always guaranteed from him, and he has a lot to do in it given the over reliance on the character of Pye and of him often talking to himself. He’s ably abetted by Judith Parfitt, another reliable character actor familiar to fans of British television, as Mrs Dredger, but their relationship is one that suffers in the writing. Dredger dislikes Pye when he first arrives but by the halfway point of the first episode she leaps enthusiastically, with no prior warning, into his camp of good deeds. The two of them adapt names for each other and while some may find them calling each other “Chief” and “sailor” constantly and repeatedly for the remainder of the series charming others may find it twee to the point of inducing vomit. Sadly, there’s little else in the way of characters in the series. There are only two others who appear throughout all the episodes and one of those, the artist Thorpe, is nothing more than a cipher, leaving the wild and promiscuous figure of Tandy as the only character who develops much and who seems in any way real.

Slowly paced, badly structured, lacking in characters at all, let alone those which are believable or who develop, and directed in a pedestrian manner Mr Pye is a four hour disappointment. Perhaps its appeal might be to those who have read the book, which it apparently is quite faithful to, and if you have enjoyed the former then I daresay you might also appreciate the small screen adaptation. Sadly, when the series ends up being less interesting than the very welcome DVD extra of a contemporary “Making of” documentary by Channel TV for Channel 4 (bizarrely placed on the first of the two discs and therefore riddled with spoilers) then you know you’ve got a failed production on your hands.

Holy Flying Circus – where BBC4 show there’s still life in Brian

In one fell swoop BBC4 has given a clear indication of its importance in the modern TV landscape by not only broadcasting an entertainingly innovative piece of drama such as Holy Flying Circus, based on the furore surrounding the release of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but in double-billing it with an archive repeat of the engrossing original debate which forms the centrepiece of the drama, the otherwise dreadfully forgettable chat show Friday Night , Saturday Morning. To be bold and inventive on one hand and, on the other, to have the courage to repeat, in full, fascinating pieces of archive which would otherwise be left unseen is all the evidence you need that BBC4 has already become something of a national treasure which needs to be protected in the face of the oncoming storms about to lash against BBC budgets and expenditure.

The subject of the drama, Life of Brian, has now become such an institution, with its highly quotable scenes passing into the collective British consciousness, that it stands remarkably close to overshadowing the Flying Circus TV series which spawned it. For newcomers to the Python legacy it’s period setting means that it has dated less so than the early 70s fashion blunders on the BBC episodes and it now seems that it is to be this movie with which the name Monty Python is to be synonymous. And to think that, back in 1979, upon its original release, there were quite a few towns across the UK where you couldn’t even get to see the movie as indignant local councils stuffed full of killjoys and religious fundamentalists moved to ban the movie and attempt to quash the idea of people having a laugh. Heaven forbid.

It is this very furore surrounding the movie’s release in the UK which has now become the subject of an interesting BBC4 production as we follow the Python group in their attempts to fight various bodies opposed to the movie and who want to see it banned, culminating in John Cleese and Michael Palin’s memorable face-off against Malcolm Muggeridge and the Bishop of Southwark in a highly charged confrontation on a late-night weekend chat show. It’s an interesting way to approach making a drama about Python and there are obvious parallels with the success of Frost/Nixon where another famous piece of television chat was made the focus of a drama with the build-up to the event being fascinating and the finished broadcast leaving one side famously defeated.

Of course, the question with dramatising events relating to Python is how do you play it – straight or for laughs? In the past we’ve seen the BBC produce a series of dramas on the lives of well known comedians and they’ve all been played fairly straight, concentrating heavily on tragic aspects of the featured artist’s life. While some have been more successful than others it has seemed that they’ve been something of a one trick pony, focusing almost exclusively on the “tears of a clown” angle. For something which was as innovative and surreal as Python was in its day this serious approach seemed inappropriate and with the central pillar of the drama being the outcry over Life of Brian rather than the private lives of the Pythons there seemed the opportunity to do something radically different. And radically different is what we’ve got because the producers have bravely opted to produce a work of surrealist comedy in the style of Python itself.

Following a rather forgettably outrageous pre-titles fart joke involving Jesus, which made me fear for what I was about to watch, we’re treated to a gloriously Pythonesque opening credit sequence which you can imagine being created by Terry Gilliam himself. Some jokey text scrolls upwards to tell us the lay of the land in 1979 with a rather miserable state of affairs with strikes and failing politics in Britain while the Pythons have been out enjoying themselves in Tunisia creating what would go on to be known as their masterpiece.

The opening office scene with the Pythons gathered to discuss promotion of their movie introduces us to the lookalike actors immediately and a good job has been made of gathering together this cast. Steve Punt and Charles Edwards, as Eric Idle and Michael Palin respectively, are the standouts here and at times they capture their roles so perfectly both in looks and mannerisms that you almost forget you’re not looking at the real thing. John Cleese is the other main character of this production and Darren Boyd makes a reasonable stab at this most recognisable of the Python team. It’s part of the unusual presentation of this drama however that the actors aren’t playing the Pythons quite as they are but as deliberate caricatures for comedic effect. For instance, Cleese is basically portrayed as Basil Fawlty (complete with a branch-wielding moment when he attacks a newspaper vendor), Idle is shown to be greedy and money-driven at every turn while Palin is presented as “the nicest man in the world”, even stopping to take hankies out of his pocket to wipe dog poo from Terry Gilliam’s feet. It works, because we now have an easy handle for all the characters and traits in them which are guaranteed to get a laugh, rather than a lot of agonised meetings full of glum faces as trouble brewed, which is probably what really happened.

The idea to take the drama off on surreal tangents also works and there are many early successes. I enjoyed the cutaway to the reaction of a cinema audience in the US to the movie which included a hooded Klu Klux Klan member announcing that the film was “morally repugnant”, before adding, “Oh, and kill all the blacks”. The camera then moves to a black guy who says, “I agree with him. Except the stuff about black people. That’s not cool”, before a fight breaks out between the two. There are also nice little references to the movie itself when we see a fictionalised religious undercover group meeting to plot how they will combat the movie. The caption on screen outside their meeting place suggests that they are The Popular People’s Church of St Sophia, but that they were also formerly the People’s Church of St Sophia and the St Sophia Church of People. It’s a funny nod to the People’s Front of Judea/Judean People’s Front section of Life of Brian itself.

My favourite flight of fancy though in the proceedings is with Michael Palin’s homelife where they have Rufus Jones who plays Terry Jones playing Mrs Palin as Terry Jones playing Mrs Palin. The Pythons, of course, were never shy about dressing up as old washer-women (pepperpots as they called them) and Terry Jones was probably the best of them all at carrying off the shrill-voiced parts, so it makes perfect sense to have Rufus playing Terry playing Palin’s wife, including bed scenes. In later scenes we are also treated to Charles Edwards playing both Palin and Palin’s mother in the same scene.

The surreal attitude and complete disregard for factual truth is taken to extreme lengths when we are given a glimpse into the production meetings for the Friday Night, Saturday Morning chat show which staged the famous debate between the Pythons and the representatives of religion which forms the centrepiece of this drama. We are given an energetic and obnoxious producer in the shape of Alan Dick, played with OTT relish by Jason Thorpe, and the benchmark for the character is very clearly Rik Mayall’s  Lord Flashheart from several episodes of Blackadder. This crazed lunatic’s attempts to create a chat show sensation form one thread of the narrative with the People’s Church of St Sophia and the Pythons themselves forming the others.

The People’s Church segments are probably the biggest misfire of the drama. While the decision to show this fictional bunch as a group of bungling quasi-terrorists has a certain comic appeal in keeping with Life of Brian itself, and while the always reliable Mark Heap puts in a decent performance, their sections never really work for me. Perhaps it’s the over reliance on cheap gags with one of their three prominent members having a stutter and another suffering from an unfortunate case of expletive-ridden Tourette’s Syndrome. While this in itself is very possibly a nod of the head to the Pontius Pilate scenes of speech impediments in Life of Brian they do seem rather lazy and are a million miles from the comic majesty of the movie’s Biggus Dickus scene featuring Pilate.

Pythonesque asides of animation, characters breaking the fourth wall and general silliness do, however, stand up well throughout the drama and the creators have put a lot of effort into making something which not only looks like a 21st Century Python show but in making it funny into the bargain. Two demons debating on sofas with two angels about “What have the Christians ever done for us?” is not only a direct lampooning of a Python scene but manages to be funny in its own right with an angel offering up, “Christian names“. “Alright, alright, I’ll grant you that!” comes the reply. My favourite though is an un-PC comment about Joey Deacon, that oft-used cruel shorthand for stupidity in every playground across the country for those of us of a certain age in the early 1980s. When he is referenced in the drama we cut to a shambolic nerd sitting at home who immediately picks up on the mistake of this being used in a drama set two years before Mr Deacon was introduced to the nation on Blue Peter. The email is printed out and an office junior rushes it to the head of BBC4 only to find him snorting coke while barking out orders for commissions for programmes about canals as he throws the complaint in the bin.

We do settle into something of a pattern though as the drama oscillates between the Pythons in a near endless loop will they/won’t they take part in the programme and the increasing fanaticism of those opposed to them. This possibly goes on a little too long and the proceedings do start to sag before we get to the actual debate itself with Cleese and Palin lining up for the Team Python and the ex-womanising, hard living (but now born again) Malcolm Muggeridge and the Archbishop of York stepping out for Team Religion. These latter two are splendidly played by Michael Cochrane and James Laurenson with the Archbishop, with all his whisky drinking imposing nastiness, being only a slight caricature of real-life whisky drinking rude and nasty piece of work that was presented in the debate in 1979.

Just like Frost/Nixon the actual debate is a difficult thing to pull off in a drama recreation of it. While they capture the lines spoken and the delivery of the real-life debaters quite well the actual debate and the conclusions which can be drawn from it are all quite subtle and don’t lend themselves easily to being “dramatic” in the normal sense of the word. In Frost/Nixon the real drama is all away from the interviews and about the insecurity of Frost who is seen as out of his depth and desperately looking for a killer blow as Nixon easily toys with him. With this debate, sure, the archbishop and Muggeridge are plain rude throughout and attack the Pythons from the word go with incredibly weak and closed-minded arguments and we can see, looking back, that the Pythons come out of the debate very much better in terms of both clear points well made and basic human good manners, but it’s not something that is a rousing finale to ninety minutes of drama, despite some ill-judged attempts to add dramatic stings of music from time to time. However, they do something wonderful to address this very issue by having a Palin fantasy sequence in which the normally terribly nice Python (who was nevertheless clearly simmering with anger on the actual night faced with the pig-headedness of his rivals) suddenly grabs an ashtray and smashes it against Muggeridge’s head to leave him squirting blood. For anyone, who has ever seen the real debate it’s exactly what you wanted to see in real life. (Not that violence is big or clever, of course!)

In the end it all sort of peters out though. There’s a very unlikely scene where the People’s Church of St Sophia change sides to join the Pythons after the debate, horrified by the pomposity of the old fool that is the Archbishop of York, and Palin is very downbeat about it all, as he was in his real-life diaries, before being persuaded that the archbishop and Muggeridge had come across so badly that the Pythons had actually won the argument after all. It’s all wrapped up with a final meeting between Palin and God with the big man being played in a wonderfully genial way by Stephen Fry. In fact, you really can’t imagine anyone other than Stephen Fry ever playing God again. All in all then this is a drama which is quite lovingly crafted and while it misfires from time to time that’s ok. It’s hardly as if every single Python sketch ever performed worked. There was good and bad even from the Pythons themselves and so this tribute to them meets the mark often enough for me to give it a deserved thumbs up, even if it could easily have had at least ten minutes snipped from it to stop it plodding two thirds of the way through.

Brilliantly though, it’s not over quite yet as BBC4 decided to serve us up the original debate from Friday Night, Saturday Morning. Thank goodness for BBC4, a channel who have the remit to present curios from the archive like this because, although the actual series of FNSM was deemed a colossal failure at the time and was originally critically lambasted (with a bizarre turn from ex-Prime Minister Harold Wilson sleepwalking his way through the presenting duties before being pulled from the show and replaced by the equally sombulant Tim Rice), it’s important to have the context of all the events we’ve just seen dramatised and it’s refreshing to have a channel like BBC4 who are prepared to treat their audience as intelligent beings who won’t switch off just because the people being interviewed are sporting old hairstyles and fashions.

The first astonishing thing you notice about this broadcast is that the opening credits for it are actually real and not just some spoof created for the relevant section of Holy Flying Circus. These are credits in which a lady dutifully lies naked in bed as her husband returns home from the pub/match/work and jumps in beside her as the logo for the show appears on a TV in the corner of their bedroom. It’s remarkable that even as late as 1979 something so casually sexist could be broadcast each week as an opening title sequence. But, then again, the opening titles for Holiday ’86, seven years after this, featured a naked pair of breasts splashing out of the sea in slow motion at prime time so perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised!

The other remarkable thing to notice from this debate is that everything you may have heard about Muggeridge and the archbishop is true and that, if anything, Holy Flying Circus actually presents them in a better light than they came across in real life. Sniping with insultingly barbed comments from the off they come across as plain rude – men with no manners at all behind their facade of respectability. Cleese and Plain, by comparison, emerge much better, people who could launch cheap broadsides at their opponents’ outdated views, and do it with wit and humour to bring down the house, but who choose instead to debate and not get dragged into petty insults. Cleese said in an interview just a few years back that he was sitting with a piece of paper in his pocket filled with quotations from Muggeridge that he could have produced at any stage and utterly demolished him with, but he chose not to do so out of pity for him.

I’m sure the original producers of this forgettable chat show series would be bewildered to think that just one edition of their show could be the basis of a ninety minute drama all these years later but I’m glad BBC4 bravely commissioned this and I’m glad we’ve been given the opportunity to watch the actual warts and all programme to see for ourselves the grossly impolite and unmannerly performance of Muggeridge and the archbishop with their dusty, centuries-old views.

Xmas Viewing Part Two

Welcome back to Part 2 of the Xmas Viewing List and if you were largely uninspired by what is being served up this year in the days leading up to Christmas you can expect to find more disappointment as we rejoin the schedules on Christmas Day itself for what must surely rank as one of the most lacklustre line-ups of recent times. As always though there are a few gems to be found – almost exclusively, as per usual, on the BBC.

First up, mention must be made of one of the dullest traditions in the history of the British people – listening the Queen drone on in her latest hostage video to the nation. It’s clear that the annual recording of this must rank as her very least favourite moment of each year and it’s so mutually un-beneficial (the nation is bored watching while the Queen can barely stay awake while recording it) that it’s a surprise it hasn’t long ago been replaced by the sight of some freshly painted doors drying. As has been pointed out by others before, considering that she has had sixty years now of practice with this message you’d think she’d actually be a lot better at it. Instead, it’s a chore for both her and us.

However, the first thing to watch out for on Christmas Day is the BBC’s latest animation of a Julia Donaldson children’s book. Following on from the huge success of The Gruffalo two years ago and last year’s sequel, The Gruffalo’s Child (both repeated in the run-up to Christmas) this yuletide sees the BBC plundering another of her backlist titles and another genuine modern classic piece of children’s storytelling with a friendly witch in Room on the Broom. It just goes to show that you can always create something new which the nation will take to its hearts and which will quickly turn into a Christmas tradition each year. Donaldson’s charming works, brought to life in her books by the superb and heartwarming illustrations of Axel Scheffler (which are rendered skillfully in 3D animation for these screenings), are now something which both I and my son look forward to each year. And with so many classic works under her belt it’s highly possible that her slot in the Xmas schedules could run and run. Personally, I’d recommend the wonderful The Stick Man for next year which finishes at Christmas with an appearance by Santa to boot.

Another thing which didn’t exist in the Xmas programming until very recently, and which it would now be inconceivable to have Christmas without, made its first appearance back in 2005 and has graced the line-up with a new installment every year since. Yes, for the eighth year on the trot we have a brand new episode of Doctor Who to look forward to. Almost always these are actually very Christmassy in flavour and this year is no exception as the Doctor takes on malevolent sentient Snowmen in Victorian London with an evil Richard E Grant skulking around. To be honest, the yearly Xmas episode of Doctor Who, and the series in general, has been a lot less enjoyable ever since Russell T Davies handed over the reins of running the show to his successor, Steven Moffat, but that won’t stop me looking forward to it all the same and with a new TARDIS interior promised, as well as a revamped title sequence and theme music (hopefully much better than the rather dull versions of the last revamp when Moffat took over), it’s going to be the most eagerly anticipated show of the day in my household. Oh, and Sir Ian McKellan – Gandalf himself – voices the big baddy while Matt Smith looks set to continue his excellent tenure as the Doctor with a brooding performance following on from losing his two companions at the end of the last series.

And, well, that’s just about it really. Two potential hits to look forward to and just about nothing else. The BBC will no doubt score enormous ratings for their Xmas Strictly Come Dancing and the social meltdown that is the annual gloom and miseryfest of Eastenders but the schedules after Doctor Who are skewed heavily away from entertainment for the whole family and with the addition this year of a seasonal sprinkling of Call the Midwife the kids may as well just traipse off to their rooms with their new toys following the end titles of Doctor Who.

So, what else is there? Well, another Christmas tradition is a slice of James Bond. This year, there’s no movie to be found but we do have a repeat of a Top Gear special looking at the cars of James Bond. To be honest, car chases in movies bore me rigid. Probably even more rigid than cars in general normally bore me. Though perhaps not quite as rigid as Top Gear‘s neanderthal laddish obsession with cars and driving them very fast as somehow being an expression and barometer of your manliness. Richard Hammond ineptly presenting a show on cars – Bond or otherwise – while revving up engines because he’s a real man must surely rank as the thing I want to watch least this Christmas. In fact, perhaps I’ll make my way over to You Tube instead and re-watch this superb evisceration of Top Gear in general and Richard Hammond in particular by Stuart Lee. Infinitely preferable.

It may be a repeat but the only other real highlight of the day is Blackadder’s Christmas Carol on BBC2. It’s simply perfect festive viewing, superbly written and performed and it somehow manages – almost impossibly, but with consummate skill – to perfectly marry both seasonal warm-heartedness and biting cynicism into a satisfying blend of timeless comedy that is sure to leave you with a glow and a smile upon your face. Such a pity though that for many years (and on DVD as well) the BBC have been screening an edited version of this special which, following Baldrick’s revelation that due to high Victorian infant mortality the part of Jesus in the nativity play has had to be filled by a dog, omits the line about the kids looking forward to nailing the dog up at Easter.

And so what do ITV have in store for us? Damn all, really. It’s one of those certainties in life that ITV gets utterly annihilated by the BBC each and every year in the Christmas ratings battle. Even their normally reliable flagship of the Christmas episode of Coronation Street has not only been losing out to Eastenders but also to Doctor Who. In recent years it’s almost as though ITV have given up the ghost and just thrown in the towel and this has never been more evident than this year. Living in the Ulster Television region of ITVland I’m treated not only to the usual pawn sacrifice of Emmerdale against Doctor Who but – incredibly – an ordinary episode of a regional opt-out programme: Lesser Spotted Ulster. It’s difficult to even begin to fathom what was going through the mind of the UTV scheduler here. Instead of a Christmas special of something or a family orientated programme to chase after the Christmas Day family audience we’ll just show a regular episode of a minority interest series about a boring man wandering around the countryside talking to old codgers about making walking sticks and basket weaving. At prime time. On Christmas Day. They may as well just screen a test card saying, “Programmes will return in half an hour. Do not adjust your set”. The Shove Ha’penny World Championships would be a better choice. Are they thinking, “We may as well just shove any old guff out as everyone will be watching Doctor Who“? It’s moronic scheduling.

Of course, ITV do have one major weapon up their sleeves for Christmas evening and that’s the latest Downton Abbey Xmas Special. To be honest, this will, with a degree of certainty, be much more far-fetched than anything witnessed in Doctor Who earlier. ITV, who had fallen way behind the BBC in the making and selling to America of period dramas in recent decades have suddenly stumbled upon a winning formula which is, nevertheless, utterly unwatchable. Masters of the vacuous serious drama as well as being masters of ridiculous pantomime-like characters and plotlines in their soaps, ITV have blended the two together and sprinkled posh accents and frocks on top to provide unmissable viewing for their target demographic – i.e. those who wouldn’t know a good drama if it kneed them in the groin. Julian Fellowes, who has a proven track record with the movie Gosford Park of providing immaculately produced period settings over the top of an utterly shallow and empty script, has opened up a new genre for ITV to milk – the period soap. For that is all Downton is – a soap opera, more ridiculous than any other on TV, but with upper class accents.

Strangely enough, ITV3 are far more watchable on Christmas Day by giving up the ghost even further and showing little else but Carry On movies. In fact they’re even screening one of them twice on the same day, but at least it’s the excellent Carry On… Don’t Lose Your Head. Carry On movies were a staple of my childhood TV schedules and many of them are fine examples of bawdy British comedies of the time, ridiculous double entendres and all. Their real peak was in the mid sixties when they produced a run which included Don’t Lose Your Head, Carry On Cleo and Carry On Screaming (all of which are shown over the holiday period) which combined their saucy humour with excellent production values. However, by the mid seventies they were a cheaply made embarrassment parading increasingly blue humour in a way which made the participants look like rather pathetic dirty old men. Some of the finer black and white and colour movies are on show though on ITV3 this Christmas and the truly abysmal penultimate movie, Carry On England is shown on BBC2 on 30th December.

Boxing Day brings more comedy of the kind that forces me to scratch my head wondering who it is actually for. We get the second Mrs Brown’s Boys special of the season and also the beginning of a new series of Miranda. If you get caught in someone’s house (probably an elderly relative) and are forced to endure that particular double bill, I can only advise you to remove all sharp objects from the vicinity, including your keys, for fear of you being tempted to gouge out your own eyes.

Channel 4 provide some movie escapement as they cleverly run two sequels over the holidays. The first is the second part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (the first was on Christmas Day) and the other is the first part of the original Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. In truth, Dragon Tattoo is only average and the first movie in particular removes huge expanses from the novel which leave the main characters seemingly very lacking in motivation. However, this is exactly the sort of thing which should be on at Christmas – series of films which encourage you to come back the next night for more of the same.

And speaking of which, we arrive at what easily looks like being the best of TV shown on Boxing Day and which triggers a mini season of movies – BBC2’s showing of The Girl which examines the relationship between Sir Alfred Hitchcock and the last of his great screen blonde ice maidens, Tippi Hedren. With Toby Jones and Sienna Miller playing the two leads this is a fascinating subject matter and comes just ahead of the major Hitchcock biopic starring Anthony Hopkins next year. While next year’s movie will focus primarily on the making of Psycho this one obviously homes in on the two back to back movies Hitch made in the 60s starring the girl he plucked from obscurity before throwing her back there and holding her under contract without ever using her again, The Birds and Marnie. These are two very fine movies from Hitchcock – his last great works in fact with only the mixed Frenzy being worthy of his name after these two releases – and the story behind them, with the slightly seedy and manipulative older Hitchcock trying to control a pawn he has created, being a compelling subject.

Following on from The Girl BBC2 are screening that night both his brilliant version Daphne Du Marier’s Rebecca and his very overlooked black comedy Mr and Mrs Smith. Further Hitchcock movies from his earlier period, including The Lady Vanishes, will be shown on the 28th December  and ITV will even get on the act with another Du Maurier/Hitchcock work, and subject of BBC2’s drama, The Birds. It’s about time that broadcasters started theming their schedules this way over the festive season again. When I was younger I was drawn into the works of so many actors and directors by the fact that their films would be stripped across a number of evenings (albeit often in graveyard slots). It seemed that each year brought several seasons of films starring the likes of Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Woody Allen, Jack Lemmon and many others. You’d also get runs of Marx Brothers, Abbot and Costello and other old comedies. It was an education, creating an interest for me in the movies as I scanned the Radio Times that wouldn’t have been there if they were one-off movies and Hitchcock seemed to always be represented with at least a handful of movies, if not a full-blown season. It created viewer loyalty and it seems bizarre that the broadcasters seem to eschew this handily available tool for getting people to watch their particular channel over Christmas. They always increase the number of movies they show so why not, within such an increased wealth of film broadcasting, create a little space for memorable runs of movies rather than treating each as a one-off which has to fight all over again to gain attention.

Fortunately, this year seems to see something a slight return for this format of old with Hitchcock, Charles Laughton, the screen goddess strand, and two trilogies being represented. However, several months ago I took maters into my own hands, fully expecting that the schedules would be even worse than they are and devoid of good movies. I set about creating my own themed seasons and so the only four Hitchcock DVDs I didn’t own were ordered up cheaply, four Fritz Lang movies were purchased and a few Terry Gilliams were earmarked on my shelves for re-viewing. Into this mix the brilliant new box set from the BFI, Ghost Stories for Christmas, featuring all the episodes of the BBC’s (mostly MR James) ghost story adaptations from the 60s and 70s, was acquired in order to provide some spcetral chill and an old Hollywood ghost movie starring Ray Milland, The Uninvited, was added to my own plans. Throw in some Peter Cushing Sherlock Holmes stories from the 70s BBC box set and I had my own schedule worth looking forward to. Who needs the uninspiring offerings from the main channels when you can do it yourself? Sadly, it’s what we’re more or less forced into doing if we want something decent to watch because this year is a big disappointment which, save for some superior children’s programming and some traditional repeats, has been lacking somewhat in vision.

And so that is Christmas 2012 in TV world. After Boxing Day it’s not worth mentioning much else save for the annual disappointment of Jools Holland’s Hootenanny on New Year’s Eve and the reliably observant and funny Charlie Brooker with his review of the year which, frustratingly, isn’t shown in Northern Ireland until Wednesday 2nd January.

Normal service will soon be restored with the blog soon and first up will be a number of half completed and late articles on shows from the last year such as the BBC Monty Python drama Holy Flying Circus, the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, the BBC’s Rolling Stones at 50 strand of programming, a farewell to Ceefax and analogue TV, the final series of The Thick of It and the slightly crazy last series of The Killing. Until then, Ho! Ho! Ho! and here’s hoping you find your own way of enjoying what TV has to offer over the holidays.

Xmas Viewing Part One

It’s Christmas time and that brings with it various certainties: wine, shameful work parties, indigestion and, most certainly of all, that sinking feeling you get after scampering home with the double issue of the Christmas Radio Times only to discover that the Xmas schedules are as interesting as a random Tuesday evening in February and not a patch on the (probably false) memory of festive broadcasting from our youth. However, there’s always something worth watching on TV, even if it’s a well-worn repeat, so I thought it was high time I kick started the TV blog again with a navigation guide through the choppy arctic waters of yuletide viewing, obviously ignoring the vast majority of what the main broadcasters are hyping up for us and focussing on what few treasures are in store.

We’ll be journeying mostly through BBC territory it must be said and there’s little point in looking at the myriad of obscure channels offering up repeats that we could watch on DVD any time we like (or on those channels any other day of the year). ITV will, of course, be virtually absent as well, for reasons we’ll look at later in Part 2 of this Yuletide Blog, and films will only be mentioned if they’re on a prominent channel. All set?

Well, the first day of programming in my Christmas Radio Times (Saturday 22nd December) offers up a few seasonal nuggets, albeit almost exclusively repeats from the last year. However, there’s no doubt that among the subjects we’re drawn towards at this time of year, and which represent good, solid, safe scheduling from the main channels are programmes celebrating nostalgia, variety shows of yesterday and Dickensian Victoriana. and repeats on Saturday 22nd celebrate all three of these strands. First up we have another outing for last year’s The Toys That Made Christmas. Presented by Robert Webb of Peep Show fame it’s probably a little too long at an hour and a half, but given that Christmas is so much about the receiving of toys it’s good to wallow in a little nostalgia for the playthings of yesteryear.

Next up I’m already breaking my own rules by highlighting a programme on Gold but it’s worth mentioning as it’s a dramatisation of a double act who have become something of a Christmas institution even long after their deaths – Morecambe and Wise. In Eric and Ernie (originally shown last year) we follow their early career and the formation of their enduring comedy act and it is supplemented by some other Morecambe and Wise programming earlier in the day on the same channel.

Our Christmas Dickens fix comes in the shape of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Again it’s a repeat of a recent broadcast but we need Dickens at Christmas and I missed this when it was shown earlier this year. This was Dickens’ final novel and he died before completing it – leaving us in something of a cliff-hanger considering that it is a murder mystery without a resolution. While there have been various attempts over the years to finish the novel we can never know how accurate they are or how faithful to what was inside Dickens’ mind. However, I’m definitely looking forward to finding out the BBC’s take on it in what is certain to be a lavish production – no one does Dickens quite like the BBC.

Oh, and one more thing that is essentially Christmas is, undoubtedly, Christmas music and there are two offerings on Saturday 22nd to heap Slade upon your eardrums. First up is The Nation’s Favourite Christmas Song on ITV1 and then later in the evening is Top of the Pops 2: Christmas on BBC2. Delight in the brilliance of Jona Lewie and struggle to keep your dinner down as Cliff Richard appears. And if you foolishly stay with ITV until 9.00pm your stomach will probably lose its fight with the sickening round of sycophancy that is Jonathan Ross with guests Michael McIntyre and Jamie Oliver. Instead though, you’d be much better advised to hop to BBC4 where the Arena team are screening a documentary entitled Screen Goddesses focussing on the sirens of the silver screen as a product of the Hollywood studio system from the early days of cinema through to the 1960s. This looks like an unmissable documentary and it is preceded by a showing of Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and Showgirl. In the glory days of Xmas broadcasting channels used to have little themed seasons of programming over the holiday period (more on that later!) and it’s refreshing to see that BBC4 is giving us one here with a documentary on Elizabeth Taylor the following day entitled England’s Other Elizabeth (with Cleopatra leading into it) and Clara Bow: Hollywood’s Lost Screen Goddess on Sunday 30th December.

Sunday the 23rd sees us wallowing in more toy nostalgia. However, your enjoyment of Channel 4’s The 100 Greatest Toys With Jonathan Ross is likely to hinge around your normal enjoyment of the last two words of that title. For me, that will be not at all. ITV play it safe in the evening with Ade’s Christmas Crackers featuring Adrian Edmondson taking a look at Christmas TV from the archives. It’s bound to contain something of interest for those who enjoy vintage TV but is equally bound to be presented in ITV’s normal cack-handed manner and dumbed down significantly.

While we’re still waiting for the first piece of new programming worth watching that doesn’t feature archive this Christmas you can console yourself with helpings of both Sherlock Holmes (the Jeremy Brett vintage) and Poirot over on ITV3. Again, it’s Christmas and we need a bit of Sherlock and Agatha Christie so here they are. Another repeat today on Channel 4 is the timeless and wondrous animated version of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman. This is being given another outing ahead of the sequel the following evening but, let’s be honest, we need no excuse to watch this classic again. Get your hanky out for the final scene as always.

Also on Sunday we have an offering from ITV which is so bizarre that it could go either way and be surprisingly interesting or just a total wreck. It’s Joanna Lumley: the Search for Noah’s Ark which sees her intrepidly trying to hunt down the trail of the ark and find out the basis of the myth. It seems pretty globetrotting in its scope and will no doubt be nicely filmed with Lumley usually an engaging host. However, this could just as easily be a Christmas turkey as a cracker.

Christmas Eve finally sees our first piece of new television worth watching, some classic repeats and some further televisual atrocities. If The Snowman and the Snowdog on Channel 4 can capture even a fraction of the charm of the original early 80s animation then it looks sure to be a winner. To be honest, I was slightly uncertain about the idea to resurrect the character given the absolutely perfect ending of the original, but my young boy is so happy that the Snowman is alive again and that’s got to count for something. This is the absolute gem of the day’s viewing for certain.

The BBC serve us up some classic repeats of Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies on Christmas Eve. Both of these double acts are part of the Christmas furnishing and as traditional at this time of year as crackers and party hats. They look increasingly creaky and ancient each year as the fashions pass further and further back into the past but it’s simply impossible not to enjoy them. Many of the Two Ronnies special programmes were shown last year which further goes to demonstrate the dearth of original programming this year, though Ronnie Barker: The Many Faces of… appears at least to be new, but I’ll watch them again anyway.

Over the course of Sunday and Christmas Eve you can catch not just one but four different versions of A Christmas Carol. These range from a bizarre musical version starring Frasier’s Kelsey Grammar, through an animated effort voiced by Nicholas Cage (!) to a version starring Jim Carrey, which must rank at the very bottom of my list of TV viewing this Christmas. I would literally need to become suddenly dispossessed of all movement in  my arms and legs and with the TV remote control inaccessible even to my teeth to force me into watching this. Of course, the pick of the four is The Muppets Christmas Carol, which goes without saying.

For those with no discernible working sense of humour you can tune into Mrs Brown’s Boys on BBC1, which appears to be one of the Beeb’s hyped Xmas specials this year. However, for all normal people just get as far from BBC1 at 10.15pm as you can as a hatchet through the head is just about preferable to watching this dross. One channel which can’t offer any solace though is ITV1 (though that’s no great surprise) as they begin broadcasting at the exact same time Christmas Carols on ITV with Aled Jones being joined by the cast of Coronation Street in the soap’s local church for a retelling of the nativity. No thanks.

All in all, a pretty uninspiring run of pre-Christmas programming, though there are enough decent repeats to ensure there’s at least something decent each day. We’ll back with a look at the schedules from Christmas Day itself through to New Year very soon and I’ll be talking about how TV used to provide excellent seasons of films – something which I’m happy to report is getting a mini return this year in the shape of a number of Hitchcock movies and every day leading up to and including Christmas Day BBC2 is running a Charles Laughton movie in the early hours of the morning for all you night owls, culminating in his brilliant turn in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

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.