The John Foster Diatribe - 15/12/98John Foster diaribe November

There is nothing in the new wave of programming which is in the least reassuring concerning the creative health of British television, despite a valiant attempt by director Richard Standeven to recreate thirties Ireland in the at times poignant yet self-destructively melodramatic Falling for a Dancer on BBC1. The reliable Dalziel and Pascoe provided fleeting excellence, but on very safe ground. World Productions, fast becoming the prime creative mover of the Indies, ventured audaciously into hardline genre with Jo Ahearne’s Ultraviolet on C4, almost - but not quite - producing a piece of television slipstream in the form of cleverly disguised vampire hokum, favouring scifi before crifi yet failing both. One had to turn to BBC2’s Storyville and the screening of D A Pennebaker’s groundbreaking rockumentary, Don’t Look Back, an early fly-on-the-wall featuring Bob Dylan’s mid-sixties British tour, as a reminder of what is possible from genuinely visionary programme-makers. And Don’t Look Back, made for the cinema, wasn’t crime. There was plenty of crime on the box. It just wasn’t very good.

Typical fare was Yorkshire Television’s Heartbeat, a police series format developed from the rather better novels of Nicholas Rhea. The show is so cosy that it is the contemporary equivalent of Dixon of Dock Green. Like Dixon once did, Heartbeat functions as a public relations commercial for the police. Although an episode written by scriptwriting warhorse Brian Finch brought some melodramatic tension, the series is cynically formulaic, incurably dated and predictable old hat: a programme that can see the punters coming. Recent cast changes have not improved the dull, stiff performances from actors who seem to have been delivering the same stale dialogue for years. Whilst the old lag Bill Maynard hams it up, a seedy, long-haired Stratford Johns seems well past his Charlie Barlow best. The North Yorkshire landscape is the real star of the show. Plus that wistful sixties music, of course: without it the lame Heartbeat wouldn’t have been any kind of success, as its producers know.

Hard-faced cop series such as ITV’s long-running Taggart and newcomer Liverpool One, try to appear hardboiled and uncompromising, but seem hopelessly hoked up and artificial: they try too hard, wearing their toughness on their sleeve. Whilst their mean streets look decidedly papier maché and their police people rugged and lantern jawed waxworks, an interesting new cop show was BBC1’s Undercover Heart. Astutely written by Peter Bowker, the drama was rooted in its characters and made a refreshing change from the normal run of policiers, even though this was not truly a police drama, but one concerned with the interweaving private lives of the ensemble. Certainly deserving of another series, Undercover Heart was particularly impressive because of its writing, acting and production values.

However, the series frontrunner this season has been BBC2’s The Cops. Perhaps it is too early to pass judgement on the programme, even though this column has been delayed to include comment on the first few episodes. Executive produced by Tony Garnett, the producer of the legendary Cathy Come Home, itself made to resemble a documentary through the veracity of Ken Loach’s camera-eye and a soundtrack featuring testimony from the real-life homeless, Garnett’s other World Productions series – the police investigating themselves policier, Between The Lines, Cardiac Arrest and This Life - similarly adopted a

pseudo-documentary shooting style. Unfortunately simulated cinéma-vérité is now a predictable and increasingly clichéd technique aimed at lending realism to fictional or semi-fictional material by aping the documentary and stealing the spurious authority of its newsreel look. It is an attempt to manufacture ‘documentary truth’ and enhance the believability of scripted drama. In most television fiction the camera is a passive observer, a naturalistic voyeur, yet appears to know precisely when to cut and where to; it is aware of who is going to speak next, when someone is going to enter a scene or absent themselves, and films these events with impeccable timing and visual precision. This is past tense ‘tell me a story’ fiction, where the omnipresent camera unfolds a precisely planned sequence of events. Vérité based fiction such as The Cops sets up a different convention: the camera here behaves as if doesn’t know what is going to happen next, suggesting that what it captures on film is largely circumstantial if not accidental. Drama shot like documentary feigns a spontaneity that is carefully structured and planned, and is thus faked.

Adopting such a documentary style in television fiction has long been controversial and made many a programme controller twitchy. Disclaimers now usually preface the transmission of dramad documentaries, defining them as dramatic fiction in case gullible viewers should mistake them for real actuality footage, especially in the era of the docusoap. Dramas such as Antony Thomas’s Death of a Princess and Alan Clarke’s Contact were attacked at the time of their transmission for a employing documentary style, and such an approach in a more extreme form was one of the reasons the BBC banned Peter Watkins’s 1965 devastating portrait of a nuclear attack on Britain, The War Game. It was condescendingly feared by the BBC hierarchy that Watkins’s film would incite suicide amongst members of its viewing audience, especially the old and the vulnerable. The anxiety concerning the dramad documentary in general is that, even with signposting, audiences will be confused as to the status of such programmes and assume, because of their documentary frisson, that what they are watching is ‘real,’ and not the product of someone’s imagination. This, of course, presumes impartiality and balance in news and documentary programmes - an extremely contentious proposition.

Issues arising from the mix of drama and documentary, including those voiced by Tony Garnett, are the concern of an interesting if restricted study of the television drama documentary, Derek Paget’s No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/docudrama on television, Manchester University Press, £9.99. Paget’s expressed ambition is to bridge the ‘gap between the academy and the entertainment industry.’ Yet the industry itself barely recognises the existence of the drama documentary, with many producers insisting that there is either drama or documentary: if you write a script and hire actors, the programme is drama. A deliberately simplistic view of complex and constantly changing programme genres.

Paget’s book is probably too broad to be genuinely useful, yet also sustains major omissions. He ignores the rise of the ‘factually based drama’ under Peter Goodchild at the BBC, first with dramatised editions of Horizon, then through the creation of a Special Features Unit at BBC Television’s Science and Features Department, where one-off drama documentaries and dramadoc series such as Oppenheimer were produced; finally Goodchild was appointed Head of BBC Television Drama and brought his not uncontroversial concept of the ‘factually based drama’ – one where the scriptwriter was permitted to make imaginative leaps and interpretations - into the mainstream of BBC television fiction. Richard Creasey’s and Brian Lewis’s units at ATV, later Central - responsible for commissioning Death of a Princess and the makers of many innovative dramad documentaries - also get no mention, nor do attempts to update the Peter Watkins’s You Are There style of actuality reconstruction, such as Thames’s production of The Luddites. Watkins himself, one of the most cinematic and confrontationalist directors Britain has produced and a pivotal figure in the dramad documentary, gets only a passing mention, despite the excitement and controversy generated by his work. No book can cover anything, but there is the feeling that Paget somewhat incestuously and perhaps lazily focuses upon Granada Television, metaphorically down the road from the Manchester University Press. There is fascinating coverage of Sita Williams’s Granada production of Hostages, but also too much emphasis upon Leslie Woodhead’s well known and frequently publicised hardline views of what elements he believes should constitute a ‘genuine’ drama documentary, where each line of dialogue requires strict transcript adherence plus three independent witnesses; unlike Goodchild’s writers, Woodhead’s are not permitted to do what writers do, be creative and invent. ‘We make bad plays,’ Woodhead once remarked, doubtless to his writers’s indignation, but his is not the only intellectual voice in the dramad documentary debate.

Whilst it is true that many drama documentaries are made, like Woodhead’s, by default because there is ‘no other way to tell it,’ this is by no means universally the case. Many practitioners elect to produce their work specifically in the form of the drama documentary, mainly because of the buzz documentary treatment brings to fiction, the adrenaline rush of cinéma-vérité. Now even popular weekly dramas have got in on the act. Originally restricted to one-off dramas, the documentary ethos has filtered into popular series and serial drama since the mid-eighties. Yet the first major breakthrough in the television policier in the early sixties, Z-Cars, was also documentary in its intense casebook research – its writers sent insitu to Liverpool - and shooting house-style. The programme grew out of the long drama documentary tradition at BBC Television, and was originally a product of the BBC Drama Documentary Department, its predecessor being Scotland Yard, produced by David Rose, who next produced Z-Cars, and written by Robert Barr, a distinguished documentary writer-director responsible for the first television documentary ever, Germany Under Fire in 1946; Barr became a script editor of Z-Cars and one of its main scriptwriting contributors. The documentary élan of Z-Cars and such Barr creations as Spycatcher and Moonstrike were quite unobtrusive compared with The Bill and The Cops. Z-Cars particularly sustained a static, photographic look, which caught a grainy, still-life impressionism. The observational camera retained a distance and was laidback, refusing to draw attention to itself by flashy handheld. By comparison, both The Bill and The Cops evoke a proactively restless eye, with the camera crushing in close, or cruising in wayward trajectories in a series of deliberately artless discovering shots.

Unfortunately the visual implications of an invented documentary dynamic have never been properly thought through in terms of credibility, especially with regard to The Bill. Quite basic questions, such as why this camera is present, filming this scene, at this time, in this place and in this way, never appear to have been asked. Why do these characters sheepishly accept the presence of the camera during the course of daunting traumas in their lives? Why aren’t the technicians a part of the drama? It is not enough to say that the vérité drama creates its own conventions: the conventions have never been properly defined. There is no rationale for the imagined presence of documentary camera and, in the case of The Bill, the documentary treatment purely exists as a stylistic nicety, a mere expedience dropped whenever troublesome or inconvenient: many episodes of The Bill have been made where there is not even the slightest suggestion of vérité. This makes its use expendable chic and, lacking any philosophical basis, deeply flawed and fraudulent.

The Cops has a more honest approach, even if the logic of a documentary presence in many scenes still goes missing. Here the documentary idiom is more dogged and yet more extreme in terms of visual gymnastics. The problem is that documentary visuals have become so commonplace in drama that there is a so-what? quality to them now, and their employment seems somewhat pretentious, like filming in black-and-white. And the fast turnaround world of weekly television frequently undermines precision of execution: fly-on-the-wall looks easy - just twist and shake the camera around a bit - but in fact it is quite complex and demanding: not unlike making deliberately mundane dialogue not play mundanely, another trick The Cops has to learn. It is easily to make vérité look like the gauche fumblings of film school undergraduates, but the technique requires the camera to become an actor in its own right. A scene in The Cops postulated the hackneyed cop opera situation of a potential suicide ready to throw himself off a rooftop. A cop tries to talk him down but, cajoled into a word game by the would-be suicide, not only fails to prevent the jump but appears causal of it. Given the realist in-your-face agenda of The Cops, it would have been dramatically more surprising had the potential suicide remained potential and not jumped. But the real problem was the way the scene was written and filmed. The dialogue was clichéd and contrived, tiresomely trite in its attempts to demonstrate the limited counselling abilities of the policeman involved in the situation. The camera was also wrongly positioned, making the scene wholly unengaging, undramatic and gruesomely clumsy. Visually it was impossible to accept that the threat of suicide was real, or that when the suicide jumped he did so from any height at all, but instead landed neatly on an out-of-sight ledge.

A poorly scripted and executed scene, already over-familiar in urban police series. Z-Cars, where this scene was probably first enacted in a television cop show, had the great advantage of public innocence with regard to its perceptions about the police. The programme provoked through its abrasive characterisation and storytelling. All the latest ‘gutsy’ and ‘gritty’ cop series such as The Cops, City Central and Liverpool One are publicity dubbed as ‘the Z-Cars of the nineties,’ but is there now anything new to say about the police? Hasn’t it all been said? Will anything any longer surprise us? Another controversial Tony Garnett BBC2 production, G F Newman’s 1978 Law and Order, disabused us concerning the bad apple theory of police corruption and was the most ferocious attack on law and order agencies yet seen on television. As cop shows become harder and tougher, tougher and harder, so audiences become increasingly desensitised. Police series give writers a natural access into the dramatic and socially significant corners of society, but we need new themes and byways if the cop opera is to continue to engage us. Tony Garnett’s new cops take hard drugs and we’re obviously meant to be shocked. But we’re not anymore.

Certainly The Cops, despite a certain air of self-importance in its programme title, is more ambitious and purposeful than most drama, especially crime drama, on the small screen. Comparisons with NYPD Blue flourished in the tabloids when the first episode hit the screens, but the effect of this accolade was to demonstrate how far we have fallen behind US Television in popular programming, when for decades British weekly drama series were well in advance of American counterparts. This was because

British tv, particularly at the BBC, valued writing and writers, which no longer seems to be the case, a factor discussed in detail by Sean Day-Lewis in his Talk of Drama: Views of the Television Dramatist Now and Then (Luton University Press, £12.95), an excellent collage of interviews of television scriptwriting practitioners, both past and present, including dedicated crime writers such as the brothers Kennedy-Martin, Troy and Ian: Troy creator of Z-Cars and creator-writer of Edge of Darkness, Ian creator of The Sweeney and Juliet Bravo. Whilst it is intriguing to read of Troy Kennedy Martin’s development as a writer and his current creative concerns, the bitchy philistinism of his less talented brother, Ian, is boorish in the extreme, especially in his peevish comments concerning the reputations of other, usually better, television writers.

Hovering over Day-Lewis’s perceptive set of interviews is a deep air of pessimism. These dialogues with writers offer a jaundiced view of creative opportunities in today’s television, confirmed by the paucity of this autumn schedules. The study covers a whole range of writers; forty are interviewed, from the heavyweights – Potter, Bleasdale, McGovern, Plater, Flannery – to the soaps, with a very good, informative chapter on EastEnders. Whilst there is an air of publicity-seeking writers anxious to secure the prestige of a published interview with a distinguished critic – one scripter actually travelled each morning to Day Lewis’s central London office in order to progress the interviewing sessions - Talk of Drama is essential reading for anyone aspiring to write for television or interested in the current state of the medium.

Amongst the writers interviewed for the weakly titled Talk of Drama is the prolific Lynda La Plante, who speaks eloquently of her scripts of her first success, Widows, followed by a seven year fallow period when nothing she wrote was made, until Granada produced the excellent Prime Suspect. Given the hackneyed content of La Plante’s latest works, ITV’s Supply and Demand and Trial and Retribution 11, one wonders what has happened to her skills of invention and also to the form she earlier worked in so adroitly, the mini-series. An American innovation, the mini-series has been responsible for generating some of the most powerful and profound television thrillers, such as Trevor Preston’s Out and Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness. These days mini-series tends to come in two feature-length parts, although The Jump, based on Martina Cole’s pulpy thriller novel, retained the erstwhile format of four one-hour parts.

Soapishly adapted from not the greatest of literary sources by Adrian Hodges, who also proved himself to be a writer not afraid of a cliché, The Jump, produced for ITV by the independent Warner Sisters, boasted a subtle performance from Adrian Dunbar and that was about it. The so-called action dragged its feet so much that one didn’t care whether the prison jump of the title was successful or not. Big houses once again abounded: those long, spacious rooms containing the archetypal woman in a dressing gown neurotically angsting. Despite being directed by Falling for a Dancer’s Richard Standeven, this mini-series was remorselessly padded, with insufficient storyline to sustain its four hours. What did exist was turgid and stereotyped, lacking atmosphere and vigour, thinly characterised and zimmerframe in pace. Is this what Nick Elliot, Controller of ITV Network Drama, means by ‘event’ drama? Probably.

Likewise The Cater Street Hangman, adapted by T R Bowen from Ann Perry’s novel, presented in ITV’s The Inspector Pitt Mysteries, was a dud two hours. This Victorian sub-Ripper crime melodrama was ploddingly directed by Sarah Helling, who intercut her shots routinely between cardboard cutout performances and the stodgy, long-winded dialogue which, with its cod-period references, jumped both feet in with hamfisted exposition. The dense dialogue, thick with the researcher’s notes, made this a depressingly leaden historical whodunit.

The dialogue-led nature of the unimaginative script made the drama static, and the whole debacle was bathed in candlelight-and-mist clichés, with the inevitably recurring anonymous black carriage mysteriously travelling down rainswept streets whenever the tension lagged, which was frequently. Dickensian style social conscience was spuriously embodied in a sequence where beggar children mournfully sang Barbara Allen in unison, but with a director’s impotent camera incapable of evoking any sense of mood, pity or outrage for their well-documented plight. Apparently this was the feature-length pilot for a projected series. There is a clear audience appeal for a series of mysteries set in Victorian London, but Eoin McCarthy’s Inspector Pitt is not a strong enough protagonist nor the pastiche recreations sufficiently convincing for a longer run of programmes.

By far the most confident and assured crime orientated productions this month were the two feature length films in BBC1’s Dalziel and Pascoe series, adapted from the novels of Reginald Hill. The first in the pair of self-contained dramas, Bones and Silence, excellently adapted by Alan Plater, was the most successful of the two. Apart from some self-consciously arty flashbacks, this was a deeply gripping and atmospheric film, deftly directed by Maurice Phillips, and subject of a powerfully coarse-grained performance by Warren Clarke as the sourly laconic Dalziel. The detective’s obsessiveness in quarrying an old enemy and suspected murderer was compulsive, and Clarke’s growling persona totally dominated the screen. Less successful was the second film, an adaptation of Hill’s The Wood Beyond, although once again the production values were first class, with particularly impressive flashback reconstructions of the First World War. The problem here was more to do with the story than the production, although the dreadful conditions faced by soldiers fighting in what was often called the ‘Great’ War have been frequently recounted, making the meticulous delineation somewhat wasted effort. The story involving Pascoe’s forbears in a rueful if somewhat implausible tale of history repeating itself unfortunately hinged on a substantial degree of coincidence and also gave rise to some absurdly unreal action sequences involving Pascoe and his adversary at the climax to the drama. Although a competent and engaging performer, Colin Buchanan as Pascoe lacks the raucously intimidating screen presence of Warren Clarke. Something of a letdown, The Wood Beyond was nonetheless far superior to most crime dramas currently gracing the small screen.

Despite persistent cultural snobbery towards it, the crime story is the most difficult form for the writer to work in. So much is required to make a good crime melodrama work, beyond the surface necessities of plot and action, and it is the most demanding of narratives to execute successfully. Yet everyone thinks they can do it, partly because thrillers appear to be so accessible. Apart from a handful of movies - such as The Third Man, Gumshoe, The Long Good Friday and, grudgingly included because of becoming so ludicrously cult, Get Carter - the majority of dramatised thrillers have been television made, mainly because of several decades when a moribund British Film Industry produced little and all the real media talent in this country went into television. The recent renaissance in British movie-making has produced some interesting low budget Shallow Grave inspired thrillers, clearly influenced by but failing to equal the Coen Brothers’s remarkable debut, Blood Simple.

Accompanying a celebratory air of success, there is also a feeling of amazement that we can pull it off, that we can actually make a cinematic thriller in an industry, both television and film, which seems to worship the classic adaptation and the middle-class psychodrama above all else, films which usually ends up photographing dialogue instead of telling its story in imagistic pictures. Unfortunately our weak performance at cinematic crime genre means that the meretricious will be praised alongside the genuinely fertile, so unusual is it for us to produce something even mildly diverting. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, with its too-clever-by-half title, written and directed by music video and commercials director Guy Richie and looking like it, was a major setback to the cause of the bigscreen Brit thriller. Apparently the movie has enjoyed a reasonable degree of critical success in monthly glossy film mags such as the voguish Empire and Premiere, always keen to support the homegrown, however substandard. Lock, Stock is a superficial, depthless piece of work, where everything is sacrificed to action and pace, little to atmosphere and none to characterisation. As to such grandiose notions as theme and meaning, forget it. That requires real authorship, individual voice, imagination and invention, and those old fashioned ideals that insist that filmmaking - even entertainments - should be made with a sense of purpose.

Who can take seriously a movie which so blatantly rips off the opening title sequence and interior monologue of another British movie, the most memorable and successful of recent years? Since Richie’s thriller is the umpteenth which has been predictably and fruitlessly influenced by Tarantino, just as yesterday’s man ripped off Badlands for True Romance in the name of homage, so Lock, Stock is similarly derivative: of Trainspotting’s electrifying prologue in terms of its racing handheld camerawork, musical soundtrack, and sardonic voiceover. How does Richie justify such a cheap imitation of a far superior work right at the beginning of his movie? Bums on seats, no doubt.

From midgets to giants. There have been few thrillers to equal Michael Mann’s 1986 movie Manhunter, re-released on video at £10.99 by BMG. Based on the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, vastly superior to the pretentious and unconvincing The Silence of the Lambs, and also Mann’s much vaunted but vacuous Heat, Manhunter was one of the first films to introduce us to the bemusingly callous world of the monochrome serial killer and the hall of mirrors psychology of the multiple murderer. Manhunter is renowned for Brain Cox’s performance as Dr Hannibal Lecter, an absurdly literary creation, here rendered credible by virtue of the film’s starkness rather than the gothic noir which haloed Anthony Hopkins more fruity performance, and one in contradiction to the known atypical persona of the ‘Mr Xerox’ non-person serial killer. One of the few blemishes in Mann’s movie is, in fact, the portrayal of the albino killer and the clichéd associations of albinism: a crass metaphor for evil, or at least one open to that interpretation. Despite this quite serious flaw, Mann directed a highly atmospheric film which remains painfully tense and terrifying, predicting John McNaughton’s 1990 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in its sense of oppressive bleakness, the unnerving sense of helplessness sustained by the audience. But the element in Manhunter most effectively deployed was the doppelganger motif linking the killer and William Peterson as the pursuing FBI agent, the underlying tension of many movies, including Heat, where Mann ineffectually revisited this theme. Manhunter is a doppelganger movie, a film about duality and the invasion of dark forces experienced by the troubled agent, reluctantly called back from early retirement into service to track down the murderous ‘Tooth Fairy.’

The world of Manhunter and Henry is chillingly evoked in Mark Seltzer’s telling study Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture, Routledge, £13.99. This incisively referenced work is far superior to Eliott Leyton’s earlier much praised but hollow and exploitative Hunting Humans: Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers. The somewhat unimaginatively titled Serial Killers is of particular interest and importance to crime writers and readers, since it examines the bleed through of the fictional culture into the real life culture of serial killing, examined in a particularly disturbing chapter entitled ‘Pulp Fiction: The Popular Psychology of the Serial Killer,’ which includes references to Jim Thompson’s seminal The Killer Inside Me and quotes FBI serial killer profilers who maintain that ‘our antecedents do go back to crime fiction more than crime fact.’ Although an academic discourse, Seltzer’s book is highly readable, entertaining and compulsive, drawing upon authors as diverse as Bram Stoker, Robert Block and William Blake. Films as varied as Badlands, Dressed to Kill, Pulp Fiction and Copycat, together with US tv-series such as ER and works of popular crime fiction are sighted in this fastidious analysis of society’s image of the serial killer. This intensely researched and imaginatively argued account is highly recommended.

Also re-issued on video this month is the duplicitous The Usual Suspects, 4Front, £5.99. For an analysis of this movie, see my article The Games Some Movies Play, originally published in SHOTS magazine, now reproduced and posted with this edition of the Diatribe.

Page Revised:
03 Mar 2003.

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