As Seen on TEEVEE: John Foster's verdict on the recent television adaptation of Ian Rankin's Black and Blue.

The long anticipated emergence of Detective Inspector John Rebus of the Lothian and Borders Police onto our tv screens finally happened in Jesus week. Any similarity between John Hannah’s resurrection as the Christlike Edinburgh cop and Ian Rankin’s fearless publicity foto was faint. Hannah is credible, sometimes even good, but that laconic, mean streets gaze from the Orion soft book cover is Rebus. Hannah isn’t, not quite. Too saintly. He doesn’t have that grungy, leather-jacketed, lip-curling look, rehearsed to perfection in front of many a misty mirror. Rebus is Rankin’s alter ego and baby-faced actors doubling as executive producers just don’t cut it.

The ITV adaptation of Ian Rankin’s powerful and evocative police novel, Black and Blue, was always going to be disappointing, since adaptations rarely live up to or surpass the source work. This one, sadly, conformed to stereotype. Hitchcock in his famous interview with Truffaut said that his practice was to find a third rate novel, read it once, then degut it before making moving pictures from it. You can make a good movie from a bad novel, but it’s difficult to make a good movie - one personal to the filmmaker - from a good novel. The veracity of the original author’s abstractions tends to get in the way. However, there are exceptions, even in Hitchcock. The third rate certainly didn’t apply to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. Nor does it apply to Black and Blue, which unfortunately didn’t have a Hitchcock directing it, but a mere Martyn Friend. Consequently, Rebus didn’t quite have the expected impact, but was welcome to our screens nevertheless. Hopefully the next film will be better and the one after that better still. It takes time, but so far there isn’t much to beat. Rebus can only improve

John Hannah needs time and space to ease into the performance. He’s too clean looking at the moment, too virginal. Does he ever scratch his balls? Rebus does, regularly. Does he pick his nose in public? Rebus has been caught doing it on CCTV. There aren’t yet enough rugged rocks to Hannah’s performance, no sense of past skeletons. Hannah doesn’t offer the screen presence needed for a lead protagonist and especially this one, carrying the weight of Edinburgh’s darkside on his shoulders. The softness of Hannah’s persona lacks the conviction of a tough city cop. It’s good that the actor doesn’t affect a grittiness that isn’t there, and no doubt the steel will emerge in its own time in its own way. Meanwhile Hannah came across as a pleasing guide to the story, even if an innocuous one. I was waiting the length of the film for Rebus to make an entry.

Rankin’s novels are individualistic pieces of work, executed with flair and a true writer’s love of language. They have a tough, realistic edge, an acute sense of place. The television film disappointed because it was so much else like other teevee thriller fare. Again, it was Curate’s Egg time. Black and Blue was competent, watchable, good in parts - but the book is so much better. The book is where it’s at.

It was hardly an inspired adaptation and production, which is what Rankin’s work deserves. The waste of a great opportunity. With such a wealth of material in this series character, the stories and especially the downbeat atmosphere of the novels, the film failed to explore the riches at its disposal. Good as it sometimes was, Black and Blue was like many tv thrillers - okay but forgettable. The piece didn’t leap out at you from the screen or, in the words of the late John Hopkins, ‘become a bomb in the living room.’ Given the source material, it could have been a bomb instead of a spluttering Roman Candle. There was a flatness to the film, a lack of dynamic and excitement which is in extreme contrast to the book: like all of Rankin’s novels, Black and Blue is a real pageturner, it insists upon being read. There is real voice to the books. On tv, Rebus was lacklustre and switchoffable. Scenes stacked up like dirty dishes. Interesting dishes, not exciting ones.

Stuart Hepburn’s dramatisation was efficient, as was his performance as a senior cop. In fact, everything was efficient, but without much heart. Neat, clean and well advised. Not a lot, though, was inspired. Inspiration is messy, dangerous. Doesn’t fit into a clean-cut ITV two-hours with commercials. Essentially the adaptation was leaden. It simply served up an edited version of the novel and added no authorial magic nor invention of its own. Hepburn took from Rankin and gave nothing back, as if this was another job, one more commission. Again, the feeling that this was the product of journeymen. And I had a quibble with some of the conventions offered by the film. The story is set in the past from the perspective of Rebus looking back and commentating upon events with his private thoughts and observations, one of Rankin’s recurrent themes being the impact of the past upon the present. Even though Rankin’s novels are in the third person, Rebus’s reflective interior monologue gave the film initially a strong first person sense, destroyed when there were cutaways to other situations not directly experienced by Rebus, nor witnessed specifically from his viewpoint. The break with this convention nearly robbed the film of the view from John Rebus. It seemed a cheat and indicated some lack of generic understanding in the way the written-to-order screenplay was put together.

Yet when we really needed to see something not actually witnessed by Rebus, it was curiously excluded. Early in the novel, a man tied to a chair, gagged and facing torture blasts his way through a window and falls to his death, being gorily impaled upon railings below. A powerful and disturbing scene. A touch of the Tarantinos and you’d think the tv version would gobble it down. Difficult to film, but not impossible if approached impressionistically. Yet all we saw was the aftermath, the body, or what passed for one, stuck onto the railings like an abandoned Guy Fawkes, the sequence filmed without any sense of punctuation, no frisson whatever. And the set-up looked so unreal, constructed and contrived for the camera. No one had died here, there was no tragedy, no dead body. Ditchwater dull.

There were moments when they tried, but this usually came across ineptly. In one would-be surreal sequence, Rebus has a nightmare, seeing the montaged faces of his tormentors, amongst them the dead head of a suicide who had also fallen to his death in this vertigo of a storyline. But the man’s face was daubed with production blood somewhat resembling canteen ketchup, and the whole thing was embarrassingly risible. Otherwise, like the screenplay, Martyn Friend’s direction was efficient enough, if underwhelmingly predictable, executed by numbers, only occasionally arresting.

The opening sequence, showing off with its film noir rain and Dolby sound, played up all the clichés of the genre so that the whole production threatened to become pastiche. This considerably undermined the authentic scepticism Rankin provides, that bleak perspective latticed with wry humour concerning human limitations and the truth lying behind the prissy facades. The Rebus of the books is stubbornly off-message. Rankin has helped pioneer the realist policier in the British crime novel so that now it is commonplace for it to be a vehicle of social critique as well as a good, character-led story. This approach, invariably one adopted by British tv cop drama, was nowhere to be seen in Murray Ferguson’s safe-pair-of-hands production. The social concern was borrowed and spurious, worn superficially but without genuine feeling, simply part of the tapestry of the narrative rather than an organic element, so that caricatures and aunt sallies abounded, lacking the finely etched detail of Rankin’s astute and often poetic observations. This made the violence and death seem opportunistic selling points, audience grabbers. The pain underpinning the books didn’t bleed through from the pages.

If the opening visuals self-consciously aped B-picture film noir in a heavy handed and quite dated way, then the style and content of the interior monologue delivered was equally misplaced. Too conscious, imitation hardboiled underworld USA, again externally applied. Hannah’s delivery was studied, precious, self-admiring. The sleight-of-hand in the novels is that being written in the third person, we get Rebus’s thoughts in Rankin’s language - presumably on the basis that a cop wouldn’t be able to articulate such philosophical depth of thought in this kind of moody prose. Well, after all, cops are terribly thick, aren’t they? The Bill gets it right each week.

Rankin’s words, of course, delight with their dark rhythms, but here once again in the dramatisation they were used pragmatically, for effect, rather than for the deeply felt anger which steams from the book. There was a nice laconic feel to the voice-over, which was inappropriate in actual content, veering towards narrative rather than expressiveness. Interior monologue is a non-narrative, impressionistically psychological medium. Those random thoughts and edgy sensations which dart through the mind. And no interesting games were played as in, for instance, the unreliable narrator deployed in the original Edward Dymtryk version of Farewell, My Lovely, where we don’t believe nor necessarily trust everything Dick Powell’s Philip Marlowe tells us in the voice-over. Nevertheless, the attempt here was brave if gauche, reminiscent of the Thames private eye series Hazell of the late-seventies, which were based on the novels of Gordon Williams and Terry Venables. And better than this.

Despite showing off with no-expense-spared Dolby, the use of sound was unimaginative and crass, the hissing pitter-patter of rain on Edinburgh streets notwithstanding. The music was really disappointing - music is obviously very important to Rankin and to the books, where songs and musical influences are frequently mentioned, the lyrics of urban blues having a profound influence upon Rebus’s outlook as well as being an approximation of his feelings and moods. Again, the opportunity to produce a really interesting score was thrown away. Instead we had the same tacky melodramatically foreboding type music which seems to have featured in every ITV thriller in the past three years. It sounds not too dissimilar to the music in BBC thrillers for the past three years and even longer. Again, safe and unchallenging.

Rankin-Rebus deserved better. Read the book.

JOHN FOSTER