Love and Liberty

Have you seen the trailer for Ashes To Ashes Series Two? Classy, fun, cinematically shot and set to one of Spandau Ballet’s better tunes, it’s been all over the BBC for weeks, and I’ve been looking forward to tonight’s first episode… But not without doubts gnawing at me. I’d already had more problems with Ashes To Ashes than its predecessor Life On Mars – and, after Red Riding made old-fashioned violent policing seem less funny, and the death of Ian Tomlinson warned us that the Met’s changed less than we’d all hoped, will we still be laughing with Gene Hunt?

Life On Mars was a brilliant concept, superbly delivered, with two great leads. John Simm’s Sam Tyler was the ideal modern cop – efficient, intelligent, compassionate and brave – transported back to ‘simpler’ days of arrest first, ask questions when you know which answers you want to beat into the crook. But Philip Glenister’s Gene Hunt, like that other ’70s invention Judge Dredd, was such a ludicrously authoritarian parody that people couldn’t help falling for him, so naturally he became the big hit. If Sam Tyler was an echo of Jane Tennison, this time he was never going to convert the team; the bunch of old scrotes he was stuck in with won him over more than the other way round. Still, the scripts were sharp, the overarching mystery was intriguing, and Gene was funny because he was played and written straight down the line, with entertaining lines opposite the solid, respectable Noughties man.

Eventually, Sam Tyler made his exit, and the ’70s-set Manchester show – filmed around places I remember when I was a kid up there – moved, like me, down to London. With a new title, a new decade, and a new lead called Alex. What could be better?

Well, despite the music being more to my taste, I didn’t warm as much to the first series of Ashes To Ashes as I had to the two of the earlier model. And there were two key reasons – both relating to the leads. Now he’s become a well-loved folk hero, Gene Hunt’s off the leash; he is, god help us, our audience identification character, there’s no longer any tension that he might not be entirely trusted, and even his least appealing underling Ray Carling, who was initially a brutal, corrupt thug, has been airbrushed. And permed.

The other was Keeley Hawes’ Alex Drake, a perfectly good performance, but a real problem of a character for me. While Sam Tyler had been the one with his feet on the ground that you could recognise from normal life, in this series the lead from ‘now’ is far more of a stereotype than even DI Hunt, shallow and peripheral. Despite a chilling through-line of the story of her parents in last year’s series, I couldn’t help thinking that for most of the time she was more the comic relief than ‘funny’ Gene. Structurally, her character was in a much more difficult position than Sam had been: where Sam was the lead, she was just the ‘new girl’; with Gene fully established and her already in a side job rather than in the thick of it, she becomes far more peripheral; and, after Sam’s inner mystery was solved when he woke up, there was never going to be the serious tension about the extent to which the series was real.

So, with both Alex and the audience knowing that the whole thing’s a comatose delusion, she knows that it’s literally all about her. The problem with that is that, while Sam would be torn – like Thomas Covenant – between treating people as if they mattered deadly seriously and not wanting to give in to what could be madness, she can treat the whole thing as if it’s one big laugh, because she ‘knows’ that no-one else matters. So, when we have serious subjects and the ‘serious’ character is the one who’s pissing about the most, there’s something very offputting about it. She’s become the stereotype of a ‘flighty’ woman who doesn’t take anything seriously, a much older stereotype even than Gene Hunt, mixed with the lady psychiatrist in a ’30s screwball comedy. That part was pretty advanced feminism for the ’30s, but three-quarters of a century later and without nearly as many sassy lines as Rosalind Russell or Katharine Hepburn would have been given, it seems like a backwards step. And, let’s face it, I just don’t find a solipsist leading character appealing, and if she’s meant to personify the ’80s as the ‘me’ decade… Well, I didn’t like ‘me, me, me’ ’80s characters in the ’80s, and I’m no more likely to identify with them now.

Last year’s final episode crystallised the good and the bad of the series for me. The revelations about her father were predictable, but brilliantly executed; Take the Long Way Home made such a haunting closing track that I picked it up on CD. But, while I enjoyed the fictionalised version of Tom Robinson, someone I’ve met a few times, it couldn’t help dragging me back to the police attitude to gays in the ’80s. When I first started going out in Manchester in the late ’80s, noticeably illegal by some years according to the law at the time, I had a bit of a culture shock; I’d always been brought up to think well of the police, yet there all the stories I heard were of thugs and rapists who either laughed off homophobic violence, perpetrated it, or arrested the victims. And it didn’t help that our local Chief Constable at the time was a raving bigot who was determined to cast us into Hell.

So, when Alex Drake laughed and made postmodern remarks about how funny gays were because she was fine with that sort of thing, I noticed that the men she was laughing at were in the cells, and thought how repulsively smug she was. And when a fictionalised – but, again, real name, real person, just an actor playing him and fictional lines – Lord Scarman came in and the team lionised Gene Hunt and said what a waste of time the busybody Scarman Report was, getting in the way of good policing, I just felt rather ill.

I was at my most politically active in the ’90s, yet despite realisation of my sexuality triggering my political involvement and always being out, among the dozens of policy issues that I pressed I was always wary of being seen as ‘the gay one’. I knew that no matter how many other things I pressed, that was what would get me labelled as a single-issue politician. Eventually, I decided ‘oh, fuck it,’ because if I didn’t press for what I was pressing on LGBT issues, no-one else was going to do it (the one Manifesto for the last 15 years until today that I wasn’t on the FPC for is the only one that didn’t mention sexual orientation. I look forward to reading the new Euro-Elections Manifesto with a tiny amount of trepidation). And the issue that I fought hardest to raise our profile on was hate crime, right up until I eventually piloted a full motion on the subject through Conference in 1999. I started by picking up and running with the issue of Police Racial Attack Squads, which was knocking about the party ineffectually in the early ’90s; it wasn’t just because I wanted us to bang on about homophobic violence too that, when I started getting the idea into major policy proposals, I made sure we gave them a different name. Because too many people assumed the police already had “Racial Attack Squads,” and that they might be on the receiving end of them. It was a policy I pushed because it tackled an issue that most police forces at the time were shamefully ignoring; because hate crimes were something that the other parties would go nowhere near, making it both distinctively Liberal and tough on crime; and because I knew from first-hand experience that there were plenty of places and communities where, unless the police made it absolutely clear that they’d changed by taking such issues seriously, there were an awful lot of law-abiding people who would never trust or help a police officer.

Perhaps Gene Hunt could be funny and loveable because he and his attitudes were safely in the past. And perhaps the ’80s version of the series was just a little too much closer to the present for me to be comfortable with it last year. Reminders that there are still times when we can’t always trust the police, that the other side of them always getting the right man was the police always knowing what ‘sort’ the right man would be, don’t chime in with the jolly advertising that the ’80s are back, and it’s criminal.

So, again, I’m looking forward to this show. But more than ever before, I’m worried what it’ll laugh away. And, after the past few weeks (with more fallout daily), I wonder just how many other people will be laughing with it any more at the idea that the police should just beat up whoever they like, because they’re always right and only evildoers get in their way.

Labels: Ashes To Ashes, British Politics, Gay, History, Life On Mars, Music, Personal, Reviews

I write about quite a few BBC shows here, but very few ITV ones… Largely because ITV1 is rubbish, while the BBC at least tries occasionally. However, ITV tried something interesting last night, albeit with half a million fewer viewers than the announcement of Matt Smith for Doctor Who. Demons is Gene Hunt’s Philip Glenister’s new vehicle, not a Quattro but a British attempt at Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You can catch it again tonight at 8pm on ITV2, followed by the even more implausible Van Helsing – for classier horror pastiche, I’d turn to ITV3 at 7pm for Carry On Screaming (with Carry On Cleo following at 9pm). Oh, and if you spot this a bit later, both channels have a +1 shadow, so you can just add an hour to the time and tune in then.

Demons

Any thought that Demons was going to be a great success was demolished by three things in the first three minutes: the naff CGI gremlin of the pre-titles sequence; the even naffer opening titles, which appear to have been borrowed from a 1998 video game; and Mr Glenister’s hilarious American accent. For several minutes, listening to his cod drawl and looking at his ’40s gumshoe drag, I wondered if he was doing a murder mystery weekend or some other diegetic play-acting, but no, it seems to have just been for a bet. And, perhaps, because in American series Buffy the Vampire Slayer the wise old (actually middle-aged, but most of the cast look teenish) tutor Rupert Giles who tells pretty young Buffy her destiny, reveals the world of the undead and demons all around her and teaches her how to use her amazing natural abilities has a stereotyped ‘English’ accent, while in British series Demons the wise old (actually middle-aged, but most of the cast look teenish) tutor Rupert Galvin who tells pretty young Luke his destiny, reveals the world of the undead and demons all around him and teaches him how to use his amazing natural abilities has… You get the idea.

Young lead Christian Cooke as Luke Rutherford was in uniform as Ross in The Sontaran Stratagem from last year’s Doctor Who, and out of his clothes a lot in Echo Beach. Guess which option Demons goes for? Not many minutes have gone by before he’s wandering around his flat in a pair of tiny trunks, the camera crawling over his abs and lingering on his legs in a way that would make Sarah Michelle Gellar say, ‘Ooh, that’s a bit exploitative.’ Still, he’s quite pretty (if he could do with putting on a few years, stone and hairs). And life for him, his he-doesn’t-think-she’s-his-girlfriend and his unwitting mother (“Have you tried not being the Slayer?”) will never be the same once his long-missing godfather Rupert turns up. In a rare difference from Buffy – other than Buffy being a terrific series, and Demons a mediocre one – Luke is raised by his mother alone not because his father ran out on them, but because he died in a-not-in-fact-the-car-crash-they-were-told. In fact, Luke is now the last descendent of the Van Helsings, and Rupert’s turned up at the door to bond because, after years of innocence, the monsters have tracked him down and it’s time to give Luke his father’s lightsabre bring Luke to his father’s secret library, the Stacks (yet another thing to wind up Lawrence Miles).

Anyway, the CGI gremlin gives way to a misshapen demon-bloke in a big overcoat, apparently dragging up as the macho-dragged-up Mr Glenister, and then we get to meet the main villain behind him, who’s Mackenzie Crook dressed as a cockatoo. Gosh, and he’s invulnerable to one of Q Division’s magic demon-melting guns! Gosh, but not the other! At least Zoë Tapper’s much less anonymous than she was in Survivors. It’s got some potential, but the first week hasn’t delivered much on it. Charlie Brooker finds it a bit offputting, though it was the preview from elsewhere in this week’s Guardian Guide that put its finger on it:

“The end result… veers too much towards a splicing of Hollyoaks and Torchwood.”

Both of those are quite watchable, as far as I’m concerned, though I don’t find myself keeping up with either as religiously as I might, and don’t miss either when they’re not on. Let’s hope later episodes do a better job of making me watch with enthusiasm. In the meantime, I’m tempted to stick on some old episodes of Buffy or Ultraviolet, but I suspect that’ll make me rather less tempted to return to the apparently inferior new one.

Oh, yes, and Van Helsing to follow at 9pm… Van Helsing was a bookish, religious man who used his scientific and mythological learning to defeat vampires. So let’s make him a pumped-up walking armoury for the Pope! That’ll work. An attempt to launch the same sort of franchise as the film of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (we suspect Zoë Tapper’s character in Demons may have an unnatural amount in common with her namesake in ‘LXG’, too), this fails for much the same reasons, though is a rather worse film; instead of realising that the dumb bits got in the way of adapting a clever, witty and dark comic, this scoops out any bits that look clever or witty and just goes for a big dumb action flick. I do have a sneaking fondness for it, despite all that, thanks to a pretty good leading actor in the ludicrous title role and all its little homages to my beloved Universal monster movies of the ’30s and ’40s. I’d rather watch most of them, though.

Carry On Screaming / Carry On Cleo

The Carry On films are undoubtedly one of the greatest parts of Twentieth Century British culture, and I’ve written before that, rather than the Gordon Brown squeezing some joyless work ethic into a laboured definition of Britishness and boring kids to death with it, they should just show every child in the land Carry On Cleo and Carry On Up the Khyber, because they do a much better job of communicating what being British is all about than anything Hazel Blears wants to test us on.

The Carry Ons are, of course, a real mix – they run all the way from one of the greatest films ever made right down to pretty terrible. The best has to be Carry On Up the Khyber, and I’m sure there’s a mathematical formula somewhere that can predict the likely quality of a Carry On by looking at the strong correlation between the number of the regular ‘team’ working on each film and how good it is, with high weighting given to Kenneth Williams and Sid James, then Joan Sims, Hattie Jacques, Charles Hawtrey, Barbara Windsor, Bernard Bresslaw (controversially, I’d say the Carry On actor with the widest range) and so on. That’d make Carry On Loving the limit of the standard deviation, I suppose. But an easier way to do it is to say that, in common with my love of historicals, the ones with dressing up are generally better than the modern day ones. So, while the best of the ones set in ordinary life is probably Carry On Doctor, there are at least four films in the series that are quite a lot better. Gnashing at Khyber’s heels, I’d go in no particular order for Carry On… Don’t Lose Your Head, Carry On Screaming and Carry On Cleo. So it’s rather fun that two of them are on tonight, back-to-back.

Carry On Screaming was my favourite of the films when I was a little boy, and it’s easy to see why – it’s a Hammer spoof that was turning up on TV just as Doctor Who was doing the same sort of thing. It even sees Jon Pertwee gruesomely murdered, and who could complain about that? There’s no Sid, but manic detective Harry H Corbett is a fantastic replacement, whether paired in an hilarious double act with Peter Butterworth or acting opposite Fenella Fielding’s fabulously smouldering performance. The wordplay of the “Whereabouts?” “Hereabouts” and “Watt’s his name!” scene is utterly sublime, and Bernard Bresslaw’s toes are very rude. The film’s stolen, though, by Kenneth Williams’ reanimated Dr Watt, who’s having difficulty with his regeneration and even more with a mummy he wants to get moving.

“Frying tonight!”

Carry On Cleo is another cracker, spoofing (and borrowing expensive props from) Cleopatra with the perfect relationship between Sid and Kenneth as Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar. And the two of them supply far too many of my favourite lines:

“Blimus!”

“Ooh, I do feel queer!”

“Friends, Romans…”
“– Countrymen.”
“I know!”

And, of course, the famously nicked from Frank Muir and Denis Norden but unbeatably delivered by a phenomenally camp Kenneth Williams:

“Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”

All that, and Amanda Barrie’s poisonous asp, Jim Dale actually pulling off the heroic lead from Flintstones Britain, and a few Doctor Who connections. There are similar scenes and one of the same actors as in The Romans, actors who’ve appeared in half a dozen other Who stories, and at least two crossovers with The Key To Time series: Sosages, Captain of Cleopatra’s bodyguard, is no doubt the man from whom the Doctor learned his sword skills; and Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of The Stones of Blood carries a rare out-and-out in-joke on Jon Pertwee playing the soothsayer who warns Caesar about his assassination when the Doctor thinks to himself in an aside:

“He’d always got on very well with Julius Caesar, though you couldn’t really trust him. And, of course, he’d never listen to advice. Even when the Doctor had gone to all the trouble of dressing up as a soothsayer, and croaking ‘Beware the Ides of March’, old Julius wouldn’t listen.”

Of course, if you’re fed up with everything on all 637 channels, there’s always The Randomness Times (in an aside to the first ‘issue’ of which, Lawrence Miles notes that ITV is “ten years late with its Buffy homework”).

Labels: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Carry On, Comedy, Comics, History, Jon Pertwee, Life On Mars, Matt Smith, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Reviews, The Key To Time

Not a terribly good night, but on feeling marginally less ill this morning I managed to ring NHS Direct, which seems more concerned with checking my personal details in triplicate than making a diagnosis. And they say New Labour’s dead! I lack the energy for writing Doctor Who celebrations right now, but looking at Lib Dem Blogs Aggregated I find that it’s gone back to the 1970s for me. Apparently, it was last updated on Thursday 1st January 1970, which has a few disadvantages. There aren’t any blogs, and it’s not the ideal time period in which to be stranded.


I’ve just missed the ’60s, and I might bump into Jon Pertwee. The horror! There are at least three Liberal revivals to get excited about and then fizzle away dishearteningly without us getting in again, the music’s going downhill, I’ve got half a decade to wait for Tom Baker, racist jokes are ‘funny’ and as for being openly gay… It’s even a couple of years before I can go find myself as a baby and see if chucking my tiny chin can cause everything to explode.

Leave Life On Mars, thank you very much. I’d rather have life in 2008.

Switching on the colour television and seeing Andrew Marr, I’m momentarily reassured. But then I notice he’s talking to Ken Clarke, who appears to be wearing… Tom Good’s nettle suit from 1977. Oh no! It’s spreading!

Labels: Blogs, Doctor Who, Health, History, Life On Mars

Strange though it may seem, Richard and I don’t watch that much TV. That is, not that much (other than news) as it’s transmitted – a large collection of DVDs and videos means there’s quite enough to fit in. However, in the last couple of years that’s swung back slightly, and we’ve watched much more new TV. Suddenly, television drama is just more interesting again. 2006’s highlight so far by a long shot has been Life On Mars, which finished on Monday after keeping us gripped for two months. The final episode appropriately resolved two mysteries running throughout to reward regular viewers, but left the biggest one dangling so we stay tantalised and tune in when the series returns next year (so if you’ve not watched it yet but are going to, don’t read the final paragraph of this piece or it might spoil a couple of plot twists).

Life On Mars didn’t just come out of nowhere. Richard and I both love interesting TV, and it’s been depressing how dull and formulaic British drama has been for – well, most of the time we’ve been together. Cop show, doc show, soap, cop soap, doc soap, playing it safe. But thank goodness, signs of life are showing. Spooks has been running about four years, and gradually inveigled Richard, as well as drawing me in from time to time. The real breath of fresh air for us was from the same production team, Kudos, when Hustle started up in 2004. I love The Avengers and many of its freewheeling ITC cousins of the ’60s and early ’70s, and Hustle has such entertaining plots and is such purely joyous TV to watch that it could fit right in with them, albeit having a bigger budget and even more stylish direction, neither of which I’m complaining about. Stars like Adrian Lester and Jaime Murray are every bit as talented and charismatic as any you could imagine being cast if it had been made in 1969 as ‘The Hustlers’, and it’s even got Robert Vaughn in it. The same company’s behind Life On Mars, and in twenty years’ time there’ll be twenty- and thirty-somethings saying, ‘Oh, do you remember those programmes Kudos used to make? They were dead exciting,’ in just the same way people remember ITC now.

In case you think I’m on a retainer from Kudos – chance’d be a fine thing – there’s kudos (sorry) due to another organisation for making it happen. It’s such an enormous relief that the BBC has stopped just playing it safe and started making or commissioning drama to surprise and delight the viewer again, and of course that includes their jewel in the crown, the most-watched non-soap last year, Doctor Who. Obviously I love it and am busily trying to avoid all the plot details whizzing around for the new series coming up in about a month or so, but this time I’m talking about some of the impact Doctor Who has had on television rather than the series itself. By being so good and such a big hit, Doctor Who seems to have given the BBC the confidence to do two things: it’s rediscovered family programming – shows complex enough to satisfy children and amusing enough to distract adults, with high hopes soon for a new Robin Hood – and it’s no longer afraid of series that step outside ‘the real world’. Even ITV had a bash, though their recent Eleventh Hour – not trying to cash in on Doctor Who at all, oh no, with a lead named ‘Professor Hood’ – didn’t quite work for me, or the ratings. I suspect it’s because while on paper the mix of charismatic, established sci-fi star (Patrick Stewart) and paranoid Noughties take on the ’70s series Doom Watch (scientists investigating dangerous science) sounded like a winner, the scripts were leaden and the style was like every other dreary ITV cop chow, so failing to enthuse anyone wanting something different. With its possible explanation of time travel, as well as ’70s nostalgia and a number of sly references, Life On Mars has several nods to Doctor Who, a series that surely paved the way for it. Though its first season has just concluded, like Doctor Who it's been successful enough to have already been given the go-ahead not just for a second series but a third. Hurrah!

If you missed it, you’ll have gathered that Life On Mars was something special (and while the DVD’s not due until the end of the year, you can catch a repeat run in the Monday night / Tuesday morning BBC1 ‘Sign Zone’). In it, modern DCI Sam Tyler is transported back to 1973 after a car accident. Or is he? We still don’t know if he’s a genuine time traveller, insane, in a coma – the character’s belief – or in some yet more bizarre alternative. Is he now the number two in a real 1970s Manchester police division, or is everyone he works with just an aspect of his own mind? And what do the sinister sock puppets have to do with it? Well, I suspect there’ll be no answers to any of that for at least a couple of years, but in the meantime it’s an exhilarating Ford Cortina ride.

John Simm gives a great performance as Sam, a sensitive and logical police officer of today in the world of The Sweeney, simultaneously more straightforward and more corrupt (and it’s interesting to see what level of racism, sexism and homophobia the producers think they can get away with without alienating a modern audience. They’re toned down very much in that order). Despite Simm’s superb performance, usually calm and reliable, often vulnerable, sometimes desperate, his 2006-style ‘realistic’ character is regularly blown off the screen by the larger-than-life ’70sness of DCI Gene Hunt. Philip Glenister – strangely enough, brother of Hustle’s immensely dependable Robert – gives in Hunt one of the most scene-stealing performances of the decade, hugely likeable and very funny, but more than solid enough to avoid becoming the comic relief. One of the more off-the-wall possibilities for the series is that Gene may be real and Sam his conscience, which may be intriguing but which I wouldn’t dash down to put a punt on (though nice policewoman Annie could be there just to tempt our hero). In any case, the clash between their personal and policing styles has really made the show, to such an extent that they even kept me interested the week the plot was about football (and I spent my entire childhood being bored sick by City-United arguments). It’s that good.

Last week’s penultimate episode really racked up the tension, with a death in police custody being covered up, but perhaps because I knew it would be back next year – and assumed he wasn’t going to suddenly wake up in the ’80s instead – the season climax didn’t keep up quite the same pressure, because I didn’t expect it all to be resolved, and it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean it was a let-down, with the running storylines of what happened to Sam’s dad and his fragmented memory of a Don’t Look Now-style red dress both finally paying off. Richard and I may have both guessed the ‘Keyser Soze’ twist, but there were the usual entertaining details like the coppers’ bet that made me laugh, and the final confrontation sent shivers up my spine. It might have had that effect anyway from Simm’s stunning, desperate performance, but the reason it spooked me is that the police track Sam’s dad to Woodbank Community Centre and then chase him through the woods next to it; I recognised the name and building and, whether they actually filmed the wooded scenes in the park next to it or not, I used to play in Woodbank Park in Stockport when I was the age of ‘young Sam’, probably just a couple of years later than this is set (I’m only a couple of years younger than he’s meant to be ‘now’). I suspect few readers will get quite the same buzz, but it’s certainly worth a go. And of course the episode was accompanied by a trailer for the new series of Hustle, so TV continues to look bright.

Labels: Doctor Who, History, Life On Mars, Personal, The Avengers