Love and Liberty

Tonight it’s Part Two of The Politician’s Husband – though, first, it’s political drama at the ballot box, so if you have elections round your way and you’ve not been out to vote yet, do. If you need a reminder, here’s why you should vote for the Liberal Democrats on philosophical grounds, on practical action, and for just five good reasons – but pick just one to read, as the polls are closing!

Now back to The Politician’s Husband, starring David Tennant and inevitably in a line from 1995’s rather good The Politician’s Wife and 1990’s outstanding House of Cards. But not a patch on either of those after Part One, is it? I hope it’ll improve, but a third of the way in it’s failed for me on three crucial levels.

No Politics

You can’t do a political thriller if you’re too frit to commit.

House of Cards prefigured Thatcher’s downfall and Major’s minor majority, and captured the moment by being utterly unafraid to show the Conservatives at their worst and best. The Politician’s Wife, too, was a brilliantly crafted revenge drama, but still took time to understand how the Tories worked, and felt of its times with the sleaze and media feeding frenzy of the last days of the old regime. But The Politician’s Husband wants to have its coke and sniff it. Is it Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper in a Labour Party struggling to cope after being returned to power by a masochistically amnesiac electorate? Is it the Tories all over again? Is the point that you can’t tell them apart these days? The problem is, it pulls every punch and so seems to be about nothing – a pale shadow compared to what’s actually happening in today’s complicated politics, and the personal conflict terribly artificial after Chris Huhne’s.

OK, One Bit of Politics. But It Was Rubbish

The whole farrago is triggered when Aiden Hoynes resigns to force a Leadership election. He has no support and his sole issue makes no sense. Has no-one ever seen a Leadership challenge?

For a senior Cabinet Minister to think they’re in with a chance – unless they’re an unbelievable idiot – a number of things would have to happen. We didn’t see any of them. Is the Prime Minister in trouble? Is there discontent, rebellion, lost votes, attacks in the press, open criticism from the party grassroots? Not here. Does Mr Hoynes have people talking him up in the press, cheerleaders in the blogosphere and the rest of his party – even in the Tories since the two better dramas of two decades ago, Leaders face votes from their party? Not here. Does he have more of a nucleus among the MPs than Cassius at the back there? Not so much.

So far, so stupid on the practicalities.

Then the choice of issue to resign over. Unbelievable.

Immigration is an increasingly toxic political issue on which, like the National Front and the BNP before him, Mr Farage’s neo-fascists are currently rising on in the polls. The Tories used it nakedly in the 1960s; when open racism started to go out of fashion, Mrs Thatcher dog-whistled to victory in the 1970s; the Tories binged on it all through New Labour’s time in office; Labour and the Tories and their lickspittles hit the Liberal Democrats on it harder than any other single issue to stop Cleggmania in the 2010 election; immigration is one of many issues on which Labour has shot to the hard right under Ed Miliband, apologising for being too soft in an attempt to corral soft racists back into voting for Labour. For crying out loud, politicians have been whipping up hate against immigrants to win easy support since the Middle Ages.

Everyone, but everyone, knows that immigration is unpopular, and it’s the first issue that desperate politicians leap on to oppose. Despite every crackdown on immigration being not just racist but kicking the economy in the nadgers. The only party I can think of in my lifetime that’s positively campaigned in favour of immigration was the Liberal Democrats in 1989, when passports for Hong Kong British / Chinese citizens and gay rights were two highly unpopular but principled issues that helped keep the core of the party together when we were at 3% in the polls.

So someone in either the Labour or the Tory Party resigns with an unprincipled, cynical, populist speech… In favour of immigration? In what sensible-but-incredible mirror universe?

If the Prime Minister had been exposed as doing a deliberate u-turn against what were known to be his convictions; if there was a smoking Cabinet paper exposing that he was only doing it because the press and the Opposition were forcing him; if Mr Hoynes had put out spin that he was a man of principle, prepared to take the hard but unpopular choices, so you knew he must be a pretty straight kind of guy… Then it still would have strained credulity past breaking point, but at least they’d have shown they’d thought about it. Nobody did.

It’s clearly not a coalition government, so if The Politician’s Husband had seriously wanted to make immigration a Leadership issue in this way they could only have done it with a Lib Dem majority government… But even I didn’t read that into it. Vince arguing for immigration on economic grounds to challenge Nick might just work with Lib Dem MPs and Lib Dem members. But not with any other party. And it’s clearly not us.

I can’t help thinking that writer Paula Milne chose the topic out of sheer cynicism rather than ignorance as something that viewers, like voters, would hate Mr Hoynes for all the more.

Freya Hoynes Doesn’t Seem Up To It

And finally, there’s Freya Hoynes. From the start a far more important figure than The Politician’s Wife’s Flora Matlock – not just a wife, but an MP, and not just an MP, but a minister in her own right, if not quite yet as high-flying as her husband. She must be good! But though we keep being told it, we don’t see it. Nothing of her talent at all. It’s not just that Emily Watson isn’t quite as good as Juliet Stevenson – it’s that her character is written so much worse. With no politics and no personal grudge yet, in the first episode we needed to see that she was, at least, brilliant. She was a vacuum. Only the men around her gave her definition. And that wasn’t just sexist, nor just foolish to think we’d assume she could get there on so little, but insulted the viewers by expecting us to side with her anyway.

When Ed Stoppard’s slimy Tory Bruce Babbish – and, come on, if you’re trying not to give away which party it is, don’t make him such a caricature – took Mrs Hoynes to dinner to slather her in blatant lies so as to get her on side, he did it incredibly badly. He told repeated and obvious lies – that he’d never supported Mr Hoynes’ bid, and had tried to deter it, when everyone on Earth knew he’d set him up for a fall – then came in with the enticing truth, that he’d suggested her for promotion (without noting that he’d only done it as part of the power-play against her husband and didn’t expect her to take it). What sort of fool would believe that?

Any student of human nature, still less drama, could see that if you want to persuade someone in a political thriller, you come out with the disarming truth first – ‘Look, you know and I know that I stabbed Aiden in the front, but he was a loose cannon that was damaging the party, he’d only have done more harm to himself and the rest of us, so I encouraged him to self-destruct’ – and then come in with the persuasive lie, which then seems plausible. At least, that’s how you’d do it in a political thriller with any brains. Doing it the other way round was rubbish writing for Mr Babbish, and apparently worse for Mrs Hoynes when she seemed to swallow it.

I can just about forgive her being written as deer-in-the-headlights on Newsnight – the character was making up her mind, dramatically (as if we didn’t expect it), live on TV. But this should have been the moment when she showed, suddenly, that she was up to it. She just looked like she was wavering between whose pawn to be.

I could have come up with a better answer for her to Kirsty Wark. So could you. Go on the attack.

‘My husband resigned on a matter of principle and I respect him for it. Of course I support the Government – I’m a Government Minister. But, Kirsty, I didn’t come on your programme to talk about this issue. It’s not part of my Ministry. And we both know that the only reason you asked was to embarrass my husband or the Prime Minister. You would never ask a male politician if they took all their views from their wife, and frankly I’m surprised and disappointed that you’ve taken such a sexist line of questioning.’

But, no. She didn’t. Frankly I’m surprised and disappointed that Paula Milne’s written such a sexist script where a female politician must be a helpless victim and can’t be any good until she has to be to escape her husband’s no-doubt-soon-to-be-sociopathic control freakery.


Still, at least some of the actors were good. David Tennant, of course, despite the Highlights of Evil. Hoping to see more for Chipo Chung to do. Roger Allam’s Chief Whip, reliable as always, his marvellously disillusioned Peter Mannion MP now bleeding into all realities.

And was it just me, or was Mr Hoynes named for Tim Matheson’s disgraced Vice-President John Hoynes and slimy Bruce Babbish named for Oliver Platt’s Oliver Babish, both from The West Wing? Shouldn’t you have spent a bit more time getting your scripts up to Sorkin level before exposing yourself quite so blatantly to unflattering comparison?


Update: On the bright side, and for the sake of fairness, Richard reminds me of the BBC’s last, disastrous attempt at a political drama. The Politician’s Husband is much, much better than The Amazing Mrs Pritchard. But that was brain-dead Poujadist* smiley-faced UKIPpery, and it was shit. Here, also, is an informative factual snippet – though not without its own bias, naturally – from one of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s leading hit-men. Unlike anyone involved in The Politician’s Husband, he knows exactly what’s involved in a Leadership coup attempt.

*Yes, it is known in our flat as The Appalling Mrs Poujade.

Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Conservatives, David Tennant, Immigration, Labour, Reviews, The Politician’s Husband, The West Wing

Peter Davison’s time as the Doctor begins with a vibrant mix of stories and ideas, set to rather beautiful music. There’s a return to adventures in history with Black Orchid and The Visitation, and the divide between this vulnerable Doctor’s main themes opens up with arthouse stories like Castrovalva and Kinda, each exploring reality, identity and the dark places of the inside, versus macho stories like gripping Cyberman near-movie Earthshock. And in Doctor Who Monthly…

The Tides of Time

“The scanners indicate a large, hollow plastic object… No means of propulsion… No mechanism whatsoever… In short…
“A giant toy duck!”

Steve Parkhouse and Dave Gibbons create rich worlds that journey from village greens through demonic maelstroms and magnificent Gallifreyan four-dimensional vistas to galactic wars. Mind-expanding, surreal and moving, this remains DWM’s greatest work, influencing many later Doctor Who strips and series writers like Paul Cornell.


Originally printed in issues 61-67 of Doctor Who Monthly – which later became the Doctor Who Magazine that still continues today – this was reprinted in US comics, but the best way to read it now is the beautifully cleaned up 2005 Panini graphic novel collecting the complete strips of Peter Davison’s time, naturally titled The Tides of Time.

Labels: Comics, Doctor Who, Music, New Adventures, New Beginnings, Peter Davison, Pictures, Reviews, The Master, The West Wing, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

I felt guilty in the run-up to Liberal Democrat Conference for writing nothing about the Democrat and Republican Conventions, despite watching way too many of their speeches – the good, the bad, and Tom Ridge. Hopefully you’ve kept up to date by reading Paul Walter’s outstanding US elections coverage (832 posts in September alone). My impression’s that the Democrats had a successful Convention but, hamstrung by having no idea how to tackle Sarah Palin, have faltered since. Now bad news may be good news for them as life continues to imitate art and, particularly, the climax of The West Wing.

If you followed that brilliant but patchy series – two stunning years that were among the best TV ever made, descending into something slower and more banal before recovering for a tense final year and a half in a close race for the White House – you’ll remember just how those last few months went with an eerie feeling of déjà vu. The Democrats finishing a long and fractious primary contest by picking the youthful, gifted candidate with a message of change, the first non-white Presidential nominee in US history, teamed with a much older Washington insider as his running mate; the Republicans picking an older, veteran senator perceived as more moderate than most of his party, but teamed with a youthful, more exciting theocrat to keep the religious maniacs in his party on side… Well, now there seems to be more.

The other week, when President Bush announced the largest nationalisation in the history of the world - $75 trillion, and without even proper control to safeguard the huge cheques from taxpayers underwriting it – I wondered just what there was left for Republicans to vote for, other than hating the Democrats and hoping Sarah Palin will become President and announce the Rapture. After eight years of racking up a deficit so vast that it’s almost incomprehensible, George W Bush doubled it at a stroke to bail out the ‘free market’ (not that I think much of the Democrats’ current anti-free-trade platform either, but at least President Clinton paid off the national credit card). Last night Naomi Klein, a talking head on Newsnight, described the Bush economic approach as “Socialism for the rich”. So Republicans screaming shrilly about Barack Obama and “socialised medicine” somehow sound like very small change indeed. When the polls were turning in favour of John McCain, I wondered if President Bush had already decided the Democrat candidate was going to win and was finding the biggest conceivable way to trash the place and stiff President Obama for the bill.

So how does this relate to that West Wing ‘story’ (spoilers follow, though I don’t say who wins). Seeing Wall Street in meltdown this week, with one after another of the world’s biggest investment banks collapsing and the American economy imploding, I can’t help thinking that this is one of those defining moments in an election period – and that it can’t be good news for the Republican Party, both the party of big (or, in the case of America, even bigger) money and the party currently in the White House. In The West Wing, the Republican candidate had been pulling ahead in the polls until a nuclear power plant in his state, one he’d been tied to over many years, suddenly went into meltdown. Overnight, the Democrats’ Matt Santos came back into contention in an instantly neck-and-neck race. Once again, it looks like the story of real life’s running in tandem, as financial meltdown makes US voters sit back and wonder about the Republicans as a safe pair of hands.


Lib Dem Conference / West Wing – Studio 60 crossover / life imitating art moment: on Tuesday morning, Richard and I found ourselves pedeconferencing with Matt and Danny…

Labels: American Politics, The West Wing

Eight episodes in, Richard last night suggested we stop bothering to watch Aaron Sorkin’s much-hyped, soon-cancelled follow-up new show (and we gave Robin Hood the full series). The first two years of The West Wing – those on which Mr Sorkin had the most control – are among the best television anyone has ever produced; this has the same writer, the same producer and many of the same faces. Yet it comes across as a bunch of not very funny people who are terminally up themselves about their own genius, with an underlying suggestion of ‘TV series as multi-million-dollar therapy’.

This may sound strange, but Richard and I don’t watch all that much TV. That is, we don’t follow much of it as it’s broadcast, generally watching a fifty-year stretch of favourites on DVD instead. Over the last couple of months we’ve tended to tune in for Studio 60 and Heroes, while in the last few weeks I’ve often caught Hollyoaks (at which Richard rolls his eyes on the occasions when he gets home early enough). Which one ought to be the high-concept, high-budget, highbrow show, and which the clichéd pile of old tat that panders to bigotry? I ask the question only so that, in the style of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the revelation at the end is pre-telegraphed in letters sixty feet tall.

A Show Within a Show

The format is that we see the making of a show (also called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) within a show, with some of the ‘hilarious’ sketches that might bear some resemblance to Saturday Night Live if any of them managed actually to be hilarious. The episodes in part tend to revolve around new President of Studio 60’s home station NBS, high-achieving party-girl-but-not-so-much-as-her-slimeball-ex-husband’s-tabloid-friendly-memoirs-make-out Jordan, who despite her role on paper is perhaps the nearest thing the show has to a rounded character, and the big three actors in the show. These are Tom Jeter, token looks-gay-but-isn’t-so-don’t-drop-our-show-please, Harriet Hayes, token Southern Christian, and Simon Stiles, token black guy (again, usually rising above the material). I sometimes want John Simm to pop by and congratulate them on ticking every demographic box, then tell them to run for their lives. Or just telling them to run for their lives and having people shooting at them would do at a pinch.

The two members of the cast that really matter, though, are ‘the one from Friends’ Matthew Perry as writer Matt (who’s on-off involved with Harriet) and ‘the one from The West Wing’ Bradley Whitford as producer Danny Tripp (who’s in trouble for having had trips with cocaine). I rather like both performances, actually, and for me they carry the show, but of course any resemblance to writer Aaron Sorkin and producer Thomas Schlamme is completely coincidental. I mean, look! It was Mr Sorkin, not the producer, who was busted from The West Wing for cocaine! And the show is, essentially, about how unbelievably brilliant these two guys are. If you think this sounds self-congratulatory… That’s one of its typically subtle and hard-to-spot messages. This is laid on particularly thickly in the first couple of episodes, the linked Pilot and The Cold Open, in which once-fired golden boys Matt and Danny are brought back because only they have the quality and genius to save the show, television, and perhaps the United States of America. Danny, like Mr Sorkin, has had a cocaine habit. Matt and Danny, like Mr Sorkin, worked on a brilliant funny-but-political show which, after they were fired, went slowly downhill (“it took four years, but the show collapsed without them” – uncannily, just about the length of time it took The West Wing to be cancelled). By the time beautiful young women are throwing themselves breathily at our heroes with cries of ‘Only your adorable genius offers hope for quality TV! Forgive our foolish ways, and please come and save us, Aaron! Er, Danny and Matt!’ it’s become clear that what the series wants to be is not a showcase for funny sketches and fully-formed characters, but the most expensive therapy session in the history of the world.

The Opening Episodes

The pilot episode opens wanting desperately to be (and referencing) the film Network, with the producer bawling out the viewers after deciding the show-within-a-show has stopped being cutting-edge political and social satire and started pandering to cheap laughs and the middle ground, because, you know, TV is really bad, yeah. And so after that smack in the chops, we’re ready to get a reinvigorated show-within-a-show with brilliantly funny humour and cutting-edge political and social satire once the bright new station president brings back the genius writer and producer that can deliver all this. This may happen fictionally, but to those of us watching the whole show at home, it’s the same problem identified in Cornelltoppingday’s review of The Armageddon Factor (they think it’s a bit Shapps) in their influential Doctor Who – The Discontinuity Guide:

“There’s a parody of bad television and propaganda in the first scene, complete with hackneyed dialogue… However, this would only work if the rest of The Armageddon Factor were lavish and believable and populated by actors working at the height of their powers.”

Most of the actors here are pretty good, but you can tell just how far the fictional talent in Studio 60 lies from what we’re actually given to watch when their first relaunched show is a much-lauded smash hit. In their very first show, they come up with a brilliant and innovative new opening sketch to get people punching the air in delight: do some Gilbert and Sullivan shtick. I stared in horrified disbelief. What really irritated me was Mr Sorkin repeating his trick of ‘two-episode build-up with no delivery’ from the opening two-parter of The West Wing’s third season; in that, we kept hearing about President Bartlet’s brilliant upcoming speech, and the second episode cut off just as he took to the stage. In exactly the same way, the first two episodes build around a controversial but astoundingly funny sketch called ‘Crazy Christians’, which is just about to begin as the episode goes off the air. Grr. Anyway, the next few weeks bumbled along in similar we’re-new-but-brilliant-and-wrestling-with-our-brilliance fashion, until a fortnight ago, when we had the first ‘ordinary’ episode, where it felt like the show had stopped being ‘new’ and settled down. Was this one a success?

To discover just how badly wrong the first ‘ordinary’ episode went, read its surgical evisceration by James Graham. The Wrap Party was the ludicrous episode a fortnight ago in which young actor Tom thinks inviting his stereotypically redneck parents to an after-show party will change their minds about Hollywood (well, it changed mine; I was amazed at the lack of sex and drugs) and a dazed old man wanders about the studio, wanting a photo from the 1950s in which, as every viewer guesses at least forty minutes before the cast do, he inevitably features. To be fair, Eli Wallach is so good as the old blacklistee that he almost, almost beats the treacly script and even more treacly strings that smother the climactic scene. It’s also the episode in which The Middle-Class White Liberals Confront The Black Issue, which turns out in every way as you’d expect. James’ review was great fun to read and pretty much said all that was wrong with the episode, though on the other hand, James had slightly more patience than I did – yes, that’s one of those sentences at which you have to look twice – with one aspect of the show:

“The fact that it tackles the subject of live TV comedy with the same reverence as the top tier of US politics is simultaneously ridiculous and sublime.”

I tend more to the view that it just shows them to be up themselves beyond belief. When people took things extraordinarily seriously in The West Wing, they were debating issues of global importance, and that they could sometimes behave in over-the-top and childish ways became realistic and sometimes amusing character flaws. When they do the same in Studio 60, the bathos is overwhelming. It comes to something when, having spent my whole life bristling at the words ‘It’s only a TV show,’ I have to bite back the urge to bellow them at the cast every time they furrow their brow to a full orchestra at the thought that one of their affiliate stations may be down a point in the ratings that week. I know people in showbiz indulge in queeny strops; this is not lifting a lid on some great revelation, just Mr Sorkin revering his own work again. I. Don’t. Care.

How Not To Deal With ‘Issues’

What tipped us both over the edge, though, was the latest two-parter just shown on More 4, Nevada Day Parts I and II. Having wrapped up everything anyone could possibly want to say about black people, a climate of fear and family tensions in the previous episode – and still had time for the much more important fall-out from a nearly-kiss – Nevada Day was the show’s time to deal with rising capitalism in the China, Christianity, women, gay people, drug laws and small-town America. First, the good bit. Getting out of the studio worked, as did the fish-out-of-water West Wing staple where powerful people are stranded somewhere that ignores their power, this time starting with Tom under arrest, dressed as Jesus, with a spliff in his pocket and in Pahrump, Nevada. John Goodman was funny as the absurdly over-the-top redneck judge; Richard was appalled at his flagrant abuse of all due process, but I suspect by that stage I’d long since stopped hoping for any realism from the show and was relieved to get some broad comedy. Of course, he makes fourth wall remarks about them expecting him to be a redneck, then goes all redneck anyway, the resolution to the storyline is a heartwarmingly predictable homily to America and our boys, and I was only laughing at an offensive small-town America stereotype, but when the laughs are as thin on the ground as they are in this show I take my fun where I can find it. Still more amazingly, the bits we saw of Tom in rehearsal as Jesus placed in charge of TV regulation had the makings of the show-within-a-show’s first funny sketch, even though ‘people who claim to be Christians always focus on telling people off for little things and not on loving their neighbour’ is such an old joke even I’ve made it.

The point where I started growling, however, was when, after the leading lady tells an interviewer that homosexuality is a sin but she’s courageously not really made her mind up about it, Matt exasperatedly tells Harriet there are “any number of gay people working here”. Any number? Would you like to pick one out of the air, based on every single Studio 60 character we’ve met so far? Yes, the number is zero. Even with the stereotypical-gay-character-shaped void that is Tom, who is a bit camp and shy and has issues with his right-wing parents who don’t like or understand his theatrical lifestyle but who, PLEASE LISTEN, SPONSORS, is very definitely dating a LADY.

It’s not that the story didn’t have a little potential, despite its unlikely premise. Rough, tough gays on the streets in conflict with the straight man that ‘looks gay’ – a point nobody made, though in between chiding Harriet for her homophobia, obviously the rest of the cast take time to ridicule the idea of aggressive gay men because they’re all so wimpy and limp-wristed, and men overdo being wound up when asked to rate the appearance of other men. The main problem with that side of it was simply that Harriet sits on the fence, and so does the show. When she says in effect ‘I abdicate my critical faculties to a higher authority’ she’s posing as a dumb blonde, but we’re supposed (in less sexist moments) to find her intelligent and sympathetic. She comes across as cowardly, dim, and a bigot who doesn’t want to admit it. Riled about ‘Hollywood morality’, she instantly names three ‘scandals’, the clichéd bigot-propagandist association of one consentingly gay adult proposition with two underage mixed-sex cases. But no-one points out that leaping straight to the ‘gay = paedophile’ line is like her citing a Jewish ‘scandal’ alongside usuring baby-eaters. Yes, Matt answers her back on why civil unions aren’t good enough; they’re saying that “homosexual love isn’t as good as heterosexual love”. But he can’t answer back often enough or persuasively enough, because that might lose ratings in the real world. And he has no effective answer when her character’s given one of the most ludicrous lines to say, when (as bigots usually do) she claims you can’t compare gay people with black people. Why? Because your lot used to hang black guys from a li’l ol’ tree, but used to burn gay gays at the stake? But no, she argues. It’s because people have had four hundred years to get used to black people, but gay people have only been around openly for thirty. So of course Matt can’t say what he’d really think of Harriet for that, because it would make the idea of their will-they, won’t-they relationship untenable. Black people were only invented when they came to America? Uh-huh. Gay people were only invented when they started coming out? Uh-huh. We were never, you know, called ‘faggots’ because the religious right had hundreds of years to light fires under us? Uh-huh. Because we were driven into invisibility, though everyone knew about the idea, we should wait another 370 years for the people who forced us to be invisible to get used to the idea? Uh-huh. But, instead, so as to remain the charming female lead, all this is presented as her not having made up her mind.

Richard was particularly incensed by Harriet’s complaining that the interview had only quoted her in saying that the Bible says we’re sinful, but not that she had added “Judge not lest ye should also be judged,” and that this meant she left the decision to ‘wiser people’. Actually, he argued, this makes it worse. Either you stand up and be counted for gay rights or you don’t, Richard pointed out. Harry doesn’t. She puts forward the ‘Bible view’ and (never mind her hand-waving qualification) by default she agrees with it. She just doesn’t want to take the blame for that.

Then another woman character performed a clever feint because, ah-hah, I thought her overdone ‘English accent’ was going to be the most irritating thing about her, but no, it’s that she (being a weak and feeble woman who really has no place as a writer) dissolves into floods of tears which only Matt’s manly arms and Danny’s manly orders can dry. Pinch yourself again, and remember which century this is. ‘Tonight, from the 1950s… Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip!’ Like the ‘Operation’ sketch the poor weak girly proposed, you can see how all the parts of this show are assembled, but they don’t add up to convincing human beings. Studio 60 didn’t handle racism well. It handled homophobia very badly. And it seems to have no conception of just how sexist it is. If the show hadn’t been cancelled already, I’d suggest they find other subjects to ‘do’ than ‘diversity’ stories, and not just because they always come down to two self-satisfied straight white guys wisecracking about their ‘chicks’. Which is a shame, because the two lead actors are much better than that (and I never even liked Friends).

Meanwhile, the occasionally-cameoing head of NBS’ parent company does another little turn in the style of the original concept of President Bartlet as an infrequent but powerful presence (Mr Sorkin kept that idea on file, then), though Ed Asner’s not a patch on Martin Sheen; his henchman evil station chairman Jack has some effective moments; and, unusually seeing a cliché and swerving away from it, they didn’t do the ‘hard-faced Chinese man secretly understood every word they were saying all along’ revelation. So that’s one up on Eli Wallach.

Aaron Sorkin. Bona fide record of TV genius behind him. Now churning out self-obsessed, patronising, mediocre pap. It isn’t meaningful, and it isn’t funny, so why bother? Embarrassingly, the show I’m much more embarrassed to admit I’ve dropped in on since a friend told me about a gay storyline a couple of months ago is far more stylish, inventive and raw. Hollyoaks is a cheap teen soap I’d only previously noticed to make fun of. Yet, despite such staples as the hilariously bad soap gangster, it’s mostly well-acted, significantly better-written, and each episode opens with a wordless montage that often dispenses with realism and convention in favour of sheer creativity (though it’s sometimes worth turning off once you’ve seen the first minute or so). It also has actual gay characters, rather than taking the 1950s option of a straight one who’s a bit camp. Heroes, too, soars above Studio 60 for writing and creativity (and hasn’t Steven Carrington aged very well). You know that guy in Heroes who’s an inspired artist and can actually paint the future – but only when he’s off his face on heroin? Maybe Mr Sorkin should never have given up the coke.


26th October Update: Oh dear… So much for the saving grace. You remember I said they swerved away from a cliché by not doing the ‘hard-faced Chinese man secretly understood every word they were saying all along’ revelation? Well, against my better judgement I was watching last night’s feeble episode (The Harriet Dinner, Part II), in which Zhang Tao returns to the show and reveals… Sigh.

Labels: American Politics, Bigotry, Gay, Reviews, The West Wing

After seven years, the final episode of The West Wing was shown in the USA last weekend. We’ve had its third and fourth seasons on DVD for ages, and this has prompted us finally to start watching them. I remember when we first caught it, part-way through the second season; it was so arrestingly brilliant that we dashed out to buy the DVD of the first season straight away. We watched it faster than anything else we’ve seen; usually we’ll only watch one episode of any one show in a day, but we galloped through all eleven in a weekend. As they initially released the seasons in halves rather than complete sets, we then had to gnaw our knuckles over our addiction while waiting three months for the next eleven episodes to be available on shiny silver disc. Including my favourite episode, Let Bartlet Be Bartlet – one which I’d still encourage everyone aspiring to elected office, and particularly everyone who wins, to watch – it was well worth the wait, if the wait was torture. Sharp, witty, and with a not-quite-wish-fulfilment liberal, intellectual but not always successful President, it was gripping television.

So how come it’s taken us so long to start on the rest? Well, we saw the third and fourth years of the show on TV well before the DVDs came out, and I’m sorry to say that it suddenly felt like the life had gone out of it. I think it was towards the end of season three that we realised it was only just starting to gather pace, and that the rest had felt like it was treading water. Not bad, exactly, but no longer reaching out and seizing our attention. It’s a shame, but we didn’t feel in a rush to watch it again. In the meantime, though, later seasons we’ve never seen have been released - and, yes, we are trying to avoid plot details of them - so now we’re catching up. Having not seen the fantastic first two years for a long time now, will the third any better without the weight of expectation?

We’re just three episodes in so far, and one’s a one-off, slightly uneasy attempt to deal with 9/11. The real start to the season was the two-part story Manchester (NH), a non-linear account of the month following President Bartlet’s twin announcements that he would run for a second term and that he had multiple sclerosis. It’s… all right. It feels a bit stretched, with the same arguments running over and over, and a running thread throughout of preparing for Bartlet’s big speech to kick off his campaign, which at the climax he finally strides out to deliver.

What we hear of the speech – entirely in snippets as it’s written and argued over – made me realise two things (in addition to Martin Sheen’s fantastic comic timing, but I knew that). The first is tragic. When a draft talks of the United States being the greatest civilisation, the greatest force for peace, the envy of the world and so forth, at the time it seemed merely over-the-top, as several of the characters pointed out. After the Iraq War it seems no longer amusing but ludicrous in an ugly way, just as the references to the military base at Guantánamo Bay can now never be heard in the same way again.

The other thing I realised is that – well, truth be told, I knew this too – I am not an ordinary television viewer. The speech is trailed through 42 minutes of high-class soap, followed by another 42 minutes of high-class soap, because that’s what viewers wanted. Not this one. I sat through two episodes of high-class soap, but seethed with annoyance when it faded to the credits as Bartlet finally got up to speak. Because, dammit, right then I wanted to know what he said, and I wanted to hear a 42-minute speech, not just the trailers.

Labels: American Politics, DVD, Reviews, Speeches, The West Wing