Alan Breck is one of the half-dozen most thrilling boys’ heroes in all the long, swashing, twig-snapping, heart-pumping library of adventure. Bring on your Allan Quatermain, Chingachgook or Tom Brown: Breck could take them all. He stands astride the greatest boys’ story ever: Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped (Sunday, BBC1).
More than any other writer, Stevenson managed to merge two contradictory elements of storytelling: atmosphere and plot. Kidnapped is one long adrenaline rush of excitement and terrified expectation, and it is also an evocation of the despair, anger and bleak spirit of the Highlands at its lowest and darkest time. Breck is the hopelessly romantic, swashbuckling hero who befriends Davie Balfour. He is the archetype of the heroic big brother in every boys’ story that came after. But with an inspired second thought, Stevenson made him duplicitous, contradictory and not necessarily dependable. He may even be an outright liar and fantasist. You can’t help adoring Breck, but neither do you wholly trust him.
Kidnapped should be the perfect Sunday-telly adaptation, and it has been re-created many times, though never wholly satisfactorily. There is one great, gaping flaw in the novel as far as television is concerned, and it’s the thing that makes it so gripping: it’s a first-person narrative. Davie is telling you the story. You never know much about him, so, as a reader, you impose your own character, which is brilliantly engaging — but on television, you have to be shown someone, which means you have a lead character who is a sort of underage Zelig.
It’s the same defect you get with Treasure Island, Oliver Twist and Pip in Great Expectations. In all of them, the supporting cast steal the show, are far more exciting and interesting.
Making Davie an attractive, believable protagonist is the main task of an adaptation, and this latest attempt didn’t just fail, it never really took a swing. This Davie looked and sounded like that weird little loser in About a Boy: all big eyes and bad hair. Breck was played by Iain Glen as a cross between David Niven and Ian Botham. Neither of them was helped by direction that was incapable of, and apparently uninterested in, putting the act into action, and although much of the time was spent with everybody running hither and yon, the camera never broke sweat. There was no sense of pace or suspense. All the editor did was fiddle with washes and digital finishes for the film stock.
The greatest mystery of this Kidnapped, however, was how they managed to make a series on the Highlands look like London’s chic Primrose Hill. There was no sense of the harsh grandeur of the place, or of a Scotland split into two countries — a Protestant, farming, Hanoverian southeast, and a Catholic, herding, Jacobite northwest. It was all brushed aside, along with any explanation of the politics, the defeat and the injustice that are the core of the story. It was a pretty sorry, urbanised, timid, girlie, social worker’s rendering of the great adventure, as if some Tristram had said: “Look, let’s take another look at Kidnapped and do it as a costume version of The Catcher in the Rye.” A good peripheral cast all handed in fake-haired, fake-dirt, fake-accent and fake-histrionic performances. The Scots accents, too, were all more Primrose Hill than Ben Nevis.
Biopics are the rage now. All the films at the Oscars were about dead people, brought to the screen by the weirdly unlifelike. I watched the first, red-carpet bit of the ceremony, and it struck me that I was witnessing one of those leaps in natural selection that Darwin warned us about.
Film actors are evolving, or perhaps that should be devolving, into a separate species. They are growing ever more apart from humans. Look at Renée Zellweger — like a homo sapiens, but definitely different. The definition of a species is a closed breeding circle. Only actors can breed with each other. If you or I tried it, it would probably be a sort of bestiality.
Biopics on the small screen are more human-size and believable. Following the partially successful Peter Cook and Dudley Moore one, we were offered In Praise of Hardcore (Wednesday, BBC4), about Oh! Calcutta! and Kenneth Tynan. I’m not going to beat about the bush on this. It was coruscatingly awful. Not just awful, but really stupid and awful. Crass, confused, stupid and awful.
I would bet that most people watching had not an inkling of who Tynan was, and even those who knew his name probably didn’t know much about him. This play, in a careful, environmentally friendly manner, left them exactly as it found them: utterly uninformed. Rob Brydon, who played Tynan, is a comic actor of rare talent, and this week he must be feeling a great sense of relief — a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. He has just performed the worst act of his professional life. It is behind him now. He can relax and move on, knowing that he has touched bottom, that this is as bad as it gets.
On the other hand, Julian Sands, who played Laurence Olivier, reached the zenith of his envelope, did the best he could, was at the top of his game, and handed in a dramatic imitation that was by far and away the crappest bit of acting I have seen this year — probably this century. He didn’t stumble bravely. He didn’t dare to fail. He seemed simply, nakedly, humiliatingly bereft of all talent and ability in any one of the disciplines that mummery demands. It was an unspectacular rout, and as he takes up a long run driving a minicab, he should consider the rich comic irony of sending one of the least talented actors of the 21st century to play the greatest actor of the 20th.
Tynan, for those of you who, against all the odds, might still be interested, was the greatest drama critic of the 1960s. He was funny, observant and blisteringly cruel. He made me sound like Molesworth.
For all his personal vanity and sexual peculiarity, he was one of those people who changed things for the better. He helped to force the retirement of the Lord Chamberlain and official censorship. The final irony is that because Tynan was the first man to say the f-word on television, and to show the prim idiocy of broadcasting and the hypocrisy over sex and eroticism, little teams of sniggering scrotes are able to put on dramatic puke like this.
Help (Sunday, BBC2), written by and starring Chris Langham and Paul Whitehouse, I liked a lot. I’m surprised there haven’t been more comedies made out of psychiatry. This series of little vignettes, like a neurotic La Ronde, is both funny and sentimental: a winning combination. Langham, as the therapist, faces Whitehouse, playing patients in an impressive selection of wigs and accents. It is a new take on the tired old comedy double act, the straight man and the comic. It’s artfully done and, as yet, blissfully entirely free of catch phrases.
