Generally - and I think it is fair to make this sweeping a generalisation -
you know if you're the kind of person who wants to watch three hours of BBC
drama, starring James Nesbitt, about the invasion and subsequent
reconstruction of Iraq.
Immediately on hearing about the project, a well-defined tranche of viewers
will say to themselves, calmly: “Friends, I am out. It's going to be a
programme for people who've read Bravo Two Zero under the pretext of
‘research'. For me, it will be a no-deal.”
If asked to define myself in some manner of TV census, I would definitely have
put myself in this group.
It was, then, with an unexpectedness similar to the discovery of the
duck-billed platypus to find that I enjoyed Occupation. My plan to review it
on fast-forward - occasionally pausing to shout: “God, I hate James
Nesbitt!” - was Semtexed by a big, human script by Peter Bowker (Blackpool),
and a directorial pace so fast it often seemed to be bordering on a polka.
If you'd drawn the plot-points as a graph, it would have looked like a
printout of the bass line to Blue Monday.
Additionally, Nesbitt was not annoying. I know, I know. Indeed, as Sgt Mike
Swift - a man who gets his foot caught in the door on his last tour of Iraq
- Nesbitt seemed to be acting from the guts; rather than, as is more
commonly the case with Nesbitt, the eyebrows. As you can see, it really was
one surprise after another.
In brief: three friends (Nesbitt, Stephen Graham, Warren Brown - all firing on
four cylinders) serve in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Subsequently they become
em- broiled in the future of the country - through love, money or political
idealism. As the script made abundantly clear, however, it doesn't matter
how heartfelt their actions are - having originally arrived in an invading
army, they are socially, politically and morally contaminated.
Reconstructing the country with UN money only makes the place more corrupt,
and, as the tattered population retreats into religious fundamentalism, just
talking to a married Iraqi woman gets her shot. There are warehouses with $2
billion inside, Ecstasy in the barracks, someone trying to open Basra's
first pizza parlour, and Nesbitt trying to convince his family back home
that Iraq is a beautiful place: “It's not a s***hole - it's full of forests,
and picnics, and poetry.” And Aliyah, the married, chain-smoking doctor he
is still in love with, five years later.
But however the characters deal with Iraq, and whatever love they find or
make, Occupation's stance was that they should never have been there in the
first place. A line from The Epic of Gilgamesh was the recurrent motif:
“What you seek you will never find. Let your every day be full of joy. Love
the child that holds your hand. Let your wife delight in your embrace. For
these alone are the concerns of humanity.”
The BBC wasn't the only channel toting a high-profile wedge of drama this
week. Sky1 had the much-hyped The Take - a project whose main selling point
seemed to be the appeal of the luscious Tom Hardy (soon to be Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights), who was cast as a hot-yet-mad gangster with an
enthrallingly brutish wardrobe.
It opens in 1983 and Freddie (Hardy, nailing his character from the pimp-roll
to the open-mouthed, mindless shark- grin) has just been released from jail.
Everything has changed while he's been inside - the Sky1 props and costume
departments have gone all-out with perms, cheap plastic jewellery, Club
Tropicana and blossomy wallpaper.
“Who are these poofs?” Freddie asks, staring in disbelief at a Culture Club
record. Ten minutes later, and he's querying Mad Lizzie on TV-am, with her
new-fangled aerobics.
“What's that woman doing?” he boggles. Oh, it's like Ashes to Ashes in
reverse. But there's no time to marvel at the period-perfect wall-to-wall
white carpeting, cream-coloured TV and beige blinds - Freddie's got some
gratuitous murdering to do! One bloke gets killed with a rusty garden
trowel, one has his head pushed into a television, one “muppet” gets a
bottle to his jugular, and a couple get a good, old-fashioned shooting.
Freddie is just horrible - and particularly to the women: working-class
girls in lipstick with carefully done hair, who all suffer like women used
to suffer in dramas. It's all rapes and beatings and “He's never laid a
finger on me before”, and “But I still luv 'im!” The Take is like a
cross-breeding experiment between Catherine Cookson and Guy
Ritchie,sprinkled with the visual monosodium glutamate of Eighties
EightiesEighties. And a bank robbery sound-tracked by Bananarama's Robert De
Niro's Waiting.
I am not one to take against a garrulous homosexual - they constitute the
greater part of my social and cultural diet - but the opening episode of
Alan Carr: Chatty Man was the nearest I've ever come to shouting: “Just shut
up, you rambling poof!”
While there has been amazing progress over the past ten years in making this
country less homophobic (Graham Norton getting Eurovision, bisexuals on
Doctor Who), the dark reality is that that many people have merely swapped
homophobia for “finding gays cute”.
I attended an advance fan-screening of Torchwood last week, and every piece of
dialogue between Captain Jack and his boyfriend was greeted with knowing,
slightly hysterical laughter from the audience - as if everything that the
characters were saying was high-camp, bitchy banter. In actuality, a great
deal of it wasn't, and some of it was outright sombre - yet it was all
drowned out by Pavlovian giggling at the “cute queer couple having a
bitch-fight”.
If we really are reducing gayness to camp, in terms of social progress, it's
going to be as useful as supporting sexual equality - but only so long as
all the women are giggly and have big tits.
As a camp man at a crucial moment in his career, then, Carr has some mighty
socio-sexual-political currents to swim against. Alas, to the disappointment
of any watching recruitment officers at Stonewall, Carr's new chat show
consists of little more than an hour of pointing at things - Bruce Forsyth,
pictures of people from Big Brother, his own set - and squealing. It makes
Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served? look like Harvey Milk.
With an hour of airtime to fill, without Justin Lee Collins, Carr appears not
to generate any actual material - he just relies on mannerisms. The third
line of his opening monologue is on Britney Spears: “She sings like she's
talking through the intercom at a drive-thru McDonalds.” Unfortunately, the
line also appeared in a Mirror interview with Carr, printed on the same day
- a pretty damning index of his productivity. The conversational topics for
his first guest, Bruce Forsyth, were: how big Bruce's chin is, how old Bruce
is, whether Forsyth knows who will be on the next series of Strictly Come
Dancing? (no), and how old Forsyth is again. Forsyth seemed exasperated by
the end - like an old, greying horse being harassed by a tiny Jack Russell.
Most damningly of all, the audience laughed at everything Carr said - like a
previously unknown experiment involving Pavlov giving his dog a biscuit
every time Larry Grayson said, “Shut that door”.
There was no such creative exhaustion evident in Psychoville - the new project
from Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton from The League of Gentlemen.
Psychoville has a purposeful air to it: as if someone had said: “Right,
lads. The plot is: it's a sit-com about psychopaths! No messing about - and
let's make sure we've got a scene with an incestuous mother and son
scratching each other's eczema before the ten-minute mark, OK?”
As with The League of Gentlemen, most of the characters are played by
Shearsmith and Pemberton, in a variety of wigs, prosthetics and pendulous
rubber bosoms. It's a bit like a collegiate version of The Nutty Professor,
but with jokes about bestiality. Well, just with jokes, really. I don't
remember there being any in The Nutty Professor.
Darkest moment so far: Mr Jelly. He's a clown and children's entertainer. “Mr
Jelly Keeps Kids Quiet” is the logo painted on the side of his car. Mr Jelly
comes to children's parties and combs their hair until they cry. Then he
puts lipstick on their eyes.
Casualty 1909 - a drama that is Casualty, but set in 1909 - cries out for a
version of the Casualty theme tune, played very slowly, on a tuba. I still
find it upsetting that this has not happened. You get only one pop at this
kind of thing, guys! Please sort it out for the next series.
Starring Cherie Lunghi as Matron Eva Luckes and a lot of starched petticoats,
Casualty 1909 is always good for a bit of good-natured, sofa-bound sarcasm.
Personally, I have a great deal of time for shows with this premise. In
Casualty 1909, the pleasure is heightened by an almost sing-along element to
the dialogue - exchanges that end with the unspoken codicil: “But penicillin
hasn't been invented yet, so you will sadly die,” or “Yeah, anthrax: that's
still around at the moment.”
For the opening episode of the series we had a man falling into a blast
furnace, a child dying of an overdose of ether on the operating table, and a
12-year-old child prostitute coming in with problems “down below”
(Inexperienced nurse: “What's that smell?” Old-hand nurse: “Gonorrhoea.”).
While in Casualty 2009, doctors shout “We need to defibrillate and intubate,
plus I need an IVI for arrhythmia!”, in Casualty 1909, they shout, “It could
be pulmonary anthrax! Get me a basin, warm water and a preparation of
carbolic soap.” The doctors drink tea - from proper china, with saucers -
while operating on patients, and there's a palpable sense that everyone's
waiting for Archduke Ferdinand to get shot in 1914.
This week also served up a BBC Two documentary on the early Impressionists -
but as it was very sunny on the evening of broadcast, I don't think Manet
people will have watched it.
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