If you are one of those people who are troubled by a long, hot summer at the
best of times — coming down with “sexy hay-fever” on a potent combination of
thigh, wine, cigarettes at dusk and the distant sound of cats on roofs —
then I must thoroughly dis-recommend True Blood, Alan American
Beauty/Six Feet Under Ball’s new series. Not that it’s easy to be
disrupted by it, anyway. It’s premiering on the FX channel, which, for many,
is the equivalent of putting it roughly 12 miles offshore, in a dinghy,
surrounded by police incident tape. You’re not likely to trip over it in
your day-to-day TV business.
But as it’s due to transfer to Channel 4 in October we may as well be TV
pioneers and deal with it now. Everyone will be talking about it this
summer, anyway. And then going for a long, cold shower, before spending an
hour looking through a catalogue of concrete renders and finishes in order
to calm down a bit.
There are just two key facts, really: it’s brilliant; and it’s filthy. Set in
the fictional north Louisiana town of Bon Temps — all bayou, margaritas,
Spanish moss and hot pants — True Blood exists in a
fractionally different world from ours, where the development of synthetic
blood, and the Vampire Rights Amendment, mean that vampires live openly in
Scandinavia, and the US. Angelina Jolie has adopted a vampire baby.
Nonetheless, when Bill Compton’s (Stephen Moyer) smokin’ piece of undead ass
walks into Merlotte’s Bar, it’s the first vampire the backwater town has
ever seen. “That is trouble, looking for a place to happen,” says Tara, one
of the barmaids and, coincidentally, the “Categorically Most Enjoyably Arsey
Woman” ever to have been portrayed on screen.
Obviously and understandably, at this point, many people will be having an
automatic embarrassment-reaction to the subject of vampires. Even the
superlative work done on Buffy the Vampire Slayer has failed to quell
many people’s default Vampire Alarm. “Vampires are strictly for overweight
teenage girls, into gallimaufry with capes,” they will tut. “It’s all just Wuthering
Heights with silly teeth. It’s not proper drama. Proper
drama is about corrupt cops shouting at each other in parked cars, or
divorcing couples shouting at each other in hallways. Vampires are just the
default metaphor of the over-excited.”
But what they fail to realise, of course, is that being over-excited is
brilliant. And that if you’re going to get over-excited about anything, it
really might as well be an undead, 200-year-old Southern gentleman falling
in star-cross’d love with a virgin, psychic waitress — Sookie — played by
Anna Paquin. Vampires, you see, aren’t just about blood, sex and death. I
mean, there is quite a lot of that. Well, a huge amount of that. You will
see a woman drinking blood from the crook of a man’s arm like milk from a
pail, and as graphic a beating of a teenage girl as will ever be allowed on
television. At one point, blood sprays from her nose like smoke.
And as for the sex — well, as one of the bar regulars says: “I read in Hustler
that everyone should have sex with a vampire before they die.” Within the
first 20 minutes of True Blood, there’s groping on the sofa, rough
sex on the edges of beds, coupling on a dressing-table as mirrors break and
perfume bottles go flying, and erotoasphyxiation in the front room. Combined
with the simultaneously woozy and hyper-real Kodachrome cinematography — the
trees drip, the sky is mad with stars, Paquin’s bum has very little room for
manoeuvre in those hot pants — if you don’t feel troubled and restless at
the beginning of the show, you surely will by the end.
But all this sexual intensity is by way of illustrating the nature of
vampires. When Sookie asks what will happen now she has drunk vampire blood,
Bill replies: “Your senses are keener. Your libido will be higher. And I
will be able to feel you, and find you. Fast.”
Vampires, in other words, live in a state of crack-like, obsessive love. Their
sensuality is so highly pitched, it spills over into the human world like
the pollen off the bayou, and makes any forthcoming box-set an absolutely
terrible idea to watch with your parents.
Whenever there’s a Jimmy McGovern drama on, it’s always a little bit like the
Fonz has walked on to the TV schedules.
“Heeeeeey,” his scripts say to the rest of the world. “Sit on this.”
However, with the return of The Street coinciding with FX’s Furious
Fangy Rumpo Meltdown, it wasn’t initially obvious just how good it was to
have McGovern back. It is, after all, a little hard to get excited about Bob
Hoskins shouting “Get ahta mah pub!” just after you’ve watched the
luminescent undead going at each other like woodpeckers on a Sex Tree.
But McGovern’s righteous reputation — he is one of the Twelve Apostles of
modern British screenwriting — became apparent within minutes of the new
series kicking off. The plot was simple: principled pub landlord Bob Hoskins
bars a weedy teenage kid, Callum, from his pub, after he smokes in the
toilets. In retaliation, Callum’s dad, local gangster Thomas Miller (Liam
Cunningham), says he will come to the pub at 3.30pm tomorrow and break
Hoskins’s ribs unless he unbars his son. Hoskins remains obdurate. And
that’s the entirety of the set-up, five minutes in.
So having gone with such a clean, unadorned set-up — in itself the casual gift
of a master — the joy of the next hour was seeing just how
McGovern was going to play it all out. The late Alan Coren’s advice to
writers was: “When you hit on a third thought, pick up the pen. That one is
just yours.” With McGovern, however, what you’re dealing with is what
appears to be the ninth thought along. He can bust a third-act twist
that will make you simply stand up and applaud the screen.
So here’s Bob Hoskins, due to be beaten up, at 3.30pm. Where would any other
screenwriter take this? Let’s go through the possibilities:
1. The local community come together and save Hoskins and “their” pub from the
bully. You can never crush the spirit of the people! We are at our best when
we are united. Yeah!
2. Hoskins’s wife and the gangster’s wife get together and, through some
loveable fishwifey collusion, save their daft menfolk from their own
foibles. Tsk, those men! Let’s all have a lovely Baileys anna ’ug.
3. Hoskins’s kids and the gangsters’ kids get together and through some
inspiring can-do young-folk idealism, and some side-plot to do with “the
internet”, save the old folks from themselves. Tsk, those adults! Let’s have
great party, on a roof, with sexy teenage kissing. Cor.
4. Something to do with someone finding out they have cancer. Realisations
about the important things in life all round. Sad.
5. Something to do with an unexpected cameo from Sue Johnston. Probably
involves a secret abortion in 1971. Crying.
6. Plane crashes into the pub. Tsk, those Iranian bombers! Politics.
7. A letter arrives ... from an alien! Hoskins has Mars powers, and
will laser the gangster with his eyes! Sci-fi. Woot!
8. The Moldavian revolutionaries massacre everyone, except Joan Collins.
So what did McGovern do? In the event, he sent proud Hoskins off for his
beating. Then he sent the battered Hoskins round to the gangster’s house,
and told him that he and his son were now welcome at his pub, and that
drinks tonight would be “on the ’aaaaase”.
Standing behind his bar that night, Hoskins could barely see through the
stitches to his eye. And when the gangster and his son came in, he started
to pour their drinks.
“Do you think I should have barred you?” he asked Callum, the gangster’s son,
as the glasses slowly filled.
Callum, actually quite a sweet lad, nodded.
Hoskins served him his lager — finished with a cocktail umbrella and a pink
straw.
“If you’re bringing him up like a tart, then I’m gonna to serve him like a
tart,” Hoskins bawled, in front of the whole pub.
Callum looked at his dad with tears in his eyes. His dad was raising
him like “a tart”, and they both knew it. Hoskins had won. As a final twist,
Hoskins then kicked out every single customer in the pub, for not supporting
him in the first place.
It was a conclusion only Jimmy McGovern would have come up with — as unique
and wonderful as a fingerprint on a wineglass that, on closer examination,
looks exactly like Ava Gardner’s face. As far as scriptwriting goes in
Britain, everyone else still has to step to this.
Of course, while True Blood and The Street are scripted dramas,
there is another, newer kind of drama, which increasingly dominates our
schedules and certainly gets more media attention: the lives of reality
celebrities.
Katie Price, aka Jordan, granted a one-off, hour-long interview to Katie Price
Exclusive with Piers Morgan for a reported fee of £100,000. The interview
was to discuss the slew of bad press that Price had received after breaking
up with her husband, Peter Andre, and subsequently spending the next eight
weeks racketing around nightclubs in her pants, off her face on WKD, while
he looked after the kids. Who woulda guessed it would all play out so bad?
Piers Morgan, who had a new, oddly pie-bald complexion — as if he’d fallen
asleep under the sunlamp with a pair of goggles on — adopted a “stern” tone.
He asked questions such as, “In the News of the World it was
claimed that you and Pete didn’t have sex for two years. Is that
true?” — as if the Andre-Price divorce were the assassination of JFK,
and the tabloids had been triangulating the angle of the sex bullets.
Price replied by revealing that, in May, she had conceived and then miscarried
Andre’s child. In a world where every piece of information about her life
carries both a monetary worth, and a strategic weight, Price clearly
considered putting this information down on the table as a good hand. The
interview was a successful round of Divorce Battleships with her husband.
Sympathy could be bought with the release of the information, to the 5.1
million people who watched.
The next day, PR Week announced that the interview had been “a
success”, and that the public were, once more, “on Price’s side”.
The drama rolled on, to its next scheduled turning point.
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