Articles in “Television”

I’ve been unusually lazy today. Well, perhaps not unusually lazy—but definitely actively lazy.

This week has been a series of petty annoyances . . . the air conditioning not working in the car, housekeeping tasks piling up, lack of parking spaces, forty pieces of first-year assessment to be marked in a week, lack of sleep, rain coming down just as you’re heading to a lecture while wearing a white top, unexpectedly becoming unable to distinguish between an adjective and an adverb right in the middle of a lecture.

These little pinpricks are actually something that I enjoy, in retrospect; it’s the slowly developing to-do lists of life that make me realise (briefly and ephemerally) that I’m actually a grown-up. Oddly, the fact that I live in my own home, am a wage-earning adult, actually get to choose furniture, and have the ability to control my own television-watching experience doesn’t actually bring my maturity home to me, as much as the little irritations.

But the end result is laziness.

The final two weeks of the Ph.D. were so fraught, and the whole experience so exhilarating but exhausting—I feel like I need a holiday. And the mid-semester break coming up doesn’t count—I’ve just finished my first years’ marking and the second years have submitted their first assignment.

So, in the absence of a reasonable holiday period, I’ve spent the day sitting on the sofa (the uncomfortable sofa, for reasons I can’t actually explain) and watching the entire second season of Green Wing.

But this is where the problem comes in. I don’t want to neglect the blog, because I enjoy it and I don’t want to get to the stage where I think “Oh, well—I don’t have to update regularly.”

But I don’t want to blog about Green Wing.

Because I’m obsessed.

I get these obsessions occasionally. I thought—one upon a time, when I made myself stop reading the Narnia series for a while, because I was getting a little funny about them—that they were just part of the exaggerated emotional states in which one spends one’s adolescence. Essentially, I thought I’d grow out of them.

But apparently I haven’t.

They don’t completely overtake my life—they’re leisure-time obsessions. So now I just lean into them.

The last one was Fables. And that shouldn’t be in past tense. I’m still obsessed with Fables, but it’s calmed—although that may be an optimistic claim, because I did become a little worried when one monthly issue was delayed by six weeks.

Before that, it would probably have been Deadwood, which was accidental—I bought it for my brother for Christmas, thinking he’d like the swearing and violence, and then he dared me into watching it.

Green Wing is the latest—and it, too, will settle down over time.

Anything that I develop an obsession with (and it’s not a new obsession every week) stays with me—they remain something that I enjoy watching and re-watching over the years.

Okay, except for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. I’m not sure where that came from, all those years ago, but I really did enjoy it once.

Ahem.

But I’m not writing about these obsessions while they’re still in the early stages. After all, you need to keep the crazy at least slightly under wraps.

Once I’ve finished watching season two, I might be able to explain why the show delights me so much.

For now, I’m just going with the flow.

1. Small, computer-generated, dam-building mammals should never make appearances in tampon commercials. This seems self-evident to me.

And, on that note, I “only get one, so look after it”? What are they going to do? Repossess it if I buy the wrong brand of tampon?

2. Thank you for your kind offer of Easter specials, Woolworths, but eating something called a “Sitting Rabbit” just seems a little . . . unsportsmanlike.

3. Beer commercials are entirely dependent on a parade of homosociality—well, except for the Carlton United Brewery ads, which were kind of awesome. Not as awesome as the ad for a service I can’t currently recall, with the man picking a ninja master up from the bus stop, but still awesome.

Given this, it seems that a beer ad that emphasises that all-male rollerblading and “bromance” will flatten your beer would be counterproductive.

(Nick suggested that I call this post “This, I Do Not Like,” but . . . no.)

I really enjoy Robin Hood, despite the fact that it’s very silly in parts. I’m fairly certain that one of the main reasons I like it is that Robin is one of the few genuinely English legends out there, along with King Arthur and Jack the Giant Killer.

I discussed it with my sister at one point, and she was uncertain about the idea, pointing out that it doesn’t even employ any of the main tropes, including the archery contest. My father, on the other hand, never misses an episode.

But there are stranger things about the show than the omission of the archery contest.

I feel a numerical list is warranted.

1. The fact that I’m blogging about it instead of just watching it.

2. Nick suggested that the hats in tonight’s episode probably weren’t period-appropriate. I don’t know about that, but I’m pretty sure that belted trenchcoats weren’t popular in the reign of Richard the Lionheart.

3. Ditto Guy of Gisbourne’s black-leather duster. But, really, who cares? It’s Guy of Gisbourne (or, as a friend calls him, “Lord, Have Mercy!”)

4. Marian’s over-the-dress corsets also cause me some concern. But Nick says I’m to leave those out of it.

5. In the middle of blogging I just came across the lines
“I’m not a Judas!”
“And I’m not Jesus.”
Well, no.

6. I’m fairly certain that Robin Hood didn’t earn his name because of his predilection for khaki-coloured hoodies.

7. Where is Friar Tuck? Nick swears he saw him in an early episode, but there’s been no real sign of it.

8. Shouldn’t Alan-a-Dale be a minstrel? Sure, any regular player of RPGs, especially table-top RPGs, knows that bards/minstrels are the most irritating of all character classes (although Nick suggests that if I’d ever played Dragonlance I would have found Kenders fairly annoying), but still, Alan is supposed to be a minstrel.

9. Will Scarlet’s memorial to his father, which was on par—despite the brilliance of Harry Lloyd’s performances—with the end of Van Helsing.

10. That Nick could tell that Sir Edward was going to die from his first appearance in the episode.

11. That Robin owes less to his literary ancestors and more to Marvel superheroes in his ability to completely and utterly defy the laws of physics.

12. Poor Much the Miller’s Son being relegated to the position of comic relief. Not appropriate for a Troughton.

13. They’ve just advertised next week’s episode as including a “Terminator.” I realise that that’s a metaphor, but, honestly, let’s not push the modern references too far, okay?

14. On that note, we’ve not only had an episode called “I Shot The Sheriff,” but we’re apparently about to have one called “Get Carter.” If that includes Michael Caine, I’ll be reasonably happy. If it stars Sylvester Stallone, I’m out of here.

15. The impunity with which they can wander around Nottingham with only the barest of disguises.

16. The casino episode. I know it co-starred Dexter Fletcher, and I realise that Wikipedia suggests that craps may date back to the Crusades, but really—did you not think we would notice that the mise en scene was distinctly Vegas?

Did I miss anything?

Look, I enjoy watching Supernatural, okay?

Sure, it’s cheesy, but it’s fun and sometimes we need a bit of trash in our lives.

On the other hand, I don’t enjoy watching J-Horror, because J-Horror is freaky and terrifying.

I suppose that’s the point, really, in which case—well done, Japanese film makers.

But is it too much to ask that there aren’t any advertisements for freaky J-Horror films during Supernatural? I don’t really enjoy spending ad breaks with my hands over my face.

Oh, and on that note, Jessica Alba? Whatever happened to Sarah Michelle Gellar?

Wedge, your father must be spinning in his grave.

(That is, if it weren’t more likely that Darth Vader simply had him thrown out an airlock.)

But that’s beside the point.

I’m very disappointed in you, Wedge Antilles.

Your father, the good Captain Antilles, resisted the Empire.

You fought against the original Death Star, and you survived. Not many people did.

You fought in the Ice Battle on Hoth, and you survived. Largely, I admit, because you didn’t make Dacks’s foolhardy mistake and claim you could “take on the whole Empire myself,” but still. You survived.

And then you flew against the second Death Star. The “fully operational” Death Star that blasted half your flotilla out of the air and still you survived.

That’s fairly impressive.

And now what is this I see?

Betraying King Richard?

(Sure, he may have been a testosterone-fuelled, war-crazy king, who left the kingdom to be ruled by his apparently able younger brother while he went gallivanting around killing ‘infidels,’ but that’s apparently beside the point.)

Having strangely creepy, bondage-infused sexual politics?

Selling everyone you know out for the sake of gaining control of Sussex?

(Okay, Sussex is kind of cool: it has Bexley-on-Sea where an Agatha Christie novel partly took place, and Crawley where part of The Cure grew up. But is that enough of a reason to actually betray people for it?)

Look, Victorian seaside resorts aside, I’m extremely disappointed in you.

The Wedge Antilles that I know would never have done this.

And I think you should give serious thought to this pattern of behaviour, before you end up duelling over a pit of hot tar.

None of us want to see that.

Oooh, I’ve been looking forward to this.

Whenever I teach Gothic Literature, which is not nearly often enough, there are always three novels that the students feel they should know, even though they’ve rarely read them: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We rarely read Frankenstein any more, but they’re always surprised by the other two.

I’m not sure why, but these must be among the most, if not the most, frequently adapted nineteenth-century novels. And they’ve never been adapted accurately.

The adaptations usually have some positive features. I quite liked, for example, the way in which Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Dracula caught much of the spirit of progress that marked the novel: the dependency on new technologies that gave the middle-class English professionals—and of course Quincy, the representative of American progress—such an advantage over the distinctly Old World Count. But the need to give the Count a tragic love story robbed the figure of much of his viciousness and made, in my opinion, a much less creepy tale of the whole narrative.

And I’m not even going to mention the recent BBC telemovie.

Jekyll and Hyde hasn’t been treated much better.

But this isn’t an adaptation. And that’s the first thing in its favour. Because this is an entirely new way of approaching a story that everyone feels they already know—and, really, they do, so thoroughly saturated are we in this narrative.

The other reason I was so excited about this so far in advance is Steven Moffat.

As far as I’m concerned, Steven Moffat can do no wrong. I was exactly the right age (and, frankly, the right kind of girly swot) to become totally besotted with Press Gang, which was essentially a how-to on writing tight, high-quality drama that didn’t patronise its audience.

Then there was Coupling. And the new series of Doctor Who, for which he gave slightly tremulous fans of the original series four brilliant episodes in the first three seasons.

Oh, yes, the idea of Steven Moffat made me particularly interested in watching this.

And it’s good. I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to get to that point. But it is good.

The idea of time-sharing and scheduled versus unscheduled changes is both a fascinating one and an intensely modern way to approach suddenly finding that you have two completely separate people living in the one body.

For that matter, the use of technology to allow each to track the behaviour of the other is both modern and, at the same time, faithful to the obsessions of the late Victorian Gothic novel, stemming back to the sensation novels—particularly Wilkie Collins—that helped keep Gothic literature alive in a mid-Victorian England obsessed with realism in its fiction.

Ditto, the use of the cityscape, which worked so well in the relatively contemporaneous Invisible Man: the idea that one man can easily become lost among London’s teeming millions, the anonymity, the dark alleyways.

I like the idea of the change coming late in life, as well; it not only recalls Henry Jekyll’s own mid-life crisis, but has, to me, shades of a disease such as Huntington’s Chorea—the idea of a debilitating, degenerative disorder arising late, once you’d already had children and, possibly, doomed them, too.

Speaking of children, can I mention how much I love that the twins are called Eddie and Harry?

And, finally, Denis Lawson. Ah, Wedge: you survived the Ice Battle on Hoth and the destruction of both Death Stars. Is there anything you can’t do?