Articles in “Television”

This must be about the fifth entry I’ve written on television advertising, but I never cease to be amazed by what they actually think is suitable for advertising.

On the one hand, I’ve just seen an advertisement for the Trading Post that suggests the best way to deal with your uncontrollable son and his tendency to violently shove his sister is to buy a swing-set.

True, I suppose it channels that strong desire to experiment with the potentialities of kinetic energy.

But what happens when the child ends up in an environment with no swing-set?

But the strangest advertisement I’ve seen all night is one for APIA, with Max Walker—at least, I’m fairly certain it was Max Walker—talking about being duped in the purchase of a diamond while on an African tour.

I think, from what I can remember, that the whole point was the idea that age brings wisdom.

But I saw it and said to Nick, “Did they really just build an entire advertising campaign around Max Walker attempting to buy an unregistered African diamond? A blood diamond?”

Honestly, I thought the Pepsi Max advertisement where they suggested that drinking that particular soft drink would make random businesswomen rip off half their clothes and wrestle in a spilled consignment of jelly was the oddest thing I’d ever seen on television.

I’ve been meaning to say something about this since the second season ended, now that the Sam Tyler story arc has been wound up—so, yes, this is spoileriffic. But, frankly, I’m not sure how I feel about the resolution.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first season, despite the fact that we were watching Life on Mars when the second car (in a series of three, so far) drove through the fence, completely destroying my car and much of the surrounding property—it wasn’t Life on Mars‘s fault, but the programme did tend to trigger jumpiness for a few weeks after that.

But the first season was fantastic: the concept was clever, Philip Glenister was a joy to behold in every scene, and John Simm’s appearance as Sam—despite the fact that the character was not at all evil—made me very keen to see what he could do as The Master. And the answer to that turned out to be more a case of what couldn’t he do? I’d been looking forward to the return of The Master since the new series started; I kept saying to Nick that there was no chance that The Master returned to fight and die for Gallifrey, no chance. And I was right.

(On a slightly disconnected note, Nick and I also have an ongoing debate about his preference for the wonderful Roger Delgado and mine for The Master of my times, Anthony Ainley, who I’ve only just realised died four years ago. Vale, Anthony Ainley. So I was pleased that we both enjoyed John Simm’s version of the character.)

To get back to my main point, I was a little uncertain about the return of the show for a second season.

I am—as will come to no surprise to a readership comprised at the stage almost entirely of people who already know me—a media tart, capable of becoming strongly attached to particular programmes. I respond badly to my favourite shows being cut off in their prime, although I am flexible about what constitutes “prime”: for example, Firefly was cut off in its prime, while Angel, which I would happily have kept watching, doesn’t qualify, not after a run of five seasons.

And I’d enjoyed Life on Mars enough to want to keep watching it. What worried me was the fact that the concept might end up too thinly stretched. Some shows, no matter how good, need to end before the concept can become stale: Joe Ahearne’s wonderful Ultraviolet might still be one of the best instances of this. I would have watched more of that, but perhaps it is better that it ended at six superb episodes.

And it did seem at first as though the concept might have staled a little: the show wasn’t quite as funny nor quite as creepy as it had once been, although the episode where Gene Hunt was suspected of murder brightened things up a little.

Then we got to the final episode and, as the credits rolled, I turned to Nick to say, “Did what I think just happened actually just happen?”

Basically, my feelings about the show became thoroughly confused the minute Sam jumped off the roof.

But perhaps this is best encapsulated in a conversation that I ended up having with my mother (which I may not, after a period of some weeks, have reproduced verbatim):

MUM: What did you think of the end of Life on Mars?
ME: He killed himself!
MUM: I thought it was lovely; it brought back all the humour, which had been a bit missing from the episode.
ME: But he killed himself!
MUM: Because he was happier in the ’70s.
ME: But he wasn’t in the ’70s—he jumped off a roof.
MUM: But he was happier.
ME: But why did I spend twelve weeks of my life watching a character struggle to get back to his real life only to have him jump off a roof?

And I think that’s my main problem; it was out of character. I don’t want to characterise suicide as essentially a defeatist action, but in this case it was: after a brief period of isolation, the man who we’d seen struggling against all odds to return to his normal life gave up spectacularly and threw himself off a roof.

It didn’t seem in keeping with what we’d seen of Sam’s character up to that point.

(It also didn’t say much for the Metropolitan Police’s counselling of recuperative officers, but that’s a different matter.)

Nick tells me that the suicide reading—that Sam was genuinely hallucinating the 1970s’ episodes and managed to recover from the accident, only to kill himself—is writer and co-creator Matthew Graham’s preferred reading. (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Graham is also, apparently, the writer of Doctor Who‘s “Fear Her,” which I frankly loathed.)

But there are alternative options. The main one, it seems to me, is the option offered by the surgeon in his alternative role as the high-ranking policeman from Hyde: that Sam, deep undercover, suffered a breakdown as the result of an accident in the 1970s, and that it is the modern life that is the hallucination. In this reading, the blue-tinted return to modern life at the end of the last episode would be the result of a psychotic break that Sam suffered in the tunnel, under the pressure of the shoot-out.

This would answer one small, but perhaps significant, question that the final episode raised for me, which was why, when Sam awoke in hospital after apparently undergoing brain surgery, was his head not shaved?

But perhaps I am grasping at straws here, to explain what was to me an unsatisfying conclusion.

Perhaps I should accept instead that sometimes, when we die, we go to the 1970s. It might be an improvement on dying and going to Devon.

When did iced coffee suddenly become macho?

All the iced coffee ads these days seem to emphasise that this is an inherently blokey drink.

I remember that there was a macho emphasis on some brand of milk-based drinks a few years ago—I can’t remember the name, now—but it seems to be endemic, these days.

I personally blame the Ice Break ads that suggested you weren’t worthy of incredibly sugary iced coffee made with skim milk unless you were also proficient at such extreme physical activities as jumping out of a plane in order to land on and enter another plane, or driving backwards very fast down a freeway and then clambering onto a semi-trailer with the help of some Dalek eye stalks. (Or, possibly, plungers.)

True, the last one did, I believe, have a woman in it. But the overwhelming emphasis is on hyper-masculine men drinking cold coffee from bottles, and I find this slightly odd.

I don’t have any answers, mind.

And they’re still a vast improvement over Lynx ads.

I was an enormous fan of Steven Moffat’s Press Gang as a lass. I was the right age and the right kind of academically focused girl to enjoy that programme.

(I’ve mentioned this before, I know: I may be either repetitive or narrow in my interests. I leave it to posterity to judge.)

But one effect of this interest is my delight in the current renaissance of Lee Ross, or Linda’s long-suffering best friend, Kenny (at least until he moved to Australia late in the show’s run.)

Kenny was a lovely character: he was clever, sweet, and efficient. He put up with Linda because he really loved her, despite her abrasive personality. He managed to woo a young Sadie Frost, albeit via the ghost of her drug-addicted brother. And then he sang in one episode, and all the fans who had a soft spot for a musician were smitten all over again.

So I’ve been really thrilled to see Kenny in a number of things, recently. According to imdb.com, he’s been working regularly since Press Gang, but I’ve not seen him in anything.

But over the last year or so, I’ve seen him in The Catherine Tate Show, in Life on Mars, in Hustle—admittedly, four-year-old episodes of Hustle, but I’ve come to that show fairly late—and in Robin Hood.

Admittedly, he was a fairly unpleasant character in Life on Mars, who quite rightly got punched in the mouth by both Gene Hunt and Sam Tyler. And his Sir Jasper in Robin Hood wasn’t a pleasant man, either. The sketches he took part in for The Catherine Tate Show were simply bizarre. About the only redeeming character was Hustle: sure, he was a conman, but then so are the protagonists, and we sympathise with them.

But then, I don’t really mind that the characters are so far removed from sweet, hen-pecked Kenny.

I just like seeing Kenny back on the screen.

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?

I know adaptation is a tricky business. When a book I enjoy—or have read, or have simply heard about—comes to the screen, I don’t expect that it will be exactly the same as it was in print. But the difficulties of translating word to image don’t quite explain why a Nazi appeared in a Miss Marple story.

The most recent series of Miss Marple adaptations—the novels Ordeal by Innocence, At Bertram’s Hotel, Nemesis, and Towards Zero—have been a mixed bunch at best. Towards Zero was actually an enjoyable and extremely faithful adaptation—except that it isn’t a Miss Marple mystery. Neither is Ordeal by Innocence, which is a one-shot appearance by research scientist and, as it turns out, highly successful amateur sleuth Arthur Calgary. And I can understand that, since Miss Marple only appeared in twelve novels.

However, I do wonder why, of the twelve adaptations that Geraldine McEwan has appeared in, four have been non-Marple stories. Not only have Ordeal by Innocence and Towards Zero been modified, but also the earlier adaptations The Sittaford Mystery (originally with amateur sleuth Emily Trefusis) and By the Pricking of My Thumbs (a Tommy and Tuppence mystery).

And this is all the stranger when you think that four full-length novels haven’t been adapted since the Joan Hickson days: They Do It With Mirrors, A Caribbean Mystery, The Mirror Crack’d, and A Pocketful of Rye (although the latter, at least, is coming with the new Miss Marple, Julia McKenzie, in 2008). Even The Thirteen Problems would furnish material for at least one adaptation.

When all is said and done, however, the insertion of Jane Marple into non-Marple stories is less disturbing than the alterations made to actual Miss Marple plots. I first noticed this with Sleeping Murder, which is one of my favourite Miss Marple books; nowhere else is she simultaneously as fluffy and old-maidish but insightful and acute as in this novel. Not, alas, in the adaptation.

But At Bertram’s Hotel, which aired tonight on the ABC, was perhaps the strangest. It’s not the most satisfying of Miss Marple novels, to begin with; the plot is strangely melodramatic and somewhat implausible. What it does do well is show Miss Marple as an old woman, coming to terms with the disappearance of the pre-war England of her youth when she revisits a place where time seems to have stood still.

What it doesn’t contain, but the adaptation does, is the following:

• a garishly made-up German milliner who is seeking his father’s stolen Vermeers and Rembrandts
• twins who are highly successful quick-change artists and jewel thieves but, nevertheless, forget that right-handed people tend to wear their watches on different wrists than their left-handed siblings
• a black-mailing chambermaid
• a best friend whose arm is crippled after a bout of polio
• a chambermaid who shares Miss Marple’s first name and detective acumen
• an embezzling lawyer
• a Polish race-car driver and concentration-camp survivor turned Nazi hunter. Well, all right: the original did have a Polish race-car driver, but he’s slightly less of a Jack-of-all-trades
• a hotel that serves as a kind of Underground Railroad for Nazis
• an African-American jazz singer with a predilection for stolen paintings
• Louis Armstrong
• and, just in case you thought Louis Armstrong was the strangest thing in this list, did I mention the Nazi?

I started boggling when Louis Armstrong turned up, but it was really the Nazi who tipped the scales for me.

I could cope with Miss Marple being shoe-horned into non-Marple stories.

I could cope with radical alterations to characters (Richard E. Grant is wonderful, always, but that wasn’t the Raymond West of the novels) or even to otherwise strong plots, as in the thoroughly bizarre re-writing of the otherwise wonderful Nemesis. Frankly, I had hoped that the murderous nun in that one was as strange as it could get.

I could even cope with the fact that apparently the most accurate televisual adaptation of Christie’s novels is the Japanese series Agatha’s Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot and Marple, in which the two characters are linked by Miss Marple’s great-niece Mabel West and her pet duck Oliver.

But Nazis? If that’s really necessary, why not make it the Marvel Universe’s Swarm? At least in that case, to quote Wikipedia, you have a character whose “most notable feature is that his entire body is composed of bees with Nazi sympathies”.