Dramatic day at the office?

I’m not sure this proves very much, but I was surprised to have a conversation the other evening – at the BAFTA premiere event for this, in fact – in which it proved a bit controversial. It’s this: most TV drama is workplace drama.

This isn’t simply about the setting or format: the cops ‘n’ docs shows are superficially all workplace dramas, after all. But the definition goes much wider than that.

There is, after all, a limited number of ways in which conflict can be generated; and no conflict means no drama (conventionally speaking, anyway). Sex, romance and other aspects of personal relations are a massive source; material self interest is another; and the demands of a job or vocation are also a huge source.

So, where the conflict comes from is key. Soaps are not workplace dramas: the characters interact by virtue of inhabiting the same precinct, and conflict arises from that interaction on its own. But beyond soaps, I reckon you can call a lot of things workplace drama: the conflict arises from the need to do the job.

I’m going to go into my DVD collection at random and get a few titles now. OK, here’s what came out.

The Sopranos is a workplace drama: the conflict arises from Tony trying to be a successful mob boss and successful family man at the same time (neatly here, there is clearly demonstrable internal and external conflict along these lines as, for instance, Tony at first tries to keep his profession secret from his daughter, and also unburdens himself to his therapist).

This Life is about a set of 20something lawyers… but it’s not workplace drama. It’s the classic houseshare drama – the conflict arises from the characters’ personal relationships, and work considerations occasionally intrude on them, not the other way round. Similarly, No Angels, despite being touted as starring “naughty Northern nurses” it is really about a group of friends who share a house, and happen to work together as nurses – its creator Toby Whithouse explicitly defended it in such terms against criticism from the Royal College of Nursing. Another Whithouse Creation, Being Human, is also really a houseshare drama, and was first conceived as such – the characters were housemates long before they were supernatural beings.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: classic workplace drama. The conflict comes from Buffy’s vocation; take that away, and you’ve not got a show.

Cracker: like Casualty, this is a riff on “physician, heal thyself”; accordingly, it’s a workplace drama – the healing vocation is central to generating the conflict.

Shameless: you could argue that the characters are essentially engaged in scrounging and scamming, and the conflict arises from it, therefore it’s a workplace drama. But that would really be stretching it; it’s a family drama, much like Only Fools and Horses (the dodgy dealing usually generates the comedy, but not so often the substance of the plots other than the frothiest).

Blackpool: conflict arises from Ripley’s business ambitions – clearly a workplace drama.

Class Act: the characters are pretty dedicated to scamming as a way of preserving their lifestyles, so this probably is a workplace drama.

Taking a few non-randomly chosen examples (OK, I’ll admit the Sopranos and This Life choices weren’t really random – the others were, though): Grange Hill is clearly a workplace drama, as the conflict arises from school life – they don’t get paid for it, but going to school is what the kids do dans la vie (the French idiom is probably much more useful and descriptive, actually!). Byker Grove, by contrast, is not one: the kids know each other via the Grove, and are very seldom seen at school. The Wire is obviously a workplace drama – not just for the cops, but for the drug dealers. Star Trek is a workplace drama (Doctor Who isn’t – I can’t honestly argue saving the universe is somehow the Doctor’s vocation).

Does it matter? Perhaps it’s a useful way for the writer to think about what sort of show they’re writing without getting dragged into rigid cop/doc/scifi/etc. genre categorisation, while still keeping things accessible for a reader. Perhaps also it provides a focus on what matters to the characters. Or perhaps it’s just stating the obvious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_Act_(TV_series)

Stephen Fry’s armpit

The announcement of Karen Gillan’s casting in Doctor Who effectively announces that filming is due to start shortly on the first full Moffat series, we are less than a year away from its broadcast, and that’s an exciting thought.

I’m also reminded of one of the best magazine columns I’ve ever read, also from the pen of the Moff. It’s from a few years ago, before David Tennant had even made his full on-screen debut. I particularly sympathise with the views on hugging – confronted by a looming Stephen Fry, I imagine I would have done much the same…

hug in a moff

Nostalgia’s not what it used to be

Every so often I put a post on here that may well be of literally no interest to anyone but me. Be warned: this is one.

Fact: after Google, the second-most used search device on the internet is YouTube. Partly, no doubt because it’s so addictive: I find it hard to go on there and look up just one video. Among its many possible functions, perhaps the greatest is to re-visit your past: for those of us who were smal children in the 1980s (or earlier) the likes of old kids TV shows often maintain a rarity value – footage from the time can be hard to find any other way, and the amount on YouTube can still be small, but is growing.

But this isn’t just about old telly. Unlike for those raised in the 1970s, we have a possible archive of camcorder footage out there. In fact – my God! – it’s just crossed my mind to go and look for old primary school plays. I’m not sure I dare…  Hang on.

Phew!

Right, yes, camcorder footage: specifically, from places you were taken on days out! Almost certainly there will be a few places you went to regularly, or semi-regularly, right? Well, here’s one I went to as a small child. (don’t worry – it’s not all pink)

Dinting Railway Centre – now long-since closed, which makes the nostalgia trip even more complete: I can’t have been since I was, at the absolute oldest, eight years old. The above clips must have been shot when I was three, so it’s maybe a bit unlikely to see myself among them. But the one below is from a couple of years later:

No sign of me or my brother, but there’s all sorts of things I like about that one in particular. Firstly, the miniature railway – my God, I remember that! And it did seem frighteningly fast when you were sat on one of those little trains, I can tell you.

This was shot on a completely typical day: I remember the two engines Tiny and Nunlow. I went in the cab of Tiny, which was exciting – it was small enough not to be terrifying to a tiny child. But Nunlow was my favourite because it was green.

I also like how the restoration of the locomotive Bahamas has clearly progressed very slowly since the previous clip: it mostly seems to be sitting in much the same set of bits, in much the same place as two years previously.

Plus there’s the obvious things: hairstyles, fashions… Watching this, you almost expect Anneka Rice to come into land in a helicopter. But it all seems very fresh and immediate because it was shot on videotape: both clips must have been shot on what was expensive kit at the time.

Rather sadly, Dinting Railway Centre – though my brother and I always called it simply “Dinting” without realising Dinting is an actual place in its own right – is now derelict, as you might be able to tell from Google maps:

The smudgy triangle at the bottom is where the platforms used to be, that you see the trains trundling in and out of. The white-roofed building on the right is the shed Bahamas was being restored outside, and seems to be the only building still standing. The larger shed has been completely demolished – I suspect the track-bed that can still just about be seen running past the Bahamas shed runs into where it used to stand. The miniature railway was in the area north of the Bahamas shed, which was on raised ground, now apparently completely overgrown. The railway tracks you can still see are the normal rail network, and still in use – services run along them into Manchester Piccadilly.

But what the hell, let’s finish with some old kids’ TV. Many of the old Broom Cupboard links no longer exist: they were considered to be between-programmes continuity, and so were not recorded by the BBC (the same goes for the daytime magazine slot Pebble Mill).

Here’s Debbie Flint filling in for Philip Schofield: I have no memory of Debbie Flint at all, but I do remember the time before Neighbours was on immediately after CBBC, of which this is an example.

Blimey – Jossy’s Giants, eh? Not actually filmed in Newcastle, but in Stalybridge – only about five miles away from Dinting, as it happens. Plus you can still see from this Blue Peter were doing reports on film, not videotape. Makes it seem ancient, doesn’t it? Mind you, at 23 years, I suppose it is.

I think Debbie Flint was mentioned in the Tribe of Toffs song John Kettley is a Weatherman. As was Simon Parkin – remember him?

OK. Enough now.

Skinning up

A little while ago the BBC Writersroom advertised a competition to write a webisode of Skins, for young writers who had never had work produced. “Aha, that’s me!” I thought. I was wrong – the upper age limit was about 23.

But that’s the point of Bryan Elsley’s vision: not only is he making heavy use of a US-style writers room, but he is stuffing it full of young and untested writers. The result is undeniably dynamic, and as I’ve said before, even if Skins falters it is sure to do so in an interesting way.

That said, I do wonder to what extent the show represents a new way of making TV, to adapt to a changing audience to whom a screen in the corner of the room is not so important as it is even to people my age (26 – but a technological revolution away from today’s teenagers, or so I’m forever being told). When all’s said and done it’s still a 10 x 45 minute ensemble drama, and it’s not the only show to be making heavy use of web-based promotion and extra material.

So, Skins embarked on its brave new era this week, having ditched all its main cast and brought in a whole new set of characters. I was excited and impressed when this gambit was announced; inevitably, after only one episode it’s hard to tell whether it has paid off to the extent of bettering the previous series – but there’s a lot of promise on display so far.

The obvious point of comparison is the start of series one, and there are big differences immediately apparent. The first is that we are seeing the group of friends encounter each other for the first time, whereas they are already established at the start of the first series (bar the arrival of Cassie in the first episode). There are pros and cons to this new approach: as the characters are on a journey of adventure and discovery, so is the viewer; then again, we are not being given privileged access to a warm group of friends as before. It’s quite a contrast.

But Skins itself has moved on since those first episodes, where the breadth of the humour and the deliberately OTT hedonism alienated many critics who subsequently missed out on the show’s blossoming into a powerful drama and had to pretend for series two that they’d liked it all along (I can claim a bit of credit for seeing promise and watching it from the start, despite the promotional approach frankly not doing the show justice). But the kind of stylised storytelling that gave us a character called Mad Twatter seemed to belong to a different show altogether by the closing episodes of the first series.

Episode 3.1 dipped into that style briefly, and a bit incongruously, with the broad and crude humour of the school hall scene in which the staff welcomed the new intake. Two of the old teachers were present again – both of those who featured in the disco dancing sequence with Cassie in series two. Not sure I remember the bloke being Welsh, though – nor did the comedy accent (if that’s what it was) add much. Cook’s deception of Effy’s dad early in the episode was deeply funny and told us about his character; the comedy farting was kinda funny, but by contrast didn’t add much.

Overall the new cast of character – and their actors – show enormous promise. I’m not sure any is quite as immediately sympathetic as Sid was from the get-go in the first series – perhaps shy twin Emily comes closest. I fear Effy might be showing signs of degenerating from enigmatic ringleader to tiresome slut, but all being well we can trust the writers to avoid that – and even if she does lose some of her sympathy, it will be in keeping for Tony’s sister, I suppose. But why is she best friends with Pandora? No indication is given – when we first saw the pairing, Pandora was with Effy very much on sufferance. That said, I suspect there will come a moment when Pandora shows her mettle, and I’m looking forward to it; in the meantime, I can’t help but love her introducing herself with “Hi, I’m Pandora, I’m useless.”

The nods to the previous series, such as Sid’s locker, were nice touches and got the balance write between self-reference and looking forward. The skateboarding sequence at the start was fabulous, but it was perhaps a bit easy to overlook how good it was, considering that the previous series started withan even-more daring three minutes of contemporary dance.

It’s certainly a promising start. I can’t help but feel that some critics have approached it expecting the kind of pay-offs that routinely cropped up in series two, and are disappointed that we only got a load of set-ups, and that consequently it felt a bit slight. It shows the dangers of opening episodes, I suppose: they can often frustrate, and seldom satisfy. But if anyone tunes out on the basis of this, I’m willing to bet they’re mugging themselves: Skins is a bold show made by some of the country’s best TV talent, and while the opener might have been “merely” decent, there is surely much, much better to come.

Human nature

“Bloody hell, is that Julie Gardner?” I thought to myself. I imagine if you work in television, you find yourself thinking “bloody hell, is that Julie Gardner?” at least once a fortnight, and the answer will usually be “yes, it is Julie Gardner!” Over the last few years the BBC executive has been associated with some of the most exciting drama projects on British television, most famously the revived Doctor Who, Life on Mars and now BBC Three’s Being Human.

It was in fact celebrity-spotting heaven for geeks at last night’s preview screening of the first episode of Being Human at the National Film Theatre. The event was publicised as including a Q&A with cast and crew, and I was impressed with the turn-out: Russell Tovey and Leonora Critchlow were both there, though only the former was on the Q&A panel; producer Matthew Bouch and writer Toby Whithouse were also on-hand as was executive producer Rob Pursey. I know what you’re thinking, and yes, that is Rob Pursey of Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research and now Tender Trap! The Rob Pursey! Must admit I had no idea his day-job was as a TVwriter /  producer, but it is – if Ash Stewart had been there I’m sure his head would have exploded in a spectacular but inconveniently sticky fashion.

So, is the new episode as good as the pilot that I have raved about on here before, despite the re-casting and reported tweaking of the format? (NB: mild spoilers follow, but – I believe – nothing that should ruin the episode for you.) The answer is: yes, it undoubtedly is; indeed, much as I still love the pilot, I can see why they have made the changes, and they seem to make a lot of sense.

The first surprise is that the episode does not re-tread the plot of the pilot, in which George and Mitchell move into the house and discover Annie the ghost in it. Instead, it picks up more or less from the point at which we left the characters at the end of the pilot: the trio are installed in the house, and Annie is newly visible to humans… some of the time. Indeed, George’s containment cell is made unavailable to him, which leads to a frantic search for somewhere else safe to transform.

There are big changes to the casting. Leonora Critchlow replaces Andrea Riseborough as Annie, and is every bit as good as you’d expect. Brilliant though Riseborough was in the pilot – and I was certainly sorry to hear she was no longer involved – I do wonder whether the frail and kooky insecurity she brought to the part would have worked well over an entire series. Critchlow brings a warmer take on the part, though her acting chops are every bit as impressive – the sequence in which she attends her own funeral and screams at her relatives who cannot see her is devastating.

Additionally, Aidan Turner replaces Guy Flanagan as Mitchell, and is altogether more of a hunk and a lothario in the role. He’s very good, and it should please those who felt Flanagan was a bit “drama school”; myself, I thought he brought an understated charisma to it, a bit like Paul McGann in Withnail and I. But I’ve not got anything bad to say about Turner’s performance, which puts Mitchell’s dilemma across very powerfully. The re-casting apparently arose at least in part because by the time the show was commissioned the cast of the pilot were no longer under option, though it seems likely from the Q&A that the tweaking of the format was at least partly responsible too.

One other point on which the pilot was criticised was the rather gothic depiction of the scheming vampires, particularly the character of Herrick as played by Adrian Lester. Herrick has now been re-thought, although the overall threat from a vampire plot has been retained; but in the guise of Jason Watkins, Herrick is a more down-to-earth and ambivalent villain, and all the more menacing because of it.

The greatest strength of the series is of course the writing from Toby Whithouse, and the deftness with which he has crafted the characters. It was interesting to learn from the Q&A that originally the show was envisaged as a house-share series for BBC2, as more of a This Life style drama without any “genre” elements. Much of the character development had already been done on George, Annie and Mitchell before it was decided that they would be a werewolf, a ghost and a vampire. There’s a lesson in there for the developers of other shows – perhaps if ITV’s Demons had started with the characters rather than the monsters it would have been more engaging – decent though it is.

One thing I found interesting was that the first episode felt able to open with a voice-over and flashback sequence, these being two things that new writers are constantly warned off, on the basis that script readers tend to view them as suggesting the writer is using cheap gimmicks rather than having a command of their material. I’ve heard and read this so many times that when I now see a voiceover or flashback it jars with me – and if I remember rightly, the pilot steered clear of them as it tried to establish the show, even though it was from an established writer. Maybe it’s just a coincidence – after all, the new episode has to convey the set-up very quickly at the start.

In sum, Being Human is a great achievement for the writer, cast and crew; I thoroughly recommend you watch it on BBC3, Sunday January 25th.

Geek attack

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit to finding this so fascinating, but there are a lot of complicated stories around old telly – specifically, around what exists, and why it comes to exist in the form it does. It seems strange that mainstream artefacts of our culture – programmes that were enjoyed in the homes of millions of people – often no longer exist, even though they might have been made less then fifty years ago, which is no time at all really.

So if you’re at all interested in reading about how it has recently become possible to take a black and white copy of a programme that was originally made in colour, and turn it back into colour again, I recommend this article.

For emphasis: a black and white programme. Turned into colour. Well, I was impressed. And don’t be side-tracked by the mention of computer colourisation at the start of the article: obviously this technology has been around for a while, and there’s nothing special about applying a made-up selection of colours to a black and white image; the real meat is the bit about restoring the original colour from the black and white image. So read on…

Word of warning to those not familiar with vintage Doctor Who: the episodes concerned are, sadly, dreadful. Technically and historically fascinating though the whole thing might be, I’m not sure even I’d actually buy the DVD.

Doctor Smith

Today is a day that arrived a good ten years earlier than I expected. Today the next actor to play the Doctor is younger than me.

When the talking heads on Doctor Who Confidential let slip the first clue – that the new Doctor is the youngest ever – I envisaged writing something along the following lines in this post: a young Doctor strikes me as a mistake, but Steven Moffat is a great writer and producer who is rightly paid to take these decisions, and he will get it right and prove me wrong.

Moffat himself evidently had the same preconceptions, and expected to cast an actor in his forties.

But actually… my first reaction is that Matt Smith is likely to be very good. From the clips shown – and I’ll confess Ruby in the Smoke and Party Animals are both programmes I intended to watch and then didn’t, bar a perhaps unrepresentative ten minutes of the latter – he seems to have that magnetic charisma on-screen that the part requires. He also has a face that is 50% chisel-jawed heroism and 50% wonky excess head area – a quirky combination that must be right for the role.

So: four more David Tennant specials, then Matt Smith in 2010. Excellent!

Just in case anyone missed it: Smith’s first appearance is promised for Spring 2010. The date of Tennant’s last special has not been announced, but the latest rumour seems to be Easter 2010 rather than Christmas 2009. Could it be scheduled to kick-start the first Moffat-Smith series? Could be a great move, or a dreadful one. Or maybe it’ll be a Christmas Day regeneration after all.

Though, to come back to the age thing… if ever there’s something to make you feel like you’ve totally wasted your life to date, it’s seeing the title role in Doctor Who go to someone younger than you.

The Krypton Factor

ITV’s revival of the Krypton Factor slipped on to the airwaves on January 1st, with apparently little fanfare – at least, that’s how it seemed to me, although maybe if I watched ITV more often I would have seen more promotion for it. Few people seem to have got very excited about it one way or the other: nobody is hailing it as the greatest quiz ever; nor is anyone claiming that the revival has ruined the format (as far as I can see). For my money, an essentially sound format has withstood the updating exercise, although the peripheral problems that the original experienced have been replaced by a new set of peripheral problems for the new version.

The challenges remain fiendishly difficult. The opening mental agility round in particular was horrifically tricky – although I did better than the first two contenders. Mind you, I wasn’t slammed in a needlessly over-dramatised “cube” to answer the questions – more of this gimmicky tendency later. In the web age, further problems are now available for viewers to try via the ITV website, which is quite neat.

The other big studio-based challenge – usually to reassemble some shapes in some obscurely difficult way – seems to have been retained similarly in keeping with the original; ditto the general knowledge round. The other rounds have been subjected to quite a bit of tinkering. The observation round, for instance, is now based on clips from old TV shows, rather than a specially-shot skit as in the 1980s – undoubtedly a bit of cost-cutting! But it still works tolerably, and is surprisingly difficult.

The obstacle course has been changed substantially, however. It is no longer the traditional army course near Ramsbottom, but a new one in Yorkshire – but that’s neither good nor bad of itself. More significantly, the contestants have to go two at a time, so we lose the ability to see all four competing against each other simultaneously; instead the result is decided by the times set by each, which does add a bit more suspense, I suppose. More serious is the fact that the round is edited together: with a good time being sub six minutes and a poor one over nine, we do not get to see the contestants’ attempts in real time, which frankly makes the whole thing look a bit nonsensical, as the viewer really has no idea how each contestant is doing unless it’s either conspicuously well or conspicuously badly.

Worst of all is the treatment meted out to the aircraft similator round: it’s gone! Dropped completely. Now, it might no longer hold the novelty it once did, as today’s games consoles can produce better graphics than the most sophisticated simulator of 1990, but it seems a bit much to lose the entire round. The Krypton Factor was always pretty slow-paced, with regular and very slow scoreboard reports from Gordon Burns and ponderous introductions and explanations, but dropping a round does not help! The new version is undoubtedly pacier in style, but compensates by injecting short films introducing each competitor – I can live with these, except the producers have clearly told the contestants to big themselves up, as is currently fashionable. Still, there are worse things.

Those worse things include rather needless gimmickry: the “cube” in which the contestants take the first round is one example; the fact their heart rates are being monitored at the same time is another. On the up-side, the new set is heavy on lighting effects and manages to be visually stimulating while maintaining the old colour-designation of each contender, without obliging them to wear an item of clothing in that colour. Overall, the show could perhaps have been made more tacky and gimmicky than it has been, so good on the producers for showing some restraint, even if maybe not quite enough.

On the presentation front, truth be told, Gordon Burns was always likeably rubbish: he was presented as an authoritative figure, though why on earth he was qualified to comment on the particular skills demanded of each contestant was never really explained. His presentation was reliably cardboardy. Ben Shephard is a bit more natural in front of the camera, but too often descends into lightweight smarm; rather than being informative or authoritative, his commentary is too often unhelpful and snide. But this is on the evidence of one show: he could well improve over time, and is certainly not recovering from a bad start.

There is also a fundamental problem with the format that the new series has not tackled: owing to the scoring system, it was always possible to win the show even if you were rubbish at one or two rounds: the inaugural winner of the new series came dead last in one round and joint last in another, but won the rest and snuck it by one point; the second-placed contender scored more consistently albeit that he won fewer rounds – it’s hard to argue that he wasn’t at least as worthy of victory (although they do operate a “highest scoring losers” system, so he may yet reach the next round). In particular, the general knowledge section can still be a bit more pivotal than should perhaps be the case for a quiz that mostly tests a diverse range of skills rather than knowledge. On the up side, Shephard still announces the scores by saying “in the lead, with a Krypton factor of ten, is – “.

Titles are new, of course, although the graphics remain based around a stylised letter “K”; in a bigger departure from the original, the iconic theme by Art of Noise has not bee retained, even in a re-worked version. Bit of a shame.

Overall, the series seems to remain fundamentally sound; it’s not perfect, and it seems unlikely to become appointment television. But it is still an example of an old format remaining essentially workable on modern television, and shows that innovation for its own sake does not lead to good programming.

2008 on the goggle box: Comedy

[EDIT: I've changed the typo in the title of this post, so it says "goggle" rather than "google" - my fingers seem predisposed to do the latter]

My favourite comedy show this year was easily Outnumbered, which finished its second series on BBC2 just after Christmas. I feel somewhat vindicated by the extent to which this has become first a critical, and latterly a word of mouth, hit – the first series did not attract anything like the same acclaim, other than in a few places, including this blog. As last year, the outpourings of the children provided some clenchingly acute humour, while there was some seriously effective drama as well, particularly around the fate of Sue’s deteriorating father. If it had a flaw, it was maybe in the second half of the final episode, which concentrated on the adults: the children rather faded from view, without any particular scene to round off their appearances. This contrasts with the first series, which closed with  delightful  scene setting the horrors of parenthood in contrast with its joys. Still, I hope the BBC commissions a third series before the remarkable cast of child actors become too old: there would probably be little point in continuing the series if, say, Ben reached the same age as Jake was at in series one.

Lead Balloon seemed to me to have upped its game from an already high level. Last year, I remarked that I admired the show, but couldn’t warm to Rick Spleen on account of his habit of bringing misfortune on his own head through his consistent mean-spiritedness. This trait was still in evidence, but – and it might just be my imagination – Rick seemed to be on the receiving end of some genuine bad luck in this series, as well as messing things up for himself. It made the whole thing more palatable. Though the programme still regularly depicts Spleen as not especially talented, which calls into question the idea that he was ever well-known – though maybe it’s just trying to say he’s lost his magic and is destined to spend the rest of his career on the scrap-heap; the episodes in which he overtly prizes monetary reward over artistic integrity were among the best-drawn, I felt.

I recall Sean Power, who plays Spleen’s altogether funnier and better-balanced writing partner Marty, got shirty with a blogger on Off The Telly, condemning all “armchair critics”. Happily not all performers take this view of bloggers, as Robert Webb’s comment on here a couple of months back demonstrated. But it seems to me to be an unsustainable position: as an actor or writer, you’re in the position of putting an item of work in public view; it’s not rational to expect that nobody will ever form an opinion on it. Indeed, if it’s not valid for the viewer to have a reaction, what’s the point of making the work available? And if it is valid for the audience to have a reaction, why should they not express that reaction in conversation, or in writing? Maybe it’s easy for me to say that as a blogger, and it’s different if you’re on TV. But the availability of a comment function on blogs makes it easier, if anything, for unwelcome feedback to be passed to the blogger than to an actor (unless they google themselves – not quite the same thing, but see what the captain of King’s College’s University Challenge team, Kat Gold, found about herself).

I’m looking forward to the new series of That Mitchell and Webb look in 2009; and Peep Show again proved reliably excellent this year. But the outstanding sketch show I want to comment on is The Kevin Bishop Show on Channel 4. Its pace has been commented on, with over 20 sketches in probably less than 25 minutes’ airtime. They included some deadly accurate swipes at celebrities (“Mutton… the new fragrance from Madonna”) and superb parodies. Countdown USA was only very slightly implausible, while the Vietnam-set adaptation of ‘Allo ‘Allo, Harrow Harrow, was deeply un-pc, but extremely funny. Bishop’s turns in Star Stories also continued to impress – there’s no doubt much more to look forward to from Bishop in 2009 and beyond. Elsewhere in the land of sketch shows, Peter Serafinowicz’s debut series compared poorly: a lot of good ideas, but often stretched a bit thin. Though I very much enjoyed the Michael 6 robotic talk-show host.

Finally decent comedy continued to emerge from BBC3 this year, despite what some critics might tell you. Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps is perhaps a little past its best, but the seventh series was as crude and as funny as ever, particularly the live special. And I mean that without any irony at all – I genuinely think Two Pints is great, and gets a very raw deal from critics. That said, the death of Johnny has upset the balance of the cast a little; moreover, the fact that Two Pints existed in an essentially cosy world where nothing ever changed was part of its appeal – the departure of a key character and a series of grief and tragedy-stricken episodes did muck with the formula a bit. I’m glad there’s apparently a series eight in the offing… but I would have been equally content to see the programme left to rest with the ultimately happy ending to series seven.

Meanwhile, BBC3 has cancelled the superb Pulling after a triumphant second series. What the hell are they thinking? Pulling offered a superb brand of character-based comedy: like The Office and Extras, the viewer squirms on the characters’ behalf as they get themselves into the most believably dreadful situations. Karen’s feelings about her cancelled engagement, her self-deception and her unwanted new lifestyle were, at least, given a superb pay-off over the course of this series, so at least it went out on a high.

And finally, a show that was slammed after its first episode but really came into its own subsequently: Clone again existed in a cosy world where little changed but much genuinely funny silliness went on. Unfortunately this wasn’t at all evident from its first episode, which involved a rather elaborate set-up. Textbooks on writing will tell you to be wary of flashback, but I wonder if the events that led to Clone’s creation and Victor’s flight from the forces of the military might have been better told in flashback, while introducing us first and foremost to his bolt-hole and the emotional lynchpin character of Rose (Fiona Glascott completing a superb trio of lead actors with Jonathan Pryce and Stuart McGloughlin, with the much-vaunted Mark Gatiss really in a supporting role). I hope it gets re-commissioned, given the cliffhanger nature of the final episode.

2008 on the goggle box: Drama

Contains spoilers!

I wonder why TV shows do not attract end-of-year lists in the same way as records do. Maybe they do, and I just don’t look in the right places. Or maybe it’s that music is more personal: you can carry it with you; when you buy it, there is a sense in which you own it; there is a greater choice, so what you listen to reflects who you are more than what you watch. Perhaps. Certainly TV is still something you have to experience by sitting in front of a screen – albeit you can take a small screen with you on the train these days if you wish – and the number of things you can do while watching it is limited to things like ironing rather than driving.

The comparison also falls down for books and films; all attract much mainstream comment. TV shows are assessed among select bands of producers and writers, joined only recently by anoraks connected by the internet. It baffles me slightly: for me, the engagement with a drama series is every bit as deep as that with a book or a record – as with other forms, it might be more or less deep or involved depending on the scope, ambition and quality of the work, but in principle it is fundamentally similar. It certainly does not require less skill to write, produce or act in a television programme than it does to make a record or a film. So I’m going to do much the same for TV as I have for music – apart from the compiling a CD bit.

Just as Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes have been topping end-of-year album polls, a few shows would probably be making the running in TV lists if they existed. Skins, Doctor Who and Apparitions might be on the list. Unfairly overlooked might be Jericho and Out of the Blue. But if you put a gun to my head and asked me to name the best TV show of the year in my opinion, I would plump for season four of House.

The writers’ strike perhaps enhanced this show, as its story arc worked beautifully over a truncated season of 16 episodes in a way that would probably not have been the case over 25. Despite each episode being deeply formulaic, the makers of the show are still finding new ways of putting the formula into action: this year, House begins an X-Factor style talent contest to hire a new team of assistants. The drawing out of these characters over the course of the first two thirds or so of the season was masterful; the pay-off in the later part was utterly sublime, and will surely frame the early part of the fifth season.

To turn to more widely-viewed fare, I approached the fourth series of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who with little enthusiasm: much of the preceding series had been merely OK in my eyes, and I feared we were in for a year of re-treading old ideas. Delightfully, I was largely wrong about that: this year’s series was probably the most consistently high-standard run since Christopher Eccleston’s sole series, and also contained some sublime high points. Catherine Tate’s Donna was a far more interesting, and far better-acted, character than Martha Jones; while I was amused to see a set-up at the end of the series for Martha to join Torchwood, only for Freema Agyeman to take the dosh and move to ITV. They’re welcome to her – I’m in the camp that says she just can’t act, sorry.

I found myself lacking the time to do episode-by-episode reviews, but there was barely a story I did not enjoy. The Sontaran episodes were probably the most satisfying of the many Earth-invasion stories we have now seen, bar Army of Ghosts / Doomsday; Steven Moffat’s episodes were every bit as good as you would expect; and RTD’s own Midnight and Turn Left were in my view among his very best scripts ever, starkly exploring the best and worst of human nature in totally different ways from each other. On the down side, while the finale was great fun I didn’t feel Davros added much to the story, nor did I feel the story thread with Rose added to the perfect ending she was given in Doomsday – if anything, it seems to cheapen that episode, which had provided the most emotionally resonant moment seen in Doctor Who. Still, this is nit-picking: the series was a triumph.

Happily, Torchwood found its feet as well, with a more purposeful and convincing set of characters in the Hub than the first series had presented. I still wasn’t too sorry to see Tosh and Owen killed at the end, but Owen’s journey to get there in particular was extremely inventive. Elsewhere in the Doctor Who universe, I still have most of The Sarah Jane Adventures sitting around waiting to be watched, but the episodes I did see suggested it retains its sureness of touch – though perhaps it suffered slightly from overly cute and tidy endings.

Skins was another sure-footed second series this year. Reading RTD’s views on the first series in his book is rather interesting. I think he misreads the show somewhat: to my eyes, they seemed to have got the tone right after the first four episodes or so of the first run, and then kept it running solidly to the end of the second (bar 2007’s now-notorious rubbish Russian episode): certainly it is no longer a show from which we would expect comedy characters like Mad Twatter, gloriously-named though he was. Instead, it proved a show that put its characters through the wringer like almost no other: Sketch’s downfall on-stage, the death of Sid’s dad, the unveil of Cassy when Sid and Michelle return home and Chris’s death were all utterly stunning moments in television – many programmes can’t manage a single climactic moment like that, but Skins was awash with them. Although I couldn’t manage to feel much warmth towards Cassie this time round – all she ever seemed to do was fuck things up for other people. Still, Hannah Murray’s portrayal was superb throughout. Bryan Elsley’s fearless approach to making drama continues with a new cast in 2009, and I can’t wait – I fully expect it to be brilliant, but even if it falters it is bound to do so in a fascinating way.

Another of the TV moments that sticks in my mind from this year was the revelation of Tom and Debbie’s relationship in Shameless, which I’m pretty sure actually made me say “oh God!” out loud, even though there was nobody else there. This time last year, I was lamenting Shameless’s descent into drivel and dreading the prospect of a huge 16-episode run in 2008. Once again, I was proved gloriously wrong: Shameless was on top form this year, with its characters back to being dissected in the most fascinating and rumbustuous way. A great example: Frank is in a drug-induced conversation with his younger self, who asks him when he started drinking; the realisation of the answer to the question strikes him for the first time as he says it out loud: “just after Mum died”. David Threlfall would be a great choice for Doctor Who; despite reports that Shameless will be reduced to eight episodes in 2010, it still seems that his commitment to the show will rule him out of the reckoning. Shame.

Let’s leave the high profile shows for a moment: two of my other favourites this year have in common that they were both imports, both overlooked, and both cruelly mistreated by the networks that commissioned them. Well, in the case of Jericho, that’s a bit debatable: excellent though it was, it simply didn’t attract the viewers in the US, though whether that was through network mismanagement or not I don’t know. Anyway, it’s a story you might have heard: the series revolved around a small town in rural America after a co-ordinated nuclear attack destroyed most of the country’s major cities; it follows the fortunes of the town – the titular Jericho – and its inhabitants as the USA’s rule of law, government and infrastructure disintegrate. At the same time, clues start to emerge about the true nature of the mysterious terrorist attacks.

Perhaps the superficial similarity of Jericho’s premise to a series of 24 made viewers regard it as old hat; if so, they were missing out on a totally different beast. It was a compelling programme: I picked up on the first series as part of a set of re-runs on ITV4, and could happily watch two or three episodes at a time – it’s one of those programmes where you hate having to wait to find out what happens next. The second series – only seven episodes, after which the axe fell in the US for a second and apparently final time – made its debut on ITV4 in the autumn and delivered the goods in a satisfying way. I recommend you seek the show out on DVD in the new year sales.

The second of my pair of imports was an Australian soap – the first time I’ve watched one of them since giving up on Neighbours in about 1994. I’ve written about Out of the Blue elsewhere, but I remain annoyed by the BBC’s handling of the show: with an evening repeat or weekend omibus I feel quite sure it could have picked up a strong audience. Trouble was, the BBC wanted it to pick up the Neighbours audience and gave it about two weeks to do it – it failed, and was shunted off to BBC2. It was interesting to hear Russell T Davies say at his National Film Theatre event to promote his book that, back in 2005, the BBC had made contingency plans to shunt Doctor Who off to Sunday afternoons half-way through its run if it had flopped; alas, for Out of the Blue, similar contingency plans were put into operation prematurely. The show has 20 or 30 episodes left to run in the new year, after which the BBC will stop making it; I gather, however, that at least one foreign broadcaster has commissioned another run of episodes, so I hope they will find their way on to UK screens. Alas, it looks like it won’t happen until – at the very earliest – one of Five’s digital channels has completed a run of all 150 BBC episodes, for which it has just acquired the rights. No small irony given that Five was the destination of Neighbours after the BBC opted to stop paying for it.

One new BBC commission that did manage to make it through its run in its intended scheduling position was Merlin, the second “tried and trusted formula” drama commissioned to attract the family audience that Doctor Who had re-discovered. It was a strangely uneven show: if anything, it showed how sure-footed Robin Hood had in fact been. In Hood, the characters were well set-up and consistently well-acted, and each series told a story across its run. In Merlin, the characters seemed more sketchy, the acting and production values more haphazard, and the series overall rather aimless.

But that’s not to say it was bad: rather, it seemed to give the impression of a show struggling to find its feet, not unlike the first series of Torchwood. It showed undoubted promise, and the BBC were right to show the faith to re-commission it; most notably, Merlin held its audience despite not having a consistent timeslot on Saturday evenings. The idea of exploring the start of the relationship between Merlin and Arthur was inspired; it also gives a clear “destination” for the series, as Uther Pendragon is still alive, and Guinevere and Morgana are not in their accustomed positions of legend, but are instead a servant girl and Uther’s ward respectively. Perhaps the production team were wary of taking too many strides towards the characters’ eventual destiny too soon: Morgana’s emergence as a seer has so far led nowhere, though hints of her estrangement from the Pendragons have been shown. Mordred, Excalibur and Lancelot all put in appearances, but for one episode each and really seemed to go nowhere. Hints were given too of Guinevere falling in love with Arthur, although for most of the series she seems more interested in Merlin.

Comment on the series initially focused on the identikit plots: a mysterious stranger would turn up at Camelot and be welcomed by Uther, only to turn out to be a sorcerer with nefarious purpose. Merlin would then save the day with some magic to which everyone else remained oblivious. It had the unfortunate effect of making all the characters look like idiots. Some commentators also picked up a homoerotic frisson between Merlin and Arthur – perhaps it would be more fair to say that Colin Morgan and Bradley James were among the very few pairings of cast members between whom there seemed to be any particular chemistry. Richard Wilson was invariably watchable as Gaius – without him I rather suspect the show would have crumbled. Morgana remained under-used; hopefully the second run will give her more screen time – and maybe even re-cast Gwen, who came across as both wooden and wet. Michelle Ryan’s hypnotically seductive Nimueh seemed under-exploited, while the death of Gwen’s father was rather thrown away, going unmentioned after the episode in which it occurred. Oh, and the dragon was a bit of a waste of time too; there were hints that the dragon was pursuing his own agenda here and there, but it might have been more interesting to have him manipulating Merlin to his own ends rather than just periodically whinge at him.

I’m looking forward both to new Merlin and the third series of Robin Hood, but both suffer somewhat from having to meet 13-episode runs. For series of self-contained episodes with smallish casts and only one setting, it’s too many. Doctor Who can do it because it has a new setting almost every week, but for other shows ten episodes would be quite enough.

Staying with the BBC for a moment, I can see why Dan Paton and others might write off Survivors as boring, but on balance I felt it was pretty effective… with a massive “BUT” looming in a moment. It certainly succeeded in building up a set of characters that I cared about. But it was undeniably slow-paced (that’s not the big “BUT”): almost certainly this reflects the source material – it claims to be based on the novel by Terry Nation, but (that’s not the big “BUT” either) that was itself bound up with his TV series of the 1970s, so a slow pace is not unexpected. Overall, it perhaps lacks the desperation seen in Jericho, where the collapse in civilisation was stark and immediate; in Survivors so far, things have seemed fairly cute with occasional interjections of the horror of the situation. Maybe it needed to go further in exploring the horror – then again, Jericho was about a pre-existing community trying to survive and so could juxtapose collapse and cohesiveness; in Survivors, there are no communities left to begin with.

The big “BUT” is this: after five slow episodes, gradually building the characters, the sixth offered some big pay-offs, bringing back numerous apparently guest figures, plus the putative new government… and then it ended in a dirty great big cliffhanger! Now, there’s easily enough mileage in the show for a second series, and I would guess that the second series is when the show will depart from the source material completely and tell the story that Adrian Hodges really wants to tell… But I couldn’t help but feel somewhat taken for a ride at the end – having invested in a well-made but rather slow and demanding series, I was given next to nothing for my efforts. Plus, if the BBC had opted not to commission a second series, Hodges wouldn’t have got to tell his story anyway. I wonder if the lesson is that it’s better for a show-runner to get his story hammered out at the first opportunity, and worry about leaving himself short of plots for a future series if and when it becomes a problem. House provides an excellent example of a show that apparently told all its stories after a couple of series, but found a brilliantly successful way to find new twists on its formula; Survivors has taken a different approach – I’m hopeful it will be rewarding come the second series, but I’d rather have had a bit more satisfaction from the first.

A show deliberately pitched in an eccentric way was Pushing Daisies, imported from the US and shown by ITV at 9pm in an unusually bold move for imported drama (remember when BBC1 would put the imported Perry Mason on in Saturday primetime? It seems like a lifetime ago). The programme’s heavily stylised, fairytale-cum-cartoon idiom generally found favour with viewers and critics, and it was certainly very enjoyable: Anna Friel and Lee Pace were hugely watchable, working with some very sharp scripts. That said, the overt wackiness was clearly an effort to put across an uncanny plot scenario in a way that was more palatable to the US network than the show’s predecessor Wonderfalls, which also featured Pace in the cast. Indeed, a minor character from Wonderfalls is due to appear in a second-series episode of Daisies. Ultimately Brian Fuller’s experiments with tone proved only marginally more successful than the streetwise style of Wonderfalls: Daisies has been cancelled in the US after two series rather than one. But if you liked Pushing Daisies and would enjoy something similar but with more bite, I can’t recommend Wonderfalls highly enough – it remains available on region 1 DVD.

The second series of David Renwick’s Love Soup aired at around the same time as Pushing Daisies. When I last blogged about it, I expressed doubts about the tactic of adapting it to fit the absence of the leading man from the first series. Alas, it proved enjoyable and funny, but ultimately unsatisfying: the confirmation that Alice had indeed missed her soulmate due to Gil’s heart attack made for a horribly downbeat and unsatisfying ending to the series, even though it had in every other respect been superb. Still, I’m looking forward to the New Year’s Day special of Jonathan Creek, with Love Soup refugee Sheridan Smith, whose turn in the play Tinderbox at the Bush Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush was my only serious theatrical experience of the year, and a really worthwhile one.

Finally for drama, let’s go back to the start of the year for Ashes to Ashes. I perhaps can’t add much to my comments at the time: I enjoyed the setting of the 1980s more, as it means more to me than the ’70s, and certainly don’t think the excellent Keeley Hawes deserved the stick she got for her performances. But I’m not sure I care about Drake’s backstory: the climax showing her parents’ death, with the clown make-up special effect, was mesmerising – but where can they go next? As with Life On Mars, the climactic storyline might end up being nothing to do with Drake’s modern-day life – and I seem to be the only person who felt like Life On Mars ended by taking the viewer for a mug.

Looking ahead to 2009, there are some new series of the shows above to enjoy. A programme I’m particularly looking forward to is Being Human, the BBC3 series commissioned off the back of an excellent pilot earlier this year (the same batch of pilots that gave us the ultimately unmade Phoo Action – which was fun as far as it went, but perhaps would indeed have struggled to maintain a full series). Unfortunately perhaps, the cast has been substantially retooled between the pilot and the series: in particular, Andrea Riseborough is now absent – she was brilliant in the pilot and put in an excellent, and totally contrasting, turn in Channel 4’s The Devil’s Whore this year. That said, she’s been replaced by Leonora “Sugar Rush” Critchlow so it’s not all bad. The real question is whether the sharp and sassy vision of Toby Whithouse’s pilot has been compromised by BBC3’s apparent desire to pitch it at a slightly younger audience. I do hope not. There is a screening of the first episode at the NFT on January 16th – I might report back then.