Category: tv

I return to this from time to time. Dennis Potter was one of the great television writers. In 1994, he learned he had cancer. He resolved to finish his last works, and undertook a final interview with Melvyn Bragg for Channel 4 just before completing them, to close out his writing life. Afterwards, a transcript of the interview was released, which I still have somewhere. I remember being spellbound in front of a little tv set, watching it without getting up once.

There’s a piece early on when he talks about, in full knowledge of his impending death, looking at the plum tree in blossom outside his window, and seeing it anew as “the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be.” And that’s when I started spending five minutes every day for myself to just look around.

This remains, for me, both an elevating and a heartbreaking watch. Even now.

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I’d love to hunt down a copy of this one day. Check out that cast. It also included Ciaran Hinds. I remember Tim Roth’s performance being one of his most exuberantly evil. It was a tv play on BBC 1 in 1990, part of The Play On 1 strand that I think was a belated and brief replacement for Play For Today. Because, back then, we could do strands of hour-long standalone originals on tv.

Written by Malcolm McKay, whose Wikipedia entry surfaces this note about another play in the Play On 1 strand that he wrote, AIRBASE:

His writing has always dealt with extreme behaviour and includes the controversial BBC play Airbase which dealt metaphorically with drug abuse on a USAF base in England. The play achieved notoriety after it was mentioned in Parliament and the Lords after Prime Minister Thatcher demanded a copy, the Chairman of the BBC, Marmaduke Hussey publicly apologised for the content, and Mary Whitehouse, of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, issued a second apology to President Reagan on the behalf of the British people.

Anyway, this is what YELLOWBACKS was about:

Chilling drama set in the future when draconian powers have been given to the authorities under the new Secret Emergency Provisions of the Dangerous Disease Act. Dr Juliet Horwitz finds herself hooded, handcuffed and interrogated by a ruthless pair, as does a scientist Alex McPherson, both of whom are the key to finding Martin Pitt, a virus carrier who has disappeared.

I watched it on the night it was broadcast, and haven’t ever seen it since. The AIDS-inflected plot had faded from memory, and I just retain the sense of its British Dystopia atmosphere, its clever details, the recollection of its grim tension, and some immense acting. We have a vast amount of lost gems in the televisual history of this country. Imagine: The Play On 1 alone generated thirty plays – 60-90 minute films, is my memory – in two or three years.

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These two boxes contain what were for me very formative hours of my youth. They probably surround half of the way I learned to think about non-fiction writing. Possibly even half the way I learned to think.

A particular kind of television that doesn’t really exist any more, except perhaps in very dilute forms. (I also have THE ASCENT OF MAN in the house somewhere, but I didn’t see it as a kid.) Or mutations like the Adam Curtis style.

There’s a thing that’s sometimes called “rhetorical television”: where someone walks around on screen, basically, and tells you what they think on a given topic. Here’s how I perceive the world, they say, and here’s the history and the evidence to back it up. It’s what we in Britain call Reithian, after Lord Reith of the BBC; the idea that tv can be both compelling and educational.

Obviously, I cannot help having grown up in the 1970s: as in the examples above, this form has, as a matter of era and biases, most often been a white guy of a certain age walking around on the screen.

Though this train of thought has suddenly reminded me of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s incredible history of ska music documentary he did for BBC Radio 1, and now I need a copy of that too…

Anyway. Yes. All cultural queries and problems understood and accepted, but I loved these things nonetheless, and am glad to have copies of them.

COSMOS (UK) (US) – CONNECTIONS (UK) (US)

And, if you’ve not heard me talk about CONNECTIONS before, can I take just one minute and eleven seconds of your time?

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Yes, it was co-created and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, and I will die on the weird poisoned hill that is VALHALLA RISING and its perverse glory. But as far as I’m concerned, the banner for this imminent new series on Amazon Prime is that it was co-created and written by my friend Ed Brubaker, better known to you as the creator of Captain America’s Winter Soldier and the line of CRIMINAL crime graphic novels with Sean Phillips.

Feast your eyes. Give thanks.

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