Television is a transient art form
Although I’d happily confess to watching far more television than is good for me, I have only rarely dipped into the realms of cultured middle-class mass viewing – most particularly the seriously cutting edge, hard-hitting, political, thriller-drama series box sets such as Wired, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Spooks, The Killing and endless others – and therefore am something of an outsider at the smart dinner parties I frequent on average about six or seven times a month.
Even though I’m an oldie, I just don’t feel I have the time in this modern, fast-moving world.
Twenty or thirty years ago, when I had some connections with the British television industry, my peers were fond of peddling the line that Britain boasted the least-worst television in the world – sneeringly looking down on the North American equivalent that allegedly offered hundreds of channels and endless low-quality programming interrupted by advertising breaks every three or four minutes featuring scores of crap commercials.
Being the sort of cove I am, I delighted in contrary argument and made the case that the States actually had the best television in the world. Why? Because there was so much of it – and it came in such relentless fashion – that, amidst all the dross, the truly outstanding programming stood out like a beacon.
Then again, if say some world-shattering event occurred – such as 9/11 or a NASA space rocket flight blowing up just minutes after take-off – Americans would be right there, watching it all unfold live in their living room.
“Now that’s what I would call great television!” was how I’d end my controversial speech, adding that the Americans had gone well past the notion of television still being a novelty that therefore dominated daily life (as it did in Britain). In the States it was just a flickering picture and white noise-lite emitting from the corner of most rooms in their homes – and thereby a relatively unimportant aspect of their lives.
Which was all that television should ever be.
These days, when I take a break from my endeavours on the computer, e.g. having had the television on in the corner of the room all morning, I stretch my legs and nip to my armchair for a perusal of the daily paper and/or perhaps a bite to eat.
As I do I’ll watch whatever is on at the time – it could be The Jeremy Kyle Show, ITV’s Morning Show, Homes Under The Hammer, Motorway Cops, Home and Away, The Doctors, Flog It! – or even some stupid mid-afternoon game show. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s just moving wallpaper. Fifteen minutes later I’ll be back at my desk and work.
Recently I’ve had the ‘experience’ of watching, mind you only because I came across it by accident, the BBC’s one-off ‘revival’ of Are You Being Served?, its highly-successful sit-com from the 1970s or thereabouts.
It’s part of a newly-launched series commissioned by a current BBC executive which apparently includes other similarly re-heated one-off vehicles such as ‘Til Death Us Do Part, Hancock’s Half-Hour and Goodnight Sweetheart.
No doubt he or she was hoping or expecting that this raft of classic revivals would attract two quite different audiences, viz. on the one hand still-living fans of the originals and, on the other, potentially millions of Under-40s (and perhaps the critics) who might enjoy the fare and then go on to become committed fans were, say, any of them to progress towards a brand new series.
This thinking – if indeed it was thinking – was fundamentally flawed before it began because, of course, all television is ‘of its time’ and rarely travels well down the ages. Some would cite Dad’s Army as an enduring success because it still gets repeated even now (for the fiftieth or sixtieth time?), but I’d counter that it’s simply the exception that proves the rule. Plus, all the people I know who are aged Under 40 regard it as quaint, but desperately dated rubbish.
Nearly twenty years ago now someone attempted to revive some of the classic Hancock Half-Hours on ITV by hiring Paul Merton to play Hancock. It was a sad and dispiriting failure. For all Merton’s abilities, he was no Hancock … and if you don’t have Hancock playing Hancock, you have a stone cold dud. The experiment was just embarrassing.
This morning I read a review of the ‘revived’ ‘Til Death Us Do Part on one of the newspaper websites – I won’t reveal which, but let’s just say the programme took a slating and received 1 star out of 5. I can imagine why. Hire someone other than Warren Mitchell to play Alf Garnett and take Alf out of his true period (1965-1975) and it’s just not going to work, is it?
The world has moved on from Alf Garnett, that’s all there is to say.
How could anyone have imagined different? I guess the trouble is once again that what sounds like a neat idea at 0130 hours in the morning towards the end of a boozy Hampstead set dinner party amongst your ‘media luvvie’ colleagues … almost always proves to be a great big pile of doo-doo in the cold light of day.
The new edition of Are You Being Served? that I watched – about a week ago now – was pretty dire, despite the fact that the actors mostly looked just like their original counterparts and did their level best with varying degrees of success. The trouble was that there was no story to speak of and the script was poor.
Several characters were made to mention the fact that the programme was set in 1988 (as if that mattered at all to 2016 viewers), but the starkest illustration of the depths to which the quality control had sunk was when at one point one character mentioned to another that he’d just had a coffee and a couple of brownies.
And reader, here I kid you not.
The other character responded with a line of the ilk “Oh dear, I hope you flushed twice – I’m afraid that our pipe systems are very old and not in great working order …”
