While the book has been available for a week or two now, Pamela and I only had the opportunity to see it for the first time a couple of days ago. It was a wonderful, gratifying experience. Here Pamela, who designed the book, gets her first peek at her handiwork while I try to take it all in.
ADD fellow that I am, I’m already looking ahead to The New Horror Handbook, which is due out at the end of October. These are the moments that make all of the other ticks of the daily-grind clock worth it. Finally, a brilliant light at the end of the tunnel.
For all of the ink and pixels spilled over every sniffle and sigh of the Victoria "Posh Spice" & David Beckham relationship, it's interesting to find that poll results released last month from mobile phone service provider T-Mobile found that UK residents' favorite celebrity marriage was that of Dawn French and Lenny Henry. (You can, of course, enjoy a career-spanning interview with Lenny in the pages of 30 Years of British Television -- your helpful author.)
French, you'll remember, is the star of The Vicar of Dibley and one half of comic duo French & Saunders; Lenny Henry is the outrageous food maestro Gareth Blackstock in the sitcom Chef. (Check out the clip above for a French & Saunders sketch that not only features French and Henry, but also finds them playing opposite real-life marrieds Jennifer Saunders and Ade Edmondson.) Together they trounced such celebrity pairings as the aforementioned Posh and Becks (4th place), Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne (2nd), and former Prime Minister Tony Blair and wife Cherie (8th).
Other results of T-Mobile's adventures in public opinion:
David Jason (Touch of Frost, Open All Hours) proved to be the most lasting television icon
Doctor Who (3rd place) and EastEnders (8th) the most enduring shows
The A-Team (8th place) among things that should've lasted longer than they did
Last month in my entry about British TV Steven Moffat taking over the reins at Doctor Who, I mentioned that the writer's credits included Coupling, Jekyll and Press Gang. Since then it's been brought to my attention that not everyone in the US knows Press Gang, which is a very good point, and a very sad state of affairs. (Although it aired on the US cable station Nickelodeon at some point, it has yet to receive a North American VHS or DVD release. Get yourself a region free DVD player and treat yourself to the UK boxed set available on Amazon's UK site.)
Where to begin? Technically Press Gang was a children's television show that ran on ITV in the UK between 1989 and 1993. I say "technically" because, though it was aimed at a young audience and starred young people, it remains in many ways one of the most grown up shows ever made.
Now we're not in the Beverly Hills 90210 land of "grown up" television here, where "grown up" is shorthand for heavy-handed "very special" episodes about drinking, drugs and pregnancy that have plagued television in one form or another since the '50s. While Press Gang hit upon drug abuse and gun control in some of its episodes, the series as a whole concerned itself more with what it's like to be a teenager during those moments when the curtain slips and you catch a glimpse of the darker, more complex workings of the world around you.
The teens in this case work for the Junior Gazette, a newspaper affiliated with the town's major daily that concentrates on news relevant to young people. Nearly all of the writers, editors and other personnel have been forced (or "press ganged," if you will) to work on the paper by their school as a disciplinary measure, in many cases the last stop before out and out expulsion.
The Junior Gazette is run by control freak editor Lynda Day (Julia Sawalha, better known Stateside as daughter Saffy on Absolutely Fabulous) who rules her newsroom with an iron fist, very much a junior exaggeration of Margaret Thatcher. Her constant foil/sometimes love interest Spike (Dexter Fletcher, an English actor), a smart-ass American newly transplanted to the UK, brings her out of herself even as he infuriates her. Other characters include shy overachiever Sarah (Kelda Holmes), Lynda's loyal assistant editor Kenny (Lee Ross), and money-obsessed ad salesman (salesboy?) Colin (Paul Reynolds).
While it's hard to believe Spike's one-liners were ever very funny, there is a great deal of genuinely effective humor in Press Gang. Like most of Moffat's programs, the funny moments in this one are almost always derived from what the audience knows about the characters before they open their mouths. (Check out the clip above for a beautiful example of this.)
But be warned, this is not a comedy, but a drama that often has light moments. People die in Press Gang, and their deaths have consequences. And in one of the best pieces of dialog from the entire series, Lynda Day tells us a thing or two about consequences:
Look, I'm sorry you died, OK? I do care, but to be perfectly honest with you, I don't care a lot. You had a choice. You took the drugs. You died. Are you seriously claiming no one warned you it was dangerous? Pardon my saying, but it takes a lot to convince you there's a health risk.
I mean have you had a look at the world lately? Just how dumb do you think it's safe to be around here? There's plenty of stuff going on that kills you and you don't get warned at all. So sticking your head in a crocodile you were told about is not calculated to get my sympathy.
You're dead and I do care. But you were weak and stupid and you made a bad choice. And actually that isn't a crime. It just happens to have the death penalty. You had a warning, you had a choice. You got it wrong. Sorry. That's life for you.
There's always that shudder of dread whenever one clears the throat and dares bring up a classic sketch by those Oxbridge lads from Monty Python. Do it in the right circles (and you never know when you're IN those circles until it's too late) and you know there will be some OCD individual or other who will insist on reciting the entire bit, no matter how many times his (and it IS usually a he, I'm afraid) partner tugs his arm and says "Oooh, not here Jerry." He can't help it.
For nearly 40 years we British TV fans, and a great number of "casual dabblers" besides, have been brought up on the group's verbal acrobatics and, as a result, can no more resist the compulsion to go on about our inability to foresee the Spanish Inquisition than we can stop a recitation of our social security number once we've begun. And one of our chief Pythonic delights: the ex-parrot.
It's a Norwegian Blue parrot specifically, dead though he might be, that Michael Palin has tried repeatedly to sell John Cleese all of these decades: "beautiful plumage." And now an assistant curator of natural history in England has popped up in the headlines saying he discovered the fossilized remains of the Norwegian Blue -- its wing, actually -- in Denmark. That said, the bird could also have flown in Norway, he says. This piece, which comes to us by way of Yahoo! India (who knew?), includes the following bit of Pythonesque wit from the good Dr. David Waterhouse himself:
"I specialise in bird fossils and am also a Python fan, so I have lived with jokes about dead parrots for years. Obviously we were dealing with a bird bereft of life, but the tricky bit was establishing it was a parrot."
There are certain truths that every British television fan must come to terms with sooner or later:
Many British programs, like their American counterparts, are crap
If you really want to see the best offerings from across the pond, you have to invest in a region free DVD player
Chances are extremely good that your favorite British TV actor is woefully underpaid by Hollywood standards.
It’s this last fact of life that often lures performers from Over There to Los Angeles to try their hand at breaking into Hollywood. The number who actually make the transition to any degree is depressingly small.
One who has made that leap is Louise Lombard, best remembered Stateside as Evie Eliot, one half of the 1920s era sister act of couturiers in the 1990s BBC series The House of Eliott. (The French & Saunders clip above not only captures the flavor of that costume drama beautifully, but it also features Lombard and co-star Stella Gonet.) More recently, she moved to LA and has become a regular on CSI as Det. Sofia Curtis.
Recently the 37-year-old actress returned to England to star in the BBC’s Kiss of Death as Kay Rousseau, a world-weary detective still smarting from being wrongly (or possibly rightly) hauled up before a jury for the death of her baby daughter. You can learn more about the series and what Lombard’s been up to in this article from The Independent. I will leave you with her initial impressions about being back in Ol’ Blighty:
“I hadn’t been back for a good two years, and when I first returned I had a moment of culture shock. We were rehearsing on Tottenham Court Road, and when I mooched along to the sandwich shop at lunchtime, I was taken aback. Everything looked so smart and so different from what I had been used to. It looked like a film of London.”
I would like to interrupt our normally scheduled round of British telly musings to alert all who concern themselves with such things that the book 30 Years of British Television — yes, thank you, the reason your’s truly pops up on this patch of the Web a few times each week — can now be acquired on Amazon for about the price of 5 gallons of petrol in the US.
Next to a pair of geriatric gerbils, this little tome is the closest thing I have to a child, and it pleases me to no end to be able to offer to you copies of that child for the humble sum of $19.95.
Leave it to the creator of that unstoppable champion of right and wrong, Horace Rumpole, to cry foul when the Powers That Be dare to tamper with the classics. Writer John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey and the gentleman who wrote a screenplay for the 1981 television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, told BBC Radio 4's Today program that he didn't like what he was hearing about the forthcoming cinematic retelling of that classic tale.
In particular, Mortimer objected to rumors that the new film, set to hit British theaters later this year, avoids the religious and homosexual undertones of the story of Oxford students Charles Ryder and Teddy-bear loving Lord Sebastian Flyte. [Taking a quick look at the trailer above does give some fans of the original series pause.]
Leaving aside recent revelations in Valerie Grove's authorized biography, A Voyage Round John Mortimer, that the author's Brideshead script wasn't actually used in the 1981 production starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews, Mortimer's concerns with staying true to the original story will be seconded by many. The original series was hailed as a landmark event when it was aired in the U.S. on PBS's Great Performances program and, for many in North America, was the "gateway drug" that hooked them on British television drama for a lifetime.
In 30 Years of British Television (just a gentle plug, readers; there now, it's all over), Mortimer recalls his visits to San Francisco this way:
"I have this odd effect on San Francisco because when I did Brideshead they had Lord Sebastian look-alike contests, and all the young men were carrying their Teddy bears down to the marina. Now they have Hilda [Rumpole’s wife] look-alike contests."
No, not entirely relevant I'll grant you, but it's such a whimsical image to be left with, don't you think?
Good heavens — you quit your obsessing over all things British television for a year or two to go off and try to be a productive member of society (no, it DIDN’T take, thank you for asking), and you miss a televisual act of cannibalism that, quite frankly, would be more at home between the covers of my other book (The New Horror Handbook, and again, thank you for asking).
It seems back in January the helpful souls at PBS decided Masterpiece Theater needed some sprucing up. Polarization being all the rage these days, they opted to separate that nearly 40-year-old institution into three seasons throughout the year. So we now have:
Masterpiece Classic (Jan. to May): Like Coca Cola Classic, it’s essentially all the costume dramas you remember this series for — a lot of Jane Austen characters waiting around for the right to vote, earn a living, and to never again see a dance floor after their first marriage.
Masterpiece Mystery! (Summer): Ah, the very act of cannibalism to which I was referring at the outset. Here we find all of the mystery series that once had an entire year to unfold. I distinctly remember the groundwork being laid for this shotgun wedding back in 1995 when Prime Suspect 4 was shoe-horned into Masterpiece Theater, presumably for budgetary reasons. For all the Charles Dickens and Jane Austen characters who regularly inhabited that space, it must’ve been a bit like training one’s replacement. Fortunately this year we get the inevitable Inspector Lewis series, which sees everyone’s favorite Inspector Morse sidekick play the crusty detective with a heart of gold. The latest news? On May 15th, Alan Cumming (X-Men: X2) was announced to be the host for Masterpiece Mystery.
Masterpiece Contemporary (Fall): Here we will find stories that take place in modern times. First up: The Last Enemy, which “follows a group of characters — including a scientist, an aid worker, and a desperate father — who are each trying to deal with crises in their own lives when they unwittingly get caught up in a global mystery.” Admittedly pretty vague stuff. Still, it stars Robert Carlyle (Cracker: “To Be a Somebody,” Trainspotting), one of the best British actors of the day.
While these changes are all very wonderful, one can’t help feeling something like the parent of a child who has just entered those awkward teen years. Only yesterday they were such sweet, enjoyable creatures. And now? Now you just hope they won’t dabble in drugs, knock over that antique vase, or resort to cannibalism. Oops, Masterpiece Mystery, too late.
A hearty congratulations to Steven Moffat. It was announced this week that the writer of such British television greats as Coupling, Press Gang, and Jekyll will be taking over the reins of the legendary Doctor Who series from departing show runner Russell Davies. Moffat has written several episodes since the reboot of the series a few years back.
It’s long been the opinion of your’s truly that Moffat is one of the best television writers of his day, displaying a mastery of dialog and a willingness to push the bounds of what’s gone before in terms of narrative. It’s one thing to experiment with timelines and points of view in a speculative program like Doctor Who; it’s quite another to do so in a situation comedy or children’s drama. [Be sure to read my interview with Moffat's better half, Sue Vertue, and her mum, Beryl, in 30 Years of British Television, in which we discuss Coupling, Doctor Who and the rest - your pushy author.]
Check out the Coupling episodes “The End of the Line” (Season 2) and “Split” (Season 3), as well as the Press Gang episode “Friendly Fire” (Season 5) and the series finale, “There are Crocodiles,” to get a taste of Moffat at his best. And for heaven’s sake, if you haven’t seen Jekyll, do yourself a favor and track down the DVD straight away.
