Prattlefacts

The Poorness of Margaret & The Dimbleby Code

2010-02-03T04:40:00.000-08:00

American comedian David Cross has had his comedy pilot The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret commissioned as a series for More4. I'm not familiar with David Cross but I'm very happy for him and wish him all the best.

The original pilot was part of Channel 4's Comedy Showcase series, so why More4 have jumped in & decided to make this their first original comedy project is a source of bafflement to me. It's disappointing that a British digital channel with limited resources & a dependance on imported programming is focusing on transatlantic talent. Comedy on Channel 4 could really do with an intelligence shot, so it's even more depressing in a way that Mr Cross was passed up in favour of other, broader efforts like Phoneshop.

Together with the Showcase pilot for loveable Rhys Darby from New Zealand, & the forthcoming British series for Matt Le Blanc from Friends, we're beginning to see an odd pattern emerging. Comedy is something of a religion here and, at the risk of sounding like a fanatic, it makes little sense to me to avoid our culture in favour of projects with a whiff of getting sold abroad.

Meanwhile, in the BBC's increasingly presenter-led history section, we see the much-praised A History Of The World in 100 Objects shoved to Radio 4 in favour of EXACTLY THE SAME SHOW presented by David Dimbleby, only with half the content and a catalogue of shots of "the British Martin Sheen" wandering through greenery in a windcheater.

Goodnight Swedeheart

2010-01-15T10:48:00.000-08:00

It would be a shame if Wallander did not return for a third series. Much-publicized & so high profile you'd need to open the skylight, it nevertheless remains one of those projects that nobody asked for and no-one seems to regard with much excitement. "Ingmar Bergman meets Midsomer Murders" was the rather lazy Radio Times verdict.

Yet it achieves something that detective dramas tend to do every decade or so, which is strike a perfect balance between subject matter, imagery and music. Wallander offers pretty much what any modern police series offers - murky conspiracies, shocking violence, a lead character with a troubled home life - but transforms them via its highly distinctive atmosphere. In this
respect it can take its place alongside the likes of Inspector Morse and Twin Peaks.

Also it is the best part Kenneth Branagh has had for a very long time. The almost comic level of tragedy Kurt Wallander suffers requires someone you can really put up with for 90 mins. Now he's into middle age Branagh looks like someone who has been broken down but who still remains essentially decent despite the grinding self-pity. Like Robbie Coltrane in Cracker it's
a pleasure of sorts to be in his company, you just wish everyone would leave the poor self-destructive sod be.

The BBC haven't done themselves any favours scheduling the Swedish version of Wallander on BBC 4, which is generally regarded as superior - would you bother with a British version of Law & Order with Five showing the genuine article? The Branagh version finds itself in the odd position of being the slick Hollywood-style attempt, but in my view is a lot better than that
and deserves more respect.

DOCTOR BOO-HOO

2010-01-11T09:03:00.001-08:00

Although you'd be forgiven for thinking that David Tennant's departure from Doctor Who was something akin to the Messiah falling, the massive End Of Time story was also the last script from Russell T Davies, widely-credited with reviving the series in 2005.

Whatever you think of Davies as a writer it's reasonably safe to say that his work for Who was not always of the highest quality. As his contributions went on they became a strange fusion of half-baked ideas from other things. To a greater extent a lot of the best Doctor Who has taken its inspiration from literary or pop culture sources, but at least other scribes finished their thought. Looking at something like The Next Doctor, which envisaged a meaty alternate Doctor played by David Morrissey up against a proto-feminist supervillain surrounded by yapping Cyber-blankets, hatching a vague plan which involved a gigantic mobile garage with legs, you get something that sounds fantastic in a paragraph, but over an hour of multi-million pound drama doesn't sit so well.

As a long term fan I was also surprised at how, well, fannish Davies' scripts became. From the throwaway use of random 1960s monster the Macra in Gridlock, the wish list of classic villains grew, to the Dalek 'n Davros mash of Stolen Earth/Journey's End through to the reappearance of the Time Lords in the latest outing.

Davies' departure may also herald a new chapter for TV fantasy writing in general. Taking their cue from the "telefantasy" series of the 60s & 70s, we've seen a resurgence of this type of show, albeit one rarely written by people with the literary and cultural experiences of their predecessors. Davies' generation are those that grew up with an instantaneous consumer culture, with arguably shallower references. The British TV sci-fi genre had died in the 90s and the meat and potatoes of the industry had been busy writing soaps and aspirational dramas.

There's no doubting Davies' power as a writer, but he had more an idea of what he wanted to do rather than a fully-formed plan. His successor Steven Moffat, could well be the man who puts Who back on the quality map for me. Like the telefantasy writers of old, he appears to understand what goes into the format as well as being able to pen a good solid adventure story. He may be biting off more than he can chew with some of the "big beasts" he has hired for story duties - Richard Curtis no less, & Simon Nye alongside the tried and tested crop of people like Gareth Roberts & Mark Gatiss. Curtis & Nye are hardly renowned for their fantasy credentials, but who am I to cast doubt at this stage? Moffat is also a big fan of Who across the ages and it will be interesting to see if he lets the "fan gene" overwhelm him as Davies did.

On the whole though, the signs look promising. Matt Smith as the Doctor could well be the most significant casting decision since Heath Ledger became the Joker. There's a masterly writer in charge. And in these recession-hit times the bloated excess of the Tennant years looks to be falling away.

Doctors: A Captive Audience

2009-10-08T04:51:00.000-07:00

Regular viewers of the BBC flagship daytime drama will have observed that a staggering two thirds of the cast have been taken hostage over the last few weeks. Ruth was held hostage the other afternoon and now it looks like Zara is being held against her will for the third time in a row. If anything it's not exactly a good advertisement for the GP profession.

I'm one of those people who think that the soap has kind of ruined a lot of TV drama - look at anything these days and you'll see a tight, ravenous schedule needing to be stuffed for a few mins before vomiting up the results ready for the next course. Unless you're a super writer like Paul Abbott dialogue is mainly perfunctory and to the point, bashing each scene along. Characters behave bafflingly in response to events that needn't necessarily have occurred, Lucas the Allotment Fiend in EastEnders being a prime example.

The difference between a structured way of working and the latest cookie cutter is a marked one, but one broadcasters fail to understand. One of the best Screenwriting MAs in the country, (and stomping ground for many up and coming writers) at De Montfort University in Leicester, sounded a ding dong of doom in my soul a few years ago, when I was told a key aspect of my training would involve shadowing BBC 1's flagship medical/hostage-taking drama... Doctors.

S'Marvel'ous

2009-09-09T07:34:00.001-07:00

As someone who grew up with Nicholas Hammond as Spider Man and Lou Ferringo as The Hulk I envy today's crop, who are treated to fare such as Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man and Edward Norton as Bruce Banner. Marvel have finally managed to pull their finger out and shove it up somewhere decent. What the new superhero movies lack in charm they make up for in wit, sophistication and CGI spectacle. The CGI will all look pants in eight months, but it would be churlish to complain. We're now getting a comprehensive set of comic book movies from all folds.

As many of you know, if you stay past the end credits of Iron Man you get a bonus scene where Downey Jr is approached by Samuel L Jackson wearing an eyepatch. "Hello, I'm Nick Fury and I want to have a bit of a chat." Obviously he puts it a bit less politely than that, but it's the general gist. At the same point after Incredible Hulk, Norton is sitting in a bar when Downey Jr enters. "Hello, I'm Tony Stark and I want to have a bit of a chat." Again, it's delivered a bit sexier in the film.

These dull, perfunctory scenes are all leading towards something called an Avengers movie, where these different heroes will all team up in a definitive comic book pulp mash. The secret behind the Avengers movie excitement is that no-one is actually thinking about it at the moment. Once you get Downey Jr, Edward Norton, L Jackson and whoever else in the room together you then have to establish how it's all going to work. Because when Marvel Studios sit down to have a bit of a conflab about the project they might realize that team up films, be they featuring the world's best superheroes or the world's finest actors, never quite work.

On DVD & Blu-Ray This Month

2009-09-01T04:54:00.000-07:00

Sep 7

Dude, We Glued Our Nuts Together!
Frost/Hitler

Austen Unleashed!
The popular English author is out for revenge when her family are slaughtered by opium dealers. Zhang Ziyi stars.

Sep 14

Jon Culshaw's Funny Detective Agency
Britain's Swankiest Racist
Give My Teenager A Life Experience They'll Probably Forget - The Complete Series One

Sep 21

Sooty - Matthew's Wish
Sooty, Sweep & Soo are summoned to Matthew's deathbed to fulfill a series of tasks in this straight-to-DVD special!

Celebrity SWAT Team
Cheesemaking - The Interactive DVD Game

Sep 28

Wallander - Australian version

It's Raining Chips!
We all know the BBC weather presenting team can cope with anything. But could they run a chip shop? Daniel Corbett, Laura Tobin, Tomasz Schafernaker, Louise Lear and Michael Fish (!) are despatched to Glasgow to find out.

Ralph Fiennes At The UN

Lowest Common Domnominator

2009-08-18T04:36:00.000-07:00

Regaining consciousness on Monday morning, I heard the following words:

"This granny had been fiddling her benefits. Defrauding me and you. The British taxpayer!"

Who was this British taxpayer? Dominic Littlewood, pint-sized consumer champion and pro- haggler and the show is "Saints & Scroungers". It's about the type of people who defraud your benefits system, closely monitored by a team of ANGELS working for your local councils, on your behalf, especially for you. They've got halos, they're just buried under a mound of paperwork and general harrassments.

Mountingly pathological property programmes and de-clutterization doctrines masquerading as antiques shows rule the daytime slots, but every so often the BBC will throw in something a bit different. "Heir Hunters" for example - the everday story of sharks in suits who protect beneficiaries in cardigans from being exploited by an uncaring government.

"Saints & Scroungers" may look bizarre in this current climate - instead of tackling the current recession head on, production companies are looking to either milk the delusion or point and laugh at the detritus - but it follows a long tradition of televised bugbears Auntie Beeb likes to scratch at every so often.

A triumvirate of issues concerning the interaction of the working and aspirational classes regularly appear on the BBC. Immigration is frequently highlighted with a string of "we just thought you'd like to know" reports. Jeremy Paxman's exasperation with anyone to do with a trade union is a familiar sight on "Newsnight". The third is of course the role of the state to provide for the less fortunate.

People with long memories and nothing better to do may recall "Kilroy", where every few weeks a debate about the welfare state would be held in order for ordinary decent taxpayers to belt opinions at the greasy, untelegenic bastards who were scraping away at their hard-earned loot.

"Moneyspinners", hosted by travel-agent-waiting-to-happen Lorne Spicer, was a lifestyle reboot series where poor families were urged to kick their lives up the jacksie and, to coin a phrase, "get a job" (a vocal tradition currently revived by the DJ Jeremy Kyle).

When "Saints & Scroungers" does present those who deserve support, it is like watching the ocular equivalent of an interview at the Jobcentre. An elderly chap with a degenerative eye condition is justified and re-justified for the viewer - first, an explanation from the man himself about how he is losing his sight.

Then an interview with the optician who treated him. You can never be too careful about an optician.

Then a defnitive account of how he has done everything within his power to find work. Not just that. He loves work. Hard work. "I've never been out of work in my life. I love hard work me." You know, just in case you thought... well, maybe you don't need to think. Just because he's old and infirmed it doesn't necessarily mean he's a scrounger, right Dom?

"Benefit Busters", coming soon on Channel 4, will take what the League Of Gentlemen hinted at and make it real. Dependancy as entertainment in now officially engrained. What is worth remembering is that it is the people who are being scrutinized, not the system. Anyone can take a criticism of the welfare state or the current health service and use it as an excuse to question its workings. It's presented as a tough choice when it's really an easy answer. A dangerous culture of casino banking is still in operation. Do we automatically question capitalism?

In a new age of supposed austerity, it would help if a public service broadcaster wasn't running itself like a jamboree.

DOCTOR WHO AND THE HORNET'S MORTGAGE

2009-08-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

When you like Doctor Who it's a bit of a life sentence. It happened quite unobtrusively when I was 11. Sylvester McCoy, the most rubbish of the Doctors, was in charge. Twenty one years later and it's still happening.

There was a saturation point for me a couple of years ago when Doctor Who, Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures (complete with something called "Subs" from a lacksadaisical CBBC) were all running together. Doctor no.8 Paul McGann was appearing in his own audio series on BBC 7. It was enough to yank the brain stem of even the most ardent superfan and yet this was just the backwash from a massive alien iceberg that had hoved through the Doctor Who community almost unnoticed by the wider world.

When the series was off air between 1989 (when I was 12) and 2005 (when I wasn't) there was an outbreak of spin-off product, compiled largely by fans of the show who could do something about it. You could call them enterprising media producers. You could call them professional anoraks. They are somewhere between the two and between them they oversaw a vast array of novels (featuring Doctors 1 - 8), audios (radio plays without a station, for which many of the non-dead Doctors came back) and comic strips.

They weren't just flogging a dead horse. They were paying a blacksmith to knock out some shoes. The idea behind Doctor Who is fiendishly simple and as such could run indefinitely. As this will-powered skyscraper of paper and CDs amassed over fandom the common and garden Whovian would ask themselves the question: just how much do we love this thing?

The series returned and this produced a natural levelling effect. Big Finish Productions were allowed to continue their audio range. The books were honed down in favour of current Doctors. The previous administrations, with their enthusiastic, occasionally inspired, sometimes amateurish attempts at Doctor Who, were given a gentle kick into touch. What had happened in the show’s absence was an unusual hybrid of fan and commerce, which to a certain extent still continues today (proceed to the Big Finish weblink at the base of this article to assess the true extent of the culty mushroom).

Fanaticals of all hues, from fans in the loop through to bona fide TV scribblers, from Emmerdale writers to Seinfeld gagmiths, wrote several dozen audio adventures for leading men Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Paul McGann and that ball is still rolling after 11 years. The only living Doctor missing from proceedings was the most infamous - Tom Baker.

All this changes from next month. A series of audios produced by a devoted variant, this time at the BBC, will see Baker returning as the Doctor. He is teaming up with another elderly man, Mike Yates, a former companion of Baker's predecessor Jon Pertwee. The series, "Hornet's Nest", is a delayed whimper from the seismic impact Tom Baker made on the role in the 70s, but Baker is no ordinary actor and no ordinary Doctor. His recent, bombastic request to vet the script of an imaginary Children In Need special featuring himself testifies to the potential brilliance or appalling wrong-headedness of this new project. With its authentic cover illustration and Dennis Wheatley-esque storyline it could just be a step in the right direction. Either way it will be a colossal explosion amongst a small group of dedicated listeners.

The way I like to view it is that this is what will bridge the gap between "proper" Doctor Who and what materialized while he was away. At once a dalliance and the genuine article, this series may introduce a new audience to the bizarre but irrefutable world of the spin off product, before Matt Smith arrives in 2010 and consigns everything else to the vortex as Eccleston and Tennant did before him.

http://bigfinish.com/

FRIENDS LIKE THESE

2009-08-04T15:14:00.000-07:00

"High costs, tight budgets and a demand for fast results are making it more difficult to get - and keep - good comedies on television."

True, but these are age old questions. Wouldn't it be easier if we just stopped copying the Americans?

The front page of Monday’s MediaGuardian is taken up with Stephen Armstrong's article about the difficulties of securing mainstream primetime comedy hits. Like a lot of views coming from inside the media these days, it addresses many issues from within the walls of the castle, without seeing what's as plain as the nose on its face outside the moat.

With regards to Sky's latest attempts to corner the comedy market, a quote:

"'If they developed the new Friends, they'd get women buying set-top boxes like crazy,' said Lorraine Heggessey, chief executive of Talkback Thames."

Though Heggessey goes on to acknowledge the cynical nature of such a move, the pro-American mindset is clear.

What do I mean by "American comedy"? I refer to what British broadcasters have been trying to imitate for years - the team-led, aspirational, wisecrack-fuelled superhits of Friends or Will & Grace.

It all appeared to start in the nineties, when writers Laurence Marks & Maurice Gran spent a brief period working in the States and came back with an idea to copy the team-writing format. They tried it out on a series they'd created, Birds Of A Feather, which ran quite happily this way before finally peetering out.

There was one problem - it was poor quality. Partly because the pressure cooker atmosphere of the writers room generates a frantic comedy smorgasbord and partly because this approach works brilliantly in America but not here. America is a relatively young country and as such its powerhouse of an entertainment industry has dominated the market in bright and breezy product where the zinger line is all, played against the backdrop of spacious, chronically unaffordable apartments.

It's a shame our writers didn't look sooner to US shows like Cheers or Seinfeld, where the characters were a little darker, the edges a bit frayed behind the killer deliveries. They had more in common with British culture than something like My Family ever did. Now, as Ricky Gervais recently complained, we have to make do with variations on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Britain is class-driven, blinkered and sarcastic. We are now so more than ever, after the aspirational culture promoted partly in these shows led us to the rancid financial bathchair we now sit in.

A wider concern is to see the BBC behaving like an American TV network. It made sense for ITV or Sky to behave this way, with programmes abruptly cancelled and shunted about, the channels seemingly distracted in the scrabble to cram revenue into every available orifice. The BBC has less of these worries and yet, as the Guardian article explains, it pulled Not Going Out despite climbing ratings. Are we to see further schedule yankings from a public service broadcaster?

The shift to this way of thinking is increasingly apparent across the board, with the hiring of Friends scribe Adam Chase by BBC 3 to write sitcom Clone and Andrew Newman of Channel 4's commissioning of a comedy pilot for American comedian David Cross. It seems producers are hoping some comedy sheen will rub off. That's quite aside from the stars of The Wire cropping up in dramas. Clarke Peters and Dominic West are British, but they wouldn't have been given the time of day had America not made them famous.

Comedy is always fast-paced with a rapacious schedule, but it wouldn't do much harm to look back at mainstream hits of the past, such as Only Fools & Horses and see what made them popular to a mainstream audience - a) They were funny, b) They were British and c) As the article explains, they were given time to develop. John Sullivan once remarked that when he was stuck on a Fools & Horses script, he would think what the writers of Frasier would do. Strangely enough, though unaware of Del Boy's existence, Dr Crane's writers cite British comedy as an influence on their output.

When British broadcasters stop trying to run away from the place that made them what they are, only then will you see a stronger sense of identity that is the cornerstone of not just television comedy, but good output in general.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/03/television-comedy-commissioners

On DVD & Blu-Ray This Month

2009-08-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

Aug 3

Watchmen - The Musical
The Best of Teletext
Fay Ripley's Jeepercize

Aug 10

Boat That Rocked II: Rockin' On The Moon

A Slight Gayness In Winter
The stars of BBC1's Torchwood and The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency join forces for this special episode.

Find Me A Dental Receptionist - Series 1

Aug 17

Cooking With David Lynch
The Sid Owen Interactive DVD Game
Chinatown 3 starring Charles Grodin

Aug 24

Supersizers Eat... Each Other
Celebrity Horse Dentist - The Complete Fourth Season
So You Think You Can Gay?

Aug 31

Philip Schofield's Sporting F*ck Ups

The Wire - The Unseen Episodes
Fans of the popular series will be delighted to discover these as-yet unbroadcast episodes! *

EastEnders - The Complete Collection

* please note that this is not the US police drama but the magazine programme about wire installation presented by Robert Llewellyn

Mitchell & Web

2009-07-30T16:35:00.000-07:00

As seasoned EastEnders watchers will know, one of the soap's main strengths is the way it sets up a scene, repeats the same scene over and over again for approximately six months, before resolving the matter in a uniquely unsatisfying, extraordinarily violent way. The Mitchell sisters are a case in point. Locked in a Groundhog Day soap tunnel for quite some time, Ronnie discovers happiness for four minutes before it is cruelly dashed whilst Roxy makes bizarre, seemingly random decisions whilst pushing a buggy.

Last night Ronnie blanked jug-eared Jack, who promptly stormed round to Roxy to chide her for lying in order to get him into bed. I couldn't have given more of a fig. These two were fun when they turned up. Ronnie was dark in a good way. Roxy was just the right side of a dolt. Now Mitchell Sister no.1 pokes holes in johnnies with a pin while Mitchell Sister no.2 invites the man who effectively killed her niece round for something to do. Following this trajectory anything could happen. Why not have Danielle dug up, varnished and mounted on a plinth outside the Vic? That would certainly stir things up in the Square!

Fatally, the Mitchell blondes were anchored to Jack Branning, a one note character who was seemingly invented to peg storylines around. Failing to develop yet in endless circulation, like a cheesey dip at a party, he is more concept than man and has drained the life force from these poor women. He's Nosferatu with Brylcreem.

Occasional Entertainment Blog!

2009-07-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Prattlefacts, an occasional entertainment blog. My name is Lazarus Prattle, former gossip columnist for the Daily Pounce, now a citizen journalist looking for answers in places shallow enough for me to find them.