Dulness

 On the radio this morning, I heard the creator of the recent BBC TV series Marriage talking about the show and its divisive effect on viewers and critics, many of whom loved it and many of whom, myself included, were deeply unimpressed. He seemed like a nice chap, and I warmed to him as he talked feelingly about the dire state of TV drama and its ever increasing distance from anything like life as it is actually lived and people as they actually are. Marriage was a well intentioned attempt to return TV drama to something like real life – but I still think (having somehow ended up watching the whole series) that it was a failure, largely because it was, as so many viewers pointed out, dull. But let's be clear about the nature of that dulness: it was not dull because nothing happened. As someone once said, Waiting for Godot is a play in which 'nothing happens – twice', but it is an enthralling drama and has become a classic. In TV drama, I remember another series in which virtually nothing happened – Roger and Val Have Just Got In, with Dawn French and Alfred Molina. That was ten years ago now, but it still lingers in my memory, and it was utterly gripping at the time. Why? Because the characters at the centre of it (in fact the only characters we see) were so fully imagined and compellingly drawn, as well as brilliantly acted; the script made us believe in them, and want to know what was going on between them – what had happened, why were they the way they were? The direction and editing were tight, intensifying our interest in this seemingly ordinary couple doing nothing very much, and the script said enough and said it naturally, without the contrived pauses, silences and aborted utterances that were so plentiful in Marriage. There, the script was too sketchy to carry much weight,  and the characters too felt sketched in rather than fully realised. As for the direction, with its endless longueurs, this did nothing to dispel the sense of dulness – not the dulness of nothing happening but the dulness of a drama that is ultimately underdeveloped, underimagined.   
  On the radio, the show's creator told how he wrote Marriage during lockdown, just as he was discovering for the first time the music of Bach, which he now listens to to the exclusion of almost anything else. Another reason to warm to him. What a shame he didn't use some Bach as the music for Marriage, rather than that bizarre 'To the side, to the side' business that broke in at the end of every episode.