GlassGlossGloom: In TV Dramaland

Last night, being too weary for anything else, I found myself watching BBC2's new, much-hyped, much-trailed big-name drama series, MotherFatherSon. My expectations weren't terribly high – but what I saw was even worse than I'd anticipated: a highly polished showcase for every tired cliché in the 'serious contemporary drama' book, and all enacted with such ponderous solemnity that it would have taken very little tweaking to turn the whole thing into a rather good spoof.
  Richard Gere – yes, that Richard Gere (he should have been better advised) – plays one of those immensely powerful media barons who, as we all know, are running the world. He's flown into Britain to sort out various business and family affairs – but first he drops in on the Prime Minster (who turns out to be a genial black man) and they have a loaded conversation about shortbread and fruit cake. Yes, really – you might not have thought it possible to have a loaded conversation about shortbread and fruit cake, but it is. Every single exchange of words in this massively self-important drama is taut, portentous, loaded with subtext, punctuated by pregnant silences, and delivered to the accompaniment of long meaningful looks.
 What's it all about? As the mists clear, we are given enough clues to gather that – as the title suggests – there's all sorts of trouble between Gere and his son, who edits his London newspaper, and between said son and his mother, Gere's ex-wife (played by the excellent Helen McCrory, who manages to breathe some life into her part – no mean feat), and between Gere and his ex-wife. There's a story brewing about the ex-wife getting too friendly with a man at a homeless centre where she volunteers. And there's a mysterious, much bigger story lurking beneath that, being investigated by two ethical journalists (the maximum permitted number in any TV newsroom), one of whom is newly sacked and, of course, dying.
 The editor, Gere's son, is a complete mess. He spends his time staring anxiously into the middle distance, rarely showing a spark of life except when he stirs himself to stuff his nose with large quantities of cocaine. Even as TV drama newspaper editors go, this one is deeply unconvincing – as is the high-gloss newsroom, full of underoccupied 'journalists' with nothing better to do than stare silently at the passing scene. As we know from last year's ludicrous TV drama, Press, newspaper editors live in expensive glass-and-chrome apartments with fine views across the city, and have depersonalised sex with high-end call girls. The sex this editor has is so weird it's hard to watch – with a straight face, anyway. And he follows it up on this occasion by snorting even more cocaine than usual, washing it down with whisky, and ending up the next morning collapsing with a brain haemorrhage. This brings his parents rushing to the operating theatre to watch as a surgical team opens his skull – a final treat for the viewers. The parents watch from a kind of VIP viewing gallery – behind glass, of course. There's an awful lot of glass in this drama – great sheets of the stuff everywhere in this high-rise glass city, a city of glass and gloss and gloom. It's the Anywhere capital of TV Dramaland. 

Technical Note 2

From the responses I've had to my recent note about commenters encountering problems in posting on this blog, I've concluded tentatively that (a) You should be all right with Chrome and Firefox (which account for the vast majority of the Nigeness audience, according to my stats), but you might get problems with Safari and other browsers, and (b) There may be a problem with commenting via mobile phone, but I have no firm evidence on that. Anyway, keep 'em coming (unless you're a certain Bangalore-based removals firm). 

Second Chances and Top Novels

Under the curious headline here (on the BBC News website) is quite an interesting story: Cambridge University is going to use the clearing process to offer a second chance to students from 'deprived' backgrounds who narrowly miss getting a place on their initial application. As this is not a quota as such, and ethnic origin is not taken into account, it seems a sensible enough attempt to redress an undoubted imbalance. I knew things were bad, but I was startled to read that these days only two per cent of Cambridge students are white working-class. The percentage was certainly very much higher in my day – but there was a reason for that. As Charles Moore remarked in last week's Spectator:
'The truth is that no policy ever devised has seriously challenged the dominance of hereditary elites at Oxford and Cambridge, except for one. This was a thing called the grammar school, but you don't hear much about it these days.'

On a quite unrelated matter (and with a double tip of the hat to Dave Lull and Frank Wilson), I've been reading about a new list of the 100 Top Novels. What makes this one interesting is that the sole criterion is aggregate library holdings. And the most widely held novel in libraries worldwide is... Don Quixote. I must admit I was surprised (and I wonder if the figures include all published versions of the title, including abridgements, children's editions, graphic novels, etc.). The literary monument that is the full and unabridged Don Quixote is surely one of the least read of all the great novels (and I suspect Moby-Dick runs it fairly close). Everybody 'knows' Don Quixote, but how many have read it in its entirety? I know I haven't (nor, to my deeper shame, have I ever read all through Moby-Dick). Strange that a Great Unread like Don Quixote should be the book most frequently found on library shelves... The rest of the top five are much less surprising – Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Even I've read all of those.






 

Blackcap

Not my photograph, but all through this winter I've been enjoying watching a hen Blackcap, very like the one in the picture, who has been haunting the garden, feeding on suet cakes and mealworms. All through my early years, I seldom saw a Blackcap. They tended to behave like the other warblers, singing generously but staying out of sight – and they were strictly summer visitors. Now, having discovered the benefits of garden bird feeders, they are overwintering here and have become quite a common bird of the suburbs. Common but never commonplace – in their subtle, unshowy way, they are surely one of our most beautiful small birds. And the female, with its chestnut cap, is every bit as beautiful as the black-capped male.

'really shocking habits of classification'

'Scarcely anything was attractive to her in its natural state – indeed, scarcely anything was decent until it was clothed by the opinion of some authority. Her ideas about habit, character, duty, love, marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book of popular quotations, and were totally unrelated to the emergencies of human living ... In her behaviour Anna was a harmless girl, mild except where her prejudices were concerned, neat and industrious, with no graver fault than priggishness; but her mind had really shocking habits of classification ... She had none of the delicacy that goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy curiosity which justifies itself by an expression of horror.'

That's Willa Cather, writing about the elder sister of her heroine Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark (which I'm reading, slowly and with relish, at present). What a brilliant, insightful description of a certain kind of priggish closed-mindedness that is still very much with us, though it now takes different forms and classifies under different headings.
The more I read of Cather, the more luminous and magical I find her writing. Those of her admirers who regard her as the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century may well have a point...

Sore Heads in Reykjavik

Yesterday, as well as being St David's Day and Richard Wilbur's birthday, was also Beer Day in Iceland. I discovered this some time last night on the BBC World Service, where an interesting feature told the story. Iceland, a country which has (or had) its share of teetotallers, brought in prohibition of all alcoholic drinks in 1915 – a ban that was relaxed slightly in 1922 when the Spaniards refused to buy any more Icelandic fish unless Iceland agreed to import Spanish wines. So wine was no longer prohibited. Then, in 1935, a referendum resulted in the legalising of all alcoholic drinks – except, bizarrely, 'strong' beer, i.e. beer with anything more than a paltry 2.25% alcohol content. It was feared that freely available beer would have a deleterious effect on the nation's youth. However, with spirits and wines now legal, the nation's youth – and many of their elders – found ways of getting far drunker than they would have done on beer. Spirits were routinely added to the under-strength beer, and disgusting improvised cocktails of whatever was at hand were routinely drunk – just like my teenage years, when my friends and I would raid our parent's cocktail cabinets, take a bit from every bottle and mix the lot together into a kind of malign punch, guaranteed to make you first very drunk and then very ill. 
  In 1985 the teetotal justice minister banned pubs from adding spirits to beer (how on earth was that enforced?), and that proved the last straw. Eventually, on March 1st, 1989, beer of all strengths was legalised, and prohibition was at an end. Ever since, the anniversary – Beer Day – has been celebrated with epic pub crawls. There will be sore heads in Reykjavik today.

March

Today, St David's Day, is Richard Wilbur's birthday. He would have been 98 today if he were still with us. Here, in the month of his birth, he observes, with his wonderfully sharp eye, the fate of gale-stripped beech leaves...

March

Beech leaves which might have clung
Parching for six weeks more
Were stripped by last night's gale
Which made so black a roar

And drove the snow-streaks level.
So we see in the glare
Of a sun whose white combustion
Cannot warm the air.

From the edge of the woods, in gusts,
The leaves are scuttled forth
Onto a pasture drifted
Like tundras of the north,

To migrate there in dry
Skitter or fluttered brawl,
Then flock into some hollow
Like this, below the wall,

With veins swept back like feathers
To our prophetic sight,
And bodies of gold shadow
Pecking at sparks of light.