SPILT SILK

One grey morning last week, I woke up in a slightly bad mood, switched on the TV set, and was greeted with the 5:55am round of trailers for upcoming programmes. Now, because one of these irritated me so very much at such an early hour, I felt unwisely compelled to post a small but perfectly pithy rant on the first available social networking site which came to hand, one which went something like this - because I have since tweaked some of my punctuation errors with the benefit of hindsight...

That BBCTV "Silk" trailer truly is the most cringe-makingly awful thing to appear on my TV screen in a very long time (and I'd just seen the horrible "EastEnders" one on before it). 

From the "Rottweiler" reference, through some Stuke shouting, and on into the "professional not personal" exchange, it looks like the biggest load of old cliche-ridden tosh imaginable... (not that I could credit anyone involved with all that much imagination…)

Big mistake...

You see, perhaps rather interestingly, that small "rant of the morning" (which was doing little more in the great scheme of things other than distracting me from the horrors of watching the beginning of that day's "BBC Breakfast") genuinely garnered this response:

I was involved in the early development of that show! Have you ever watched it? It's crafted with a lot of love and care by some really clever and committed people!

Which is the sort of tiny event happening in my life which, as you know, would inevitably set me thinking…

And thinking will, of course, more likely than not, get me into even more trouble…

Still, no matter.

Here goes nothing…

After all, that particular person has been on my "people I vaguely knew" list for quite a few years now and this (THIS!! THIS!!!) was the first thing that I'd written that she had ever chosen to remark upon.

I guess it must have been that "lacking in imagination" barb…

And I only added that because I'd finished the previous sentence with the word "imaginable" and thought that the wordplay played well with the sentiment being expressed, which only goes to show something or other...

Ah! The perils of over-thinking your thoughtlessness...

To be honest, I am, quite frankly, astonished at this response anyway. Not because of the content (because everyone is entitled to their opinion), but simply because me and my little ways are so used to being so completely and utterly inconsequential so as to believe that nobody really cares what I might think in one way or another about anything. So, to actually get some kind of reaction, especially from someone who actually cares about the thing that I was criticising, and who also turns out to have been involved in its creation is, quite honestly, almost unbelievable...

And more than a tad embarrassing, if truth be told.

I mean... Who'd have thought it...?

Oh, I know that it's easy to criticise when you don't have to do it yourself... but, as consumers, we are, after all, allowed to dislike the things that are created for us...

"Those that can, do, those that can't… complain about it incessantly on the internet…"

…just as I know that nobody else would want to watch a television drama that I wrote, or even a TV channel that I was controller of, if such things ever came to pass in some very unlikely alternate universe.

There would be no bloody soap operas on mine, for a start, nor any "reality" shows or "talent" shows, and not all that much sport, either… So there might be very little in the way of programming at all, which would at least be an "interesting" way to run a television service, I suppose…

Now, it might very well turn out that series three of "Silk" is the most brilliant, award-winning and unmissable drama of the year, but there's still no way that I would be drawn to it by that ghastly trailer. But then again, what do I know about anything? I've never felt the need to watch "Waterloo Road" and that's won awards, and people seemed to like "Ripper Street" even though I realised that it was "not my sort of thing" after only three minutes.

The problem for me is that a lot of TV Drama these days really is a load of old cliche-ridden drivel, and I do genuinely believe that a lot of the people currently writing it must have honed their craft in the unreal worlds of soap operas and computer gameplay when it comes to notions of plotting, which is all well and good when you're dealing with audiences with the attention spans of the average mayfly, but doesn't necessarily make for good drama.

Popular, maybe, but good…?

Please…

You see, I still believe that there is a difference, and just because something is hugely popular, that alone is not enough to justify calling it good, no matter how many awards and how much adulation it might receive.

Perhaps, as a viewer, I've got to an age where I've slipped out of the all-important young aspirational professional demographic and these shows are not really meant for the likes of me, although, given the way that young, aspirational professionals are generally portrayed, often as coke-snorting hedonists dwelling in some scary facsimile of the great metropolis, I think that I'm rather pleased not to be associated with them.

Of course, when they are persuaded to comment upon or defend their art, there is a certain arrogance amongst many the broadcasting professionals (almost as much as I have myself…), and many of them are still displaying those old familiar Oxbridge superiority complexes despite the democratisation of the broadcasting business since the fusty old days of the tweed-suited, pipe-smoking brigade. This can mean that any kind of criticism, especially coming from an "inferior" intellect, is taken very personally as if, by finding their output less that magnificent, somehow you are daring to imply that they are slightly less than perfect themselves.

The attitude appears to be that, not unlike the people running the banks, they are paid very well to do this job so this must mean ipso facto that they must be the best people to do it, and, because such great minds as theirs are producing this stuff, it must be good because they say it is, and what do mere viewers like you rabble understand about it anyway?

Of course I know that there's a lot of hard work involved in making any TV show, and I also know that, just as in the movie business, nobody generally sets out to make something that's bad, even if that's how it ultimately turns out. To someone like me, the problem seems to be that a lot of what passes for drama on television and in the cinema these days is, quite frankly, bloody awful, and to find someone admitting that they've had a hand in such things and, furthermore, finding out that they might actually be proud of it in some way, is a very confusing fact to accept, because we all know that it could and should be better and we deserve to get better, and the old adage "A country gets the television it deserves…" should no longer necessarily apply.

However, since when has anyone working in TV Drama ever given a rat's kidney about what the civilians, those unwashed non-broadcasters, think anyhow? They may occasionally make a feedback programme or two, just to make themselves appear to be accountable, but the appearances of the professionals when they do condescend to appear, is always tinged with an air of smug arrogant superiority which implies that the ignorant viewer really doesn't know what they are talking about. Not only that, but most of the TV professionals I have known over the years have claimed that they rarely watch any television themselves anyway, usually before getting a bit drunk and then insisting upon playing a tape of one of their old shows to round off the evening...

The production environment is also a situation where one opinion can basically be treated as if it is almost God-like, and so much fawning and gushing goes on that it must be very difficult to be the one person in the room who can see the bilge that they are churning out for what it actually is and actually feel brave enough to say something.

The Emperor's new clothes again, perhaps…?

Interestingly there are few other professions where the rewards and awards are so profligate for just doing your job. When my Uncle Danny came up from his shift down the pit, I'm sure that he never got a round of applause or a trinket for his mantelpiece for "Best  Supporting Miner" on a shift well done.

Meanwhile I pity some of the actors involved in some of these productions because I genuinely don't know how they can find a way to bring themselves to say some of those wretched lines (I'm sure the pay cheque helps) or perform them in the way that the "Director" instructs them to.

Mind you, I am also of the opinion that it is really unwise to allow actors to speak about anything unless they're reading other people's words… (c.f. That big chap who used to be in "Casualty" appearing in court describing his attackers as being "like two hyenas bringing down an old water buffalo" for God's sake… or anything Saint Helen of Mirren might grandly pronounce upon…)

So, after all of this unreasonable ranting, what have we actually learned today, other than I have no real sense of proportion at all, and a whole bag of chips on my shoulder? Well, probably not all that much, actually, other than the fact that certain rants are best left for the blog, and people can either choose to agree or disagree with them as they like in a calm, safe and ultimately insignificant little backwater like this is.

It is still a hateful, hateful trailer, though… and, if you do happen to be the person who put it together, then I'm sorry, but it certainly wouldn't persuade me to waste an hour of my Monday evenings watching that show, and if you honestly believe that those thirty seconds are a representation of good drama and how human beings actually behave, then perhaps you're really not as good at this business as you like to think you are…

Meanwhile, my copy of Charlie Brooker's "Screen Burn" has just turned up…

I think I may be letting them off lightly…