Death by Paradise

The BBC's new fish out of water drama is called Death in Paradise. Like all new series, when I sit down to watch I really, really, really want to love it it. I do. Honest. But...ten minutes in and in our house it was being referred to as Slow Death in Paradise.

Ben Miller is the dark suited New Scotland Yard cop sent to the Caribbean to solve the murder of another British cop. It's a 'locked room' puzzle, the sort usually left to Jonathan Creek to unravel.
But all is not well on the Paradise Island which, since watching the show, we've been calling St Cliche. It really is depressing when something new hits the airwaves with a first episode so weighed down by the well worn.

Our hero, the fish out of water detective, is an asshole, or at least anal - both. No sooner has he landed then he's on the phone to his neighbour asking him to put out the bins. His luggage hasn't arrived and he had no idea that it would be hot in the Caribbean(what?), hence the charcoal-grey suit and lack of sunglasses. Hang on, a Scotland Yard detective who is so stupid he doesn't know that it's hot in the Caribbean? The sound you just heard was my head exploding. There's a goat in the lock-up at the police station, the island force has only one car and the police uniforms are being inhabited by comedy cops.
I don't mind that Miller is the sort of detective Scotland Yard would rather have stranded on on Island a long way away - actually I like the thought - but the idea that he's been posted there without his knowledge - duh! - is as unbelievable as most of the rest of the set up.
This is the crime equivalent of Doc Martin - lots of 'funny' characters surrounding a curmudgeon. Actually what it is is the kind of show that used to play on kid's tv when I was seven. "The Freewheelers" - the show I used to rush home to watch when I was seven (look it up) had better plotting, characters and dialogue. And yet this sits in prime-time on BBC 1.
Why does everything that has a comic twist have to be dumb? Because this truly is. With it's faux Poirot plot and it's achingly stupid colourful characters and a blurred flashback device that was used on The Last Detective - and it didn't work then. The only vaguely interesting character in the piece was carted off to jail at the end of the episode. (sod the spoiler alert).

Ben Miller may look like an attractive proposition for a BBC1 audience given the popularity of his sketch show Armstrong and Miller but every time he plays a character in a drama it's the same character. Sorry Ben, but by the end of this I couldn't give a flying fig about your detective  - or the CGI lizard you're about to spend another seven episodes living with.

Anyone who tells you that it's just a bit of harmless fun and sunshine to brighten a British winter should be stoned.

It IS possible to do cops and funny and colourful and bright and sunny without the cliched and the moronic.

Watch Justified.

Period Drama From Over Here and Over There

Whilst a sizeable portion of the British TV audience is still in love with Downton Abbey (I elected to jump ship after just one episode of season two) I've been lapping up the altogether more engrossing 'Boardwalk Empire'.

Steve Buscemi as 'Nucky' Thompson

At the end of season one, Enoch "Nucky" Thompson (Steve Buscemi) was basking in the glow of having helped usher in both Warren G. Harding (Malachy Cleary) as President of the United States, and Edward Bader (Kevin O’Rourke) as Mayor of Atlantic City. He also saw his mistress,  Margaret Schroede, played by the sublime Kelly Macdonald, return to his side after briefly leaving him when the full extent of his criminal activities dawned on her.
Meanwhile, as Nucky’s power and influence ascended, a clandestine arrangement between Commodore Louis Kaestner (Dabney Coleman - a great actor in shows like Buffalo Bill and The Slap Maxwell Story), Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) and, possibly least shocking of all, Nucky’s brother (and sheriff of Atlantic City), Eli Thompson (Shea Whigham) was being formed with the intent of bringing down Nucky and dividing his power amongst the conspirators. Keep up, there's so much story going on. By the time the second season starts, the plan is in full swing – and with Nucky seemingly none the wiser.
This is fiction but the kind that is confident enough to use enough truth to make the whole thing seem real. We've seen a young Al Capone, a young "Lucky" Luciano and we're promised a young Bugsy Segal in this new series. 

One of my favourite characters doesn't say a lot but everything about him says so much about this show.Jack Huston plays Richard Harrow – a former Army marksman who initially allies himself with Jimmy.  He's been horribly scarred in the war, so much so that he wears a tin mask over half his missing face, a mask that almost perfectly mirrors the flesh and blood half but is sufficiently tin to make him appear one of the creepiest characters ever seen on television.

Much was made of the 18 million dollar pilot directed by Martin Scorses but the series proper has grown and grown. It's enjoyed widespread critical acclaim, for it's look, it attention to historical accuracy - Downtown Abbey seems to attract more stories about its inacurracies then it does about its less than compelling storylines. As Nucky Thompson Buscemi has proved himself a highly watchable if unlikely leading man.

But a lot of the 'heavy lifting' on this show has been acomplished by writers, producers and directors who grew, if not cut, their teeth on The Sopranos. Producer and Writer Terence Winter adapted the novel Boardwalk Empire having been interested in creating a series set in the 1920s, feeling that it had never properly been explored before. Here the 20's really come to life. He's also joined Tim Van Patten, a regular Sopranos director who brings a confidence and visual style to the show that just oozes Prohibition USA. Boardwalk Empire is violent and sexy and mannered, we feel sympathy for characters who have no right to such emotions - that's how clever the writing is - and we can't wait to find out what will happen next.

This winter I think I'll strick with my Saturday night costume drama and leave the Sunday Night Downton Abbey to those who like their shirts a little more stuffed.

Comedy Drama

I'm of the firm opinion that any drama must have moments of comedy and any comedy must be built on a dramatic structure. Otherwise what have you got?

The Street

One of the bleakest dramas in recent years was Jimmy McGovern's The Street, by God did he put his characters through hell. And yet, even in the darkest corners of those shows there were moments to make you laugh out loud. McGovern knows that lives are not all bleak or all sunny.

Take an hour of your life and look at the emotions you experience: frustration, anger, jealousy, happiness, disgust, pride - and that's just watching Deal or No Deal.

I need all the shades in the dramas I watch and some of the darkest of my favourite shows are the funniest. Since Sky Atlantic popped up on my planner I've found myself hooked on new series and old favourites. Even though I have the box set of The Sopranos I was watching it all over again, week by week, marvelling at the depth of character and subtlety that sits alongside the moments that make me laugh out loud. Of course the trick with funny in a show like The Sopranos is conjuring the unexpected, be it slapstick or a mispronounced word - there's plenty of them, the Wise Guys ain't always too wise - or the incongruous alongside the surreal. The darker the show the funnier the comedy.

The Sopranos

But no-one calls The Sopranos a comedy drama or a dramedy, I suspect that a 'comedy drama' based on 'at home with the Mafia' would have been a very different beast - and, because it would constantly be looking for the laughs, not funny at all. No, I'll stick with my one or two laugh out loud moments in the drama.

The best episodes of House are seldom those that build on a comic plot. House intentionally being  funny is not half as funny as him being a flawed, miserable, cantankerous, self centred, medical genius.

Let's come this side of the pond, to a series that's a mainstay/highlight in the ITV schedule - Doc Martin. The good doctor is a distant, distant relation of House. He too is miserable and cantankerous and self centred and a jolly good doctor too - even if his phobia of blood was a determining factor in leaving his London job and heading to a GP's surgery in Cornwall.

Doc Martin

Doc Martin is a fish out of water tale. Brilliant man with phobia heads for English coastal village where he's surrounded by enough colourful characters to keep the series going ad infinitum with the slightest of plots and a love interest (now with baby). Doc Martin is very much 'comedy drama', barely a scene ends without a knowing look or comic button. It benefits from having Martin Clunes giving a terrific performance as Martin and a host of much loved British character actors around him. Those actors play 'comedy characters'; the funny policeman, the funny fat plumber, the funny lady from the chemist with a thing for the Doc. At its best the show delivers enough smiles to sustain - and draw a massive audience. It's not too demanding, the sun always shines and everything turns out alright in the end. It's a latter day Darling Buds of May.

But unlike those other great rude TV characters Basil Fawlty and Victor Meldrew, I often find it hard to feel sympathy for Doc Martin. He is so socially inept the longer the series has gone on the more his rudeness grates. In some recent episodes he seems to have had no dialogue other than a terse 'Yes'. He may now be the father of a child but isn't it time he started to show outward signs of growth.

You only have to look at the audience figures to see that this formula is a winner with the audience but here's the thing about 'comedy drama' - I just wish it was a tad more dramtic and all those 'funny' characters were a bit more real - which I'm certain would make them funnier.

Is It Ever A Good Idea to Bring Back A Successful Show?

As we head towards the end of October we get closer and closer to the return of one of the BBC's juggernaut comedies of the 90's - Absolutely Fabulous.

The original series began in 1992 and I seem to remember they had a 'last ever' episode before dusting it off and bring it back again. But is it a good idea to bring something back? Is it a great treat for fans or a cynical attempt to breathe life into a once great brand?

Isn't Ab Fab a child of the 90's?


Some years ago the BBC had a star studded bash to celebrate some anniversary or other and decided the best way to honour its entertainment output was to hold an awards shows. The Beeb handed out gongs to the best shows it had ever produced. It was a one off and kind of worked.

The winner of the Best Sitcom OF ALL TIME gong was.. go on guess...

Well, it wasn't Hancock, or Steptoe and Son, or Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads or Porridge or Dad's Army or Fawlty Towers or Till Death Us Do Part or Only Fools and Horses. It was...

Men Behaving Badly.

At the time this was the most popular show on the BBC. And what happens when you ask the public to tell you about their favourite show ever at any given point in time? They tell you about their current favourite. Even at the time the recipients seemed baffled.
 
Some shows are timeless, some work at a certain moment in time. I saw an episode of Men Behaving Badly recently and it meant almost nothing. And yet at the time I would have said it was  consistently funny. Viewed from a distance I see that it captured a mood, a moment brilliantly.

But that moment has past. Some shows have a finite shelf-life.

If you brought it back today - remember this is the show the PUBLIC voted the best BBC comedy OF ALL TIME it would look wrong. We remember those characters the way they were, we don't see them the way they are now.

Attitudes change, actors change. They take on different roles, we see them in a new light. Have we ever really accepted Nicholas Lynhurst, so wonderful as Rodney in Only Fools and Horses, in any of the other roles he's played?. Be honest, I'm not alone in thinking 'that posh voice is all wrong'! I agree,  I'm typecasting the poor chap and he's a fine comedic actor but I'm talking about what the public will accept.

There are exceptions to the 'never go back' rule. Til Death Us Do part became In Sickness and In Health after a long lay off. Johnny Speight and Warren Mitchell had kept Alf Garenet going during the interim years in other shows - The Thoughts of Chairman Alf and guest appearances - so when they resurrected him in sitcom form he'd never really gone away. And Speight was clever enough to challenge the old goat. Garnett may have been racist by inclination but when faced with having a black, gay home help he had to confront his prejudices. And in this show they didn't bring the whole cast back. Yes, Una Stubbs popped up just occasionally as Alf's daughter, Rita and and almost unrecognisable Dandy Nicholls reprised the role of Else Alf's wife but she wasn't well and upon her death the series continued with Alf at its epicentre.

Garnett was a tool for satire. His bigoted views, his prejudice and ill-informed rants were the opposite of what writer Johnny Speight believed. Speight thought that showing people what an idiot Garnett was would make people question their own bigotry. Of course the danger with a character like that is that some people will nod and agree with him. But that's another story.

The return of Alf Garnett worked. As did the return of The Likely Lads. Moved on from the gentle black and white 1960's series the lads returned in full 1970's colour and scaled ever greater heights. The characters had grown as had writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. They chimed with the age but if you watch those show now there's still a lot of universal truth in there - and that's timeless.

The recent reincarnation of Reggie Perrin is another matter. Viewed as a comedy about a middle aged man in crisis it's fine. But why call it Reggin Perrin? Some characters are too closely associated with one actor - Steve Martin as Sgt Bilko anyone? - Leonard Rossiter was Reggie Perrin, Reggie Perrin was Leonard Rossiter. What's more the Perrin scripts were very stylised, there is a heightened realism about them, something that worked well in the 70's series that clangs in the recent resurrection. For me they should have kept the ghost of Reggie in the writer's room and called it something else.

In the US there have been any number of attempts to resurrect old shows with new actors - or spin off characters into their own shows. I should do a whole blog about Spin Offs, a fascinating area - compare Frasier with After Mash!

Which brings me full circle to Ab Fab. They've made three shows, specials to celebrate the 20th anniversary. The actors have all gone on to do other things in recent years. Julia Sawallah has had success with the BBC One costume drama series Lark Rise to Candleford.  Joanna Lumley
Lumley has been in the public eye politically with her campaign to help Gurkhas soldiers who retired before 1997 win the right to settle in the UK. Her acting career has seen her in shows like Jam and Jerusalem, Mistresses and Marple. 

Until recently the show's creator, writer and driving force, Jennifer Saunders, continued her partnership with Dawn French in their sketch shows. Recently she's been involved in the one-off return of the Comic Strip for Channel 4. 

Does any of that baggage clutter up the Ab Fab characters? Perhaps, perhaps not. I think seeing Julia Sawalha as Saff, all grown up, might be a stretch. But hey.

I have no idea whether it Ab Fab will work, I have my thoughts but the proof will be in the screening - and then we can all decide.

How long does it take to write a script?

I've just finished the latest draft of a screenplay. It's something that's been with me for quite a while. I wrote the first draft ten years ago and it went 'out there', got me a few jobs too. But it was never quite right. People said nice things about it, some people got very excited about it but no-one got so excited that they wanted to produce it.

So it went back in the drawer. Or at least in a folder on the computer. My old computer.

Every now and then I've thought about stealing a scene or two or a line for something else I was writing at the time. And every time I dusted it down I saw something that I thought I could put right and so I'd tweak and then it would go back in the file and I'd forget about it again. Until such time as I'd decide to try to plunder it again.

I used a little sequence in a pilot I wrote. We made the pilot. We didn't make the series so that sequence was still unseen, so no need to change it in the screenplay.

Then about two years ago I was writing something when suddenly I had a moment of clarity. I knew how to restructure it. It meant taking a scalpel and performing major surgery but it was always too long. But for some reason I didn't finish it. So, it went back in the file.

Until three weeks ago when I was mapping out a new idea. I was playing with the characters when one of them started to talk like the lead in the screenplay. Okay, so why don't I take all the best elements out of the screenplay and give them to him. Made complete sense.

Until I reopened the screenplay and started to read. I discovered that I had finished my restructure but I'd never sent it out. It was almost there.

But now I could see where others things could go. So I've spent my spare time in the past three weeks on a screenplay I first stared ten years ago and its in pretty good shape. Probably the best shape it's been in since I first thought I'd finished. It's leaner, funnier, structurally better. I've lost all the hand waving scenes where I thought I was being clever but actually I was just being self indulgent.

How long does it take to write a script? Well some I've done in a week but this one's taken ten years.

Sometimes things take time to cook.  But you know that's the easy bit. 

Now all I need is a producer.

Terra Nova and an Italian Gem

The Terra Nova cast prepare to meet Glee at Nationals

 I've watched two shows this week that for very different reasons caught my attention. You'd have have to have been living up a Bongo tree on the Isle of Wagawong to have missed the trailers for Terra Nova.    "Speilberg, most expensive show ever made, time travel, dinosaurs!!!!!"

They didn't trail the cliches or the 21st century teenage American attitude that is transplanted on both the future - and via the time portal - the past.

Terra Nova begins with a rip off of Blade Runner in Chicago 2149, it then rips off or 'borrows' ideas from six other series/films. The world is overpopulated, Earth an ecological disaster area and the air barely fit to breathe. The set up and execution bears a horrible resemblance to the BBC's "Outcasts". And we know what happened to that.

In the world of the future there are laws limiting family size but the Shannon family have one more child than they should. Up until the opening sequence they've successfully hidden her in the air conditioning duct any time a Childcatcher cop comes to call. But this being genre sci-fi all that is about to change. Nasty Nazi-style cops are at the door and this time the little babe blurts out a cry whilst the Childcatchers are trashing the room.

Dad, Jim, a square jaw and an unprepossessing presence, gets banged up. His wife, Elizabeth,  struggles on for two years before she at last gets a chance to see him in jail and when she gets there she discovers he's developed a slight cough and redness around the eyes - being a Doctor she can instantly diagnoses such things. She leaves him her breathing mask which is the 22nd century version of a cake with a file in it.

With one bound he's free and joining the rest of the family as they head for the portal to the past, the Stargate to Terra Nova.

Here they encounter what looks like Centre Parcs in a jungle clearing. All gravel drives, flower and fruit markets, nicely scrubbed children and the odd pterodactyl swooping down gull-like to nick the kids chips.

Head of the colony is Commander Nathaniel Taylor (Stephen Lang, the white bearded guy from Avatar here sporting a black and white striped beard). We're not too sure if he's a good guy or a bad guy but he does have more presence than everyone else put together. Not that his lines are any better.

We may be 85 million years in the past but Teen American Mall Attitude is still on display and one of the Shannon kids soon joins some other kids as they go OTG - that's outside the gate. And what have they hidden out there? Why it's a Still, the kids are making moonshine.

A massive budget, CGI dinosaurs, fantastic scope for all kinds of stories and what have they come up with - kids bunking off to make moonshine. Duh. The cliches abound like the pterosaurs - 
which here looked the most CGI of all the dinos on display.

The wonder of seeing a giant dinosaur come to life in Jurassic Park is still something I can feel deep inside. But that was a long, long, time ago and we've seen so many CGI beasts since then it's hard to get excited about them in the same way, so this series has to do something else. Like 'Lost' it has its mysteries, strange markings on rocks, and it's own set of OTHERS, here they're called SIXERS and I'm guessing that Commander Taylor's missing son is amongst them - if not leading them.

But we've seen it all before.

Really. Ten, count them, ten Executive Producers and THIS is what they have collectively concocted? The story is rice paper thin and falls apart just as easily. I sat and watched the opening and second episode and by the end I couldn't care less whether I see any more of this tosh. Which is a shame, as going in to any new series always I really want to love it.

Everyone is so po-faced here, no humour, terrible background music, false jeopardy, contemporary attitudes, stupid conflict, two dimensional characters. The only time the dinos looked remotely scary was at night, when it was raining. Now where have I see that before? Otherwise they bore a strange resemblance to chickens - and before anyone says, yes but birds are related to dinosaurs these beasts are supposed to be terrifying and I ain't never been terrified of a chicken!

My biggest gripe with this kind of stuff is the lack of real emotion on display. Everyone reacts as though travelling back 85 million years in time is completely normal. There's lots of forced false emotions going on. People don't act that way.

I read this from a critic: "Go in without high expectations and there is some fun to be had".

No.

This is Speilberg, a man whose name has been connected to some of the most absorbing films of the past thirty years.I expect to be entertained and enthralled and surprised and wowed.

This is the most expensive tv series ever made. Why would I go in without high expectation.

This kind of criticism is unforgiveable. It's a cop out for every crap show that makes it onto the air. There's no place for comments like that here.

Whether we see any more of the dystopian 22nd century society I don't know - can they go back through the time portal or is it a one way street? I hope they do go back and all get wiped out by the bad air.


Speilberg should be more choosey about what he puts his name to. And we won't even mention Falling Skies.

Contrast this tosh with Romanzo Criminale which began this week on Sky Arts. 



I wouldn't be surprised if this show's entire budget didn't match that spent on one episode of Terra Nova.

This seires does a different kind of time-travel. It takes us back to Rome during the 1970's and tells the true story of the Banda della Magia, the prolific and bloodthirsty crime family in Italy who were responsible for some of the most violent crimes the country had ever seen.

Real emotions, terrific acting and writing, violent, funny and beautifully shot.  Absolutely brilliant. I know what I'll be watching Mr S.