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Thursday 4 December 2008

It’ll end in tears

Hughie Green, Most Sincerely (BBC4); Clay (BBC1)

As modern TV drama goes, these programmes are heroically old-fashioned affairs: wordy and literate (they’d work just as well as stage plays) with proper acting and scenes that aren’t afraid to linger. Most TV commissioning editors will tell you that this is the sort of thing that doesn’t work on TV any more. They have this obsessive received idea — as unquestioned as their off-the-shelf left-liberal politics — that TV is a kinetic, visual and democratic medium and that any programme which diverges from these principles must perforce be a failure. We need to remind these brainless trendies — weirdly, it still really matters to them what critics think — that excellence is not about ticking boxes.

Clay (BBC1, Sunday) was another of those things all too rare these days — the English, made-for-TV family drama. I forced my kids to watch it as a sort of social experiment: can children whose synapses have been fried by constant exposure to hyperactive, Japanese-animated cartoons cope with any film where very little happens for long periods?

Even I found it a bit turgid. Set in Northumberland in 1965, it was about a strange, sinister, apparently religious boy (Ben-Ryan Davies) who believes he has the power to breathe life into a creature he has built from clay. The clay monster only came alive in the last half-hour — and was quite nice, really; he didn’t even kill anybody — which left a full hour at the beginning for a glacially slow build-up. I was quite amazed the kids didn’t walk out.

That they didn’t was testament partly to the quality of the acting — with winning, thoroughly convincing performances from all the teen actors involved, and a bravura turn by Imelda Staunton as a mad old Catholic bint — and partly to the brooding atmosphere. Kids really like having their young minds messed with weird things they don’t understand and, so long as it’s done convincingly, are quite prepared to put up with a few longueurs. It’s why they can still cope with books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, despite the fact that they come from eras of much longer attention spans.

It’s examples like this that make me suspicious of the way ‘the public’ is always blamed for the relentless dumbing-down of our media. We’re told that cheap snacks and stupidity are what the viewers/listeners/readers want, when more often it’s a case of morally and intellectually bankrupt producers/publishers/editors acclerating the slide in standards by pre-empting trends which don’t yet exist.

Did I ever tell you how much I hate this modern world?

More articles from: James Delingpole | this section

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