OF ALL TIME (or 30 YEARS)

This morning, The Guardian unveiled its “50 greatest dramas ever made” for television. Cue apoplexy in the Gilbert household, predictably enough. The apoplexy was not exactly ameliorated by the on-line version of this exercise, which, unlike the newsprint original, was headed “The Guardian’s top 50 dramas of all time” [my itals]. Needless to say there was no “all time” about it. Television was first transmitted in Britain in 1936 but there was precious little on this list made before 1980. Here it is in full:


Michael Bryant, Judi Dench, Margery Mason and Maurice Denham in John Hopkins' Talking to a Stranger, which George Melly called "the first authentic masterpiece written for television"

1: The Sopranos
2: Brideshead Revisited
3: Our Friends in the North
4: Mad Men
5: A Very Peculiar Practice
6: Talking Heads
7: The Singing Detective
8: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
9: State of Play
10: Boys from the Blackstuff
11: The West Wing
12: Twin Peaks
13: Queer as Folk
14: The Wire
15: Six Feet Under
16: How Do You Want Me?
17: Smiley’s People
18: House of Cards
19: Prime Suspect
20: Bodies
21: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
22: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
23: Cracker
24: Pennies from Heaven
25: Battlestar Galactica
26: Coronation Street
27: The Jewel in the Crown
28: The Monocled Mutineer
29: Clocking Off
30: Inspector Morse
31: This Life
32: Band of Brothers
33: Hill Street Blues
34: The Prisoner
35: St Elsewhere
36: The L Word
37: The Shield
38: Brookside
39: 24
40: The Twilight Zone
41: Pride and Prejudice (1995)
42: Red Riding
43: Oz
44: The Street
45: The X Files
46: Bleak House
47: The Sweeney
48: EastEnders
49: Shameless
50: Grange Hill

There are some productions that are grossly – even grotesquely – flattered by this rating: A Very Peculiar Practice, House of Cards, This Life, 24, Pride and Prejudice, The Sweeney, Grange Hill. At least they omitted Doctor Who. There are several that I happily confess I am not qualified to judge: How Do You Want Me?, Bodies, The Shield, The L Word, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, the last two of which make me distinctly dubious even without the benefit of exposure. I don’t understand a rating for St Elsewhere but not for ER and, though they’re obviously hobbled by falling into the ill-favoured category of comedy-drama, I would put Desperate Housewives and even Ugly Betty ahead of some of these desperately serious American shows. I have no beef with The Wire but it would never have achieved half of what it did achieve if Hill Street Blues hadn’t done it (rather better) nearly thirty years earlier.


David Rudkin's marvellous one-off drama Penda's Fen which Alan Clarke directed for BBC Birmingham (in colour, despite the still)

Now, of course, the whole modern “list” movement is a load of what the Irish call bollix. It’s comprehensively meaningless to start tabulating like against not-like in some cockamamie attempt to measure their respective value. Anyway, as soon as anyone puts any two items in a one-two order, 20 percent of commentators will say “that’s fine”, 20 percent will say “the other way around” and the other 60 percent will say “oh no, two other things entirely”. So I say: “don’t do it, Deirdre”.

But it’s done. So okay, let’s play. Let’s assume that this is not a totally idle exercise. In that case, first of all we have to excoriate the exclusion of one-off drama from the list. It’s easy to see why this was decided. One-off teledrama is effectively dead. Nobody commissions it any more and so nobody is writing it. But in the golden age of television drama, which extends roughly from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, dozens of fine writers were creating original one-off plays for both the BBC (The Wednesday Play, Theatre 625, Play for Today) and ITV (Armchair Theatre, Plays for Britain) and young, ambitious directors were realising those scripts both on location and (a forgotten drama resource, these days) in the studio.

The fabulous and important thing to note about these one-off scripts is that they weren’t genre pieces nor were they dramatizations of pre-existing fiction or of the lives of the dead, lightly or (more usually) heavily fictionalized. This is almost entirely what passes for teledrama today.

It seems extraordinary that the assembled Guardian critics can knock out an "all-time great" list of teledrama that lacks any work by David Mercer, Ken Loach, Harold Pinter, Julia Jones, John Hopkins, Alan Clarke, Mike Newell, Nell Dunn, David Rudkin, Nemone Lethbridge, Jack Rosenthal, Charles Wood, Trevor Griffiths, Jim Allen, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, Moira Armstrong, Alun Owen, Philip Saville, Rhys Adrian, Mike Apted, Howard Schuman, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Jeremy Sandford, Troy Kennedy Martin, John McGrath, Roy Battersby, Arthur Hopcraft, Rudolph Cartier, John Bowen or James Cellan Jones, to name a very few. And don't get me started on the creators of single drama in the States – Paddy Chayevsky, Tad Mosel, Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer, Reginald Rose ... But then I guess it must be conceded that they pre-empted this objection by ruling out single drama. You may feel that is legitimate. I don’t.


Howard Schuman's dazzling Rock Follies, made by Thames and one of the last serials to be shot all on tape

Even given their own criteria, however, the list is nowhere near something that merits the description “of all time”. Here are a few pre-1980 dramas not listed that ought to be on any British telly-watcher’s “all-time” list: Z Cars, Talking to a Stranger, The Quatermass Experiment, Days of Hope, Diary of a Young Man, Roads to Freedom, Rock Follies, Gangsters, The Houseman's Tale, Law and Order, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The History Man, I Claudius, Thérèse Raquin, The Avengers, The World of Gurney Slade, Tutti Frutti and Minder, this last of which must surely be self-recommending if The Sweeney is thought worthy.

The lack of any of these candidates goes to an age-old problem with television criticism. Television is a vast subject (the BBC alone must sponsor more new work each week than the Arts Council does in a year) but newspapers have always insisted that television reviewers be generalists, which means that their ignorance is vast. No serious newspaper would employ a movie critic who didn't know Griffith, Eisenstein and Murnau or a theatre critic who lacked Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov (though even this may be less true than it was). But writers on television are not required to know anything before last week. And it shows in lists like these.

And here we come to the central dichotomy of such exercises. Do the organizers of these lists seek to reflect popular support or expert assessment? Some years ago, Channel 4 – in one of a long series of cheap pull-together compilations that purport to construct authoritative accounts of quality – gave us its list of 100 Greatest Musicals, voted by the viewers. Unlike (I am sure) the great majority of voting viewers, I must have seen at least a hundred musicals, being an aficionado of the form. Indeed, I suspect that a great many voters will barely have seen ten musicals in their lives and probably (at the time of voting some years ago) considered Buddy, the biography loosely draped around Holly’s songbook, as what a stage musical was meant to be. So what did these C4 viewers vote as the greatest musical of all time? Yes, it was Grease. Can you (or anyone else) even name the creators of this mediocre piece of opportunism? No, neither can I.

Grease wouldn’t make my top hundred musicals at all. I am loath to settle on a single all-time great musical. After all, there are two quite distinct forms and the stage musical (or musical play as they call it on Broadway) cannot properly be compared with the film musical, by which I mean the musical conceived from scratch for the camera. The hybrid form used to be the filmed musical play but in recent years, as theatre finances have become more precarious, the reverse hybrid has grown up, the staged version of a movie musical. Most who voted for Grease will, I feel sure, have been thinking of the movie version. I have seen both the stage original and the screen rendition and do not care to arbitrate between two such uninteresting pieces of work. Among my top-rated stage musicals would be several that appear nowhere on the C4 list – Sondheim’s Follies, Company and Merrily We Roll Along, Rodgers & Hart’s Pal Joey (not the ghastly movie version) and On Your Toes, Porter’s Out of This World, Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, Adler & Ross’s Pajama Game, Rodgers & Sondheim’s Do I Hear a Waltz? and, perhaps my first choice, Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, the premiere production of which I was lucky enough to see on Broadway in 1976 and three or four revivals of which I have seen since.


Stephen Sondheim's stage musical Pacific Overtures of 1976 – though this is almost certainly a shot of a revival

Movies being more accessible, many of my preferred film musicals make the list (though rather low down) but among those missing are Golddiggers of 1933, Swing Time, The Gay Divorcee, Evergreen, The Band Wagon, Finian’s Rainbow, Victor/Victoria and – admittedly not a choice that many would make – At Long Last Love (a very underrated confection).

But my own lists, were I to trouble systematically to make any, would be subject to change over time, even quite precipitate change. I reckon my Desert Islands Discs eightsome would never be the same two days running. Is there really any value in such a pastime, or is it just exercise for the blood pressure?

The WORLD is YOUR LOBSTER, MY SON

“Going somewhere nice this year?” barbers and other occasional acquaintances are apt to ask as summer gets into its stride.

I mean to return to “going somewhere” but for a moment permit me to dilate upon occasional conversations. Many quite like, even relish such time-passing. Not me. Being obliged to discuss immigration with a cab driver is, as far as I am concerned, the seventh circle of hell. Trapped in the barber’s chair, I find myself hoping that a light snooze will quickly overtake me or that I can dissemble one so that the transaction may be completed to the sound merely of clacking scissors and whirring clippers.

At my local barbers, there are two women who do a tolerable job with my hair and whom I have, over the years, sufficiently trained to meet my social needs. One is happy to be quiet. The first few times, she essayed: “Got the day off work?” How far do I need to feel required to voyage into an account of my working situation before she wishes she hadn’t asked? Do I really care whether she knows what my arrangements are? The other crimper is livelier but she is perfectly happy to swap anecdotes about dogs (or rather my dog tales for her grandchildren vignettes), even though most of both contributions are somewhat dog-eared. At least she does me the kindness of remembering that one of our dogs is a Great Dane.

There are two chaps there who cut hair too (including the new proprietor – needless to say a lot newer than either of the women because no barber is going to hand on his business to a woman) and I wouldn’t object to either of them looking after me, save that their only conversational topic is the one that bores me almost as much as reality television: football.

Going somewhere nice this year? Well, no we’re not. And thanks so much for asking because it reminds me that we haven’t actually “been away” since spring 2006 when we did a swing around the moors, the peaks, the dales and the lakes (not necessarily in that order) as a sort of honeymoon after our civil partnership ceremony. And it’s four-and-a-quarter years since we were abroad anywhere.

Are we extremely atypical? We are both at home all day most days. I have occasional forays to London, Oxford, Bath, Cheltenham, Bristol. David’s outings are even fewer and almost never more than a single over-night. I keep urging him to take off in the car for a week or ten days and he blows hot and cold about the idea but doesn’t take the plunge. I ponder setting off on a succession of buses (with my free pass) in the autumn and seeing where I get to. But we never talk of having a real holiday.

The first problem is the fact that we have the dogs. I always say that dogs are a much larger responsibility than children. When there was just the Dane, we took him two or three times to Landmark Trust properties and, although he found it a bit perplexing, he liked new scents and walks and soon settled. As he’s got older, he cleaves to the familiarity of home and is fussed by going further than our field. Twenty minutes away from base and he’s more than ready to retreat. We never took both of them to stay in a strange property though we have left them both with trusted house sitters. But now that the younger one is a special needs dog, taking them anywhere new is fraught with difficulty and imposing Tati’s medication and supervision regime on anyone else seems a lot to ask. Then of course house sitters add substantially to the cost of the holiday.

That’s the other thing. Like most people, we’ve been pulling in our horns lately. Provisions and utilities and … um … books and CDs are necessities. Jetting or even driving somewhere unfamiliar with no guarantee that you’ll have a good time seems a less sensible way to spend dwindling capital. On the other hand, we have numbers of friends in much more parlous financial straits than us who determinedly continue to take three or four foreign trips a year. I’m a little bemused by this but then none of them has such a comfortable and restorative place to spend every day as we do.

Am I rationalising in some way? My grandparents’ generation thought going to London was about as exotic an experience as the world had to offer. (Having said that, though, I remember the extraordinary adventure of my maternal grandmother, Fanny Allsop from Belper in Derbyshire, who, before she was married, got a job as personal assistant to Mrs John Jacob Astor when that lady was divorcing her legendary husband. Fanny accompanied Mrs Astor across the Atlantic on the Olympic just a hundred years ago and lived with her in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Mr Astor later perished on the Olympic’s sister ship, the Titanic). None of my other three grandparents, I think, ever strayed beyond these shores.

To my parents’ generation, “abroad” was still an almost unimaginable place. However, World War II took my father to Europe – he was in the D-Day landings and eventually got as far as Italy – and so the mystique began to dissipate. As a child, I was taken by my mother for a day in Paris and then a fortnight in Switzerland. Dad stayed home grumbling but he never wanted to go anywhere anyway. Our family never did anything unless Mum initiated it, organised it and oversaw it. Dad was a stay-at-home, only really happy in familiar surroundings, much like Fargo our Great Dane. He liked to quote that line from the World War I trenches: “If I knew a better ‘ole, I’d go to it”. Though we had seaside holidays in Britain, we never went abroad as a family. After I left home, Mum had a trip to Kenya with friends, Dad went to a bierfest in Germany (dragged there by friends) and the two of them once holidayed, most unexpectedly, in Tunisia. But that was it.

I have been considerably more relaxed about travel than either of my parents but it is not a compulsion or even a requirement for me. Of the places I have yet to visit, I would be sorry if I thought I would never get to Vienna or St Petersburg, the Amazon or Yosemite. And I would be positively distraught to learn that I had already enjoyed my last trip to New York or Rome, the Caribbean or the Far East.

I am not wholly persuaded that travel broadens the mind. My most-travelled friend (former friend nowadays) may be the most closed-minded person I ever knew (which is how he comes to be a former friend). And, as Sammy Cahn wrote: “It’s very nice to go travellin’/ But it’s so much nicer, yes it’s so much nicer to come home”.

By the by, that line I used as the title for this posting: it comes from Arthur Daley. It wasn’t written by Leon Griffiths or any other of the regular writers on Minder. George Cole’s son dreamt up the line and Cole paid him £5 for it and deployed it in an episode. I know this because, much to my surprise, I found myself acting as script executive for one series of Minder nearly twenty years ago. But that’s a story for another occasion …

HOW I STUMBLED on COMMON SENSE

At the beginning of the 1990s, I was working at a television production company. Euston Films, now defunct, was the subsidiary that made drama on film for Thames Television when the latter held the ITV franchise for broadcasting on weekdays in London.

Rather to my surprise, for it was hardly my natural territory, I was acting as script executive (script editor, as we called the post when I began in television and as I think of it still) for one of the big guns in ITV’s drama output, Minder. It fell to me, indeed, to devise the character – name, relationship to Arthur Daley, general function – who would replace Dennis Waterman’s Terry as the eponym. I am happy to report that the casting did not come under my purview.

One day a call came through to my office from Michael Church, an old chum from journalism days, who was then features editor on a national newspaper. He asked if I would like to consider writing a regular column for the paper. Most would no doubt accept such an offer at once and wing it. Doubtless too diligent for my own good, I instinctively felt that my script editing was a full-time job and that I could render neither it nor a column justice by trying to do them simultaneously. Without more ado, I reluctantly declined.

But “consider” lodged in my head. Middle-aged as I was, I had begun to feel utterly out of sorts with the times, not merely with the drawn-out demise of Tory rule but with the whole Zeitgeist. I had only to stroll down the street to feel alienated. As that camp old gargoyle Ernest Thesiger said of fighting in the World War I trenches: “My dear, the noise! And the people!” Of course it was a function of getting older but it seemed more deep-rooted than that. I felt that our values had come adrift and that this everyone-for-the-lifeboats and devil-take-the-hindmost mentality, much gingered up by the cult of greed that characterized the Thatcherite view of anti-society, was manifesting itself in multifarious ways, both vast and minuscule.

The promise that fulfilling the script editor function on Minder and on Euston’s short-lived and fraught new project (a drama series-cum-serial about a psychiatric practice called Shrinks) would be rewarded with my return to producing was not made good. Anyway, I got taken off both shows. Towards the end of the second year of my contract, it was clear that Thames would lose to Carlton its fight to keep the ITV franchise and, one by one, the company script editors were told that their contracts would not be renewed. By this time, needless to say, Michael Church was no longer a features editor.

I put together a few sample columns under the title ‘Now Don’t Get Me Started …’ and sent them around. No features editor was remotely interested. Eventually the country had had enough of the Tories and elected something calling itself New Labour. By the time well-merited disillusion had set in with that regime, I had decided that Now Don’t Get Me Started … could be a book ...

To read entirely free of charge that book, now entitled Common Sense, please click on the link in the sidebar

COMMON SENSE: The BOOK

and you will go to the webpage where the book is available as a download