The BBC and ME: A LOVE-HATE THING Part III

To continue this fitful saga of my relationship with the BBC, I want to tidy some loose ends from my aborted time at BBC Pebble Mill. The Other Side, the run of new one-off plays all of which I produced for BBC2, went out after I’d been sacked over Solid Geometry.

To my surprise, I had been told by David Rose to write and produce a generic title sequence for the series. I had always understood that these were made by the graphics department or the presentation department or some other bunch of specialists. After all, the original title sequence for The Wednesday Play had been directed by a young firebrand called Ridley Scott.

But I was delighted to be entrusted with it and sketched out a plan for the image of a revolving television set. The first time the screen passed by, it would show the animated BBC1 logo. The next time we would see a clip from a commercial (to indicate ITV). The last turn of the set came to rest on the series title. This sequence had not been shot when I lost my post, so David Rose himself went into the studio and made it, sticking diligently to my script. He added a neat touch: the series title itself took a further turn after the television set had come to rest. David also used the music that I had selected: a striking riff by Peter Maxwell Davis that proved to be a perfect fit. I had written to Sir Peter (as he then wasn’t) informing him of my plan but he never replied. I hope he liked it, if he ever saw it.


Jonathan Powell

I had thought to begin the run with the splash of the Ian McEwan. In its absence, David Rose scheduled Derrick Buttress’s Connie, perhaps because it was so quiet and modest. He probably hadn’t made the calculation that I had made: that my fellow television previewers and reviewers, from whose ranks I had been recruited, would expect me to knock their socks off. Inevitably, then, the Buttress got a lukewarm reception. In a run of plays, it’s the opener that gets widely noticed; the others have to take potluck. As far as audiences went, we had the misfortune to be scheduled against a brand new sitcom on BBC1, called Bread. Though scarcely remembered now, it was hugely popular in its time and so we never stood a chance of picking up extra viewers in what usually in those days was a poor choice of programmes in mid-evening on a Friday.

When I was sacked from Pebble Mill, a fair bit of my second series was in planning. Mike Wearing very properly took over my portfolio and went ahead with the scripts by Tony Bicât and David Cook that I had ordered up. Sadly, a couple of commissions to women writers were dropped. Mike also followed some of the other connections I had made, one of them benefiting him in spectacular fashion. It came about this way. At the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1978 (when I was still a producer), there had been a screening of the only surviving episode of Diary of a Young Man, a legendary BBC drama series written by John McGrath (a regular at the Festival which he had helped to found) and Troy Kennedy Martin and directed by Ken Loach. I had been thrilled by it and further thrilled to discover that Kennedy Martin was in attendance. I sought him out and talked to him excitedly and we agreed to meet in London and discuss working together.

It was wonderful to speculate that I might be able to rehabilitate a fine writer who had rather fallen out of fashion. And Troy had been one of the creators of the game-changing police series Z Cars, whose original producer was my Birmingham boss, then styling himself David E Rose. The quest seemed to promise much.

On my way to the meeting with Troy at the Hoop in Notting Hill Gate, I was smitten by a migraine. These had begun to afflict me in the run-up to finals at my university and I had yet to find the medication that could pre-empt them (happily, I made the discovery soon after this time). I found a phone-box and called Mike Wearing, who was also attending our session, and asked him to take over.


Farrukh Dhondy

Back in Birmingham the following week, I asked Mike how his discussions with Troy had gone.  He was non-committal about it and, perhaps foolishly, I didn’t press him.  The eventual upshot of Mike’s discussion with Troy was one of the most successful original television drama serials ever made, Edge of Darkness.  And this, along with Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Black Stuff, made Mike the most feted producer of his generation.  Hey ho: you win some, you lose some.

David Rose’s fiefdom at Pebble Mill, rocked by the Solid Geometry saga, was now clearly under threat from Television Centre, but happily Jeremy Isaacs rescued him by offering the post of Commissioning Editor for Fiction at Channel 4, which was due to open in 1982.  I also found myself doing work for Channel 4, though not to a fiction commission.  An independent production company pitched for – and then asked me to make – a series about television itself.  This was another invitation that I readily accepted.  It was pootling along in rather self-indulgent pre-production when the production company boss abruptly absconded to Hawaii with the programme budget.  That was the end of that.

After holding various posts, including one (not for the only time) at an ITV company that lost its franchise to broadcast during my contract, I was suddenly called in to the BBC by Jonathan Powell, the Head of Drama.  This was April 1987 and I had known Jonathan (not well) for some ten years, having first met him as a producer at Granada.  Jonathan needed a producer for a four-parter called King of the Ghetto, written by Farrukh Dhondy, who was Commissioning Editor for Multicultural Programmes at C4.  The setting was the Bengali community around Brick Lane and the story was loosely based on fact.

I quickly read the three existing scripts and happily was excited by them. Producing them would be a learning curve in several ways, including the milieu and the method (a lightweight video camera gathering takes like a movie). Jonathan told me that the director was already signed up to start pre-production in June and shooting would begin in September. He was Franco Rosso, a newcomer to television drama, though with a feature (the fairly chaotic Babylon) and a documentary under his belt. The documentary was about Ian Dury who, to my joy, had agreed to make his acting debut playing a lowlife in King of the Ghetto. And the leading man, like Ian’s a white role, had been claimed by Tim Roth, one of the hottest young actors around.

When my participation was confirmed, I took the script editor, Caroline Oulton, to lunch. She soon disabused me. Franco did not begin in June; he was already casting. Shooting did not begin in September, but June. And Farrukh had barely started work on episode 4. Jonathan had lied to me, presumably because he was in a tight spot. Perhaps another producer had walked, clearly several others would have turned it down, either because the schedule was too tight or because they didn’t care for the material.

It would have been absurd to decline to bite the bullet. Here was a chance to get back into regular producing and to pull a potential disaster out of the fire. But the difficulties came thick and fast. Franco proved an awkward customer and a disorganised field commander. He and I were soon disagreeing about many things. I also found the BBC bureaucracy much more apparent and much less malleable than it had been at Pebble Mill. Moreover, stuck in an ugly office block above a post office on Shepherd’s Bush Green, we were some way away from the stimulating hub.

Franco was random and sometimes incoherent in the many auditions we undertook to find our leading lady, also a white role (why do writers, even non-white ones, always feel they have to explore the eyes of a non-white community in drama through the eyes of white people?). And Caroline wasn’t sufficiently on Farrukh’s case, or so it seemed to me.


Franco Rosso

After a few weeks of this, matters came to a head with Franco.  He had clearly lost interest in the whole project and he walked.  I was relieved but I had to move fast.  The BBC maintains – or it did then – a long list of “acceptable” directors.  On the second page I found the name Roy Battersby.  I had never met him but I greatly admired his work.  He was part of the Kennedy Martin/McGrath/Loach generation of teledrama-makers and his masterpiece, I felt, was his epic industrial action drama, to a script by Colin Welland, called Leeds United.  I hadn’t heard of him for a while but I knew that he had been working as a fulltime political activist, including standing for parliament for the Workers Revolutionary Party, and he had made a fine feature documentary, fronted by Vanessa Redgrave, called The Palestinian.


Ian Dury, actor

I tracked him down to an address in Chiswick and called him.  He was available and readily agreed to look at the scripts overnight so I took them over to him.  A tall, handsome, beaming man welcomed me and immediately put me at my ease by expressing his admiration for my courage over the Solid Geometry business.  He then sent me packing and set to reading.  He called me first thing next morning to accept the job.

I felt triumphant that, not 24 hours after I lost my first director, I had a first-rate one sitting in my office for a discussion about logistics.  Then a summons came from upstairs.  Jonathan was away at some jaunt and the acting Head of Drama, a conventional old BBC lifer called Ken Riddington, needed a word.  When I joined him, I found him ashen-faced.  He informed me that I couldn’t employ Roy who, he said, was blacklisted.  I showed him Roy’s name on page 2 of the approved list. Riddington’s fears may not have been eased but his objections had no more ground on which to stand.  Back in my office, I found Roy smiling broadly.  He gave me a history of his own dealings with the BBC and his political activism outside the business, to which he had only recently returned.  We noted that the BBC’s failure to exclude him from the approved list had ensured that he could not be denied work there if a producer wanted him without lawyers being brought in.  Game to us.


Dury & Roth in character

Making King was very tough, although Roy made it a pleasure and, as he habitually did, raised everyone’s game in the process.  Farrukh’s final script, endlessly delayed, came in way over-length and we compromised by both trimming it as we went and shooting more than we knew we could use – practically all of Ian Dury’s scenes had to be dropped in the edit of this episode.  Each part was supposed to be 50 minutes; though it made overseas sales more difficult, we could stretch up to 60, but anything over that kicked in a slew of extra payments to actors (however, I notice that each episode of Stephen Poliakoff’s recent Dancing at the Edge ran a minute above 60 minutes and, in two cases, above 90 minutes, but he always seems to be a law unto himself).  Even so, despite the scramble, I brought the show in on time and under budget – which was (frighteningly when you have it for the first time) a little over £1million.

Unlike many producers, I attended most of the location shooting and got to know the crew – one veteran reckoned that he’d never ever been bought a pint by a producer before.  As editing got under way, I began to attend to my own BBC future – Jonathan Powell had promised that there would be subsequent projects for me but as he’d lied about everything else I couldn’t leave that to chance.


Roy Battersby

The one possibility I had great hopes for was a notion I worked up with a Manchester writer I admired called Janey Preger.  It concerned a young couple of dancers, a white girl and a black boy, who were penniless and lived in digs where they were indulged by an eccentric landlady, but who went out and had fantastical adventures, often centred around foiling criminality.  The pair furnished the series’ title, Hattie and Cole, and the prototype for the series’ demeanour and style would be The Avengers, then a rather forgotten favourite.  At the same time, the show would tap into the zeitgeist of the Thatcherite ‘80s, suggesting that being unemployed in a world full of crooks shouldn’t stop talented and sexy young people having a glorious time.  Each episode would end with Hattie and Cole performing a knockout dance number.

Another flavour I wanted to bring to the mix was to fold in constant references to classic Hollywood and to musicals and, in tandem with that, to persuade unprecedentedly starry names to make guest appearances, as much for fun as for money, so that appearing in the show became a fashionable thing to do.  In the pilot that Janey and I wrote, there was a corrupt cop named Orson Caterpillar (“whoreson caterpillar” is an insult deployed by Falstaff), a character based on Orson Welles’ Hank Quinlan from Touch of Evil.  I intended to get Robert De Niro to play this role.  Never suggest that I lack ambition.


King – a rare revival on satellite

Jonathan Powell gave me back the script, saying no more than that he didn’t understand it. This has three possible interpretations: that he didn’t read it, that he lightly skimmed it while doing something else or that he never intended to extend my contract. When King was finished, I was out of work again and that was my last job at the BBC.

In a final chapter of this saga, I will try to draw together some more general thoughts about the BBC.

TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT

Through a mist of tears, I caught up with the conclusion of My Transsexual Summer, Channel 4’s four-part fly-on-the-wall series. Seven strangers, ranging in age from 22 to 52, were brought together for four weekend “retreats”. The only common factor between them was transitioning – three from female to male, the rest the reverse route. Their progress along these transitions varied greatly: from a few weeks to four years of “living as” the gender opposite to the given, from hormone treatment but with no plans for surgery to undergoing genital “correction” during the first programme.

That the seven individuals were necessarily self-absorbed was no hindrance to an immediate atmosphere of mutual support. Hugging and weeping soon became the lingua franca but that was no bar to laughter and the odd interesting undercurrent. Those of them – the youngest – who could not utter a subordinate clause without prefacing it with the syntactically redundant “like” or adding to it the rhetorical “d’you know what I mean?” may, having seen themselves on the box, attempt to eradicate this dreary verbal tic. For the viewer, it was a modest price to pay for their candour and courage.

Lewis

Putting hitherto obscure people under the media spotlight is as old as broadcasting. What has changed radically over the years is the way that obscurity is mediated. Half a century ago, producers took a disciplined, even puritanical approach to pointing microphones and cameras at people in the sanctity of their lives. Charles Parker’s wonderful and imperishably influential Radio Ballads tapped into a rich oral tradition and linked it to ordinary people’s experiences as expressed through their music – literally, folk music. Parker’s approach was pursued in television in various ways by Philip Donnellan, Denis Mitchell, Charlie Squires, Harold Williamson, Edward Mirzoeff, Paul Watson, Roger Graef and others.

These film-makers were also tapping into the traditions of documentary-making for the cinema in the Soviet Union and, in the west, by Robert Flaherty and the Grierson school. Although their methods could sometimes be suspect – staging, scripting and even faking scenes – the intention was to create the sense that the people momentarily in the spotlight were there on their own terms.

Sarah

Though there has been a surprising revival in documentary for the big screen – especially in the States where serious non-fiction seems still to be greatly encouraged by PBS and independent cinema companies – swathes of routine documentary-making for British television have descended to a bankrupt aesthetic. Commissioning editors seem to believe that the audience will accept nothing unless it is said or shown by a supposed celebrity, however self-evidently unqualified to pontificate on the subject (or indeed on anything else). The audience cannot be trusted to watch and appreciate a stranger; an introduction must be effected by someone both viewer and stranger have (theoretically) heard of, even though the viewer and the stranger usually have rather more basis for a rapport than either has with the intermediary.

Frequently, also, members of the public only earn their place on the screen alongside the “stars” by dint of their utter singularity. This is “freak show television”, epidemic across the channels. The more grotesque and humiliating the disability, the more unusual and distorting the condition, the better the commissioning editors like it.

Fox

And then there is the most unspeakable genre of all, the crassly misnamed “reality television”, whereat people both unknown and known (though not mixed) submit themselves to situations that are very far from real. Indeed, the programmes depend for their (apparent) appeal on the increasing inordinacy of both the situations and the behaviour of the participants: a diminishing prospect, they will surely discover,

The premise of My Transsexual Summer might have cast it into the “freak show” category or the fringes of “reality television”, but thankfully in practice it did not. Producer Helen Richards had contrived a mechanism that permitted sufficient freedom for the participants to learn a little about and from each other and to get comfortable with each other and with the camera. The retreat venue obviously allowed for ease of filming but did not impose its own characteristics. More importantly, the forward planning allowed for judicious moving of the production away from the communal set-up and into the individuals’ environments.

Fire-eating is one of Donna's accomplishments

This expansion added greatly to the reach of the series’ engagement with the participants. In the matter of any kind of search for identity among the young, the role of the parents is central and Richards was lucky or shrewd (or both) with her casting, which opened up a range of parental reactions and methods of dealing with their offspring’s dramatic developments. If the estranged father of Lewis suddenly found a warmth and sensitivity towards his son because the camera was on him, so much the better for the camera and for Lewis.

Those parents – and an adorable grandma – who gamely took part did themselves great credit. Others were eloquent in their absence, including the 20 year-old daughter of the 52 year-old former policeman-cum-lorry driver. Is changing sex more difficult, more testing, more traumatising – both for the transsexual and for those close to her or him – when the changer is middle-aged? Clearly the subject does not lend itself to too many generalities. It depends on the case.

Max

Even so, during the course of the series, I could not help wondering whether the transition from female to male is easier, more satisfactory, more … do I mean “natural”? … than from male to female. Among the seven we met, at least, the women became very convincing (if camp) boys, whereas the men tended to face the problem of seeming like, in the words of Sarah in Programme One, “bad drag”. Vocally, becoming female is especially taxing, whereas hormone treatment appears to lower the transitioning women’s voices considerably. And of course facial hair helps a lot.

A couple of the group spoke shrewdly about the crucial matter of moving convincingly, especially walking, and (by implication) the larger picture of demeanour, of presentation. Genital surgery clearly assists here, obliging the transgender person to walk accordingly. But both the programme and my own observations of drag entertainers and transvestite civilians convinces me that the unselfconsciously loose and informal body language of men is much easier for women to acquire than is the unselfconscious poise and subtlety of women, especially the glamorous women that men always seem to want to become.

Karen, Lewis, Max and Drew

Of the seven, the most “successful” transitioner appeared to be Donna: that is to say, the most confident and outgoing and – more important for transgender people even than for lesbian, gay and bisexual people (and, come to that, for straight people too) – the most comfortable in her own sexuality. Donna admits to having self-harmed in her teens but now, at 25, has been on hormones for two years and presents a persuasively female shape. Her breasts have developed but she knows how to present them too.

Still, she has no plans to seek surgery. For the females-to-males, chest surgery was/is part of the process and Lewis longs for a penis of his own, even if erecting it requires mechanical assistance. For her part, Donna gaily frequents bars where men go to meet transitional women who have not had surgery. She perhaps will settle for a hermaphroditic state. As a personality and a presence, the while, she appears – successfully and in many ways to her advantage – to carry off the trick of enjoying many of the advantages of both women and men.

Donna’s strongest suit is that she is not prepared to defer to anyone. She is sure of her place in the world and will fight to keep it. All the other transitioners recognised that and drew on it. We should too.

BRITISH TELEVISION: A DIM VIEW

This article marks the culmination of several years of off-and-on work. I originally marshalled the material into a proposal for a one-off television programme. For many months, I tried to fire up first one, then another old chum in the programme-making business to run with the proposal and take it to a commissioning editor, preferably the appropriate one at Channel 4. There were long discussions about the likelihood of any television channel being ready to screen a programme that tore into the modes and manners of broadcasting, including its own. I maintained that, if a channel perceived any likelihood of getting a decent audience for such a subject, any scruple about sensitivities would melt away.

However, more (in the end) for personal than any other reason, these programme-makers bailed out. I then sent the proposal to most of the best-established companies making factual programming for UK channels. Just one of them responded, declining but in a friendly manner. I wrote to the others again, reiterating that I am an old pro in the same business as they are. After all, these independents are the first to grumble when commissioning editors leave them swinging in the breeze. A small handful responded, gratifyingly shamefaced but not otherwise up for business.

Another programme-maker whom I contacted later (whom I also required to prompt for a reply) suggested that I instead knock out the material as a newspaper feature which, if it caused the sort of stir I hoped, might lead on naturally to the possibility of a programme.

So I wrote the piece you find below. I submitted it to The Guardian, The Independent and The Times, all newspapers for which I have written in the past. Trying to make it in some spurious manner “topical”, I framed it as a letter to Chris, Lord Patton, upon his taking up office (tomorrow) as chairman of the BBC Trust. Not a word of acknowledgment came back from any of the newspapers. When prompted, The Guardian did send an apologetic but otherwise impersonal rejection. The other two remained silent under further enquiry.

Lord Patton o'the BBC

I cannot be very disheartened at these companies and journals not wanting my stuff. But their lack of the most elementary courtesy is utterly dismaying. It is a discourtesy shared with cinema, theatre, book publishing and doubtless every other enterprise. How shaming.

An INTRODUCTION for the NEW BBC CHAIRMAN

Dear Lord Patten,

Upon your appointment as chairman of the BBC Trust, you were widely quoted to the effect that “I hardly ever watch television”, something you say was a misquotation. However, I hope you will permit me to assume that the evenings that you pass slumped in front of the box are relatively few and far between. People in public life never did do much viewing. The earliest purchasers of television sets typically bought them “for the servants”. The box replaced religion as the opium of the masses, not of the movers and shakers.

BBC Directors-General hardly get to watch any programmes, which was probably why PD James was able to make mincemeat of Mark Thompson in a memorable radio encounter a couple of years ago. DGs may hear a few broadcasts on radio while being whisked by car from one important meeting to another. But when Lord Birt was DG, I doubt that he ever saw a programme unless a government minister complained about it. He was too busy tearing out the septic tank, the central heating and the roof insulation actually to notice what the house looked like or how its inhabitants felt. On his watch, morale at the Corporation fell to an unprecedented low.

That television managers do not watch stuff – anyway, certainly not on transmission – is confirmed by what has happened to the way that programmes are presented. Each channel treats its output merely as a means of winning, holding and keeping viewers: “stay with us”, as newsreaders and linkpersons plaintively beg. Marshall McLuhan saw what was happening as long ago as 1967: “the medium is the message”. We can now say that, within the general dictum, each channel is its own message.

Television programmes still have the power to inspire adherence. Think of the devotees drawn by Mad Men, Glee, True Blood, Breaking Bad and Desperate Housewives. These dramas are of course American imports (this year’s panic, The Killing, is Danish) and you may well feel that, in citing them, I am loading my argument. I will concede odd shafts of local light, all as it happens from Channel 4 – Misfits (or at any rate its first astonishing series); The Promise (old-fashioned and over-extended but a proper, sustained story); the remarkable durability of Shameless – but those other dramas that have brought a measure of éclat to current British television are, almost without exception, genre pieces of various kinds, not least the relatively new (or anyway newly dominant) format of dramatised versions of the lives of celebrities, usually dead ones with whom liberties may be taken. Christopher and His Kind was flagged on BBC4 as ”original drama” but of course Kevin Elyot had dramatised Isherwood’s memoir. Those American shows that I listed above were all born of an individual writer’s scratch notion, something that is far too nerve-wracking for most British commissioning editors most of the time.

C4's startling contemporary drama serial, Misfits

How did British television get so compromised, so nerveless, so apt to keep glancing over its own shoulder, while paradoxically being so self-important and so ruthlessly competitive? From the end of the 1960s to the early 1990s, I alternated between working in and writing about television. It seemed to me then that this was the most exciting and important field in which to toil and to be interested, and British programming was at its cutting edge. My father was one of the million householders who bought a set in the twelve months after the Queen’s Coronation, which we had – as it was termed in those days – “viewed” enrapt at a neighbour’s house. I discovered the medium’s rich range on its two, then three channels through the 1960s and into the ’70s, a period now enshrined in cliché – but clichés are founded in truth – as The Golden Age.

Here was quality in variety: Doctor Who; World in Action; Steptoe and Son; The Prisoner; Armchair Theatre; The Stanley Baxter Show; Ready, Steady, Go!; All Our Yesterdays; The Rag Trade; Diary of a Young Man; Survival; Morning in the Streets; Tonight; The Avengers; Culloden; On Safari; Coronation Street; Your Life in Their Hands; The Plane Makers; Ways of Seeing; Face to Face; I, Claudius; Not Only – But Also; Isadora; Hancock’s Half Hour; Man Alive; Talking to a Stranger; The Army Game; University Challenge; Late Night Line-Up; The Roads to Freedom; The Sky at Night; Compact; Till Death Us Do Part; Disappearing World; The Search for the Nile; That Was the Week That Was; Monitor; The Strange World of Gurney Slade; The Likely Lads; The Magic Roundabout; The Forsyte Saga; Horizon; Spycatcher; It’s a Square World; Quatermass and the Pit; Dad’s Army; The Great War; Z Cars; The Old Grey Whistle Test; Tomorrow’s World; On the Margin; Aquarius; The Wednesday Play.

Judi Dench in John Hopkins' four-part, multi-viewpoint drama of 1967, Talking to a Stranger

Look across the schedules of the myriad channels now available and ponder whether there might be some degree of falling off: All New TV’s Naughtiest Blunders; 100 Men Own My Breasts; Outrageous Vacation Videos; Hotter Than My Daughter; Aircrash Confidential; Uncut! Sex on the Job; Most Haunted Unseen; F*** Off, I’m Ginger; Even My Pet’s a Porker; World’s Wildest Police Videos; The Spa of Embarrassing Illnesses; Most Shocking Criminal Behaviour; 50 Greatest Plastic Surgery Shockers; The Most Annoying TV Moments We Hate to Love; A Hundred Orgasms a Day; Celebrity Fear Factor UK; Celebrity Rehab; Web Lives Exposed ... Even if some of these things are more innocuous than they appear – I do not propose to research the matter – the pitch that their titles make is clear. So many programmes now trumpet terms that used to be confined to sensationalist top-shelf magazines and commercial down-market videos: “extreme”, “addicted”, “bizarre”, “wild”, “crash”.

Each of my lists is highly selective, of course. But just as all of the contemporary productions would have been unthinkable thirty years ago, so it must be doubted if equivalents of the vintage ventures, all so innovative in their time, would leap the barriers to originality erected over recent years. There are many reasons why risk died in broadcasting. The evidence of this death is everywhere.

For some twenty years now, television has been widely described as “dumbing down” to meet a demotic audience perceived as requiring constant stimulus. The danger that this would happen to television was long foreseen. In a submission to the Pilkington Committee that reported on broadcasting for the government in 1960, the poet TS Eliot warned that “those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it”. I suspect that Eliot would consider the full debauch to have arrived some years past. By 2004, 54 percent of those surveyed agreed that the BBC had “dumbed down” and/or ”lowered quality”.

Uplifting television: 100 Men Own My Breasts

There were angry refutations. In an article, one-time LWT executive David Doherty snarled that “dumbing down … was always an ugly phrase: elitist without being elegant, alliterative rather than analytical. It represented knee-jerk criticism of emerging freedoms, the last rallying cry of an elite who thought that culture … was too precious to leave to the masses, down to whose level the media were supposedly dumbing”. Docherty’s phrasemaking, it strikes me, was assonant but asinine. “Emerging freedoms” was an astonishing spin on the trend that led inexorably to I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here. And if ever there was a “knee-jerk criticism”, it was calling those who argue for thoughtful work “elitist”.

Part of the dumbing down is that, stealthily, television has abandoned all pretence to any concern for its own output. The programmes – the stuff that, for most people, are the medium’s raison d’être – barely make the top fifty in the list of executives’ own priorities. These mandarins are more interested in policy, structures, demographics, sales charts, models of future configurations of transmission ecosystems, that kind of big boys’ toy.

The BBC is enjoined by charter to carry no advertising yet it generates more ads than any of its rivals. The promotion of future programmes has several times passed what seemed at the time like saturation point. And, increasingly, BBC news bulletins are deemed proper vehicles for promoting up-coming current affairs and feature programmes that touch on public events, just as weather forecasts specify those few sports engagements still within the Corporation’s portfolio.

You can trace the BBC’s commitment to self-promotion back to 1967 when, though fiercely resisted at the time, the wireless stations were revamped and “wonderful Radio One” was born. Thereafter, outlandish claims for the BBC’s own entertainment value became the norm: “we’ve got an absolutely fantastic show for you today”, that level of reticence.

The unsinkable Katie Price in I'm a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here

Back in television, even though the viewer’s whereabouts are readily verified by myriad means, most channels affix a logo permanently to the corner of the screen – that is, permanently during the programmes, not during the precious advertisements and promotions. Would that it stopped there. Further information is deemed essential, such as the declaration that the programme is “brand new” (which is to say not broadcast in Britain before but several months after it was brand new in the States) or part of some supposed “season” of related programmes or even that some different series will be starting in a day or two.

I once settled down to watch a holiday season movie on the Disney Channel. It turned out that the silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head permanently resident in the bottom corner of the screen on that channel had been redesigned for the occasion. Every three minutes, it juddered and dropped out of sight, then reappeared bearing the legend ‘Happy Easter’, then juddered again, popped out of sight and resumed its usual empty state. Disney lost at least one viewer before ten minutes of the movie had elapsed. And to what purpose?

People will get used to anything, of course. The competition to distract the viewer has to hot up. In addition to standing channel IDs, “urgent” information has to be intruded suddenly by a strap-line. Just as you are being gripped by a programme’s climax, a caption appears telling you about the next programme. No concession is made either to the viewer’s sensibility or to the attention that the programme-makers must have assumed that they would be granted by the broadcaster.

Channel 4 once had an afternoon screening of the movie Auntie Mame. In the last shot, Rosalind Russell as the eponym determinedly ascends a grand staircase, her latest protégé in tow, towards a golden future at the top of the stairs beyond the upper right-hand corner of the screen. In C4’s screening, her transported gaze was fixed on a sign that read “Next: Countdown”. Of such bathos is British television daily made.

Radio 1's first logo, 1967

Just in case these rude interjections fail to frighten you into dropping the remote, a linkperson will then speak over the end credits, repeating the intelligence about the next programme and perhaps something later in the week. And for those whose memory is terminally short-term, the end credits will also be collapsed into a vignette while other screen furniture confirms the linkperson’s message and the strapline of a few seconds earlier. The viewer who had hoped to glean some information from the credits has no choice in the matter and is not considered. Nor are those whose names appear in those credits. And it confounds me that any composer should still wish to supply theme music that will be comprehensively trampled on transmission.

Are higher management at all aware of transmission modes? Do they know how cavalierly both the audience and the programmes are treated? Have they registered how routinely the switching on of the mic in the presentation suite affects the soundtrack, music and all, of the end of the programme, so that, if the linkperson leaves the mic on, the programme ends in a cacophony of distortion? Reviewers, whose viewing is also largely conducted ahead of transmission, are spared these abuses too.

This hectoring of viewers and the hustling off of programmes that are reaching their end creates a sense of the channel as sausage-factory production line, all the products the same and a liability unless packed away immediately. Programme-makers are obliged to join the packaging/promoting culture that they cannot beat. Dramas routinely have to intrude “previously” summaries and “in the next episode” trails into the unity of story. (HBO in the States splendidly resists this). So moments are highlighted out of context and imminent revelations are imposed on you, often at the direct expense of the end-credits. Documentaries are now apt to trail clips of the upcoming segment before the ad break and then restate the programme’s premise after the break, as though we are all too stupid to hold anything in our heads.

This infantilizing and spoonfeeding of the audience inevitably infects programme policy too. News reports are constantly decorated with pointless, banal illustration (feet on city streets, children playing in soft focus, the bereaved leafing through photograph albums), overblown graphics and even moments of “reconstruction” (i.e. dramatisation). Passers-by are canvassed for random vox pops that only confirm that the public is ill-informed: last year, a bloke on his doorstep told the BBC that he disagreed with striking BA staff because “we could all do with a bit more money”, but the strike was over work conditions, travel concessions and safety regulations, not pay. Didn’t the news editor know that?

AJ 'Freddie' Ayer

A BBC news apparatchik once wrote to a newspaper, quoting (in order to refute) an earlier correspondent’s comment: “I make no apology for having been ‘obsessed with making the news interesting’ … what should we do – make [it] boring?” I don’t think news editors need to make the news anything. They ought to believe that it is intrinsically interesting, that it requires no hard sell. Otherwise they are in the wrong job.

As well as their reliance on genre, commissioning editors generally will not commit to a new drama unless at least one from a small repertory company of actors presumed to be audience-pleasers is willing to play the lead. These actors – you know who they are – may be identified by their safe dullness, a quality endlessly extended by the predictability of their casting. To compound the offence, recognisable actors are now required to front documentaries. Television executives evidently believe that, for instance, BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico cannot deliver an audience unless sold as Stephen Fry and the Great American Oil Spill. While Fry may be adept at giving what his beloved Wodehouse called “the old oil”, I entertain some doubt that he is among the world’s leading authorities on environmental disasters or multinational corporations.

So why was it him presenting? Fry is routinely accounted “the cleverest man on television”, which nicely encapsulates the degree to which the medium has declined. Such bygone regulars as AJ Ayer, Jacob Bronowski, Stuart Hall, Susan Sontag, John Berger, Marghanita Laski, Raymond Williams, George Steiner, Bryan Magee and even Malcolm Muggeridge would have eaten a Fry-up for breakfast. Why not go the whole hog with the Deepwater Horizon programme and have Paris Hilton shrieking because her heels got splattered or Charlie Sheen blaming a Jewish conspiracy? Or could we instead have a proper programme that doesn’t pander to celebrity culture?

Television has run hard with celebrity. Experts, seasoned journalists and professional interviewers are no longer in demand. No traditional, uncompromising reporter like James Cameron could now replicate his glorious broadcasting career. However ignorant or inane or irrelevant, the observations of someone who appears in the tabloids are far more welcome to programme-makers than anything smacking of knowledge, authority or experience. And because television influences so many other fields, this absurd distortion of public discourse infects marketing calculations everywhere. So the random taste in fiction of people off the telly dictates publishers’ lists, which are already dominated by ghosted celebrity memoirs and novels and children’s books by comedians and actors. Because television imagines it can only filter any information or education through the mouth of a graduate of soap opera or Big Brother, the rest of the culture follows suit. It can only be a matter of time before no job vacancy in the land is filled without an X Factor or Dragon’s Den-style audition of the applicants.

One of the authors of this televisual disaster is, I submit (and you may well be shocked to entertain the notion), Jeremy Isaacs. Sir Jeremy would seem to be the type of proper, honourable and creative television executive of the past. (At least he wasn’t dressed by Asda, like the unlamented Andy Duncan). But it was he more than anyone who dismantled the old studio system by setting up Channel 4 as a “publishing” rather than a producing house. In theory, letting a hundred independents bloom looked like an enlightened act. But what some of us warned at the time has come to pass.

Sir Jeremy Isaacs, father of Channel 4

The pattern of the industry has reproduced the collapse of the big studios in Hollywood in the 1950s. Because the independents were obliged to compete for the favours of commissioning editors, the pitch and the deal became their primary creative acts. That safety should become the prevailing tenor of the pitches was as predictable as the gradual hoovering up of small production houses by larger ones. The distinctive house-style of the broadcasting producers – Granada’s innovative thoughtfulness, ATV’s showbiz pizzazz, the BBC’s historic mission to “inform, educate and entertain” – metamorphosed into the buyer’s market exemplified by Sky, which has only recently begun to generate original British programming of its own.

In his time as BBC D-G, John Birt underscored the dismantling of the studio system by outsourcing craft services, thereby destroying long BBC traditions of training and methodology to the whole industry’s detriment. At a more subtle level, the collegiality of the big studios was snuffed out too. And middle management grew. When I was an in-house BBC producer in the 1970s, I was answerable to one immediate boss who supported my decisions as a matter of course. Now, nothing is given a green light until it has been neutered by an army of executive producers, marketing consultants and sales advisors.

Given this unpropitious climate, is it any wonder that the idiosyncrasy of talent has left the field to time-servers, profit-counters and systems nerds? Please be a restorative, creative and critical chair of the BBC Trust.

Yours sincerely,

W Stephen Gilbert

A CONTINENT DARKENED by PREJUDICE

I caught up with a recent contribution to the Channel 4 documentary strand, Dispatches. The film was called Africa’s Last Taboo and it may still be accessed, but not for much longer, at www.channel4.com/program#374C56 so do not delay. In the programme, which was filmed, produced and directed by Robin Barnwell for Insight News TV, African-born Sorious Samura visited several countries on the African continent, seeking evidence of the new militancy against gay people. It was clearly not hard to find.

In four African countries, Sudan, Somalia, Mauritania and Nigeria, male homosexuality can attract the death penalty. In two thirds of countries on the continent, homosexual acts are illegal. World attention has lately been attracted by the fundamentalist stance of many of the African bishops towards moves to liberalise the position of the Anglican church on homosexuality; by the proposal to introduce swingeing anti-gay laws in Uganda (including penalties for failing to report gay people to the police, a recipe for a culture of smear, slander, vengeance and vindictiveness); and by the case of two gay men in Malawi imprisoned for fourteen years and then pardoned after personal representations by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon.

Anti-gay rally in Mbale, Uganda

Barnwell and Samura were filming before the Malawian case came to court and they covered the men’s release. A condition of the pardon was that the pair live a considerable distance apart. One took to the bottle, reckoned he had found a woman friend and, refusing an interview, was last seen weaving pathetically into the bush. The other was luxuriating in his unexpected freedom but the prospects are no better in Malawi than elsewhere in god-fearing Africa.

It is clear that religious bigotry is fuelling this cruel outbreak of witch-hunting. Prominent in the campaign to bring greater oppression to Uganda is Bishop Julius Oyet, the Vice President of the Born Again Federation of Churches, which claims four million adherents in Uganda. Oyet’s preaching style makes Elmer Gantry look like a wimp. “Now listen to me” he bawled. “The sodomy people, the homosexuals are even more foolish than dogs. There’s no female dog that mates with a female dog. There’s no male dog that lusts after a male dog. Even animals are wiser than homosexuals. Do you hear me?”

Oyet knows as little about dogs and other animals as he knows about people. Anybody idly watching dogs in the street will soon see that he is an ignoramus. The preacherman continued: “We do not condemn homosexuality just because we are Africans. We condemn homosexuality because it is written in the holy book. The Bible tells us, according to Leviticus chapter 18 verse 22, ‘You shall not lie with a male as a man lies with a woman. It is an abomination’. I want to invite you to declare no to sodomy, every one of you, I want us to say today ‘Uganda says no to sodomy, Uganda says …’ …” and so on endlessly.

There are a number of matters I would have liked Samura to raise with Oyet. For instance, homophobes routinely quote Leviticus, and selective quotation from scripture has been an easy crutch for bigots since the texts gathered in the Old Testament were first circulated. It’s actually Leviticus 21:13 that really puts the boot in, including the death sentence for men who “lie with” other men. But in fact almost the whole of Leviticus 18 is concerned with rulings against “uncovering the nakedness” of various classes of person and then, in verse 20, against “lying carnally with thy neighbour’s wife”. I would venture that such sins are far more frequently committed among Oyet’s flock than the one that preoccupies him.

Sorious Samura

Elsewhere in the Old Testament, we are instructed that “every man child among you shall be circumcised” [Genesis 17:10] and that "whosoever doeth any work on the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death” [Exodus 31:15; not my italics], which could certainly tie up a few courts all around the planet in trying to determine what exactly constitutes “work”.

And then there is the matter of sodomy. This is not exactly the only sexual act that men can and do commit together, nor is it the sole prerogative of same-sex couples. Indeed, Bishop Oyet must very well know that sodomy is by far the most widely favoured method of “contraception” practised by men on women right across Africa. Anal penetration is also much the most common route by which the HI virus travels. And this is precisely why Aids is pandemic on that continent, though not among gay men. Samura might have pointed this out.

If Oyet has an aversion to sodomy, he should turn his attention to heterosexual sodomy, about which education on safe practice is desperately needed. Samura, interviewing a gay sex worker who is HIV positive, might usefully have made that point too, rather than half-heartedly excusing the guy because he is the sole supporter of his six year-old sister.

I would also have asked Oyet what I always ask the supernaturally deluded when they invoke scripture against anal intercourse. “If your god did not intend penetration of the anus,” I should have enquired politely, “why did he in his infinite wisdom make the anus an erogenous zone?”

At a rally, Oyet literally blew his own trumpet and then bellowed: “Our children today are being deceived by the West to buy them, to give them school fees, so that they can be homosexuals”. What in god’s name does that mean? Oyet is so obsessed with his mission that coherence goes out of his mind. Later, he told Samura that homosexuality is “an external economic manipulation, economic colonialism”. It’s an old trick to blame foreigners for what you dislike but if Oyet took the trouble to read history he would soon discover that homosexuality has been endemic in every culture and every community and every recorded age of humanity. As Gerald, a smart, articulate gay activist in Uganda, observed drily, it’s homophobia that has been imported from the west, not homosexuality.


Bishop Julius Oyet

But of course this tide of homophobia is not fuelled by reason among any of the population, let alone the clerics. Declared a Kenyan described by Samura as “well-respected locally”: “I don’t care if it’s my own brother, my own son, I will burn him”. This is a mindset in which murder is less troubling a notion than whatever sexual insecurity or fear of loss of control informs him. The leader of a women’s group cried, to noisy approval from her sisters: “Where are women going to go if men are marrying men?” Well, think about it, dear. Are all men marrying men? Is this really as big a problem as you make it seem? And anyway, where are men going to go if women are as ugly as you? I don’t think that’s a more offensive question than your own.

Gay people in Africa inevitably talk of going underground. Here is another quotation: “There comes a time, as it came in my life, when a man is denied the right to live a normal life, when he can only live the life of an outlaw because the government has so decreed to use the law to impose a state of outlawry upon him. I was driven to this situation, and I do not regret having taken the decisions that I did take. Other people will be driven in the same way in this country, by this very same force of police persecution and of administrative action by the government, to follow my course, of that I am certain”.

Those lines are not from the Africa’s Last Taboo programme. They were spoken on the same continent but a long time ago, almost fifty years. They come from the plea in mitigation offered at his trial by Nelson Mandela before he was jailed in 1962, initially for five years. I could have quoted almost anything from Mandela’s hour-long address; all of it pertains to a person’s right to lead a free life by his own lights and according to his own nature in the country of his birth. The superstitious confusion and brutal oppression meted out to gay people by authorities across Africa is no more nor less enlightened or moral than the arguments used by colonialists and racists to oppress Africans under apartheid. Today, South Africa grants freedoms to gay people that set a standard for the whole continent and are more progressive than in almost any country anywhere in the world, including Britain. South African gays have full rights including those of marriage, adoption and the option to serve openly in the military and they are statutorily protected from discrimination in all and any circumstance. This is one of the greatest legacies of Mandela’s presidency. Every African government should be obliged to justify itself against the record of their land’s most beloved figure.

WHITE EARTH, WHITE TERROR

The bloody end of Eugene Terre’Blanche can’t have taken many by surprise, certainly not the followers of Christ who know their man’s words as spoken to Saint Peter and reported in the Matthew Gospel: “All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” [26:52]. Terre’Blanche certainly took the sword. The son of an officer in the South African Defence Force, a conscription outfit not noted for its progressive implementation of apartheid rule, he joined the South African Police. He rose to become a warrant officer in the Special Guard that protected government ministers. However, he came to feel that the policies of Prime Minister John Vorster were too liberal – ha! – and resigned to join the right-wing break-away movement, the Herstigte Nasionale Party.


In his attractive youth in the South African Police

When he failed to find elective office by this route, he formed his own grouping, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (known as the AWB), a quasi-military pressure group that he would lead for 37 years. He chose as his group’s symbol a variation on the swastika, donned his bodyguards in black shirts and was always referred to as The Leader (Der Leier in Afrikaans, the precise equivalent of Der Führer). But the AWB was a tuppeny-ha’penny outfit by the standards of most militias. Even the sainted Ken Sara-Wiwa maintained a private army capable of more efficient despatch of renegades and apostates than were the AWB. Though (following the inaugural tarring and feathering of a white liberal academic) his goons were certainly responsible for some deaths in South Africa, Terre’Blanche customarily traded more in menace and bloodcurdling speeches than in systematic violence against perceived enemies of apartheid or civil disobedience in the face of what he claimed was the weakening of white supremacy successively by Vorster and PW Botha.


With fellow AWB stormtroopers

Perhaps Terre’Blanche’s most eye-catching stroke was the 1993 attack he and several hundred supremacists launched on the building where negotiations were in progress to end apartheid and introduce multi-racial elections. Having successfully disrupted the talks, however, the storm-troopers ran out of ideas as to what to do beyond pissing on the floor and painting slogans on the walls. They left with a promise of no legal repercussions and the multi-racial elections went ahead as planned, thereby electing Nelson Mandela as president.

Nick Broomfield’s celebrated 1991 documentary portrait for Channel 4, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, presented a man who worked hard at seeming ferocious but who had little coherent to offer in terms of philosophy or practical politics. This of course is the shortcoming of fundamentalists everywhere. “No surrender” is their cry and armed is their response. We can see this breaking out right across the States just now and truly unnerving it is too. Those barking defiance from the last redoubt are generally absurd creatures and Terre’Blanche played out the absurdity in full measure, strutting around like a Mussolini of the veldt and famously falling off his horse at a parade intended to burnish his legend.


AWB design style

It is the armed ingredient that stops these people existing only in a world of comic operetta. Last week, a middle-aged so-called “born again Christian” and “pro-lifer” was sentenced to fifty years in a Kansas jail for shooting dead a surgeon outside a church. The killer justified his action by calling the surgeon “a baby-killer”. It is the taking of the law into their own hands that is the logical outcome of the decision to bear arms. Just as the regulatory instincts of left-of-centre regimes can, when taken to extremes, turn into oppression so the “freedom” demanded by right-wingers soon gives way to anarchy and the law of the jungle. In that world, weapons are carried for “defence” but of course are used in practice for attack.


Menace and blood-curdling speeches

I do not doubt that there is lawlessness and vengefulness among both black and white communities in South Africa. White farmers clearly do get attacked – murdered, even – simply because they own land. It’s frighteningly easy to imagine a future government in Pretoria instigating a self-defeating campaign to drive the whites from successful farms as Mugabe has done in Zimbabwe with the same result that does no one, black or white, any good.

Equally, the poverty and resentment among poor urban and rural blacks is real and crippling enough. How they must wonder when the bright promise of Mandela is going to transform their little lives. That Terre’Blanche was hacked to death with pangas by young men whom he had cheated of their recompense for labour undertaken seems only too likely, both in terms of his indifference to their entitlement and their resorting to the only remedy they knew. If the murderous cruelties of the years of apartheid are revisited upon those whites who perpetrated them, it is hardly a surprise. Read the novels of the great Nobel laureate JM Coetzee who, with understandable discretion, has uprooted his family and moved to Australia. Among his works, Disgrace, In the Heart of the Country and Life and Times of Michael K provide as compelling a portrait as any of life for both black and white in South Africa.


Careful, Gene, you might fall off

Jacob Zuma – himself a figure of doubtful credibility with his wives, his enthusiasm for public dancing and his constant air of corruption – has a real challenge to keep this show on the road if he does not want his presidency to be remembered primarily for a Football World Cup marked by violence and crime. He has been shrewdly solicitous about the Terre’Blanche murder. He knows that the danger of a backlash is real and frightening and that he must contain it. The dead fool should be soon forgotten and, we must hope, will leave no movement or legacy that can last. But this is a moment to hold our collective breath.


Zapiro cartoon for The Jo'burg Mail & Guardian a year ago: not quite how it turned out

************************************

A most melancholy task that falls to us at this time of year is the removal of dead frogs from our pond. Evidently the females are exhausted and eventually drowned by the over-amorous males, some of whom are found to be still clinging to the corpses when they are netted out. On the night-time walks, I keep the dogs on tight leads and rake the ground with torches to ensure that we step on none of the creatures lurking and croaking to each other in the grass. But the reward of this care is the daytime dumping of bloated bodies over the hedge, as many as six or eight some days. It seems a very unproductive means of courtship. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what might be done another year to ameliorate this carnage?

UGH-GLEE

Lord knows I have persevered with Glee. I have watched all eleven episodes of series one that have been shown on British satellite television, several of them twice. There will be two more episodes before the first series hiatus necessitated by US network television’s present policy of commissioning half a series at a time: the remaining nine parts resume on CBS next month, so a time-lag for British viewers is assured.

I certainly would not be viewing so diligently or troubling my readers with the matter, had the show not proved to be such a smash. Its opening half-season won the Best Television Series (Musical or Comedy) at the Golden Globes, over 30 Rock, Entourage, Modern Family and The Office (US version). Of its rivals, 30 Rock won the same award last season, Entourage has been nominated in each of its six years of existence but has never won, The Office (which won in 2003 for its original British manifestation) has been nominated for three of its four seasons without winning and the gloriously funny Modern Family – though in truth nothing like as ground-breaking as its ’70s grandparent Soap – is new like Glee.

More influential on my viewing habits was a phone conversation with a friend whom I shall call Robert. This was early in the run of Glee when I was about to give up on it. Robert is a gay, Jewish, expatriate American who has forgotten more about stage and screen musicals than most people would think it possible to know. He is also pretty damned waspish in his judgments, so when Glee came up in our chat I was braced to be the one who was rather shamefacedly defending it against an onslaught. But the shoe was on the other foot. I found myself the one reaching increasingly for withering scorn and Robert being placatory and forgiving to the show.


Ryan Murphy

In a second conversation on the matter, Robert staggered me by citing two friends whom he had successfully alerted to Glee and snapping at me: “so you’re out of step”. For Pete’s sake. Kinda liking Glee – and I don’t think I make a travesty of Robert’s position if I put his feelings no stronger than that – is not a matter of political correctness. I was instantly reminded of a parallel exchange of emails a few years back with another gay, Jewish, expatriate American of my acquaintance. This was on the subject of the then new Shameless, another drama serial screened on Channel 4 and its satellites, though this one is a British production. Bernard, as I will call him, was unexpectedly antagonistic towards Shameless – “don’t get me wrong,” he protested, “I like Paul Abbott” (he too is in the biz) – and he came out with a putdown of my argument quite as gob-smacking as Robert’s: “well, no one in London likes it”. Sure, Bernard. That’ll be how come the eighth series is shooting as I write, all 22 episodes of it.

But to Glee. The brain behind it is Ryan Murphy whose previous hit show was the most unpleasant thing presently on American television, Nip/Tuck. His new one tells of a high school glee club. These institutions date back some 250 years and have their roots in England where the tradition died out, supplanted by more organised bodies such as municipal choral societies. The American education system has retained the term and some of the form, though not – at any rate in the television version – the habit of singing a cappella. In the serial (and probably in reality too) there is also a significant shot of the “let’s-put-on-a-show-right-here-in-the-barn” side of American showbiz that was crystalised in the 1940s Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney screen musicals.

As that touch of back story suggests, Glee does not exactly turn up new tilth. Essentially, it makes barely any advance on June Allyson and Peter Lawford in Good News in 1947, itself a remake of a 1930 movie that brought a 1927 stage show to the screen. Since then there have been endless variations on the showbiz kids theme, not least the movie, remake and television spin-off of Fame, a short-lived British television serial Britannia High and the Disney Channel franchise High School Musical. Ryan Murphy claims not to have seen the Disneys but someone should tell him that the resemblances are legion. So the form is, you might have thought, bled dry.

Glee has quite a few plot issues to surmount. Apart from the week when the glee club leader’s nemesis figure was absent, every episode’s storyline has hinged on the question of whether the Ohio school’s glee club will survive. Given that the first series runs to 22 episodes and Murphy is negotiating to raise the second to 25, there’s not a lot of tension in these plotlines.

Inevitably there needs to be plenty of soap-opera-ish traffic in the stories but, as many of the inchoate characters are still in their teens, there is a limit to what is available. This would matter less if a consistency of tone and approach were maintained, particularly in the level of realism. For instance, most of the numbers grow from rehearsal, trying out of songs and more-or-less work-in-progress performances. Insofar as these numbers break out of the strict conventions of pseudo-documentary coverage of work (adding orchestration and segueing into finished moves and routines), it’s a perfectly acceptable convention – though it would have been much more interesting (and triumphant if brought off) to go into much more realistic problems of learning and rehearsing and trying-out. The calling up of Hollywood levels of professionalism supposedly to convey the talent of amateur, untrained performers is a convention as old as Hollywood and it’s a missed opportunity that it wasn’t subverted this time.


Matthew Morrison as Will

But beyond that the show goes in for non-naturalistic breaking into song – the car-wash routine in episode three, for instance – which doesn’t occur regularly enough to justify its place. It reads like a loose hand on the tiller, making production decisions based on the moment rather than the big picture. Worse, a show looks undisciplined when it suddenly resorts to conventions that weren’t there from the get-go, such as (here) shifting plot in voice-over. Glee club leader Will and his nemesis Sue are suddenly arguing in v-o and Will then flips the convention further by being made to say “We’re even fighting in our voice-overs”. A programme has to earn the right to throw the rulebook in the air and you don’t achieve that being doggedly conventional up to that point. I’m reminded that Murphy told The New York Daily News last May that “we’re going to keep everything pretty reality-based”. Clearly one man’s reality is another’s intrinsically disordered perception.

Soap opera storylines are historically associated with female characters, of whom Glee has a full complement. Here too, though, the plotting doesn’t maintain a consistent reality. Glee offers simultaneously a secret pregnancy and a fake pregnancy, both expected by the women bearing them to go full term without anyone finding out. The fake pregnancy is indulged by Will’s wife Terri, who manifests a range of pretty much certifiable neuroses yet who seems intended to be – and is certainly played as – a comic character. Terri is clearly not meant to be seen as sympathetic because her erratic and selfish behaviour is a torment to Will, the male lead. The serial keeps signalling that we root for Will to get together with Emma, the school guidance counsellor, herself prey to (no doubt highly amusing) neuroses.

Aside from Emma, who is so flaky, all the adult women and most of the girls in the show are more or less of a nightmare. Four of the adult women so far introduced have suffered a drinking problem, which suggests Murphy has a fixation that he should look at. All in all, this is certainly not a show that does women any favours.


Lea Michele, Cory Monteith as Rachel, Finn

The treatment of “minorities” is yet worse. The founding members of the glee club include Mercedes who is black, Kurt who is gay, Artie who is in a wheelchair and Tina who is oriental. But these are all peripheral characters. The teen storylines concern primarily Rachel, whose immediately clear role is that of a demanding, striving Barbra Streisand, a resemblance given voice to more than once in dialogue, Finn the big sports lunk who is reluctantly shoe-horned into glee and whose steady is Quinn, the cheerleaders’ leader. Quinn’s is the (initially) secret pregnancy – of course, because she’s “president of the celibacy club” – and Finn is the (wrongly) designated father. Finn and Quinn and their daughter … um … Winn? It’s like Maurice and Doris Norris and their son Boris.

But back to the supernumeraries, who might be more interesting if given a hearing. Take Artie: in the pilot, he initially leads a rendition of Frank Loesser’s ‘Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat’ and the self-congratulation emanating from the script meeting is deafening. From then on, it becomes crystal clear that Artie is never going to be more than a token figure but it’s actually worse than that because all the physical business with him is quite demeaning, usually effectively rolling him out of the way. And the script keeps reinforcing the unchallenged notion from “bad” characters that disadvantaged people are “losers”.

It’s episode nine before Artie has anything more than two lines and gets (part of) a solo: ‘I’m Dancin’ with Myself’ (think poignant). To get them to understand Artie’s situation better, Will makes the other kids spend a few scenes (only when convenient to the plot) in wheelchairs, so the emphasis on the matter in this episode in practice excludes Artie himself. Nice. But perhaps the worst thing about the figure of Artie is that the actor who plays him is a perfectly able-bodied dancer. How completely shabby.

In episode eleven, the glee gang encounter rival school clubs. One is a sink school, so of course its students and teachers are all black or Hispanic. The other is a deaf school whose teacher seems not to know that he himself is deaf. Yeah, right. Fun-ny. When the deaf choir begin ‘Imagine’, in sign language and brave sprechgesang that they can’t hear, it’s genuinely moving (because genuine) but Murphy can’t bring himself to let it play so the regular principals join in, take over and soon overwhelm it.


"Minorities"

It’s odd how bad art contrives to throw up lines that betray its own lack of awareness and Glee is typical. “The minority students don’t feel they’re being heard” comes up in episode seven, and how true this is of the show itself. At the end of episode eleven, Will promises “no false theatricals” but, oh Will, the damage was done long ago. In a group discussion about celibacy (episode two), the comic relief is ugly, bespectacled and Jewish. “You know?” cries Rachel. “This is a joke”. Yup. Later, this particular “loser” tries to blackmail Rachel into flashing her bra. As we know, ugly people in glasses are so sexually frustrated that they don’t know how to behave.

Another supernumerary is introduced for Will to tell the story in flashback – another non-established convention – of a student who had a crush on him. That she is a conveniently passing character and ugly to boot – she wears glasses! – seems to make it all right for Will to treat her in a way that is callous, cruel, insensitive and stupid, just what a teacher should be doing. Will’s behaviour is offered as acceptable because the girl is “a loser”.

But the whole serial is stiff with examples of grotesquely unprofessional behaviour, usually under gratuitous and convenient coercion: a gynaecologist falsifying his findings, a headmaster buckling to the fear that a ridiculous viral of his appearance on a commercial will be seen by the pupils, a school nurse appointed with no qualifications because Terri fancies doing the job (like you do) so that she can keep an eye on Will. How fortunate that she must have cleared the checks for sexual offences against children.

In the first episode, the stall is set out by Will planting dope on Finn as a means of pressuring him into the club, an act that passes muster on no test of any kind. But if Will’s occasional action is unacceptable in anyone, let alone a teacher, the behaviour of Sue, his sworn enemy, is beyond the bounds throughout. The very opening line of the pilot has her berating her cheerleaders: “You think this is hard? Try being waterboarded, that’s hard”. Later, she cries: “I’m living with hepatitis, that’s hard” and she advises Will “you do with your depressing little group of kids what I did with my wealthy, elderly mother: euthanise them”. Does CBS really think all this is appropriate? Why not have her say: “Try being sued by Dan Rather, that’s hard”?


Jane Lynch plays Sue

Sue gets taken on as a pundit by the local television station. She tells her viewers: “You know, I’m tired of hearing people complain – ‘I’m riddled with disease’ or ‘I was in that tsunami’. To them I say ‘shake it up a bit, get out of your box, even if that box happens to be where you’re living'." Ohio should rise up against this travesty of what it would accept. The line between making fun out of political incorrectness and being gratuitously insensitive is a fine one. In episode six, Emma says of Sue: “I can’t believe she’s allowed to teach at this school”. Indeed. Neither can I.

Jane Lynch who plays Sue is one of the vanishingly few lesbian thespians in Hollywood and the aforementioned Robert seems to think this vests Glee with some special credibility. Well, Ryan Murphy is out gay too but any chance that I might have given the show the benefit of the doubt is stymied by its clumping treatment of gay stuff. The moment you know for sure that Murphy has no sense of what his responsibility is to his own or any other community is that moment in episode eight when you note that all the black boys on the school football team are the homophobic ones. Nice, from every point of view.

Kurt, the gay character, makes his bow singing ‘Mr Cellophone’. We’re asked to believe, by the way, that this son of a car mechanic can afford what he claims is an Alexander McQueen sweater, if you please. Like no showbiz boy since A Chorus Line, he seems to have gender issues alongside his closet issues. When I complained that Kurt was as marginalised as all the other “non-regular” characters, Robert had watched episode four as I had not. “You’ll see” he promised. In that episode, Kurt pretends to his dad that he is interested in football and then – goodness gracious! – is discovered to be a brilliant natural kicker of the ball, is promptly signed to the team on the strength of one four-square kick and goes on to win the next match single-handed. Remarkably, this transformation of his status at the school is never alluded to again.

How depressingly regressive that the only way a gay boy can be accepted in a school in the 21st century is as a closeted jock. Anyway, Kurt turns out in episode eleven to be selfish and treacherous, a point needed in the plotting of relations between Finn and Rachel. Marginal characters only ever have to be consistently sympathetic if they are due to die long before the end. It’s a Hollywood rule.


Chris Colfer plays Kurt

Kurt has a secret crush on Finn. “I don’t know why I find his stupidity charming” he says and nor do we. Finn is pretty damned stupid and not (as played) especially charming. Cory Monteith, cast as Finn, is just an inexpressive dope and, rather crucially, a really terrible mover. It’s bewildering how this boy got the part. Hollywood needs a big, sweet chucklehead every so often but they don’t go on to have useful careers unless they have discernible talent (remember Chris Klein?). Matthew Morrison as glee club teacher Will is a bozo too. Teri Hatcher’s Susan is a bozo but in Desperate Housewives it doesn’t matter because the other three leading women are magnificent, rounded, original creations and they carry Susan with good grace. There’s no one to carry Will so his weakness as both character and performance is cruelly exposed. We’re asked – twice in quick succession – to buy him as a rapper in episode eight. Oh please.

In fact whether the cast can sing is hard to say because the miming gives no unmistakeable sense that each voice we hear is coming from the actor’s mouth. That voice might be an unseen singer, like Marni Nixon or the cruelly treated little girl at the Beijing Olympics. At least with Garland and Rooney and indeed Lawford (painful!) and Allyson there’s no doubt it’s them singing.

That’s the central flavour of Glee for me. It never tastes organic. The plot contrivances are to get us through a problem of filling the commercial hour rather than of building the kind of big, colourful marching parade that a long-running American serial needs to be. So we get the one-episode woodshop teacher who has severed his own thumbs in a dumb accident, evidently present solely to make up the numbers of a short-lived sideline singing group. Then there is the character who dominates episode five, ‘The Rhodes Not Taken’. There was me thinking this was going to be a smart gag about Rhodes Scholarships, the kind you’re used to from my posting titles. But no, the featured guest was one April Rhodes, a washed-up former member of an earlier glee club. No doubt she got her name because CBS owns the Rhodes Electric Piano Company.


Jayma Mays plays Emma

Glee arrives in a strong era of continuing drama on American television. When it invites direct comparison with its seniors, it withers: the episode four scene where Will’s sister-in-law freaks Terri with an unforgivingly frank account of childbirth went up against a similar but far superior scene in Desperate Housewives that week; meanwhile, Emma is the Bernadette Peters role in Glee but Ugly Betty trumps it completely – in the Bernadette Peters role, it has Bernadette Peters.

Mysteriously, the Gleeful Robert doesn’t watch either Ugly Betty or Desperate Housewives (let alone True Blood). Perhaps I need to take a deep breath, brave his certain indignation and inform him that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about