Thank goodness for a writer who doesn’t treat viewers like idiots!
Never explain, said Benjamin Disraeli. Queen victoria’s favourite smoothtalking Prime Minister would have made a great Tv writer, and not just because his hobby was penning racy melodramas.
Too many serials get bogged down in turgid exposition and long-winded commentaries. even shows that delight in confusing viewers will suddenly panic and unload a stodgy dollop of dialogue.
In the past week we’ve seen over-explanation in Humans, Westworld and The Bridge. ‘Do you know what’s going on?’ demands one character. Another adopts a grim and urgent expression: ‘All I know is . . . update, background, reprise, more update.’
Full marks to The Handmaid’s Tale (C4), which followed Disraeli’s dictum by dispensing with dialogue altogether in several long scenes, letting the actors and the action tell the story while a clever soundtrack added layers of foreboding.
On the run from the suburban dictatorship where she has been kept a sex slave, June (elisabeth Moss) took shelter in a derelict building. She was jumping at shadows, crouching behind vast bales of paper when she heard police sirens, while a synthesised grumble throbbed in the background.
We watched Moss’s subtly expressive face flinch and snarl at what she discovered — empty desks, a woman’s shoe, scattered pens and notepads . . . and a row of nooses, beside a printing press.
The opposite wall was black with bloodstains and pitted with bullet holes. This was a newspaper building: the journalists were murdered when the dictatorship took power. All this was conveyed without a word being spoken.
Director Mike Barker was confident enough to repeat the technique, not once but repeatedly, when we first saw the concentration camp that will be June’s fate if she is caught, and in a flashback as academic emily (Alexis Bledel) discovered a university colleague had been lynched for being gay.
It was most effective when emily, who is also gay, tried to flee the country with her wife and baby — only to be stopped by police at the airport. As emily watched her little boy being carried away, knowing she would never see him again, all noise ceased and we heard only soundtrack music.
The Handmaid’s Tale is often praised for its visual majesty, and some of the tableaux this week had an epic, Biblical quality. But we can’t fully appreciate it without listening as well as looking.
A Very English Scandal (BBC1) would actually be easier to follow if it dispensed with the explanatory captions that roll across the screen every time the scenery shifts.
As a nervous Norman Scott (Ben Whishaw) and his Great Dane rinka were given a lift across bleak countryside by a hitman in a Cortina, we really didn’t need a giant label to tell us this was ‘ exmoor’ — or another, as the car pulled up outside a pub, to explain we were now in ‘Porlock’.
Writer russell T. Davies is too enamoured of all the ironies and the improbable details in this true story to let any of them go — so, for instance, he used more captions to tell us that one of the go- betweens in the murder plot was called ‘John Le Mesurier’ who lived in ‘ Bridgend’. Too much explanation, russell.
Whishaw was simply brilliant, though, as the fey, awkward, vain young man who might not find women sexually attractive, but is skilled at manipulating them.
The actor gave us quiet reasons to like Scott, too — his willingness to accept hardship without complaint, his love of animals. None of it needed explaining.