The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
DISASTER OF THE DECADE
still beholden to lacklustre comedy dramas starring Caroline Quentin or Martin Clunes, and while Doc Martin still limps on, the agenda has been set by much tougher, more serious shows. Two series in particular – Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty and Sally Wainwright’s
Happy Valley – demonstrate a hard psychological truth which was incredibly rare in previous years.
Both of these dramas are very British in their sensibility but there are plenty of others which feel as if they were made with an eye on the international audience. A game changer (though, to my mind, overpraised) was The Night Manager in 2016, based on a John le Carré novel and seen by many as a Bond audition for Tom Hiddleston. Since then McMafia and The Little Drummer Girl (another le Carré) have shown the BBC thinking big in a way which would have been previously unthinkable.
While these shows were not terrible, there was a cynicism to their production, an emotional deficit. Thank goodness, then, for lone auteurs such as Shane Meadows (This Is England, The Virtues) and Peter Kosminsky (The Promise, Wolf Hall), who appear to have no cynical interest in becoming global brands.
Britain has, of course, long led the way in costume drama, but the literary adaptation is diminishing. Only one Jane Austen has been made for British television in the past 10 years and there’s been no Dickens since the 2012 bicentenary of the author’s birth (although we will be treated to the BBC’s umpteenth A Christmas Carol later this month). The two biggest hits of the decade – Downton Abbey and The Crown
– show that the appetite for costume drama remains, but this reflects a demand for spectacle (these are, after all, high-end soap operas) rather than for acute psychological observation.
The Crown, Peter Morgan’s leisurely exploration of the Windsors since 1947, is what the kids might call intersectional. It is a traditional costume drama that has launched on the most radical of services, Netflix – which arrived in the UK in 2012. Indeed streaming is
TROY: FALL OF A CITY
Gods, Greeks, Trojans, swords and sandals. These things are ripe for unintentional hilarity, but this drama was simply dreary: Paris and Helen had all the pizzazz of a couple caught in the rain during a wet weekend in Cleethorpes. the biggest revolution in the industry since the launch of commercial television. What was once known as “appointment to watch TV” has become a more nebulous concept, as viewing has become untethered from the schedules and we can watch as many or as few episodes as we desire. This is hastening the fragmentation of audiences as more and more people are watching these shows on their laptops or smartphones and this, perhaps, is where we need to consider what has been lost in the 2010s.
It is unusual now for a family to sit down and watch TV together. The so-called “shiny floor” shows are an endangered species as series such as The X Factor and The Voice beg to be put out of their misery, while the traditional sitcom – once a bedrock of intergenerational bonding – looks increasingly like a moribund genre.
A bigger crisis faces the documentary maker. I am not talking about the unimpeachable David Attenborough, but the smaller one-off programmes which hold little appeal for executives who obsess about brands. I realise it is very hard to build a financial case for making a documentary about basket-weaving in the Outer Hebrides, but think of all those wonderful, offbeat shows of the past – Angel of the North, The Fishing Party, John’s Not Mad.
Documentary masters Molly Dineen, Vanessa Engle, Adam Curtis and Sue Bourne are still fighting the good fight, but they are rare beasts who must be cherished and supported. I don’t think it is any coincidence that