A thriller that made the vitally important totally forgettable
You may remember the Climategate affair. But you probably didn’t see it as fodder for a “thriller”, which is what BBC One called The Trick, their dramatisation of events. The details, briefly, are these: in 2009, hackers stole thousands of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Climate change deniers used the contents to suggest that the unit – and specifically its chief scientist, Prof Philip Jones – had rigged the data to exaggerate an increase in temperatures.
The focus of this 90-minute drama was on Prof Jones, played by Jason Watkins. A few years ago, Watkins played Christopher Jefferies, who was wrongly implicated in the murder of Joanna Yeates, and the two roles were similar: men who found themselves falsely accused and trapped in a nightmare, feeling under siege and powerless to change the narrative.
Watkins is a reliably good actor, but here he was let down by a terrible screenplay. Writer Owen Sheers is an award-winning poet, novelist and playwright, but television is not his medium. The story is inherently uncinematic, so any screenplay needed to work hard to hold our attention. What we got was endless exposition and ropy dialogue.
Watkins spent most of the film in a state of silent shock at what had happened to him, which meant that his wife (Victoria Hamilton) got a lot of screen time instead. Unfortunately, Sheers made her very dull. Worst character of all, though, was George Mackay as the world’s least cynical PR man, who seemed constantly on the verge of tears when contemplating the future of the planet for his daughters. This suggested that Sheers hasn’t spent too much time around people who work in crisis management.
What should have been a character study of a man in the eye of a storm kept trying to be a thriller, complete with urgent music and a countdown to avert disaster – but when the potential disaster in question is an unsatisfactory appearance before a House of Commons select committee, the jeopardy isn’t exactly off the scale.
Prof Jones was eventually exonerated by that committee, and deserves our sympathy for an ordeal that saw him receive death threats and contemplate suicide. But if you’re going to turn that story into a thriller, you need a villain – and here there was just a vague conclusion that the leak was the work of the Russians or the Saudis or “the same people” who denied the dangers of tobacco or acid rain. And when you consider that the BBC comes in for flak every time it touches the subject of climate change, this drama really wasn’t worth the hassle.
On a trip to Brussels, I visited the famous Manneken Pis statue without reading the details before setting off, so imagine my disappointment when I got there to find it measuring only two feet high. Still, it had drawn quite a crowd. And the fun thing about it was that this tiny urinating toddler was dressed up – wearing a yellow jersey, to mark the fact that the Tour de France was passing by. The statue, I learned, is regularly decked out in different costumes.
So dressing statues is not a new idea, but Statues Redressed (Sky Arts) billed itself as a “unique” project. Perhaps that’s because it took a number of statues across one city, Liverpool. And, of course, this was all taking place after the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol, which gave some of the programme a political slant. But it had the feel of a college art project. It was a decent attempt to address the issues but was let down not by the quality of the debate around colonialism, but by the quality of the designs on show.
Several of the statues were dressed by fashion designers. One of them put ruffs on Christopher Columbus and Captain Cook, made from fabrics associated with the indigenous populations of the countries they “discovered”. Another made a colourful cotton dress for Queen Victoria, a reference to Liverpool’s wealth and Victoria’s reign owing much to the cotton trade, and hence to slavery. The designs were underwhelming, although not as bad as the cloak made for Bill Shankly. Yes, Bill Shankly – the project didn’t just take figures with dodgy colonial pasts. It also had milliner Stephen Jones making hats for statues of The Beatles.
Former British Museum director Neil Macgregor made the point that we pass by public statues every day and pay them no attention, which is true, and Statues Redressed at least got people talking. But why do The Beatles, a wildly popular sculpture that does not lack for public engagement? The most egregious makeover was a statue of Eleanor Rigby got up in a tacky wedding dress, which didn’t question the original purpose of the work so much as entirely miss the point.
The Trick ★★
Statues Redressed ★★★