PICK OF THE DAY
Dancing On The Edge Monday, 9pm, BBC Two
Every few years, or so it seems, Stephen Poliakoff lets it be known to the BBC he’s got an idea for a new one, and the Corporation, in a curious Pavlovian response, falls over itself in a frenzy of shattered piggy banks, in order to scrape together a sumptuous budget for him to film it.
From time to time in this scenario (or at least, so I like to imagine) while more important Beeb bosses are busy in the loud, breathless whirl of ringing round the town’s most prestigious agents, clearing the schedules of cookery shows, booking out the BFI for a retrospective, and congratulating themselves for being involved in something so damned classy, some lowly boy or girl employed to make tea stumbles over a copy of the script, and then stands frowning, trying to catch someone’s attention:
“Er … Excuse me. But has anyone actually, y’know … read this?”
“It’s the new Poliakoff, darling. We don’t need to read it. Ever heard of Shooting The Past?”
“Well, yeah. I’ve heard of it. It was like a hundred years ago. But, come on, those last few he did were just really terrible. Friends And Crocodiles, I mean, jeez ... And this new one, there’s nothing going on.”
“I think you’ll find it’s all just gone a teensy-tiny little bit over your head, dear. Don’t you worry yourself about it.”
“Okay, then: explain it to me. Tell me why it’s supposed to be good.”
“[Pause. Coughs.] Two lumps, love.”
Running just under six hours across five parts, Poliakoff’s latest white elephant is Dancing On The Edge. The edge of what, you might wonder and, after the 90-minute opening episode, you might conclude the answer is sleep.
Poliakoff’s focus is a fictional black jazz band struggling in the London of 1933, and how they come briefly to be darlings of the patronising social elite, while encountering the rampant bigotry and betrayal that goes with the time and the territory. A fine cast has been assembled: Chiwetel Ejiofor cutting a dash as the gentlemanly band leader; Jacqueline Bisset as a jazz-loving aristocrat; and John Goodman as one of those mysterious odd millionaires consumed by private obsessions and strange secret thoughts Poliakoff likes so much.
Trouble is, beyond swanning around some nice lawns in period dress, they have precious little to do. Poliakoff stuffs out the vast running time with a few fairly obvious points about prejudice, hypocrisy and historical irony, adrift in a damp swamp of woolly symbolism. (Goodman’s millionaire owns a private party train that rolls prettily around the countryside, but doesn’t have a destination. I think it might mean … something.)
To anchor all the significance, Poliakoff draws from history – Bisset’s Lady Cremone is based on Pannonica Rothschild, the “Jazz Baroness” who was recently the subject of a genuinely fascinating BBC Four documentary – yet nothing feels authentic. Least of all the music, which sounds less like 1930s jazz than the kind of awful, thin pastiches produced by some British bands in the 1980s. Neither, though, does it move thrillingly into the abstract. Dancing On The Edge does have an atmosphere that could be described as “dreamlike”, but it’s the flat, stilted kind of dream you have difficulty remembering. No heat. Part two goes out on Tuesday, to fewer viewers.