Television
I’ve yet to meet anyone else who watched
Giri/haji (BBC2)– which is a transliteration of the Japanese for ‘duty’ and ‘shame’ – but I thought it contained some of the best telly moments in ages.
There was plenty of hokum, of course, involving the Nipponese Mafia and Albanian mobsters, with their overmasculine codes of honour and atonement, ceremoniously chopping the ends of their fingers off. There was a lot of throat-slitting, bullets smacking into foreheads, blood and brains up the wall. But amid all the gang wars – the balancing of oriental formality and outright brutality – a meditation emerged about the sheer awkwardness of human relations; love and loyalty as traps, not conducive to happiness.
The plot involved a Tokyo policeman coming to find his brother in London – a city as bizarre to him as Japan might be to us; the language and the customs.
Detective Kenzo fell in with Kelly Macdonald, who was hurt, kindly and lonely, and also with award-worthy Will Sharpe’s Rodney, a fearless and funny rent boy.
The series had a shuffled structure, with flashbacks and flash-forwards filling in the characters’ background and motivation, like digressions in a novel. There was even a day trip to Hastings (where I now live), which looked atmospheric in the pale winter light – was that me waddling in long shot along the pier?
Now and again, the scenes would turn into cartoons. There was generally a brilliant mixture of depth and artifice, where ghosts walked and characters spoke to the dead. The idea was that life is full of foreshadowing and echoes. A kung-fu fight at the end became a genius ballet of attraction and repulsion, psychological confusions were choreographed, and the conclusion seemed to be that we push away those whom we love most. Do seek it out on BBC iplayer.
The notion that what we are best at is death and destruction was the lesson, likewise, of A British Guide to the End of the World (BBC4). How excited the military and civil-defence officials were at the prospect of atomic bombs. All these preparations for ‘the supreme testing time in the history of our civilisation’ were treated as a kind of robust moral adventure – good for us in some way; bracing – which would bring out a Captain Mainwaring Home Guard spirit. Nuclear war was simply the Blitz with a bigger bang. Public information films (given voice by Ian Holm) were to tell us how to paint windowpanes white, to deflect the blast; how to dispose of bodies; how to fold blankets and store ‘sensible clothing’. It was almost a jape, involving sandbags, plastic buckets and WI busybodies on bicycles shouting through megaphones.
What was horrifying was the matterof-factness – the bunkers for the bigwigs and the County Council control rooms, where blasts were marked on maps with wax crayons. Barbed wire was to cordon off villages, refugees and looters would be shot and people were ordered to remain in their houses: ‘There’s nothing to be gained by trying to get away.’ Clearly there was no point in the authorities’ trying to save anyone, as ‘they are going to die anyway’, from radiation poisoning and thyroid cancers.
Everything about the Emergency Planning Committees was sinister – as, in reality, ‘We had no idea what was coming next.’ The Cold War monitoring posts, early-warning systems and radar
dishes still dot the countryside. The documentary also divulged that the army deliberately exposed soldiers to danger, when conducting tests on Christmas Island in the 1950s – the men were simply objects to be studied, and given no protective clothing. When the blast went off, with a brightness a thousand times greater than that of the sun, one witness said, ‘You could see your bones illuminated through your body.’
An atmosphere of pressure waves and black rain pervaded The End of the F****** World (C4), the bleak comedy drama starring Alex Lawther and Jessica Barden. In this, the second series, the style of the first series was duplicated. It’s basically a road-movie format, where everything goes wrong and most people end up dead – not always accidentally.
Alyssa is Carroll’s Alice for the modern world – impassive, moon-faced and coping with danger by ignoring it or swearing at it. The setting was a fairytale forest of dark greens and neon red.
The Festival of Remembrance from the Royal Albert Hall (BBC1) was very slick – almost a West End musical – with a fancy lighting design. I’m always moved by the procession of the Chelsea Pensioners. I did wonder, however, what all of those who gave their tomorrows so we could enjoy our todays would have thought of a time when a Prime Minister takes his mistress into the Royal Box.
But what has disgusted me most is the advertisement for Tesco Clubcards, which re-dubs Bogart and Bergman from Casablanca. Nothing is sacred.