Wolf Hall maker: Replace ‘endless’ detective shows with gritty drama
BRITISH television is plagued by an “endless diet” of period and detective dramas, the director of the BBC’s celebrated Wolf Hall has claimed, as he called on “supine” film-makers to produce more hard-hitting, controversial dramas.
Peter Kosminsky, whose production of Wolf Hall is one of only a handful of programmes to be shortlisted in three categories at tonight’s Golden Globe Awards, said that British film-makers needed to “get up off our a---- and try to rock the boat a bit more”, by making dramas about political issues that would “rattle the gates of the House of Commons”.
Harking back to the dramas of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ken Loach’s seminal examination of homelessness, Cathy Come Home, Kosminksy dismissed Downton Abbey as a “crowdpleaser” and “an Upstairs Downstairs remake”, and bemoaned British television’s “endless diet of detective dramas”.
He said: “Television is such a powerful medium. Millions of people watching a programme go into their school or workplace the next day and say, ‘Did you see it?’ Imagine if that programme wasn’t War and Peace
or Wolf Hall, but was something that raised real questions about the way we are governed, or how our society is structured, or the crisis over refugees and migrants.
“Imagine if people were going in and not saying, ‘Ooh, I didn’t half fancy her in War and Peace,’ but if they were going in and saying, ‘That made me really angry.’ We’ve become supine… I’d like to see leadership from the broadcasters to say, ‘Come on, we want more of this stuff ’.”
Kosminsky’s next project is a Channel 4 drama following four British Muslims who fight for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), in Syria, which he admitted was “high risk”.
He said: “It tells the story of what it is actually like on a daily basis to be a foreign fighter, or the wife of a fighter from Britain, inside the caliphate. It’s very easy to say they’re all insane. Some may be. Some are not, and are all the more dangerous for it. I want to understand how we can combat it.
“If some people say that to make any attempt to understand people associated with head-chopping, and mass murder, burning people alive, is despicable and immoral, then yes, I run that risk. I would only say, ‘watch it and make your decision’.”
Kosminsky also warned that the next series of Wolf Hall may not appear on the BBC until 2020, as Hilary Mantel, the Booker Prize-winning author on whose books the show is based, is not likely to finish The Mirror And The
Light, her third novel about the life of Thomas Cromwell, for another year.
The director, who has been given an eight-page synopsis of Mantel’s forthcoming novel, already faces the tough task of reuniting Damian Lewis and Mark Rylance as Henry VIII and his adviser. Both men are in the running at tonight’s Golden Globes, for their roles in Wolf Hall – Rylance for the category of “best actor in a film made for television” and Lewis for “best supporting actor”. Rylance is also the favourite to land the “best supporting actor” Oscar award, for his role as a KGB officer in Bridge of
Spies, and Lewis has signed up to a new primetime American series.