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It's only rubbish on the telly
How very ordinary the selection of Top 50 Greatest Dramas was.
First of all, it wasn't varied in form. The list is predominantly one-off plays and the short serial form (6-8 episodes, 1-2 seasons). Where were the TV series? You know, those long-running things that people actually watch? Most of the TV series that appeared were US shows, The West Wing, The Sopranos, Hill Street Blues - I'm not complaining about including any of these (except 24), but aren't there quite a lot of British programmes like this too? Or are they too populist? If you're going to have Z Cars, you're going to have to think about including The Bill, even if Z Cars was the one you watched as a kid, and The Bill is only on ITV.
Second, it was way too realist. There were four 'speculative' dramas altogether, if we stretch the definition as broadly as possible: 'Threads' (the post-Bomb drama set in Sheffield which you could argue is well within the British realist TV drama tradition); Twin Peaks, Doctor Who, and The Prisoner. Come on, couldn't you have even nodded to Nigel Kneale? Nineteen Eighty-Four? Quatermass? The 1970s Quatermass miniseries with John Mills even fits their tediously narrow range.
Thirdly, where were all the women? You know, women? What about Tenko? Where was Tenko?! The first British TV drama to have a cast predominantly made up of women. The programme they wanted to cancel because the ladies in it didn't look pretty enough. (Do you know what I would love to see? One of those big 'state of the nation' social history dramas, like Our Friends in the North, but about the women's movement. Or, if we're going to keep on making WW2 dramas, one about the home front. Something like Jocelyn Playfair's A House in the Country.)
And, finally - and related to this - why so much Dennis Bloody Potter? I can't stand Dennis Bloody Potter. Women=fuck=dirt=death. Misogynist nonsense. There, I've said it. So pretentious. And TV drama is so not about pretension. If you want to be pretentious, go and make a bloody film, not television. Plus, if you shed the Potters and a couple of Poliakoffs, you'd definitely have room for Tenko. Which I bet people actually watched. Poliakoff they just read about in The Observer.
All in all, it added up to a list of drama about the British male experience, c. 1940-1990. My guess is that other things were happening during this time. Quite a lot of which was even shown on television.
First of all, it wasn't varied in form. The list is predominantly one-off plays and the short serial form (6-8 episodes, 1-2 seasons). Where were the TV series? You know, those long-running things that people actually watch? Most of the TV series that appeared were US shows, The West Wing, The Sopranos, Hill Street Blues - I'm not complaining about including any of these (except 24), but aren't there quite a lot of British programmes like this too? Or are they too populist? If you're going to have Z Cars, you're going to have to think about including The Bill, even if Z Cars was the one you watched as a kid, and The Bill is only on ITV.
Second, it was way too realist. There were four 'speculative' dramas altogether, if we stretch the definition as broadly as possible: 'Threads' (the post-Bomb drama set in Sheffield which you could argue is well within the British realist TV drama tradition); Twin Peaks, Doctor Who, and The Prisoner. Come on, couldn't you have even nodded to Nigel Kneale? Nineteen Eighty-Four? Quatermass? The 1970s Quatermass miniseries with John Mills even fits their tediously narrow range.
Thirdly, where were all the women? You know, women? What about Tenko? Where was Tenko?! The first British TV drama to have a cast predominantly made up of women. The programme they wanted to cancel because the ladies in it didn't look pretty enough. (Do you know what I would love to see? One of those big 'state of the nation' social history dramas, like Our Friends in the North, but about the women's movement. Or, if we're going to keep on making WW2 dramas, one about the home front. Something like Jocelyn Playfair's A House in the Country.)
And, finally - and related to this - why so much Dennis Bloody Potter? I can't stand Dennis Bloody Potter. Women=fuck=dirt=death. Misogynist nonsense. There, I've said it. So pretentious. And TV drama is so not about pretension. If you want to be pretentious, go and make a bloody film, not television. Plus, if you shed the Potters and a couple of Poliakoffs, you'd definitely have room for Tenko. Which I bet people actually watched. Poliakoff they just read about in The Observer.
All in all, it added up to a list of drama about the British male experience, c. 1940-1990. My guess is that other things were happening during this time. Quite a lot of which was even shown on television.
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Obviously they are wrong and fools, and you should have been in charge of the programme and it would all have been a lot better.
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Oh yes. There must be so very many fascinating stories in that history that would lend themselves to a drama series.
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Not my take on it at all. Philip Marlow as misogynist, yes, he clearly was. But that doesn't mean that Potter endorsed that misogyny, anymore than a story told from a murderer's POV endorses murder. I haven't seen much of Potter's work, but the impression I've gained from reading comments by various people is that Potter was grappling with his own misogyny as an unwelcome part of himself and that get recurrently expressed throughout his work.
Or maybe artists shouldn't use their art to wrestle with their inner demons?
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Personally, I feel like I need a shower after I watch any Dennis Potter. But my point is less about Potter than about unthinking "industry experts" who continue to give his narratives such a central place in what they perceive as our culture.
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(Sorry about the deleted comment - something went very wrong with the formatting.)
I think that's it. The presumption that what's theirs is ours, and that different is worth less.
I suppose all our Top 50s would look different, and I notice that I've only seen 2 in the top 10, that I recall, and neither of those at the time of broadcast.
Mine would include Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit as well. And Frost In May.
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*slaps forehead* I spent the whole of yesterday prowling around thinking, "There's something I've forgotten, I know there's something I've forgotten..." and it was of course Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. That should absolutely have been on there.
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It *so* should have been there. It reminds of that rather silly top 10 list of books about adolescence in the Guardian recently, which was a similarly tedious list, and distinctly lacking in female experience of adolescence, because lord knows, gritty stories of male adolescence never get old.
*is tempted to pull out recorded-off-the-telly copy of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and rewatch it, if the videos still play*
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Was busy watching another great drama, Becket, last night and thought of you. ;-) Take one king (stubborn and unwise, admittedly) and his unflinchingly principled
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A Very British Coup is in there at 16, and very rightly.
I was going to record Becket and then forgot, gah.
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We were living abroad in the 80s and Game, Set and Match was about the only decent thing to watch on the local TV channel - perhaps that's why it seemed so good!
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Every year the networks trot out 30 or more new shows, and are lucky if a few gain any following. Every once and a while they have a good new show and then a dozen low quality clones appear within the next few years.
My own opinion is, that they have a tiny circle of producers who rely on a small group of writers whom they go back to again and again, mostly because they once created a big hit once. This has left the TV & movie business with a dearth of good and interesting stories.
The reason they do not do shows on the topics you posited is because no one else ever had a successful show on those topics and they are risk adverse.
mk
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Television series are a different form from the one-off play or short serial (which are basically the same form differently chunked). Soap operas are different again. It would have been quite reasonable to restrict the list to plays and serials, and do a different one for series. What is quite bizarre is including some series, then omitting many other excellent examples.
A particularly blinkered critical tradition is at work, of course. I've no problem with the Potters they included: The list would be ludicrous without Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, and while I've never seen Blue Remembered Hills, what I've seen about it suggests that it too deserves to be included. But a list that doesn't include Quatermass and the Pit is also ludicrous. Nigel Kneale is simply ignored by the prevailing literary culture. Partly, I guess, it's because Kneale's groundbreaking work has been taken up and reused over and again, while Potter's greatest work remains sui generis. But it's also because the fantastical elements in Kneale remain as objective, unforgiving facts that the characters and the audience must come to terms with, while Potter allows his fantastic and spectacular elements to be neatly explained away at the end in terms of subjective psychology. In this respect, Kneale is more mature and realistic than Potter, but the bulk of TV critics lead lives of such cozy incuriosity that they get this exactly the wrong way round.
I think there is a valid reason for including Z Cars but not The Bill. Z Cars was novel, ground-breaking and influential in a way that The Bill isn't. But then we come again to this issue of evaluating a drama by its quality taken in isolation, or by its importance or influence in its historical context.
And another problem: what about a series which, taken as a whole, wouldn't merit inclusion, but which has a particularly outstanding episode that deserves individual recognition? Inspector Morse can be as soggy as a wet day in Abingdon, but the episode "The Masonic Murders" pisses all over half that Top Fifty list.
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Well, most of the series they include are US shows, and I think they cover, "Programmes we wish we could be making."
the fantastical elements in Kneale remain as objective, unforgiving facts that the characters and the audience must come to terms with
Perhaps this is what I was getting at with 'speculative' (which I was basically setting up as a catch-all term to cover "not kitchen sinkish"). Which would explain why "future histories" like Threads or A Very British Coup can make it to the list, because the fantastical element isn't, say, a BEM. (And also because they also fit nicely into other genres: drama-documentary, or political thriller. So, "It's not science fiction, it's an alternative history.")
what about a series which, taken as a whole, wouldn't merit inclusion, but which has a particularly outstanding episode that deserves individual recognition
We were saying last night Morse should probably have been in (as we were watching Lewis). Why not include them? It's quite possible that a fair chunk of Z Cars looks awful by contemporary standards; doesn't stop it being significant.
But who knows where that would lead us? To including Coronation Street, perhaps, and that would obviously never do.
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Basically, in the expression "Best Television Drama", only the word "television" is unproblematic. And in a few years we won't even be able to say that.
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It would certainly look very strange...
But a list that doesn't include Quatermass and the Pit is also ludicrous. Nigel Kneale is simply ignored by the prevailing literary culture.
My feeling is that he's beginning to be recognised, but probably not by the sort of people who do these lists. I've seen a lot more about him than Potter recently (admittedly some of it prompted by his death), and I bet if Nancy Banks-Smith had had anything to do with it Kneale would be in.
Dennis Potter had one of the most beautiful speaking voices I ever heard; I would love to hear his last interview with Melvyn Bragg again, because when I listen to his voice I feel as if I'm kneeling to take the sacrament.
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