The Affair

The Affair is an American series starring British actors Dominic West and Ruth Wilson as the two protagonists who (not a spoiler alert) have an affair.  The big selling point of the show, apart from the two leads, is that each episode covers the same amount of time twice, from the two characters' different perspectives, first his, then hers, as they each tell the story of the affair in a police interview room. 

Set in The Hamptons, it follows New Yorker Noah Solloway and his family on vacation at his wife's dad's large house.  Noah's father-in-law is a famous writer, whose works are filmed, hence lots of money, while Solloway is a teacher and aspiring writer, essentially living a pretty affluent life thanks to loans from his in-laws.  In the Hamptons he meets Alison Bailey, a waitress recovering from the death of her son, and they then start a liaison.  The viewer is never sure whose accounts are accurate, with both being (potentially) unreliable narrators.

For example in his account her clothes are always more revealing, and women are always coming on to him (he comes across as a bit of a sleaze even in his own version...).  In hers she's a woman in torment, dealing with grief, but also her husband's reaction to the death.  In his version she's pursuing him, and vice versa. 

It's a good drama, without many unrealistic elements, but since it runs over 20 weeks (according to IMDB) we do wonder if they're stretching it out a bit, and also what is likely to happen in series two - a different affair?  Or will it, unusually for American TV, have a natural life as just one series?

Appropriate Adult - conclusion

The second and concluding part of ‘Appropriate Adult’ was (once again) unable to maintain the standard of the opener and in this case it seems to highlight the difficulty of dramatizing factual events and the inevitable blurring of boundaries.  Here would seem to be one retelling that needs to be accurate, not only out of respect to those whose lives have been blighted, but also because invention could add nothing to an already ghoulish chain of events.  Yet we hear that some details were wrong and suspect there are other errors.  Janet Leach’s children were not living with her through the investigation and trial, according to her eldest son, and would she have been allowed so much unsupervised access to Fred West?

What these misgivings give rise to is a general feeling of discomfort.  It was far more obviously Leach’s subjective view of events this time around, and weaker as a result.  She is shown as a naive and needy woman, it’s true, but one who commits perjury by denying that she has sold her story.  That same story is the one adapted here for television, so from the viewers’ perspective she is, by default, a classic unreliable narrator.

We wouldn’t dismiss the idea of creating a drama to explore the criminal, immoral and unacceptable acts of which we are capable, nor would we expect it to provide answers, but if its purpose is to promote questioning and widen understanding around this behaviour and our reactions to it, then this ultimately didn’t achieve its aims.  The impact on the victims’ families and friends, and on the Wests’ own relatives, went unexplored, and we discovered nothing of the background or motivations of either Fred or Rose.  To learn that anyone, i.e. someone who isn’t a sexually deviant serial killer, can form a toxic attachment to someone who is everything they morally reject, is no surprise. 

Appropriate Adult

On hearing that Dominic West was to play serial killer Fred West in an ITV drama, our first reaction was to ask why.  In terms of honing your craft etc. as an actor, serial killers must be good roles to get, with no dearth of talent lining up to play the likes of Crippen and Shipman.  However, with this subject matter there’s obviously a fine line between an informing and provocative drama and one that skews the truth and encourages mere morbid curiosity.  As with all matters of taste and decency, it’s hard to judge where that line should be drawn.  The names of Fred and Rose(mary) West conjure in most of us an almost primeval fear, as much, we would suggest, to do with lurid tabloid headlines and the consistent use of the same, instantly recognisable images, as with their crimes.

With regard to the crimes themselves, the details have been mostly withheld, through respect for the victims’ families and a fear of copycat behaviour that goes at least as far back as ‘On Iniquity’, published in 1967 in response to the trials of Brady and Hindley.  Very few of us are incapable of imagining horrors as terrible as those that happened at Cromwell Street, and as a result the Wests appear as modern bogeymen.  What is harder to imagine is the response of the victims’ families to a dramatisation of what is probably the worst thing ever to happen to them.  How could anyone else presume to suggest that it is good to remember, rather than to forget, or that a dramatic re-enactment will provide any sort of catharsis?  How could it avoid being deeply upsetting?

According to ITV, an early decision was taken not to portray the crimes, but to centre on the investigation, and in particular the appropriate adult of the title, who provides the everyman response to the discoveries.  This largely voids the voyeur argument and doesn’t detract from the shocking nature of these events.  Some viewers may object to the portrayal of Fred as a man with a roguish charm, every inch (or playing?) the yokel as he flirts with and manipulates Janet Leach, evades questions, or describes matter-of-factly how he dismembered his daughter.  Apparently it’s an accurate portrayal.  We're on slightly shakier ground with Ms Leach, who despite her fear and revulsion won't give up the case, and subsequently sold her story to a tabloid for a six-figure sum.

There was also humour in last night’s first half, the sort of gallows humour to be found in crime dramas and also, one suspects, in police stations and prisons all over the country.  “We’re here to search for the remains of your first wife, Fred,” says DC Savage (Sylvestra Le Touzel, compelling as always) as West waxes lyrical on the beautiful Gloucestershire countryside where he has buried her.  Dominic West and Monica Dolan as Fred and Rose are entirely believable, while Emily Watson, rather less mousy and more glamorous than she is playing, nonetheless conveys the bewilderment of someone fresh from training, immersed in a complicated family of her own, and out of her depth with what she must now face.

There will probably never be consensus on fictional depictions of real crimes, with real victims.  We would tend, generally, to prefer documentaries about something so recent and so sensitive.  'Five Daughters', shown early last year, won general acclaim by focusing entirely on the lives of the victims and the subsequent effects on their families, something that doesn't feature at all in 'Appropriate Adult'.  However, what this drama has done is to humanise demons: people who have families, children, homes and jobs, and live superficially innocuous lives are capable of the most extreme, violent, disgusting acts.  Seeing the Wests as something removed, something ‘other’, misplaces a fear which, disturbingly, should be much closer to home.

The Final Hour

We liked the performances more and more, but still couldn't care less what happened to the characters.  This, we think, was down to good actors struggling in vain with a clunky, leaden script. We're reluctant to criticize Abi Morgan, when there are (still) so few front-rank women writers in television, but if she has a passion for the 1950s, it wasn't on show.  Storylines were wrapped up neatly enough, but with careful 21st Century sensibilities and without any real sense of climax.  The horse race satire was too long and frankly dull and the flat revelations about Ruth Elmes were uninvolving to viewers who had glimpsed her only briefly in episode one.


A second series is apparently planned, set in 1957.  Lets hope that if it continues to be dogged by 'Mad Men' comparisons, it is able to live up to them this time and show a strong, unsentimental love of what it's portraying, rather than a trite trip through dramatic cliches.


***


Oh and we read that Rafe Spall is proud of his performance in 'The Shadow Line'.  He also says he admires Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis, which explains a lot.  You can act, Mr Spall, but please keep it a wee bit smaller?

Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Politics

After posting yesterday , we looked around and saw other reviews prompted by the halfway mark of episode 3.  Opinions vary, unsurprisingly, with general positives about its style and cast and some negatives about its being slightly flat and the historical inaccuracies.  So far, so expected and fair.

What disturbed were the many sneering jibes about the BBC, or more specifically the BBC's 'woolly liberal' tag.  We agree wholeheartedly that many dramas - including this one - have essentially modern characters in period dress, and that it is neither accurate nor helpful to depict falsehoods as fact, even within the confines of a drama's 'internal reality'.  However, it genuinely didn't occur to us to assume that the programme makers had some kind of political axe to grind here, and it's both distasteful and worrying that some loud posters (loud onscreen, anyway) are so quick to be so scathing.

Perhaps we're naive, and certainly (Ali) must claim some bias as an ex-BBC employee, but before the jeering mob leap into action, let it just be said that knocking the BBC is an occupational pastime for most of its employees - bad management, overpriced canteen, terrible output (in other departments, of-course), dingy workspaces, rubbish studio equipment etc.  In that sense, little has changed since the 1950s, we would guess, except that modern employees are more vociferous in their moans and complaints.  What most staff also seemed to share, though, was a commitment to public broadcasting generally and a belief in trying to produce the best and most eclectic output possible.  The results are hit-and-miss, unsurprisingly, and pretty much anything that espouses a political point of view via a sympathetic or unsympathetic character could be accused of being propaganda.  If there is left-leaning at the Corporation, it didn't stop them falling foul of a Labour administration, nor did it prevent them allowing the BNP a slot on 'Question Time'.

We groan about licence fee rises as much as the next person, but imagine life without public service broadcasting, or just visit a country without it.  Why quibble about paying less than the average lottery player spends on losing tickets each year for hours of programmes, some of which are undeniably entertaining, educational and excellent television.

Too Many Telephones - The Hour Pt 3

I'm liking the way The Hour is progressing (writes Dan).

The look - certainly the look of the people - feels right, and the plot is progressing a lot faster than lots of other dramas, especially Mad Men.

However one TWNH point is that there are too many telephones!  There would never be a telephone in a guest's bathroom in a big house in the 1950s.  Heck, even in Dallas the house only had one phone, and that was in America in the 1980s!  The scenes with Freddie on the phone to the office, checking up on Kish, shouldn't have happened - the writer should have found another way to manage the way the story moved forward.  It's just a sign that writers these days find it very hard to write for a world before mobile phones.

However that's not enough to put us off - we're still watching!

Ahem!  Ali has one quibble with the above, namely the look of the people, and particularly one person: Bel.  She looks wrong.  She lacks enough hair laquer, her face is au naturel pale, with dewy eyes and lips, and her underwear, as seen last night, is clearly not the provider of staunch support favoured by 1950s women.  To say she looks like a 21st Century girl at a vintage party would be an insult to the many party-goers who take serious trouble to create a bona fide period look.  Bel resembles Peter Pan's Wendy, adrift on a news set, minding adult-sized, perennially lost boys.

This of-course is a symptom of that strange old assumption by programme makers that audiences can't or won't understand that other eras had different beliefs, tastes and ways of doing things.  Hence the 1970s-made dramas set in WWII with... 1970s hairstyles and, more recently, the frankly terrible 'The Tudors' which ditched codpieces (and not just because the ludicrously youthful Henry VIII was forever bedding wenches) and head-dresses presumably so that viewers would, like, y'know, get it that these were real dudes.  The only characters generally allowed to wear something perfectly in keeping with the era which is alien to modern eyes are those we are meant to dislike or laugh at.  Julian Rhind-Tutt thus has appalling glasses and Freddie's geeky junior sports the kind of knitwear only found on dated knitting patterns and the odd uber-hip catwalk.

We could even go further and say this extends to casting.  Bel is meant to be late 20s and the inspiration for her character is cited as Grace Wyndham Goldie, who was influential in BBC news in the 1950s and 1960s.  She'd joined the BBC in 1944, aged 44.  Never mind her achievements, who wants to watch a plain, middle-aged, slightly dumpy woman?  So in the interests of a pretty face, pretty dresses and some sex, we get an anachronism.

That said, it is at least edging towards integration of the spy/murder plot.  There are those who praise 'Mad Men' for its slow pace and lack of action, but while I don't dislike those elements, it does sometimes drag and lack focus.  I'm still hopeful that 'The Hour' will strike a balance between its soapy relationship storylines and conspiracy thriller, which would make it a better thing than the likes of either 'Mad Men' or the too-numerous cop procedurals.

The Hour

“The Devil is in the detail” says Freddie the newshound at one point in The Hour’s hour, and he’s right.  Every set, every costume is painstakingly recreated, as though daring a challenge.  It looks telly-land perfect, which is to say that most of the usual signposts for 50s London are there, but the people look younger and better-dressed than they ever do elsewhere.  It’s a tough balance to make a programme look *wow, so old-fashioned!* and yet not alienate the viewers with the less sexy attributes of the period.  (Where are the ubiquitous hats and gloves?)  The advance publicity seemed to present it as a British version of ‘Mad Men’ with a dash of ‘Good Night and Good Luck’, the 2005 Clooney/Downey Jr film about CBS news during the McCarthy era.  This did it no favours as far as anyone with an inkling of knowledge about 50s Britain is concerned: Manhattan was glamorous in the 1950s and early 1960s, and perceived as such.  London was not. 

The cast do their best against the yesteryear scenery.  Ben Whishaw (Freddie) has a natural look of someone who is hard done by and prepared to whine incessantly about it.  This has served him well in his career so far (‘Brideshead Revisited’ and ‘Criminal Justice’ to name but two) and does so here.  Abi Morgan had better give him ample opportunity to shine or he will remain thin in all senses of the word.  As for Romola Garai, nobody does ‘gutsy woman in a man’s world’ quite like her, whether she’s playing a fortune-hunting Victorian miss, a fortune-hunting Victorian prostitute, or as here, the producer of a news programme in the exciting new world of television.  And lest we forget that Dominic West isn’t from Baltimore, or serial-killer Fred, here he is as a suave (but not as suave as he thinks he is) presenter who has married his way to success.

So far, so fun nostalgic news drama, but this has a murder with cold-war political/spy undertones thrown in.  It’s an odd hybrid, with as much tonal difference as black-and-white to glorious technicolour.  So far our only link is Freddie, and the stage would appear to be set for a pleasant few hours of conspiracy-hunting, risking life and career and ultimately transforming the state of Britain and its news.  Phew!  Let’s hope they pull it off.  We have a list of visual clichés, made before we watched, and we’re hoping to reach the end without ticking them all off.  (Dan won the bingo: housekeeper, gentlemen-only drinking establishment...)  The dialogue is smart and sharp, so no need for story cues like rehearsing interviews in the mirror, the chatty newsman and the sudden realisation of (un)likely hiding places.

Whether you love or hate it, though, you can neither miss nor fault the BBC’s great timing in airing a series all about the emergence of challenging television journalism just as the Sky Corporation’s cracks are appearing and our fine police and politicians are being sucked right into them.  Opposition, independence, public service – more please!