Dancing on the Edge

The trouble with Poliakoff dramas these days is that they're so over-hyped as 'Event Television' that they're almost bound to disappoint.  'Friends and Crocodiles', 'Joe's Palace', 'Gideon's Daughter' and 'Capturing Mary' blend into one mannered, pretentious and seemingly pointless mess which wasted hours of our lives.  Like many established talents, Poliakoff attracts starry names and seemingly no editors with the gumption to question the great man's decisions.

There are recurring obsessions in the recent work: the war, the aristocracy vs new money, photographs, secret pasts, shadowy and reclusive millionaires, the chaos and clashes of the 20th Century and a great slab of a house which often seems to put in an appearance (Mr P's own perhaps?).  It looks like most if not all of these themes will turn up in 'Dancing on the Edge', a tale of a black jazz band, a jobbing music journalist and some English gentry in a very stylish and stylised 1930s London and Home Counties.  The romances are signposted, the cliches are present and correct (the very last singer to audition blows them away...!  A Prince takes a shine to the band at a garden party!)  Of-course it all looks sumptuous, with everyone and almost everything looking glamorous and polished - if not always quite authentically 1930s - and the cast are good enough to beg forgiveness for the funereal pace, even if Joanna Vanderham doesn't quite convince as sophisticated socialite Pamela and some of the band's American accents are shaky.  Janet Montgomery, as the contrasting brunette Sarah, is meant to be bohemian but isn't very, and incidentally bears a striking resemblance to Poliakoff's last muse, Ruth Wilson. 

It's not bad overall (the going-nowhere-on-a-train interlude and the histrionics by a band member in an upmarket hotel excepted) but... we're reminded of what David Hare said about Bertolucci's epic 'The Last Emperor': "no-one says a single interesting thing."  What do you know, but the idle, decadent rich were rather liberal in their last hurrah, and paved the way for acceptance of black musicians this side of the pond!  And there were we thinking that Duke Ellington had gone down a storm with the everyday folk as well as the Windsors at the Palladium in 1933.  It's not subtle, and people ruminate endlessly as they do in all Poliakoff dramas.  "One never knows what goes on in people's private lives, does one?" etc.  This is said about John Goodman's reclusive Croesus, Mr Masterson, who has trashed a luxury suite and assaulted a young woman.

It's difficult to know whether there will be a worthwhile payoff.  'Shooting the Past' delivered, as did 'Perfect Strangers', 'She's Been Away' and the superb 'Caught on a Train', but the most recent of these was over a decade ago.  The opening scene shows musician Louis (Chiwetel Ejiofor) appearing caped and hatted out of the shadows like an extra from 'Ripper Street', on the run and calling on his music journalist friend Stanley (Matthew Goode).  The action then slips back 18 months.  We hope the next 4 hours aren't wasted.