Churchill's Secret

'Elderly man isn't all that well' isn't really a revelation, but when the man in question is Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Michael Gambon), symbol of British Bull-doggedness in WWII, the news is not to be bandied about.  Loyal members of his cabinet want the PM's stroke kept under wraps, lest there's an unseemly scramble for power in the absence of both Churchill and likely successor Anthony Eden (Alex Jennings), who was having gall bladder surgery abroad.  Mrs. Churchill, the redoubtable-in-her-own-right Clementine (Lindsay Duncan), wants Winston away from the temptations of Westminster and brings him back home to the Kent countryside home of Chartwell.  To nurse him, they contract Nurse Millie Appleyard (Romola Garai) but their peace is short-lived when the in-fighting Tories - plus ca change! - and the equally quarrelsome younger Churchills flock to Winston's bedside.

One of those 'rather nice' dramas that will go down well in America, this is a bit of a curio.  The storyline runs in a similar way to 'The Madness of George III': statesman brought low, struggles of his family and the succession, slow recovery, lessons learned etc.  It's beautifully filmed, some of it at Chartwell itself, now a National Trust gem, and is directed solidly by Charles Sturridge.  Overall though, it's rather a byway in the great man's life, and not that one that really altered the course of his remaining decade or so.  The addition of a fictional character to nurse him, who of-course happens to be from a Labour family, seems an unnecessary addition to proceedings, and merely a cypher in whom Clemmie can confide about the grief of losing her young daughter Marigold some thirty years earlier.  Things only really spring to life when the children arrive and, facing their father's death, are candid about the drawbacks of growing up with parents who were almost always otherwise engaged.

Legacy

The trouble with Cold War spy thrillers is that the genre is a minefield of cliches.  Mr. Le Carre has a lot to answer for.  Paula Milne has adapted Alan Judd's novel of the same name into a 90-minute prime-time BBC2 thriller which throws Judd's hero Charles Thoroughgood (based on Judd himself, perhaps?  He shares his army and diplomatic background.) in at the deep end of MI6 during the dark days of 1970s Britain.  He's given the task of 'turning' his old Oxford friend, Russian diplomat Viktor Koslov (Andrew Scott, aka Moriarty), only to find on making contact that Viktor has a card up his own sleeve which calls Charles's bluff in a very personal way.

For fans of 1970s nostalgia there are the cars, the blackouts and the abominable fashions and hairstyles (but only, we note, sported by peripheral characters: MI6 weren't so undercover that they grew their hair or wore kipper ties, clearly) and there's also the inevitable love interest, in the form of unhappily married fellow spy Anna March (Romola Garai who, let's face it, adds class to everything she appears in).

Exploring his own father's alleged betrayal, his feelings for Anna and his assignment with Viktor via the latter's prostitute lover Eva (Olivia Grant, slightly miscast as a 24-year-old), Charles ploughs a leisurely furrow accompanied by a jerkily zooming camera which had the effect of distracting from the dialogue.  Is this lack of subtlety in filming in vogue?  We hope it passes.  Luckily for him and us, Charles has solid support from Simon Russell Beale as senior operative Hookey.  SRB does not grace our small screens often, and his every appearance is a memorable event.  When he is allied to Geraldine James as stalwart Martha, there's no switching off.

Perfectly good of its kind, but not landmark television in the way of, say, 'Tinker Tailor...' or 'Smiley...'.  Perhaps it's the fact that the novel was published in 2012 and this was made in the same year.  Le Carre's stories were, after all, just about contemporary to the Cold War, albeit at a late stage, and there was, if not a grubbiness, then at least a seediness to proceedings.  In the UK we are used to equating the 1970s with the down-at-heel, which is maybe why James Bond didn't work so well in that decade (and he was mostly abroad, and let's not mention Roger Moore).  Glamour, so long associated with espionage, was largely absent from the average Briton's shores, having fled with the 60s and only returning, to a degree, with the garish 80s.  Somehow these pretty young things in their stylish clothes with their cool attitudes seem at odds with both the era and the rather workaday image we now have of the security services.  Beautifully moody shots of rainy alleys and gloomy seasides add style, but not substance.

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!