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.

Progs we love

And yes, we did watch 'The Killing' and mostly loved it, but it did have a couple of TWNHs: Thais wouldn't tell Pernille that Nana had worked in the wonderfully-named 'Boils'?  The security guard didn't admit to filling up the car, knowing it was where the body was found, until days afterwards, despite being questioned?  Troels's campaign was on and off a few too many times to be believed.  It seemed a bit hamstrung by the gimmicky structure of one episode per hour (think '24', spread out) but it was good enough to keep us watching for the full 20 hours....

The real reason for this blog is our love of good tv, and just to show we mean it, here are some shows we love:

Clocking Off – fresh, original stories with 3-dimensional characters, and in our opinion Abbott’s best work (yes, better than ‘State of Play’).

Life on Mars – for once a terrible-sounding premise: “Cop goes back in time!” produced a fun, entertaining drama.  The less said about AtoA the better.

Holding On – riveting, heart-breaking collision of contemporary lives, and so far unsurpassed by anything Marchant’s done since.

GBH – surreal, sublime, what more can we say?

Edge of Darkness – lionised from the off, and of its time, but still as powerful 25+ years on.  Maybe if they’d followed the original idea and turned Bob Peck into a tree at the end, it would have been even more relevant now, who knows...?

A Very British Coup – as with the above, being remade for some unfathomable reason.  Come back, Ray McAnally, Tony Benn and the vanished left?

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet – character-driven plots, realistic scenario and genuinely funny.  Take a bow, Messrs Whateley, Healy, Spall et al.

Our Friends in the North – who’d have thought a multi-hour drama adapted from an RSC play would become state-of-the-nation telly?  Another career-making programme, and maybe here the question is whether Ms McKee and Messrs Eccleston, Craig and Strong have bettered these performances?

The Singing Detective – another piece lauded almost before broadcast, and by a positively idolized writer.  We think his output pretty uneven, all told, but this is about as good as telly gets.

House of Cards – and another work that would fail all tests of ‘realism’ but translated the satire of the novel brilliantly, drawing the viewer into a sinister, claustrophobic and darkly funny tale.

Shooting the Past – great example of something that works in its own little universe, that of a photo archive in crisis, with slavishly dedicated and seriously knowledgeable staff and several fascinating life stories captured in boxes hidden away on dusty shelves….  So much more than the sum of its strange parts and, if we dare repeat ourselves, has Poliakoff done better work elsewhere?  (OK, maybe ‘Caught on a Train’.)

The Beiderbecke Trilogy – England’s dreaming, 80s style.  Some say twee, we say the sharp barbs of Jill and Trevor (pre and post- First Born) lift this clear of the derided category of ‘comedy-drama’.

The Wire – Proof that it’s possible for a cop show to avoid cliché.  Comparisons to great 19^th Century novels for scope and comprehensive human experience are not unfounded.

And not even exhaustive!  A brainstorm threw up such gems as After Pilkington, Conviction, Bellman and True, Low Winter Sun, Brideshead Revisited, Das Boot, Longitude, The Cops ....  We confess there may be TWNHs within these, but they’ve escaped us in the sheer enjoyment of watching.