Hannibal

In spite of my best efforts, I’ve become addicted to Hannibal. Admittedly fairly late in the day, with the show now having completed its second season.

Although similar in conception, it is far superior to Dexter (a show which manages the supreme feat of being both morally bankrupt and boring to watch). Furthermore it is superior to much of its source material: Lecter doesn’t go sleep in a coffin, when he isn’t deploying his demonic superpowers like he does in Hannibal. And it isn’t a big pile of shit like Hannibal Rising.

What makes the show compelling is, inevitably, the realisation of its central villain, portrayed by Mads Mikkelsen who appears to have been specially bred by scientists to answer the question, What would a jackfish look like if it was a little bit sexy? He looks divine, supremely peacocking it in floral ties and prince-of-wales check, three-piece suits. We hardly ever see Hannibal finish a meal. (Although given how extravagantly wasteful he is in the kitchen, I wouldn’t be surprised if he threw it away after the first mouthful.)The show’s most interesting decision is not to pair him off with an immediately likeable adversary: Will Graham (much more like his Manhunter form than his sanitised 2002 version) struggles with his own psyche and becomes increasingly morally compromised.

Hannibal is delectable: costume, set, photography and (inevitably) food are mouthwatering. Almost every detail in this show seems to have been chosen from Lecter’s baroque standpoint. (I say “almost” - there are some egregious misfires, such as Hannibal’s bedroom and some other cock-swinging ornaments.)

Where the show’s aesthetic sensibility really gleams is in its corpses. It was, to a large extent, Harris’s fiction which inaugurated the premise that every self-respecting, serial-killing psychopath needed an organising conceit and that every spree was a concept album. The MOs are swatted like mayflies. (Bodies are transfigured into totem poles, mushroom gardens and a cello. That’s right. A cello.) All the murders seem to have been imagined by Hannibal. It reaches its most meta moment with a collage of human bodies creating a giant eye, staring back at God (and the viewer, and Hannibal). It is this level of sophistication that distinguishes it from its horror-thriller comrades.

It’s by no means flawless. The women are poorly written. Apparently, like serial killers, they can only have one operative principle. This show fails the Bechdel test, like, bigtime. But an even bigger problem is how short the episodes are. Basically there is no third act. A macabre corpse is discovered (often artfully lit) and then, before we know it, the killer is dealt with. It’s like Columbo without the “Just one more thing...” (and a heap more gore). The show would have been much better off stringing out its secondary killers over a season rather than attempting a monster of the week. Admittedly by the end of the second season the monster of the week has become a big (well middle-sized) bad in the form of Mason Verger. But by that point he, unfortunately, gets in the way of the much more interesting kiss-chase between Will and Hannibal. (The homosocial/homoeroticism of which reaches staggeringly gay heights with the Achilles-Patroclus insinuation and a supremely misjudged doubled sex scene.)

It just gets better every episode. And the conclusion to the second season is the sort of thing that deserves assistants operating handheld aromatisers as you consume it.

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House of Cards

Back in the days when this seemed a live and pertinent comparison, a university friend compared the West Wing with House of Cards (the former had begun in 1999, the latter ended in 1995). The contention was that the West Wing, with its depiction of a virtuous political class would be as unpalatable to a UK audience as the contemptuous elite of House of Cards would be to an American audience.

If that were true then it clearly isn’t true now, as the second season of the US House of Cards is released, all in one go and inappropriately enough, on Valentine’s Day. The exhuming of the original House of Cards also seems to provide counter-evidence to claim regularly made at present that the UK’s political class face an unprecedented crisis in public confidence. To make such a claim either ignores quite how bad things got in the first half of the nineties or, at least, fails to elucidate the distinction between that crisis and this one. (I attempt a distinction of my own below.)

This isn’t the first attempt to transplant British political cynicism to the US. Paul Abbott’s far more contemplative State of Play (2003) was adapted in 2009 and writer Beau Willimon nicks its inciting incident to replace the climatic scene of the original House of Cards in the second season of his remake. The title sequence and theme, too, seem to have that earlier remake in mind.

So whilst the original was often just a pot of latex away from an extended episode of Spitting Image, Willimon’s House of Cards can take itself quite seriously, which makes for quite an uncertain tone. Gone, for example, are the Billy Bunter MPs being told off for visiting knocking shops like the never-before-seen aftermath of a Benny Hill sketch. Fine. But, then, how are we supposed to respond when an FBI agent threatens to squish a guinea pig?

Whilst anyone can have fun with a central role like Urquhart/Underwood, it’s Robin Wright as Claire Underwood that transfigures the US show. Glacial and inscrutable, she frequently wrong foots the viewer. The best scene in the first season is where she leaves her lover’s apartment, having confounded an image he made of her and folded up one tile into a large origami swan. But Claire doesn’t only leave semioticians in a spin, she adds a complexity and mystery to the Underwood’s project and makes for far more compelling viewing, deepening the shallow Lady Macbeth-lite of the UK show. The unfolding and consequences of her rape are excellently handled in the second season and it is refreshing to have a female antihero with this much depth and nuance.

What the UK House of Cards exemplified most of all was not a contempt of the political class but a kind of self-contempt. It seemed to acknowledge that the representative class weren’t there simply to represent our interests but to represent us to ourselves. The clownish despatch of political enemies and the frequent shots of rats feeding upon shit (“the rat symbolises obviousness”) were smacks to the face: no one with a degree of incredulity could seriously buy Urquhart’s machinations, they had to be complicit in them. (House of Cards had much in common with The New Statesman in that respect.) Urquhart’s addresses frequently implicated the viewer.

Underwood’s soliloquies are less frequent and not so much fun; they seem to come from a show that the producers don’t want to make. As a device it disappoints most on the one occasion it might have soared. During season one the writers do a reversal of the Lear-like climatic scene in West Wing episode ‘Two Cathedrals’. Underwood, like Bartlett, addresses God and then, unlike, Bartlett turns down to the Devil. Both times Underwood looks direct into the camera - is it us? Does he struggle to tell whether we, his secret audience, are divine or satanic? No, “there is only us” he concludes. The effect is tantalisingly close but ultimately unrealised and I can’t quite but wonder whether this is down to Spacey’s performance. Dead-eyed, primordial, lethal, Underwood is not a creature that is easily anthropomorphised. Consequently, we can’t be complicit in the activities of a thing still in a state of nature.

Underwood is not Richard III but his antecedent, the Vice figure in the Medieval morality play whose chief effect was comical. Richard was far more than that: a scourge, a catharsis, he wipes out the entire corrupted political class and, inadvertently, purges England. Neither Urquhart nor, so far, Underwood performs such a role. But, worse, the US House of Cards lets the viewer off the hook, never once raising an adversary capable of matching the Underwoods. (Partly this is a problem of the US constitution: there is no head of state for Frank to best unlike the tragic King of the UK version.)

There lies the real problem with the show, which perhaps isn’t really its fault. If there is a difference, in the UK at least, between the present political crisis and the one in the nineties, it is that this time the electorate do not feel accountable for their politicians. That is, we attack them for failing to represent us in the first sense whilst failing to recognise that politicians represent us in the second sense too. We mould a political class in our own image. The US House of Cards never successful indites the audience for Congress’s misdeeds; it is an exercise in bad faith.

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Broadchurch

I used to love Columbo. I think it’s because even by the age of ten or so I had watched so many episodes of Morse, Poirot and whatnot that I was acutely sensitised to the mechanics of a whodunnit. Subsequently such shows were no longer much of a whodunnit for me. Watching Columbo, however, there was never any pretence of a whodunnit and, instead, the pleasure was in watching a sentient raincoat catch a killer like a cat plays with its food, if cats dissembled and smoked cigars.

Broadchurch borrows liberally, and consciously, from The Killing. A drawn-out, season-long murder investigation. The willingness to dwell on the grief of the family drew much comment from the reviewers at the time. But it has also nabbed its predecessor’s wily structural innovation: suspicion moves sequentially over the course of an episode from one suspect to the next, but with a viewer-detective asymmetry. Just as the police cotton on to who we’ve been suspecting for the past hour, we’ve been given new information that draws us elsewhere. Just like The Killing, Chibnall likes to implicate the audience by chucking in heart-rending details about our former suspect that scolds us for judging before understanding. It’s a compelling trick, well-suited for serial television.

Broadchurch, probably due to the shorter length of the series, deploys this tactic more successful – and more thoughtfully – than The Killing, which ended up making the police force goonish and its principle protagonist, Lund, come across as borderline, at best. In Broadchurch the story emerges as the stitching of the “close knit” community comes loose, it all feels much more premeditated than the Nord noir's ad hoc plotting.

(Like its Danish cousin, it is littered with red herrings that, with hindsight, are just a load of plotholes: What of the angry postman? Danny the secret poacher? The drug dealing boyfriend? Why does the cuckolding hotelier get to light the bonfire? Speaking of which, the bonfire vigil is so uncomfortably close to The Wicker Man – and so cackhanded – it undoes much of the good work before it.)

But. Well. The mechanics of a whodunnit meant that the killer becomes obvious from about halfway through. (Spoiler alert). Some clumsy (and uncharacteristic) dialogue about two-thirds of the way through seals the deal. Unfortunately this makes for an unconvincing killer: the final explanation needs some swallowing and the consequence of keeping it secret until the final episode means that no groundwork is laid to make it even remotely plausible despite being narratively satisfying.

So Broadchurch isn’t really much of a whodunnit. Yet, like The Killing, like Columbo in its own way, it doesn’t really care about this. Instead the interest comes from the quiet dissection of the knotty sinew of its characters’ lives. It even leaves substantial room in the final episode to work through some of the dramatic results of the revelation.

It is also artfully shot. It was uncanny (in the technical, Freudian sense) to have my childhood world (near enough) presented to me as so unfamiliarly beautiful: all ochre cliff faces and wine-dark sea. Even the weird triangular houses with ordinarily misguided cladding took on an expressionist, stylised quality.

It’s just such a shame that, I hope against everyone’s better judgement, there’s going to be a second series.

Oh. And I’m glad they didn’t kill the dog.

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The Shadow Line

It's got a great opening: awesome opening shot of a tiny car in a miasmic darkness, two creepy policeman who deliver a Jacobean prologue. The Shadow Line is stylishly done. And it's well populated too. For the first ten minutes you're going: “Oo it's him of...” or “That's her from that...” But it rapidly loses its charm. The characters, both the ostensible good guys and the bad guys, are endlessly confrontational in way that is supposed to suggest MORAL AMBIGUITY and the writer/director, Hugo Blick, clearly had great fun coming up with a plethora of inventive ways to call someone a c**t.

But the overall result is a deluge of dialogue that is needlessly portentous and rarely realistic. The characters exist in some strange, Beckettian parallel dimension where exposition is conveyed via impenetrable non sequiturs – to such an extent that for ages I honestly didn't realise one of the characters had Alzheimer's.

In its favour, The Shadow Line is wonderfully dense and has some way to go. I just worry that at the moment a lot of it seems to pivot on what looks to be an implausible bit of plotting. Oh, and at climactic points the incidental score goes absolutely ballistic. Which is really irritating.

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This Is England

Channel 4 prides itself on its low-budget, quirky-but-authentic depictions of working class life. It thinks that's where it has the edge over the other channels: The BBC just simply can't do it – everyone they ever hire is from RADA. ITV on the other hand is for the proles – it makes telly for the working classes. But Channel 4 makes shows about the lower orders for the higher orders, for Guardian readers to get their dose of pov-porn.

It's the worthy part of its mission – from back in the days when it would spend an evening broadcasting lesbian poetry. From before it discovered The Word and it could be crass in the name of innovation and make a buck out of it. You know, Isaacs rather than Grade.

I know this makes it sound like I hate This Is England '86. I don't. I think it just about manages to pull it off. There are lot of montage sequences to eighties music, especially early on and you really do want them to just bloody get on with it. The characters are, it has to be said, thinly drawn. The mundanity of their speech appears nearly authentic but, basically, everyone has exactly the same speech pattern, and the same way of expressing themselves. The apparent reliance on improvisation only seems to exacerbate this effect.

But it is good telly. It's funny and affecting. Deep down, however, I don't think it has anything new or important to say – either about its context or the sort of people it seeks to represent.

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End of a Mitchell

I'd read the reviews and people had warned me, but nothing could really prepare me for my first sight of crack-addicted Phil Mitchell. Joining EastEnders for the post Queen Vic conflagration to see Phil transfigured fully into a Klingon I searched wikipedia for the alien hybridisation plotline that I'd been missing out on.

Sadly I was missing out on nothing so preternatural, which is a pretty achievement for a show that bears fewer causal relations with the world than your average episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who. This is, after all, a programme in which child abusers are routinely transformed into the comedic light relief after a few months and which recently had a character so evil, he turned Peggy Mitchell into a robot.

EastEnders gets everything the wrong way around. In the real world the tiny differences (who left the milk out, who laughed inappropriately at somebody's girlfriend) are the causes for all-out war; whereas the really big things (who's got a crack addiction, who's been sleeping with somebody's wife, who kidnapped so-and-so's daughter and then blackmailed thingumabob's family because whatsherface is actually a man and is also thingy's dad) cause human beings, at most, to sit around awkwardly discussing the weather or the carpet. Rarely if ever do the important things led to the sort of apocalyptic confrontations seen week after week on your average soap opera.

So rather than Phil's crack habit being the cause for some discrete coughs and tangential conversation openers, it somewhat more improbably leads to an inferno of such intensity not even the powers of the diminutive tribal elder, Peggy, could defeat it. Instead she was left squawking and flapping about like a canary in a mining disaster.

They threw all the pyrotechnics at the demise of the Queen Vic, the realisation of which played out about as authentically as the crack addiction that precipitated it – which, in spite of all the apparent research and involvement of various charities, basically involved a red-faced Phil vigorously rubbing his arms whilst listening to The Who. McFadden, bless him, has all the nuance of a twelve year old playing a drunk in a Gang Show sketch.

EastEnders would like to be a dark, Dickensian depiction of working class London. The first episode even opened with the discovery of a body, a modern day Our Mutual Friend. But the demands of being a continuing serial with no endpoint always work to defeat this possibility. Peggy should have roasted, screaming Lear-like at the flames. Instead she wanders off, tracked by a wobbly handheld camera to a gooey synth, destined to return when the ratings haemorrhage. Soap operas can never really be good TV because good TV shows will always finally die.

But if it does transpire that Phil Mitchell is incubating an alien baby and has designs of terraforming Walford then I'll start watching immediately.

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Last of the Summer Wine

And this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Or, in this case, a befuddled old man saying in a broken voice, “Did I lock the door?” For the third time.

For a programme that made much of throwing geriatrics down a hill in a bathtub, there was something quite demeaning about the final episode of Last of the Summer Wine. In the popular imagination it's all about growing old disgracefully and shining a positive light on old age, yet the actual content seems to point in the opposite direction. Everyone has the blancmange face of a well-fed nonagenarian (the upshot of which is that it is often hard to discern precisely which old person is talking). Few of the actors can move independently. Some of the old gang (well, Peter Sallis) haven't died yet and they've been reduced to thirty-second bit part scenes, indoors and in a chair.

Painfully it didn't seem to appreciate how close to death it was. The entire plot is neatly and wholly related by the description on iPlayer: “Everyone arrives at the pub for the wedding, but Glenda receives a call to say the bridegroom has done a runner so they all head off to a nice restaurant.” Half of the show involves a pensioner on the street repeatedly running between two front doors like a harrowing documentary about Alzheimer's.

In fact it was all rather uncomfortably like going to visit an elderly relative in a home. They talk confusedly for about half an hour (the dialogue isn't simply unfunny, none of it makes the slightest bit of sense) before finally reaching a brief state of conscious awareness of their surroundings in which they look terrified at you with eyes that scream, “Dear Christ, why can't I die?” (In this case the camera morbidly dwells on Sallis's dewy, distant eyes as he quietly asks himself if it's his suit that's to blame for his diminishing memory.)

Hearing the studio audience cruelly laugh at such scenes leaves you cold. Someone should've had let this programme sign a living will when its neurons still regularly touched base with other neurons. Then this slow, wasting death might have been avoided. Instead, as in the real world, we seem to prize advanced old age as a goal in itself – no matter how lonely and desperate it becomes.

The only rise Last of the Summer Wine got out of me was to go research the fees at Dignitas.

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Doctor Who - 'The Eleventh Hour'

He now has the size and surface contours of a planet and one gets the impression that conversing with him nowadays would probably be about as progressive as the orbit of Jupiter, but it was still pleasant to see Patrick Moore on Doctor Who on Saturday. Not quite in some terrifying, disembodied Gamesmaster way but near as dammit. I’m secretly hoping that the ominous references towards the end about some great intergalactic evil are going to be linked by some gordian plot mechanism to Moore’s philandering. Stephen Moffat, the new showrunner, is clever enough. He could pull it off. I trust him – utterly, after watching ‘The Eleventh Hour’ the first episode of his series.

Fairy tales abound in ‘The Eleventh Hour.’ The new companion changes her name from Amelia to Amy to be less fairy tale. The incidental music – certainly when at its best – clearly references the likes of Harry Potter and modern fairy tales such as Edward Scissorhands. The recurring theme is the importance of giving up on the adult world and return to one’s childhood dreams. In the opening minutes the Doctor even says, “I don’t even have an Aunt” like some sort of Peter Pan.

It drives right to the heart of Doctor Who and is the core insight of Moffat’s contributions to the series. Doctor Who may look like a sci-fi programme but it really isn’t. It’s a children’s programme that feeds upon bogeymen and fairy tales and has always endured because of its playing with dark, Jungian archetypes. The normal Who trick is to pick up the tropes of the children’s horror story – hidden doors, monsters under the bed, the dark itself – and give them a cursory technobabble rationalisation before revelling in the fear of it all. The Doctor is, after all, the man the monsters have nightmares about.

Smith was wonderful. His face, which seemed so strange and large in the press photos, now fidgets with raptor-like cunning. He is far more restrained than the reports made out and seems less willing to signal it for the kids than Tennant. It was less of a heroic entrance than ‘The Christmas Invasion’, the episode doing the double duty of a season-opener and post-regeneration story. But it performed its double duties expertly.

Moffat has kept much that worked from RTD’s reign: the silliness, the bombastic music, the sonic screwdriver, the companion-fancies-Doctor subplot, the ersatz-adhoc sense of epic, and the Buffy-inspired series arc. But he also played on his own mythos: the girl who falls in love with a Doctor who exists in a parallel timeline, the hospital setting, the little girl comes from a short story Moffat wrote, even the line “I've put a lot of work into it” was taken from his Comic Relief spoof. He blends these elements relatively effortlessly, justifying his claim that he is as guilty of RTD’s so-called failings.

We were also provided with some inventive visuals (Moffat clearly has a thing for eyeballs); unfortunately the realisation of some of the effects was a bit, well, 1990s bubblewrappy CGI. Nowhere near as effective as the scary dog guy and her-from-Peep-Show. It would be sad if the production team gave up on puppets and models altogether because, to be honest, I much prefer the Skeksis to nu-Transformers. Call this the Lucas Syndrome. But I can see I’m in a minority opinion and eventually some sort of Nuremberg Law is going to be passed to prohibit marriage between those who can actually work out which Transformer is kicking fourteen kinds of Castrol out of which and those of us who loved Jurassic Park mostly for the animatronic sick Triceratops and had our first crush on Miss Piggy or Beaker, so no doubt we’ll eventually die out.

The Doctor is definitely just a mad man with a box. And it was just, simply wonderful. And I bloody love it. I bloody, bloody, bloody love it.

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