Since I live-blogged a darts match, I'm in no position to chuck rocks, but can I just point out that the Guardian is live-blogging Jeff Stelling's debut as presenter of Countdown*. New media; new rules I guess. As a friend says "This makes me happy!" And so it should.
*Note to American readers: a long-running tea-time letters and numbers quiz show popular with pensioners, students and the bedridden.
You know you're getting old when the people who made the TV programmes you liked as a kid start dying. So, farewell, Oliver Postgate, creator of Ivor the Engine and, of course, the immortal Bagpuss. I suppose those of us born in the mid-1970s (post-Clangers then) were the last for whom Postgate's work was a central part of their childhood TV experience.I assume today's kids would be entraced by the subtle, wry joys of Bagpuss but I'm not sure I'd want to test that thesis. From the Telegraph's obituary:
The worlds constructed by Postgate and his long-time collaborator Peter Firmin were the products of a kindlier age, informed by Postgate's own utopian longings and encapsulated in his mild, avuncular narration.
His programmes were simple and uncluttered, yet stimulating and not unsophisticated. They eschewed the frenetic matiness of later generations of children's television, winning the trust of their audience instead by old-fashioned reliance on plot and characterisation and by an appeal to a child's instinctive belief in magic. In short, they did not treat television as a special art but as a three-dimensional extension of the story book...
Postgate's last great success was Bagpuss (1973) – in the words of its introduction, "just a saggy old cloth cat, but Emily loved him". This was the story of a toyshop whose inhabitants – among them the mice on the mouse-organ – mended broken toys with songs. Bagpuss himself, down to his yawn, was evidently a retired Indian Army cat, a piece of whimsy that watching parents could appreciate.
Part of the reason for the great affection in which the programmes were held was that they never patronised their audience; and on growing up that audience found them just as well-made as they remembered, and in turn shared them with their own children. To Postgate's delight, Bagpuss was voted the favourite children's television programme of all time...
Postgate had a cottage in Wales, but otherwise lived quietly on the Kent coast. A warm, unambitious man who was a little at the mercy of his fears and emotions, he had a strong sense of moral purpose and a loathing of the absurdities of modern children's programmes. Teletubbies, he considered, were "awful, post-nuclear jelly babies".
Back to The Wire: Ross is of course correct to argue that one of David Simon's great achievements was creating a television show that was open to multiple legitimate interpretations. Though I might see the show as grist for a certain libertarian strain of thinking, I can quite see why an ardent drug warrior could also find plenty of evidence to support his analysis. As much as anything else, in fact, its this argument between competing worldviews that proves the shows' brilliance. "Shakespearian" is a word bandied around far too often, but it's apt and worthwhile in this instance. And of course the validity of these multiple interpretations is in no way compromised by the fact they may be very different from, or at odds with, Simons' own views.
As Ross put it, the show was "the rarest and most precious of beasts: A work of art that's intensely political but rarely devolves into agitprop." I think that's true though I also agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates (and I think Ross would too) that Season 5 was much less successful than its predecessors, partly because it did descend into agitprop.
Mr Coates argues, with more than just some justification, that the final Series was too pock-marked by a nihilism that, though always present, had not before become the defining element of the show. I think that's true and that Mr Coates is also correct to say that both strands of Series 5 - the newspaper and the serial killing - lacked the complexity and the nuance of the show's first four years. Plot was driving character, rather than character leading plot.
Yet there was another problem too: the nihilism was accompanied by sentimentality. I'm more of a sceptic of Pulitzer-hunting than the next guy, but Simon's argument that there was once a Golden Age of journalism that had been squandered by a venal managerial ethos that corrupted everything that was once sweet and noble about journalism was, well, naive. Seriously, folk should read newspapers from the past. Yes, there are some things they did better than we do now, but by god they were just as often thin, dull, worthy affairs. Newspapers have always been imperfect beasts, as anyone who reads an article on a subject they know well can tell you. But Simon wants - like most journalists - to believe in the heroic reporter. That's fine, but there was no irony, no humour in his treatment of the Baltimore Sun.
He said that no=one got the fact that the real story of Season 5 was that the paper wasn't covering the real story of Baltimore. Well, I kinda thought that point was made pretty damn obvious. And it was the obviousness that was depressing. Equally, of all the characters on The Wire, just about the only two who had no redeeming moments whatsoever were the two senior executives on the Sun, while the only virginally pure character was the lng-suffering City Editor. Well, fine. But also, Come Off It!
You can argue that such sentiment played a role in earlier seasons too. But the struggles of the dock workers, no longer promised a job for life, were explained as the unfortunate, even terrible, consequences of modernity and shifting economic patterns. Equally, Bunny Colvin's paens to a warmer, gentler past when everyone knew the name of the local Cop on his beat were, though sentimental in some respect, rooted in a genuine wistfulness for what was, in some respects, a kinder, more communal past. Here too, Simon seemed to be demonstrating a nostalgia for a 1950s ideal that, one could argue - and not altogether implausibly - was in tune with a Dreherian crunchy-style conservatism.
And of course plenty of people do think like that. Whereas the sentimentality of his treatment of journalism could only really, I think, make sense to other journalists. Or, to put it another way, Simon demands more from newspapers than do most readers. At the docks or in the wider community you could see that the stakes mattered. At the newspaper? Not so much. And, as I say, it was done with a depressing lack of nuance and carried a definite whiff of score-settling.
(I'd also suggest that the fabulist story was boring, not least because The Wire's HBO viewers would know all about it, having pored over, and perhaps enjoyed, the Jayson Blair fiasco. Tell us something we don't know! And most viewers, of course, were some way distant from the mean streets of West Baltimore or the impact of economic decline on working-class communities.)
Sure, Series 5 had its moments, but having just watched the first three years again the final season was a grievous disappointment. Yes, because of its nihilism but also, I think, on account of its unfortunate and solipsistic sentimentality.
Jonh Goldberg says that The Wire should be more popular amongst conservatives. He argues that conservatives should love The Wire because it shows what happens when you let Democrats run a major, if declining, American city. Well! At a certain point this is too dull for words: have we really reached the stage where even TV programmes have to be apportioned between conservatives and liberals so that watching television becomes a dreary act by which one demonstrates ones political allegiance?
In any case, if you have to investigate The Wire's politics, it seems to me that you might be tempted to conclude that it endorses a libertarian view of local politics, rather than conservative or liberal perspective. No wonder it's such a trendy show to like... The evidence is there: manifest failure of a crippling and immoral war on drugs? Check. Manifest failure of a school system resistant to reform and implicitly ripe, therefore, for real school choice? Check. Desperate consequences of the criminalisation of prostitution? For sure. Ghastly consequences of local government and planning regulations held hostage by rent-seeking? Yup, that too.
Factor in The Wire's popularity amongst educated pointy-headed Beltway-libertarian types and the fact that it wasn't very popular across the country as a whole and, yup, it seems clear that The Wire was probably too libertarian to be successful. Hence no EMMYs and precious few viewers.
Borges quipped that the Falklands War was akin to two bald men fighting over a comb and you might think that something similar could be said of the question: which is the best (American) cable TV news channel? Still, I'm glad that the New Republic has its groove back, publishing this fun piece by Greg Veis which, in traditionally counterintuitive style, makes a not-half-bad case for CNN being the pick of the bunch. Yes, the CNN of Wolf Blitzer and Larry King.
Then again, FOX News' strapline at the moment reads: "Gov Palin did not mention Obama 'lipstick' comment at event today." Also: "Gov Palin about to get on plane to Alaska." Seriously.
PS: TNR mildly undercuts Greg's thesis by giving him the subdeck: "Cable News' Tallest Midgets". This reminds me of The Scotsman's Rab McNeil description of First Minister's Question Time at the Scottish Parliament as "hamster wars". Harsh but fair...
As a wise man* told me, "art imitates life which then imitates art":
The Baltimore Sun reports:
*Thanks, reader JT.
It's a Sunday night in August. Hardly the most auspicious time of year for television programming. Still, that also makes it a reasonable moment to see how Channel 4 is faring in its mission to meet its public service remit.
Tonight, on the supposedly up-market and less-idiotic-than-most channel, you be reassured that British TV is still "the best in the world" by watching:
A reminder of that public service purpose...
which was most recently defined in the 2003 Communications Act. This states that "the public service remit for Channel 4 is the provision of a broad range of high quality and diverse programming which, in particular:
(a) demonstrates innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programmes;
(b) appeals to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society;
(c) makes a significant contribution to meeting the need for the licensed public service channels to include programmes of an educational nature and other programmes of educative value; and
(d) exhibits a distinctive character."
If you like The Wire you should definitely read this piece in the Washington Monthly. And if you don't like The Wire that must be because you haven't seen it yet. If that's the case, you have a treat in store: 60 odd hours of the best television series ever made.
I mean this sort of thing is horrific. Yet also horrifically compelling:
What would become the fifth and final murder charge in the case of Willie Mitchell and his cohorts took place two months later. This time, only Mitchell’s friend Shawn Gardner was directly involved. It began with a man named Darius Spence, who had found out that his wife, Tanya, was cheating on him with a local drug dealer everyone called “Momma.”
Spence decided to have Momma beaten up severely. To accomplish this, he negotiated with another drug dealer named Willie Montgomery. Would Montgomery be willing to beat up Momma in exchange for money? But Montgomery had another proposition altogether. Beating Momma up didn’t make sense, Montgomery argued, because then Momma would undoubtedly try to kill Montgomery. It was better just to kill Momma outright, and for five thousand dollars, Montgomery would be glad to do the job. Spence said he’d think it over.
Unfortunately for Darius Spence, Montgomery wasn’t interested in waiting around for an answer. Instead, sensing opportunity, Montgomery decided to tell Momma about the hit. If I turn down the deal, Montgomery explained, then Spence will probably just hire someone else to kill you. Therefore, Montgomery reasoned, you should hire me to kill Spence first. Momma was persuaded. (As Montgomery later explained to the prosecutors, “I guess he like that idea better than Darius Spence’s idea.”)
Panorama tonight:
The Olympic Games are special. The biggest show on earth - with an estimated global television audience of four billion people.
But hosting the Games brings extreme attention and extreme scrutiny.
Chinese Premier Wen Jibao promised that foreign media would be free to report on Chinese politics, economics and society in the build-up to the Games, a pledge at odds with the Western perception of China as a restrictive and secretive state.
In Panorama: China's Olympic Promise, reporter John Sweeney sought to put this assurance to the test as he travelled across China following the path of the Olympic torch.
Well, fine. But there's something mildly grotesque about the notion that the foreign media's ability - or inability - to report freely in China is the biggest issue of the moment. Sure, it would be nice if that were possible, but there's a whiff of solipsism about this. I'd rather watch a programme, for instance, that looked at what the tension Chinese reformers - or reform-minded Chinese - may feel, caught as they are between, I imagine, wanting the games to be a great success (for reasons of self-esteem and national pride) and the fear, again I imagine, that a successful games may set back, rather than enhance, the prospects for reform and greater openess, bolstering the status quo and perhaps even emboldening the regime... I don't know any of the answers to any of this, but that would seem a bigger, more interesting issue than whether foreign journalists can move freely or access the BBC's website inside China...
Lord knows, there are times when the BBC is a frustrating service. And then there are times when one is thankful for the Beeb given the alternatives out there. Consider these screen grabs, taken at 11.35pm UK time this evening. (Click on each for a larger, clearer image if you like. The point is that the BBC has the big news front and centre and the others, er, don't.)
BBC:
Fox News:
ABC News:
UPDATE: At 1.35am, UK time, neither Fox nor ABC has Solzhenitsyn's death prominently featured on their frot page.
In response to this post, a reader asks how did I like the Fry and Laurie TV adaptations? Well, only up to a point is my answer. They are, probably, as good an effort as television can muster but they still, to my mind, fail to cut the mustard. An honorable failure, then. Or rather, to put it more charitably, they were closer to being a success than anyone had ay right to hope they would be.
Fry was, I always thought, rather too oleaginously piscine as Jeeves while Laurie played Bertie as - hard though this may be to believe - too much of a fat-headed ass. They got away with these excesses largely because the two friends act so well together; their timing and ease in each others company rescued them on numerous occasions. Equally, the costume, set design and music was as good as you could desire, I think, giving the series an attractive sheen that helped the viewer believe in this light-hearted nonsense. It was all agreeably frothy.
And in the end its failure wasn't really anyone's fault. The problem lies in the material. Wodehouse's England seems superficially real - I mean, the houses, the gardens, the clothes, the servants, the gentleman's clubs and all that all exist - but of course it isn't real at all. But it's the sort of fantasy that's very hard to put across on film or television.
The language problem is more significant however.
There's a further difficulty with the Jeeves & Wooster stories: unlike, say the adventures at Blandings, these are told in the first person. Much of the charm rests upon the tone of Bertie's monologue. But it's a narration that exists on the page and can't easily be transferred to the screen. Thus we may smile when Bertie says "I pronged a moody forkful of eggs and b" but all television can do is show Bertie eating breakfast with a puzzled, or thoughtful, look on his face. Not quite the same thing at all, old bean.
That's one reason why I think one might have more success with a Blandings adaptation, especially since the country-house drama is such an established genre in its own right. Of course, in Wodehouse the drama is twinned with farce, requiring a light touch and, crucially, actors who don't think they're takin part in farce...
Still, even then a screen adaptation struggles with this sort of stuff: "Unlike the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent
of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully
resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with
a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons." Well, yes, indeed.
That being the case, I think that the Wodehouse most readily adaptable to the television screen may be the golf stories. Here too, a realistic setting is immediately apparent (everything - or almost everything- takes place on the golf course after all) and though the stories are narrated by the Oldest Member he tends not to be the dominant voice. Just as usefully, the golf tales show Wodehouse at his most judgemental: there are good eggs and rotten bounders, while, being short stories, they're not too stuffed with plot. Equally, what plot there is tends to have a natural stroy arc, ending with a lesson - of life or love or whatever - being taught by the sternest schoolmistress of them all: golf itself.
Now, of course, I doubt you'd have the same ratings success with the golf stories (nor the same international sales) but I think they'd be easier to transfer to TV than Jeeves and Wooster. Fry and Lurie: entertaining stuff, but not quite, in the end, a success.
This isn't a criticism of Tim Russert, per se, rather an anecdote that, though trivial, is also rather revealing. From Mark Leibovich's nicely-judged piece in the New York Times:
My last encounter with Mr. Russert was at a Democratic debate in Cleveland, which he was moderating. I was with his colleague Mr. Matthews — I was writing about Mr. Matthews for the New York Times Magazine — and we ran into Mr. Russert in the lobby of the Cleveland Ritz Carlton. He had just worked out and was wearing a sweaty Bills sweatshirt and long shorts and black loafers with tube socks. An MSNBC spokesman who was with us tried to declare Mr. Russert’s attire “off the record,” which I found hilarious, and which I was of course compelled to include in the story. When I called Mr. Russert to tell him this, and he laughed so hard, I had to move the phone away from my ear.
“Just do me one favor,” Mr. Russert said. “Say they were rubber-soled shoes, will you?” Done.
He laughed again, and we talked vividly, I recall, on the topic of how so many people in Washington are obsessed with where they rank, how they’re perceived.
As I say, this is a very minor, insignificant moment, yet the request - and Leibovich's accession to it - are revealing. Does it matter much? Would the public good have been advanced had Leibovich refused Russert's (half-joking?) request? Not especially, but readers might wonder, with some reason, whether someone who was not rich and powerful might have been treated with such consideration. But that's Washington for you: just because it's not off the record doesn't mean it's entirely on the record either...
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