Channel Zero #3

Sorry for not being more exciting recently; I’ve been having to do much human stuff and it saps the time. Rest assured I have not lost any level of grouchiness; I just haven’t gotten round to angrily scratching it down yet! The year’s still young; bile will arrive.

This week presented one of those mildly irritating problems that come from being a servant to cats. The eldest of the creatures required a teeth-clean which involved an anaesthetic and therefore no food for the previous 18 hours… it’s a bit hard to keep one cat unfed while the others demand not to be; post-procedure the groggy moggy couldn’t be let out which provided a second problem- how to keep one cat in when the others are used to free access and one of them point blank refuses to comprehend the concept of a litter tray.

The latter part of the week was marked by a retreat from the internet as it eats time and prevents things being done: the interweb’s as bad as a dictionary or encyclopædia for stealing time, except not nearly so informative; you look up what you want to look up then think that’s interesting and so on and so forth. This hibernation was ended briefly this morning by a local Record Fair; the first of the year. It’s was… disappointing.

As was the last week’s television, the saviour was Monty Don’s Around The World In 80 Gardens while both programmes I was most looking forward to were vandalized for different reasons. Horizon: What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity? was a fascinating programme ruined by modish, extravagant and ultimately utterly pointless directorial tricks and editorial decisions. It looked rather like a 15-year old Media Studies group were let loose on it. However, I now know some interesting new facts such as that time is not a constant and light doesn’t always travel in straight lines as it is affected by dense gravitational fields… which I presume may mean that light has some sort of quantifiable mass… Andrew Graham-Dixon’s The Art Of Spain was vandalized for completely non-artistic reasons. It was broadcast on BBC4 and, sadly, Digital Freeview is rubbish. The picture broke up on a regular basis until the point where it gave up bothering to come back at all. Analogue never had this much of a problem. So, why are we being saddled with this inadequate system which is so clearly not of broadcast quality? Is it because Blair had a meeting with a media mogul just before his ascent to the Palace of Westminster? Is it because a substandard free system will force people to buy subscription television in order to have trouble-free viewing? You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment!

Possibly interesting stuff on the telebox for the coming week may include, but not necessarily exclusively, some, none or all of the following… ;-)

Saturday
BBC2: 11.10 pm: Factory: Manchester From Joy Division To Happy Mondays: documentary on Tony Wilson and Factory Records.

BBC2: 12.40am: Dawn Of The Dead: Romero’s classic zombie sequel (if you ignore the stupid custard pie fight); judging by the scheduled length it’s the so-called Director’s Cut.

Sunday
C4: 9.15 pm: Million Dollar Baby: if you haven’t seen it, you really did ought- and ignore all the people who whined about the third act!

C4: 1.35 am: Focus: all I know is it’s based on a novel by Arthur Miller and as he was responsible for Death Of A Salesman it cannot be without some merit or interest.

ITV4: 12.20 am: Sam Peckinpah’s West: Legacy Of A Hollywood Renegade.

Monday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Life In Cold Blood: Attenborough’s Ninth and Final series. It's David Attenborough, what more need be said?

Tuesday
BBC2: 9.00 pm: Horizon: Is Alcohol Worse Than Ecstasy?

BBC4: 10.30 pm: Storyville: The Polish Ambulance Murders: would appear to be about Polish Paramedics turned latter-day Burke and Hare.

Thursday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes: the week’s big new series.

There’s no getting away from the fact that I’m looking to this with a mix of trepidation and excitement. Life On Mars was brilliant… one of the best television dramas I’d seen in many a year. Then it ended. Before it got stale; before it got annoying and before I wanted to throw the television from the highest turret. So, a new piece from ostensibly the same team following pretty much the same formula should certainly be something worth seeing…

However, there are so many possible pitfalls that it seems a very tricky proposition; a courageous decision to quote Sir Humphrey. The first pitfall, as it is with all sequels, is purely having to live up to the quality, consistency and imagination of the original. Problem two: John Simm’s performance and character were a perfect contrast to Philip Glenister’s Gene Hunt: can Keeley Hawes’ DI Alex Drake match this? The clips shown so far have presumably been unrepresentative and out of context: high drama always looks bizarre and melodramatic taken as clips even if it works well within the programme itself. The next problem as far as I can see is that DI Drake knows the situation and what was the twist of Life On Mars and so does the audience. This seems to remove both a level of intrigue and more importantly a level of jeopardy. We, the audience, know that it’s definitely not real as does Drake; could this cause issues with the suspension of disbelief? As Drake herself understands the situation this could bring in the very real possibility of creating a situation where it becomes overly self-referential, too knowing and bordering on self-parody. There is also an issue of back-story: what does Drake know of Hunt as opposed to that which Hunt knows of himself. Does Hunt have a life outside of the imaginings of Drake or Tyler? As Gene Hunt was such a larger than life character in the original has the temptation to make him either too cuddly or too boorish been resisted? And as he’s now a known creation of Drake does this mean that she will project her own prejudices against his style of policing onto him or will he remain at the same level as for Tyler? There seem endless possibilities for getting tangled in knots over the whole notion of somebody else having the sequel to a different character’s dream sequence! I’m also more than a little curious as to how the whole of Hunt’s team can be shifted to London with adequate explanation excluding recourse to “it’s fantasy” or “it’s in her head so anything can happen”. I really want this to succeed. We’ll see!

On the other hand it’s got ‘that scary clown’ and an Audi Quattro in it, which was my dream car when I was younger, so can’t be all bad. Bizarrely (and somewhat disappointingly) I now find, with help from Top Gear, that the Quattro chucked out less horses than the (rather normal) car I’ve got sitting outside!