Soap, soap, soap

“Just remember this one golden rule,” he said. “It’s all soap opera. They may say its a classic serial, they may call it a cutting-edge drama, they may bill it as cops, they may set it in deep space, but actually it’s all just soap, soap, soap.”

Mark Ravenhill’s lament over the sudsing up of contemporary television drama is, to my sorrow, very right. He offers the words of a bored scriptwriter annoyed that “what they really want is a little half-hour or 50-minute morality play”.

Ravenhill even offers a few of the commandments of the new soap morality: “Be true to yourself”; “talk about your feelings”; “learn to forgive and move on”; “accept difference”; and “you’re still family even after the murder/arson/substance abuse”. He’s right, though he might add that emotional displays are more virtuous than stoicism.

What I find interesting is that Ravenhill, a playwright himself, identifies these values as a perniciously homogenous liberal orthodoxy. The worst thing here, by far, is that lack of variety, the lack of dissent, the lack of angry engagement with a world. This is a morality of withdrawal from the larger world, a focus instead on the self-aggrandising individualism of the post-sixties middle classes.

And yet, what I see here is not in fact an echo chamber for the incorrigibly empty self-interested, the reverberating clamour of which drowns out legitimate, different voices. No, what leaps out at me is that this ultra-liberal porridge is a perfect fit for the requirements of soap, of any kind of regular drama.

Let’s look at those commandments again.

“Be true to yourself”: drama not only needs strong and readily identifiable (even caricatured) characters, it needs characters who will pursue their beliefs beyond the point of reasonable disagreement, necessarily causing conflict.

“Talk about your feelings”: Television drama is based on talk, no two ways about it. Inarticulate, reticent or inexpressive characters need not apply. I remember well leaving Mike Leigh’s (excellent, emotionally articulate, Palme d’Or winning, and very soapy) film “Secrets & Lies” thinking that all it lacked was Bob Hoskins popping up at the end telling us, on behalf of BT, that “it’s good to talk”. Leigh, a proper artist, managed to do this with a story essentially about characters who were variously bad at talking. Soaps and TV dramas cannot afford such subtlety with the basic mechanisms of the genre. The least of the cast must be gabbier than the most annoying person you ever sat next to on the train.

“Learn to forgive and move on”: You can’t, as you would in real life, endlessly rehash the same problems and complaints in minutely differentiated forms over the course of weeks, months, years. You have half an hour or 50 minutes at most to state, develop and resolve the problem. Next week we need to be onto the forgiveness and the next problem, so you’d better forgive him/her/them/it now and scrub the slate clean in order to be disappointed and angered afresh next week.

“Accept difference”: Ah, the greatest liberal nostrum of all. A Good Thing, particularly if you’re a drama writer seeking to set up odd couples, cultural conflicts, and misunderstandings galore.

“You’re still family”: Blood and marriage are the two clearest ways to keep warring characters in close proximity.

The warmly liberal values produced by this orrthodoxy, are, I think, more to do with the shapes required by regularised drama, and less to do with an political or sociological intent.

Our misanthropic media

I was reading how the Daily Mail will soon be Britain’s biggest paper with its fiery compound of middle class aspirations (a thinner body, house prices rising, moving abroad) and anxieties (trying to get a thinner body, house prices falling, foreigners moving here). A jaunty sidebar to the article made plain how we have moved from the unremitting optimism of the thirties (epitomised by the Daily Express), through the unionism and welfare statism of the Mirror of the fifties, through smash and grab years of the Sun, to the bleak apocalypticism of the Mail.

I don’t think it’s adequate to raise an eyebrow and tut that, you know, things these days are pretty comfortable for most people in Britain, so whingeing about house building and transport policy as if the country’s about to collapse is a little self-indulgent. I think the point is that the moaning Mail thrives precisely because its readership is very comfortable indeed, and therefore feels that it’s got a great deal to lose.

The newspaper readership of the fifties was still, to a significant extent, looking forward to indoor toilets. For Mirror readers then, things were visibly getting better, hence the solidarity and positive outlook. Today’s Mail readership, by contrast, sounds bored, soft, uncertain and directionless. If you’re not on the rise, they seem to say, you’re heading for a fall.

Coincidentally, I noticed one of those exclamatory weekly magazines on the newstand. I can’t remember if it was Now!, Heat!, Help! or Cobblers!, but it had the most wonderfully expressive coverlines:

Blind? Who cares?

Breast cancer? Who cares?

and

Games that make kids go psycho

Which last is a promotional offer that surely can’t be beat.

Peackock tails and back-page tales

The tail of the peacock is a redoubtable example of the importance of sexual selection in forming the physiology of animals. The theory goes that the elaborate plumage of the male peacock developed first because the choice of partner rests mainly with the female. The male’s ability to produce and support a strong, colourful display implies health, or plentiful strengthm, or perhaps, indirectly, dominance of other males in the area.

Sexual selection in evolution is a curiosity, though. It develops over long periods of time into a form of evolutionary arms race, where increasing amounts of energy are expended by males in sustaining these elaborate and potentially debilitating sexual displays. However ridiculous the display, however, because it is an agreed sign, it continues to function effectively in promoting the male, and so, by permitting the showy male to father more offspring, the situation is perpetuated.

These thoughts were running through my mind, as they were no doubt yours, this morning in the papershop, when I noted the back page headline of The Sun:

Big Hits of the Seven Tease

Jaw dropped. Tumbleweed bounced past. Across the land, the sound of nobody laughing.

The story, it transpired, was that there had been a football match, in which the Woolwich Arsenal had beaten Everton FC by seven goals to nil. These things happen, and I’m sure everyone thought this was as notable an achievement as I did.

So what the hell was going on with the headline? Why the pun on ‘Big Hits of the Seventies’ (which does exist as a compilation album, but is hardly well-known)? I see where the ’seven’ comes from, but ‘tease’? Would a trouncing ever be considered a ‘tease’ if it didn’t help the pun home?

It’s not even a good pun, which, like a good crossword clue, should work on both the superficial and the cryptic levels. An example would be The Sun’s modern classic when Inverness Caledonian Thistle upset the mighty Celtic:

Super-caley-are-fantastic-Celtic-are-atrocious

So why, when they are capable of touching the heights of punnery, would The Sun’s subs allow such a stinker to be published?

The answer is because they have no choice. The laws of sexual selection in the Great British Tabloid mean that you must pun, because punning is what the readers expect. No matter that nobody in the country could possibly have even raised an internal smirk at this morning’s effort. Puns are the battleground; rather, they are the secondary sexual characteristics of the tabloid, and they must be as big and bold as possible.

No matter that they’re as debilitating, irrelevant and ridiculous as the largest peacock’s tail that you ever did see. It’s in the genes; and breeding will out in The Sun.

My Life

Many thanks for the continued flow of suggestions for decent people. With the exception of ‘my friends’, which does not count, and the addition of Patrick Moore, who I suspect does, I think we’re going to have a publishable first XI soon enough.

In the meantime, thinking about John Peel’s incomplete autobiography, and noting the current qualification for getting a publishing deal for spilling one’s life story (two years on the telly, by my reckoning), I’ve been paying more attention than I should to the distractingly unhappy art of the autobiography title.

Recent efforts have increasingly reinforced the basic rule that celebrity autobiographies, particularly for sportsmen, should have titles like tabloid headlines. So, former Englan wicket keeper Alec Stewart is ‘Playing for Keeps’, while intermittently uxorious golfer Nick Faldo says that ‘Life Swings’.

The weakness of Faldo’s effort got me thinking: surely things would work out better if we started with the punning title and created celebrities to fit?

So the straight-talking music producer telling it like it is will be ‘On the Record’. And the architect who brought bright and cheerful child-friendly environments into the mainstream, despite a battle with the bottle, would of course have ‘Swings and Roundabouts’. The ex-racing driver bled dry by paternity suits and rapacious ex-trophy wives? ‘In the Pits’. The effervescent fish shop mogul? ‘Chipper’. The fashion designer whose life has been a flurry of scandalous rumour? ‘Utter Bobbins’. The Barnardo boy who made it inhaute couture*? ‘Rags to rags’.

I could go on. Instead, a question. What should the autobiography be called of the person who ghostwrites all of those
celebrities’ autobiographies?

* No, I don’t know what Bruce Oldfield’s autobiography is called, but if it is‘Rags to rags’ I’m claiming the credit.

Flashmob: The Opera

Last night, as noted on the linklog and all over this morning’s Metro, there was a flashmob in central London: the self-explanatory Pillow Fight Club.

As a high-concept gag, it looked fun. Far more interesting, though, was whatBBC Three did with flashmobs last night. Last night they put on an opera at Paddington station.

You know what? It turned out to be alright.

I watched Flashmob: The Opera, by which I mean that I saw it on TV, not that I turned up myself as part of the mob. It lasted under an hour, and only really involved the mob for the very end of the climactic number.

But it did work.

The conceit was not just that this was a drama interacting with a real space, although it was that too, with the characters trailing about the station waiting for their trains and arguing on the concourse (an engaged couple, Mike and Sally, fall out over football, and she is picked up by a lothario). Thereal conceit was that this was opera for football crowds.

More about that in a second. First an overview of the key creative decisions involved.

First (and I must say I was initially disappointed by this), the music consisted entirely of well-known arias, with a couple of choruses thrown in. I had a nasty feeling this was going to be Hooked on Classics all over. It wasn’t, largely because the English libretto had been written so well and so wittily (by Tony Bicat). The opening line of the piece was “What a plonker!”, and the tone was set from there.

The first act was pretty stodgy, with the characters separated and a surprisingly large amount of the performance prerecorded (noticably Mike’s rendition of La donn’e mobile on his tube journey).

Incidentally, this was I suspect a moment where life had let down the art a little. Mike was cast as a Charlton fan, and Charlton were, until a couple of months ago, the home of Paulo Di Canio. I’m sure Mike’s opening lines were originally meant to be the chant based on La donn’e mobile that used to accompany Di Canio on trips to Liverpool:

‘We’ve got Di Canio; you’ve got our stereo’

Anyway, things got rather better at half-time, not least because the producers did their best to play up the football theme: veteran commentator Barry Davies gave the half-time analysis. As throughout, this maximised the sense of a football audience meeting opera, rather than opera being brought to a football audience. This also explains the choice to show the piece on populist BBC Three rather than artsy BBC Four.

In the second half the atmosphere grew with the flashmob, who had evidently been asked to arrive for about two-thirds of the way through the performance. It all moved swiftly towards a conclusion with Sally being persuaded to catch the train to sin and Swindon, while Mike failed to grab her attention with a rendition of ‘Nessun dorma’.

Cue the flashmob, circling Mike, blasting out a quick chorus, and sending Sally scurrying back towards her one true love. It was a very basic story tricked out with frills and ruffles (Mike is confronted by an argumentative chorus of Chelsea supporters; there is some business with the carousel in a sushi bar), but that’s what you get with opera.

In the end I think it worked for two reasons:

First, the choice of popular pieces rather than original music was made to work by emphasising that these pieces are part of the popular consciousness. It felt perfectly sensible to hear a Chelsea gang hammering out the Anvil Chorus, and it was probably ‘Nessun dorma’ that gave the piece its football theme in the first place.

Second, I’m a complete and utter sucker for found choruses. The flashmob chorus at the end, a motley bunch of commuters, students and web-types, gave a decent account of themselves and Mike had the nous to look astonished as they accompanied him.

In short, the performance was cleverly angled to take best advantage of its own peculiarities: everything in it was defined by the twin poles of flashmobbing and opera.

Clever, successful, and definitely unrepeatable.

How to read an newspaper

Fine article on Monday by Andrew Marr on reading between the lines when addressing an newspaper. Applied field semiotics of the highest order, covering important elements such as identifying the key paragraph (the second, not the first), applying proper scepticism to quotation marks and ‘research’, and remembering to read the small stories.

It’s notable how much emphasis Marr puts on paratextual information: the byline, the page the story is on, the headline itself (if it is a question, you can probably answer that question ‘no’). Marr could write a useful appendix to Genette’s seminal Paratexts — one of my favourite books of literary theory, because it resolutely addresses the information you think doesn’t matter when addressing a book.

How often have you bought a book you’d never heard of, just because it caught your eye in the bookshop? You probably bought it solely on the basis of your paratextual reading: the title, the dust jacket, the author biography, maybe even the dedication. I’ve bought books solely on the basis of the index, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

Four years in an hour

One of those occasions where the idea is so much better than the reality could possibly be:

The Nine network [in Australia] will roll all episodes [of American daily soaps Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless] made in the past four years into two one-hour specials, to bring Australia’s programming up to date with the United States.

(source: Nine News)

This should be like Tom Stoppard’s joyful The (15 Minute) Dogg’s Troup Hamlet, in which everything pretty much everything gets crammed in, actors haring ever faster about the stage as they realise they’re running out of time, and which includes, as an encore, a one-minute Hamlet.

You can be sure it won’t be anything like that, of course. The only way of getting four years of plot into one hour is through lots of tedious exposition. It’s a shame, because there’s the germ of a winning idea here. For those of us who don’t care to watch soap operas, but have to communicate with people who do (i.e. half the population), it would be a public service to have, instead of a weekly omnibus edition, a weekly microbus: a five-minute preciswhere no conversation involves more than twenty words and all the entrances and exits are done running.