VERY early on January 1 I had a rush of duty to the head. I retired to
a private place and did a quick zap through all four television
channels. BBC Scotland's Hogmanay Live, a decent enough compromise
between folk and pop cultures, was still playing the ''village hall'';
Scottish Television's A Guid New Year had yielded to a ceilidh from Eden
Court Theatre in Inverness; a crewcut youth was rasping into the mike on
BBC2; and on Channel 4 the Minnesota Vikings were body-charging the
Washington Redskins.
Ah me, I thought, lapsing prematurely into that mood of exquisite
melancholy which attends the small hours of New Year's Day. Pity the
Hogmanay programmer. North of the Border he's thrown in the towel and
slunk back into the arms of tradition, or what passes for it in tartan
television. South of the Border he's finally flipped, beaming pop
concerts and American football into sitting-rooms empty of their
youthful target audiences, who are all elsewhere looking for action,
dancing, singing, drinking, filling the streets with half-eaten kebab
suppers and shattered bottles of imported lager. Doing everything, in
fact, except watch television.
If I ran the networks I'd give the nation some bongs and bells at
midnight, then go off the air while the young party, the middle-aged
blether, and the elderly go to bed. The great pagan festival of decline
and renewal does not suit the television age.
By January 2 I was officially back at work, pleasantly surprised to
find that despite the never-ending holiday some sense was creeping back
into the schedules. First treat of the day was Budgies Repaired
Saturday, a Viz production for Scottish Television. In any other hands
(Viz's, not Scottish's) this was a show which could easily have bombed.
It's hard enough to tell a good joke well, but to extract the humour
from a cartoon and try to tell people why it's funny is well-nigh
impossible; unless you are the feverishly inventive Grigors, Murray and
Barbara both, who directed and produced this celebration of the life and
work of Bud Neill.
Bud Neill passed me by. Lobey Dosser, Rank Bajin, El Fideldo -- who
they? As far as I was concerned Tom Shields was delirious. But Budgies
Repaired Saturdays, a film for fans, starring many Neill groupies and
career Glaswegians, has changed all that. Powerful visual talents and
quirky imaginations were at work in this work. The Grigors and Bud Neill
were made for each other. Even people who lived their lives outside the
orbit of Neill's influence -- people who read the Scotsman or the Press
and Journal -- must now find it hard to resist the art of the man who
invented Pawnee Mary of Argyll.
My excuse is, like Billy Connolly, I was too young to appreciate him.
His mongrel language of Old West patois and West of Scotland argot was
not beyond the comprehension of a Lanarkshire child in love with Kit
Carson, but its humour was too surreal for the unformed funny bone, and
the social significance of some of the names was beyond me. Connolly
explained what must have puzzled many until now: a ''lobby dosser'' was
the member of the family who slept in the hall in order to defraud the
social services -- although the precise nature of the fraud remained
unclear.
The film itself was like an extended cartoon, and brought new
excitements to the function of the talking head. Many of its
contributors shared Bud's fascination with the subculture of the West
(Glasgow has always seemed closer to America than Europe) and some were
willing players in the Grigors' games with graphics. As for that
barbed-wire tumbleweed -- it may have looked like a George Wylie oeuvre,
but the idea was the film-makers' own; designed, perhaps, to say
something about the spiky nature of Scottish creativity, or the bed of
nails on which the Scottish artist lies?
There is hope, however, for the Scottish artist as long as Scottish
Television are prepared to commission entertaining, imaginative, and
expert works like this one. But how long will that be?
I seem to be becoming a bit of a bore on the subject of the Ruth
Rendell/Barbara Vine adaptations, but the sheer quality of these
productions -- A Fatal Inversion, Gallowglass and now A Dark Adapted Eye
-- provide shining hours in the lowering darkness of television's recent
repertoire of drama. They have all been made for the BBC by the same
independent team, who deserve to be named: Sandy Welch does the
screenplay, Phillippa Giles produces, and Tim Fywell directs. And no
novelist could ask for people who more skilfully articulate the
complexities and more faithfully honour the spirit of these memorable
whydunits.
A Dark Adapted Eye is my favourite Rendell/Vine and, I believe her
finest. Its intricate structure and penetrating psychological force are
literary achievements in themselves, even without the extra dimension of
mystery and menace. How often do you see a favourite book satisfyingly
translated into a different medium? The last time it happened to me was
when I first saw Gone With the Wind.
The highest compliment I can pay BBC1's two-part production is that it
made you forget you'd read the novel. And when you did think about the
book you remembered its many layers and saw them woven into an equally
complex but never obfuscating narrative structure (flashback-friendly, I
call it) and found its characters compellingly recreated by some
exceptional acting; most notably by Celia Imrie and Sophie Ward as the
doomed sisters, Vera and Eden.
Their terrible summer struggle for possession of the child truly
chilled the heart. A Dark Adapted Eye is not original drama of the kind
the BBC once produced in-house, and it's not immortal drama. But for
scenes like these the licence fee is still worth paying.
The heart was also chilled by this week's news that Carlton's bid to
buy Central has been successful, and this unimpressive outfit is now the
biggest commercial television company in the country. Carlton's first
year as a franchise-holder has exposed a set of values which has
something in common with the grisly glitz ethos of Hello magazine.
A typical Carlton product -- their idea of documentary is as trivial
as their concept of drama -- went out after the News at Ten on Monday.
Diana -- A Princess Alone was what newspaper reporters call a cuttings
job -- a lot of cobbled-together material, in this case extracted from
the past year's footage of the Princess of Wales, sketchily supported by
a sentimental narrative and some over-rehearsed opinions from the usual
suspects (Anthony Holden, Andrew Morton, etc). With friends like these
does Diana need her enemies?
I have not forgotten that this is the start of the International Year
of the Family. How could I? It's yet another hook for television to hang
some programmes on. I ventured innocently into BBC1's Family Watch
(observe the British family in its natural habitat) but was forced to
recoil in horror, waving bulbs of garlic, when the presenter was
revealed as Robert Kilroy-Silk; and due to technical incompetence I
failed to see the same channel's Wednesday spectacular, The Family Show.
But I'm willing to bet I learned more about families watching A Dark
Adapted Eye.
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