Post by Teddy Bear on Jul 24, 2011 18:24:17 GMT
An interesting observation by Peter Hitchens about a recent drama he saw on the BBC, and his criticism of it.
The BBC can't recreate 1956 - because it loves our selfish, grasping present too much
By Peter Hitchens
Why does the BBC find it so hard to understand the past?
Last week saw the launch of a new drama set in 1956, The Hour, attended with great trumpet blasts of publicity. It was, from top to bottom and from side to side, the most feeble, laughable tripe.
Yet it could have been so good, and I switched it on in the genuine hope that it would be.
Unrealistic: Dominic West, Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai star in The Hour
If you don’t like watching public humiliation or cooking, there is little enough to see on the TV. This is especially so since University Challenge turned into a scowling science lesson, and most news and documentary programmes are aimed at backward eight-year-olds with the attention span of a bedbug.
Which is why The Hour could have been great. There was, from the mid-Fifties to the early Sixties, a mighty revolution in TV news and current affairs. The story of how it happened, combined with the events that it covered, Suez, Hungary, the end of the Empire in Africa, and later the Cultural Revolution, could be great drama.
No such luck. TV producers seem to think that if they deploy enough cigarettes, bright-red lipstick and nail polish, not to mention a few dozen pairs of vintage spectacles, they have recreated the era of Anthony Eden.
If they can hire a few old cars and clunky Bakelite telephones, they imagine they have attained utter perfection.
What they don’t seem to understand is that the spirit of the age is what they need to capture, and that people in those times were quite unlike us.
They really did speak in those strangled accents, and in complete sentences. That is because they thought differently, had grown up with different experiences from those we know. Everyone over 25 could remember the war.
Men really were courteous to women, and women – including educated women – genuinely expected to get married and have children and saw nothing wrong in that. The men wore blue or grey suits (often shabby) and knotted their ties tightly.
Most women – particularly in offices – were compelled to be fairly dowdy by the general shortage of money. Career advancement came very slowly, and so deference was common in offices. People knew if their colleagues were married. Oh, and stabbings in London were so rare that they merited a bit more than a paragraph in the paper.
But The Hour revolves around two central characters who seem to have been transported direct from 2011 into 1956. The pair, played by Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai, stamped and flounced through the slow-moving scenes as if they were superior to the times they lived in, cross that everyone wasn’t Left-wing and politically correct like them, sure that they were about to inherit the Earth.
Did the director have a bit of a problem with persuading them to get into character? While all the other actors had been subjected to more or less authentic 1956 makeovers, these two looked as if they’d just wandered in from the Groucho Club, or wherever 2011 groovers go.
The BBC cannot recreate 1956 because it loves the present day too much, and is afraid to admit that anything about the past might have been better.
By Peter Hitchens
Why does the BBC find it so hard to understand the past?
Last week saw the launch of a new drama set in 1956, The Hour, attended with great trumpet blasts of publicity. It was, from top to bottom and from side to side, the most feeble, laughable tripe.
Yet it could have been so good, and I switched it on in the genuine hope that it would be.
Unrealistic: Dominic West, Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai star in The Hour
If you don’t like watching public humiliation or cooking, there is little enough to see on the TV. This is especially so since University Challenge turned into a scowling science lesson, and most news and documentary programmes are aimed at backward eight-year-olds with the attention span of a bedbug.
Which is why The Hour could have been great. There was, from the mid-Fifties to the early Sixties, a mighty revolution in TV news and current affairs. The story of how it happened, combined with the events that it covered, Suez, Hungary, the end of the Empire in Africa, and later the Cultural Revolution, could be great drama.
No such luck. TV producers seem to think that if they deploy enough cigarettes, bright-red lipstick and nail polish, not to mention a few dozen pairs of vintage spectacles, they have recreated the era of Anthony Eden.
If they can hire a few old cars and clunky Bakelite telephones, they imagine they have attained utter perfection.
What they don’t seem to understand is that the spirit of the age is what they need to capture, and that people in those times were quite unlike us.
They really did speak in those strangled accents, and in complete sentences. That is because they thought differently, had grown up with different experiences from those we know. Everyone over 25 could remember the war.
Men really were courteous to women, and women – including educated women – genuinely expected to get married and have children and saw nothing wrong in that. The men wore blue or grey suits (often shabby) and knotted their ties tightly.
Most women – particularly in offices – were compelled to be fairly dowdy by the general shortage of money. Career advancement came very slowly, and so deference was common in offices. People knew if their colleagues were married. Oh, and stabbings in London were so rare that they merited a bit more than a paragraph in the paper.
But The Hour revolves around two central characters who seem to have been transported direct from 2011 into 1956. The pair, played by Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai, stamped and flounced through the slow-moving scenes as if they were superior to the times they lived in, cross that everyone wasn’t Left-wing and politically correct like them, sure that they were about to inherit the Earth.
Did the director have a bit of a problem with persuading them to get into character? While all the other actors had been subjected to more or less authentic 1956 makeovers, these two looked as if they’d just wandered in from the Groucho Club, or wherever 2011 groovers go.
The BBC cannot recreate 1956 because it loves the present day too much, and is afraid to admit that anything about the past might have been better.