The return of the great British TV play

I've noticed, especially in the last year, a decent crop of feature-length one-off TV dramas on the Beeb and Channel 4. I've even watched a few of them, especially in the last week, hence the lack of a proper "film" post.

Last night, as part of its Curse of Comedy season, BBC 4 aired Most Sincerely, a bio-pic about Hughie Green, the loathsome slimy presenter of indescribably shite 1970's talent show Opportunity Knocks. At the centre of the drama was a perfectly observed performance by the guy who played the title character in Shoestring (which in contrast was quite a good 1970's TV series). Most Sincerely charted the rise and fall of Hughie Green's TV career. While there wasn't much character development (he starts out entertainingly yucky and finishes up entertainingly yucky), the personal stuff hinged upon his secret fathering of Paula Yates. Once he's off the telly himself he takes notice of young Paula's TV career and in this way the drama contrasts the changing styles of British telly. The two of them span the history of British light entertainment telly up to the 1990's, and so the drama elegantly condenses the shift from Green's "ordinary" viewer implicitly defined as old people, housewives and idiots, to "ordinary" viewer implicitly defined as, er... young people, people who swear a lot, and idiots.

There's also a bit of postmodern weirdness with the use of archive footage of the late Paula Yates, so you have an actor playing Hughie Green watching the real Paula Yates on the telly. But it works grand in context and is only weirdly postmodern when you think about it.

Channel 4 showed Poppy Shakespeare last Monday, a dark, Kafka-esque comedy/drama about two contrasting characters trapped in the NHS's mental healthcare system. One character, N, is a career loony or "dribbler" as she calls herself, in and out of hospitals most of her life, like her mother before her. The other, Poppy, appears perfectly sane and has no idea why she is being forced to turn up at the hospital every day. Her attempts to get out of the system only make matters worse and overall the message seems to be that the mental health system is so infuriatingly bureaucratic it would drive even a sane person mad.

Refreshingly, there aren't any attempts at docu-soap realism which seems to be the style of choice for "issue" drama. Instead there's a surreal, dream-like quality to it, and while the main characters of Poppy and N are fully fleshed out, all the healthcare professionals are utterly one-dimensional mouthpieces of the system they run. I strongly approve of this - there's far too much dreary "balance" in "issue" drama.

So, it's the return of the great British TV play. And I approve, because it's all the best aspects of TV plays of yore - gripping, character driven, writer-friendly stuff - without all the naffness of the 70's and 80's, i.e. multi-camera shoots with Eastenders lighting and production design. It also fills the void in the cinemas due to the lack of adequate distribution for British cinema, allowing these dramas to potentially reach much bigger audiences in their homes rather than relying on the cinema box office. Not that there's any excuse for the lack of screening opportunities for British cinema - indeed, there's a limit to the styles suited to the great British TV play, and Britain needs more CINEMA, with evident cinematic-ness, to be seen by people in Britain. But hey - a decent crop of good feature length TV dramas is better than no British films in the cinema and nothing but reality TV to watch at home.

The Boss of It All

And now, my promised review of The Boss of It All, in which Lars von Trier directs a comedy, and keeps reminding you it's a comedy and is therefore supposed to be silly and forgettable.

Havn, the manager of an IT company, has adopted a passive-aggressive management strategy since his company's inception. Although he is the sole owner/manager, whenever he needs to make an unpopular decision, he blames this on "the boss of it all", a company president he claims lives in the US, but who doesn't really exist. When Havn decides to sell his company to some Icelanders, they refuse to negotiate with anyone other than the president, so Havn has to pay an actor to pretend to be him. With hilarious consequences, etc.

I'm a huge fan of Lars von Trier, and I love the whole concept of this comedy. I don't even mind him being a smartarse and making his presence felt during the occasional voiceover to draw attention to the mechanics of the plot, in fact I think that's kind of cool, albeit smug (but I'm a smug git myself anyway). The downside is that The Boss of It All, while fairly entertaining, isn't all that hilarious, but this is probably down to the language barrier really. Imagine watching The Office with subtitles if you don't speak English. All the nuance, the embarrassed pauses, the comic timing - they all get flattened by the clunky blocks of text at the bottom of the screen. And some jokes just don't translate at all. For example, the actor guy thinks that HR refers to Hell's Angels, which is probably a cleverly punning mix-up in Danish, but doesn't make any sense in English.

Having said all that, The Boss of It All is very well observed, and to compare it to is perfectly valid, as like Britain's best loved contemporary sitcom, it portrays to cringe-inducing effect all the worst aspects of management and office culture which most people will relate to. While it is not a Dogma 95 film,* von Trier does retain a lot of the stylistic quirks associated with Dogma 95 (jump cuts, rough sound) which give it the enjoyably rough and ready docu-drama style which for all I know The Office and a whole wave of British comedies picked up from Dogma 95 in the first place. The circle closes.

So, not worth going out of your way to see, but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours either. If you're a von Trier fan, it's a little something to keep you going until his next major work of crazy genre-bending paradigm-shifting film-making hits an arthouse cinema near you.

*Contrary to popular belief, while Lars von Trier was one of the signatories of the Dogma 95 Manifesto, he has only directed ONE Dogma 95 film (The Idiots). The same goes for the other three signatories. They have only directed ONE Dogma 95 film EACH. I'm sick of people writing ignorant rubbish about von Trier's work assuming that all of it subscribes to the tenants of Dogma 95 and then ill-informedly picking holes when it does not. There. Just had to get that off my chest...

Mister Lonely

In Mister Lonely (dir. Harmony Korine), a lookalike Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) by chance meets a lookalike Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) in Paris, who takes him to stay in a commune for lookalikes in the Scottish Highlands, where they can all live in comfort and happiness and be lookalikes away from the mockery of mainstream society. Meanwhile, in a separate narrative strand, Werner Herzog (the one, the only Werner Herzog) plays a priest piloting a plane full of skydiving nuns across the jungles of Panama.

Having considered this synopsis of Mister Lonely, if you think you'll hate it, chances are you will hate it. If, like I was, you're amused and intrigued, and you have some degree of tolerance for wankiness (sometimes an inevitable companion to those other "w"s, weird and wonderful), then go see it. It's certainly unique, and while it brought to my mind Lars von Trier's The Idiots (lonely innocent seeks sanctuary in a commune full of performing weirdos), and Michel Gondhry's Be Kind Rewind (impersonation of cinematic performances as folk culture), the fact that those two films are so different from each other gives some indication that these similarities are only partial.

If you fill a castle in the Scottish Highlands with lookalikes of the Pope, the Queen, Madonna, the Three Stooges, Sammy Davis Junior, Abraham Lincoln, Charlie Chaplin, etc, etc, alongside the aforementioned Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe, obviously there is scope for lots of bizarre, funny, surreal images, and in this respect the film does deliver (Marilyn and Michael rowing across a loch, Abe Lincoln and the Three Stooges slaughtering sheep). As for skydiving nuns - well that's cool to look at alright too. Korine got a good cinematographer on board and he has a knack for marrying haunting, plaintive music up with wondrous visuals. He's also quite deft at using kitschy, pithy, cliched devices and dialogue in a manner that makes them oddly profound and moving (I don't want to spoil any surprises but let's just say look out for the bit with the eggs. Or the bit with the sun). What's pleasantly surprising is that these moments have a reassuringly conventional narrative to cling to - basically "Michael Jackson" goes on a journey of personal discovery. Stuff happens to him, and... he learns from it. Maybe that's why some Korine fans hate this film (according to the review in Sight and Sound anyway) - it's practically a feelgood movie.

Can a film be wondrous and wanky at the same time? Well, you could argue that there's not much point to the parallel unrelated bit with Werner H and the plane full of nuns, but who cares when it's the weirdly accented Werner doing his Werner thang? For me anyway, the prospect of this, quite apart from watching a bunch of lookalikes was the deciding factor as to whether it was worth checking out. And if you've seen him in Julien Donkey-Boy or Grizzly Man you'll know what I mean.

Still want to see it? Then do.