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.