Pointless bickering
James Delingpole rr he thing I want to talk about this week is random and unnecessary tensiongeneration because it ruins almost every TV programme I watch and, once I've explained it, I like to think it will ruin all your TV viewing too.
I'll give you a classic example from Heroes (BBC2, Wednesday), a series to which I'm afraid I've become mildly addicted. I'm thinking of the episode where sinister Mr Bennet tries to stop his adopted daughter Claire from going to her prom-queen homecoming because he knows it's her destiny to be attacked there by the evil serial killer Sylar.
Does he a) say, 'Look, Claire. I know about your superpowers. And by the way there's a guy who's trying to kill you, so best not go to the homecoming.'
Or does he b) say, for no obvious reason: 'You're grounded,' thus causing his wife to be upset by this gratuitous nastiness and his daughter to hate and fear him even more than she does already.
Well b), obviously. First it ratchets up the tension as everyone gets upset with one another. Second, it enables Claire to meet her destiny at the homecoming because all she has to do, with her boyfriend's help, is sneak out of her bedroom window with a ladder. And why hasn't Claire's generally devious and omniscient father thought of this fairly obvious ruse? Because, er, because the plot requires him temporarily to be really thick, that's all.
Some Heroes fans — my brother, for example — say to me, 'Oh God, why do you have to be so fussy? It's entertainment, not high art.' But I'm not expecting quantum theory or iambic pentameters. All I'm asking is a little basic respect for the viewer's intelligence: making the characters behave more or less as they would in real life; not having them bicker purely as a means of raising the emotional stakes and padding out the episode.
In Heroes there's an awful lot of this pointless bickering. Nothing ever comes easily to anyone: relationships must always be tortured; friendships are forever under strain; and love affairs are always about to break up. No one's allowed to enjoy their superpowers, either. You'd think it would be quite a cool, fun thing to be able to fly or jump off a 200-storey building and survive. Instead — with the honourable exception of Hiro — everyone has to whinge all the time and see their abilities as a curse.
I blame all those screenwriting courses. Every screenwriter, I imagine, has to learn the mantra 'No drama without tension' and so shoehorns it in at every turn, no matter how implausibly.
Man (to greengrocer): I'd like a pound of apples, please.
Greengrocer: Pound? You bastard. We only do kilos here. And not apples. Never apples. Apples killed my family!
If you were a drama commissioning editor you'd think this was seriously classy stuff, because they all think that way, too.
I'm sorry to say that this problem afflicts high-end drama. Especially sorry in the case of The Relief of Belsen (Channel 4, Tuesday) because it was directed by a friend of mine, Justin Hardy, and I suppose next time he sees me at a party he'll smash my face in — as I always want to do to friends who dare say anything even mildly critical about anything I've done. (No, I don't consider you're being constructive. Shut up, will you?) The premise was strong and interesting. It was about what happened at Belsen during the first weeks after its liberation when a small team of British medics suddenly found themselves having to care for 60,000 starving, skeletal prisoners almost drowning in their own filth, riddled with Typhus and dying at the rate of 600 a day. Rather than try to film the unfilmable — not even the skinniest actor would look plausible as a Belsen inmate — Hardy sensibly confined himself to the relationships between the doctors, nurses and orderlies as they battled against seemingly hopeless odds. The horror of the camp itself, meanwhile, was conveyed through period footage: those awful images of bulldozers piling up the dead.
Where the docudrama went slightly wrong, I think, was to stray too far from the docuand into the drama. I suppose you feel you have to, slightly, when you've lined up as top-notch a cast as Corin and Jemma Redgrave, lain Glen, and so on: you can't just have them standing round like lemons. But though the script claimed to have been drawn from eyewitness accounts, the drama didn't ring quite true.
Instead of knuckling under, making the best of limited resources, gritting their teeth and getting on with it — which is I suspect how the original April 1944 team actually dealt with the problem — the soldiers and officers in this version behaved more like Noughties civilians. There were near-nervous breakdowns, hysterical speeches, bouts of indiscipline and backbiting which I don't believe happened and which I don't think we needed. Sorry, Justin.
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