What’s the big idea?
James Delingpole
Ithink I may have worked out what’s wrong with TV. Not just TV but newspapers, films, publishing, everything. It’s that no one can accept things for what they are any more. There always has to be an angle.
For example, suppose you were trying to pitch a feature idea to a newspaper? You could never just say, ‘I think Thom Yorke from Radiohead would make a great interview because he’s such a laugh-a-minute fellow who’d give us loads of fab jokes and some cracking one-liners as well as lots of cool insights into being a musician.’ You’d have to go: ‘Well, what with global warming, the environment’s a key issue right now and Thom’s always been very outspoken on this.’ Your editor would then feel that he had done his job. But the piece would be really dull because no one cares what pop stars think about climate change — or they jolly well oughtn’t to — and you would have been miles better off with the more traditional ‘This famous bloke. So what’s he like, then?’ approach.
TV’s even worse for this sort of commissioning big-idea-led idiocy because there’s an even longer chain of idiot bosses and bureaucrats to please. I’ll bet when Russell T. Davies was pitching his Doctor Who revival, they all went, ‘We tried with the Paul McGann version and it didn’t work. What new and special thing are you bringing to the Doctor Who party?’ And Davies would have gone, ‘My Doctor will have an emotional heart he never had before. There will be much more caring about the oppressed mutants of the universe and maybe a bit of love interest.’ And the idiots would have gone, ‘By Jove, he’s got it.’ With the unfortunate result that Doctor Who, good though it was, ended up getting so soppy and sentimental and PC that you didn’t need a sofa to hide behind any more — you could just use your vomit bag.
Now the Doctor Who slot has been taken over by Robin Hood (BBC1, Saturday). So what’s the big idea/new angle with this one? Well I suppose it’s something like: ‘OK, so we’ll get a Robin who looks like he’s come straight out of a boy band, even down to the skinny wraparound cotton scarf which was so in at Topman last year. And, er, we’ll put in an anti-Iraq war joke to show we’re not afraid of getting political. And, um, the action scenes will be really state of the art and zappy — more Jackie Chan than Richard Greene. And we’ll film it in Hungary, where it should be cheap and everyone’s really honest so no one’s going to nick the master tapes or anything ghastly like that.’ I could really have done without the Jackie Chan thing, I must say. Whenever I’m tempted to think that Jonathan Ross may actually deep down be quite intelligent and sound, I need only remind myself how much he loves Jackie Chan movies. Have you ever tried watching one? It’s all so stunt-laden and hyper-kinetic that you long for the painfully stilted badly acted talkie interludes just so you can get a break from the relentlessness of the action. And it’s not interesting action, or edge-of-theseat action. It’s comedy action, which is no kind of action at all. There’s a theory that children ought not be exposed to serious screen violence. I disagree — violently. The worst kind of violence for them to see, I reckon, is comedy violence (like they used to have on The A-Team) which makes you think brutality and mayhem have no serious consequences. Scary violence, on the other hand, is really good for them, which is why I let my boy watch Lord of the Rings endlessly on video when he was three. It’s made him terribly dark and morbid, of course, but at least he now understands that the universe is an evil place and that we’re all going to die, which is more than most kids do, the naive fools.
So if I’d been making Robin Hood, I would definitely not have had the scene where Robin goes swish-swish-swish with his sword, stupidly fast, in a Ninja style, because (a) it’s historically inaccurate for a series set in the reign of Richard I and (b) because it’s just silly. I would have asked mediaeval fight experts to get all the swordplay and archery as ultra-realistic as possible. (So, no, there definitely wouldn’t have been the scene where Robin fires two arrows at once and at different targets; nor the one where two baddie knights are felled by a thrown sword; nor yet the one where Maid Marian spikes another baddie by throwing her hairpin at his neck.) Also, incidentally, I would have stopped the women wearing make-up, because again it looks wrong.
Pretty much everything else, though, I would have kept. Yes, I know I started out as if this was going to be a slag off, but in fact I think this Robin has a lot going for it. Keith Allen’s Sheriff of Nottingham is delightfully bad; the script’s jolly; they’ve kept in the fact that Robin is the Earl of Huntingdon, which means, controversially, it endorses toffs; Robin’s side kick is quite funny; the sets do look properly mediaeval. Pity there’s no plausible violence for my kids to appreciate, but it’s OK, there’s always The Sopranos.
Previous page
