Television
Short, sharp and shocking
Wendy Cope
Arriving back in London from Califor- nia is a depressing experience and it didn't help to discover that half the episodes of LA Law (ITV, 9 p.m., Thursday, but don't bank on it) I thought I'd recorded were missing. One of them seemed to have been edged aside for a Thames Television birth- day celebration. Had the bastards broad- cast it at a different time? Eventually I got to another episode and found it followed on from the one I'd seen. Thank goodness. But if only I'd known, I could have squeezed in a couple of instalments of thirtysomething as well.
Watching thirtysomething (Channel 4, 10 p.m., Tuesday) last week, I gathered that we have now got past the point where Michael and Eliot go bankrupt. I've known for ages that this was going to happen because somebody sent me a New Yorker article about it. I did warn you that the programme was going to become more depressing. It's a response to complaints that it was too yuppie and uncaring. Poor Hope and Michael. I shall be sorry if they end up begging on the sidewalk just to prove that their creators have a social conscience.
Unable to face watching anything that wasn't American, I gave The Bronx Zoo (Channel 4, 11.45 p.m., Wednesday) another whirl. This is set in what I might, in the past, have called a downtown high school. But now I have learned that downtown doesn't mean the poor end of town, it means the centre. Ed Asner's school is in a rough district. Last week all the teachers had flu but they weren't allowed to go home to bed — they had to be bullied into staying on their feet because there was no one to replace them. That — as the world can't be told too often — is what it is like being a schoolteacher in the inner city. Just thinking about it makes me feel I might be developing a temperature.
On Sunday I did watch a British prog- ramme, a play called Out of Town (ITV) by Neil Clarke. It is about a young man, played by David Morrissey, who is walking along a country road and gets his foot stuck in a hole. However hard he tries, he can't get it out again. This was difficult to believe. If the foot got in there, surely a bit of manoeuvring would enable its owner to retrieve it. But, apart from this flaw in the plot, it is a very good play. The young man tries to flag down a car. No one will stop. One driver deliberately drives through a puddle and splashes him. When someone does eventually stop and get out, it is only to rob him of his jacket, his rucksack and his personal stereo. Then, at last, a good person arrives — a black man, who wants to help. Samaritan, as the credits call him, steps out into the road to stop a car and is run over and killed. Darkness falls. The young man is looking very ill and desper- ate. Something has already bitten his trap- ped foot and now he sinks, or is sucked down, into the ground (the hole has got much bigger). When nothing but the other foot remains to be seen, a tramp comes along and steals the shoe.
Out of Town had everything — pathos, suspense, mystery, and an indictment of our uncaring society. And it was all over in a quarter of an hour. I don't know whether or not the viewing public wants 15-minute dramas but for the television critic they are a boon.
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