Television
Loose ends
James Walton
On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was
on two terrestrial channels at the same
time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of
a gruff but kindly detective with a beard.
Even so, she needn’t worry too much about
getting typecast. In BBC1’s Strike, she con-
tinued as the immaculately turned-out,
London-dwelling Robin, who uses such
traditional sleuthing methods as Google
searches. On Channel 4, not only was she
dressed in rags, with a spectacular facial
scar and a weird hairdo, she was also living
in an unnamed dystopian city, where her
detective work relied on a handy capacity
to read minds.
This was the first and highly promising
episode of Electric Dreams, which has set
itself the ambitious task of adapting ten sci-
fi stories by Philip K. Dick, each with a dif-
ferent writer, director and cast. Sunday’s
programme opened with a demonstration
understandably protesting against a new law
that all citizens must have their minds read
by the mutants known as Teeps — as in tel-
epathics. Unfortunately for the protestors, a
Teep called Honor (Grainger) was already
deploying her psychic powers to identify the
ringleader for the cops. And once she had,
it didn’t take her long to discover either his
most shameful secrets or his co-conspirators.
Her reward was to be made the assistant to
Agent Ross (Richard Madden) in his quest
to root out more anti-government, anti-Teep
subversives.
At first, it seemed as if the pair had risen
above the mutual suspicion between ‘Nor-
mals’ and Teeps — who’ve been banished
to their own ghetto. The longer the episode
went on, though, the less certain this became.
Dick’s stories, written during the Cold
War, are already famous for their ability to
resonate in any era. And here — without the
programme ever stinting on the thrills — the
parallels with our anxieties about state and
corporate surveillance, the death of privacy
and the fear of minorities (justified or other-
wise) came across in a way that managed to
feel both unignorable and unforced. It was
also nicely tricky to work out whose side we
were on.
My only slightly sheepish reservation is
that the ending was one of those inconclu-
sive ones, where the final revelation — inthis case, the real nature of Ross and Honor’s
relationship — was left unrevealed. As ever,
you could appreciate how smart and grown-
up it was to let us make up our own minds.
But as ever too, in a less sophisticated part of
the mind, there was a definite twinge of dis-
appointment at being left dangling.
The other big new programmes of the
week were all sitcoms — which I’ll take in
ascending order of quality. On Wednesday,
ITV brought us Bad Move, co-written by and
starring Jack Dee as a man who’s moved to
the countryside with his wife — or at least
to that version of the countryside general-
ly found in sitcoms. Cue rude shopkeepers,
smug neighbours who announce their visits
with a hearty ‘Coo-ee!’ and much anguish
about the lack of internet access. The result
isn’t wholly terrible, but it is distinctly plod-
ding, as if Dee had given himself a creative
writing assignment in which the aim was to
reproduce as faithfully as possible all the ele-
ments of a bog-standard prime-time sitcom.
Far better, and far more idiosyncratic,
is Porters (Dave, Wednesday), a pitch-dark
show featuring a group of hospital por-
ters who vary between the unpleasant, thedeluded and the psychopathic. Subjects for
hilarity on Wednesday ranged from mental
illness to a bloke smashing a dead rabbi on
the head with a mobile phone.
This is not, then, a programme for those
who like their comedy lovable. On the other
hand, the plotting is inventive (at times
alarmingly so), there are plenty of good
lines, and, as in Green Wing, the heartless-
ness somehow ends up being bracing rather
than mean-spirited.
And so to the best of the lot: BBC2’s
W1A, now back for a third series. The mak-
ers claim that their feelings towards the
BBC are a mixture of exasperation and
affection — but on Monday, once again, the
exasperation was much easier to spot.
We rejoined the BBC management
team as they launched a new initiative
that requires ‘finding what we do best and
doing less of it better’. (Incidentally, in my
intermittent experience, the people most
depressingly fluent in BBC bollocks are the
ones who’ll have been promoted next time
you see them.) Meanwhile, the more cut-
ting-edge types have decided that ‘nobody
watches television any more’ and that the
future lies with ‘BBC Me’, where viewers
provide content for the corporation instead
of the outmoded other way round.
As usual, enjoying W1A’s pin-sharp, side-
of-the-angels satire was undercut by just one
thing: the thought that somewhere in the
real BBC there’ll be people wondering if all
this doesn’t sound like rather a good idea
(going forward).The people most depressingly fluent in
BBC bollocks are the ones who’ll have
been promoted next time you see themtwin, the shameless Cavalleria rusticana, is
perhaps more coarsely enjoyable, but Pagli-
acci has refinement and, in the relatively
complex figure of Tonio, the deformed (not
that he was here) and jealous clown, pathos
and unease.
With an all-round excellent cast, Peter
Auty’s Canio stood out, dramatically fright-
ening and with his superb voice on its best
form. But Canio is given the most chances;
the build-up from suspicion to conviction to
crime passionnel is plotted by the compos-
er-librettist with skill, the performer of the
role just having to be careful that he doesn’t
feel too much too soon. Jon Vickers set the
standard here, but Auty can be ranked along-
side him. And the Nedda of Elin Pritchard
was excellent too, in her Madame Bovary-
like dreams, and her growing nervousness.
Opera North’s orchestra showed that it is
not only the Ring that they are consummate
performers of, and Tobias Ringborg, not pre-
viously known to me, found plenty of col-
ours in the score.
These Little Greats will come in vari-
ous combinations, and audiences can pick
which ones they prefer, or just go to a single
one — there is a separate programme book
for each of them. The second on this occa-
sion was Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, to
Colette’s marvellous text. A much trickier
piece to bring off, it actually triumphs in this
production by Annabel Arden to an extent
I’d hardly have thought possible, especial-
ly after the Glyndebourne production, one
of the few that I have taken as definitive.
Wallis Giunta is brilliant as the Child (it’s
performed in French), more plausibly boy-
ish in figure and movement than any other
I’ve seen. The cast clearly adore doing it,
with John Graham-Hall outstanding as Tea
Pot, a large upwards- curving black spout in
just the right place. Maybe the Tom Cat and
Female Cat could make more of their duet,
but though Colette might have liked them
to, Ravel might not have. Martin André con-
ducted with the gusto that is often lacking
when people tackle this piece, and brought
the work to a close that was both charming
and moving.
It occurred to me midway through the
piece that it is really Ravel’s Parsifal, not
perhaps an insight that everyone will want
to share. But the Child is shown us, to begin
with, very much in a state of nature, bent
on self-gratification and failing to notice
the feelings of others. When Parsifal is
hauled on to the stage for shooting a swan
and declares, ‘If I see something flying, I
shoot it’, he has to learn pity, which he is
able to do only through the recognition of
his ill-treatment of his mother, leading to
her death. The things that we have seen the
Child mistreating, from furniture to live
creatures, are all moved when he bandages
the Squirrel’s wounded paw, and they mur-
mur that ‘Il est bon, l’enfant’ — Ravel’s ver-
sion of Parsifal’s final healing of Amfortas’s
wound, with the knights’ approving chorus.
In the programme book there are heavy-
weight quotations from Melanie Klein, but
she is only, as is so often the case with psy-
choanalytic thinkers, emphasising a point
that has already been made with clinching
conviction by artists.