Well I
quite enjoyed that mini-series of 'Dirk Gently'.
Like it's title character, who may be deranged genius or charlatan on
the make, it's never quite possible to pin it down...
I
mean, obviously you can get things. A bizarre and
seemingly random succession of people and events will find their way
onto a white board, and link up into a formula. Which will elude
Gently for roughly 55 minutes. He will entreat everyone to watch out
for coincidences, but not look out for the one coincidence he should
have been looking out for. And so on.
But if
you can often guess what's happening, where you're wrongfooted is
over what you're watching. You know, not the
things, not the building blocks, but the tone and
spirit. A scene will look like knockabout comedy, chases and capers
and all, then you're smacked by a sudden left hook. "Seventy
years," comments a young woman after a recent death, "it's
neither one thing nor the other." Which, at the end of the day,
it isn't.
All
smart and genre-defying stuff. But, on the other hand, are we just
being given what we want? You know, us media-savvy types who want our
TVs to tell us that we're clever. Too much of a good thing. Doesn't
that start out as a plus, become a glut and then finally, inexorably
a clog?
Let me
explain this by taking a tangent...
As a
kid, one of my favourite TV shows was 'The Avengers'.
Of course, I'd never actually seen it or anything.
It had long been off the TV and home recordings were a crazy
futuristic dream. Instead I had to rely on my parents to tell me
about it. This process might seem rather roundabout but actually
added to the show's elusive quality. Unlike most stuff then on the
TV, it seemed both one thing and another. It could be spy adventure
andabsurdist comedy and
surrealist vision. It didn't live inside those neat little genre
boxes that confined most other shows. Like Mrs Peel and the traps set
by felons for her on a weekly basis, it sprang free of all that.
In
that sense the new 'Doctor Who' would seem to owe
more to 'The Avengers' than to the old
'Who'. As does 'Sherlock.' As
does... and you may well be ahead of me here... 'Dirk
Gently.' Like people and events on a white board, it's all
starting to link up.
Let me
explain this by taking a tangent...
I grew
up in the late Seventies and early Eighties, a foreign country if
ever there was. Take for example our school music lessons, where our
teachers would lecture us on their classical music and how it was
objectively superior to our silly pop music. We didn't understand
their music, all this stuff about time signatures and recurrent
themes, and that proved its worth. They didn't understand our music,
which proved it's foolish irrelevance. The whole thing was
self-evidently ridiculous, even to us eleven year olds.
They
seemed guardians not only of an archaic style of music but the very
model of society, which was predicated on everything staying inside
it's neat little box, or else anarchy would ensue. So naturally,
shaking it up seemed not just desirable but my whole mission in life.
If a rock band (say Led Zeppelin) referenced classical music that was
just one more step to breaking down those walls. Like Mrs Peel, they
were staging a breakout.
Now
fast forward to a more contemporary character, such as the violinist
Nigel Kennedy, who calls Beethoven a "cat" and makes a
point of liking both him and Led Zeppelin. In one sense, fair enough,
I like both of them too. But as soon as the thing is taken up in that
execrable way the limits of it dawn on you. I like them in
different ways. They don't live in different boxes, but
they come from different places. They work better apart, as one thing
and the other. As soon as you start to imagine them as
interchangeable you start to file off at the edges of what made them
individual, and what's left is simply homogenous.
Dirk
Gently, Sherlock, the Doctor... a dynamic lead who may be genius or
deranged, with a plodding, blokeish sidekick in tow. They embark on
adventures from rollicking thriller to poignant drama to self-aware
comedy and back. Two out of three gain traction from reminding us
they were based on an original text which did none of this, back in
that black-and-white past. And we, the audience, make the leaps with
them. We are, after all, modern and sophisticated and want TV screens
which reflect us.
Let me
explain this by taking a tangent...
Robyn
Hitchcock's original band, the Soft Boys, played psychedelic music at
the height of punk. Except what they played was psychedelic music
crossed with punk, when the two were held to never mix. He compared
it to playing with plasticine which somehow kept it's different
colours. Except, he reflected, finally the plasticine all went browny
grey, and the band had to split.
Which
is my point. We should beware of too much of what we fancy. If we
keep playing with the different-coloured plasticine like we are, it
will all go browny grey. It will be neither one thing nor the other.
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