The Rotters Club is a dramatisation of Jonathan Coe's novel (which I haven't read) adapted by old favourites, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.
Set against a mid-seventies backdrop, we follow Ben Trotter, his family, friends and others in a largish ensemble cast. I missed this on Wednesday, but BBC2 are running same week repeats (no BBC4 repeats this time around), so all is well.
This is a superb series, with a terrificly accurate portrayal of the strikes and industrial relations of the time. I was only four in 1974 when this series starts, but I practically learnt to speak by hearing union leaders on the radio.
One small thing that does suprise. For some reason, this production was shot on the Isle of Man. Why was that? Was it because they have some superb examples of late sixties/early seventies architecture? Was it the fact that Douglas is the spitting image of Birmingham? Or is it because they offer enormous financial incentives if you shoot your production there?
That would also explain why the school featured in The Rotters Club looks amazingly similar to the school featured in the recent ITV adaption of Tom Brown's Schooldays. It's the same school - King William's College (this is the same school that sets the impossibly hard quiz every Christmas published in The Guardian - answers here).
While I'm sure that this all does no end of good to the island's economy, I can't help feeling that this probably doesn't help us in the UK all that much. And in some strange way, that seems relevant given the subject matter of this series.
BBC Four have been showing Death on the Staircase in pairs of episodes nearly every day this week. I watched them all pretty much back to back, much as many watch 24 when the DVDs are released. Except that this series was much more like Murder One.
First of all, you must know that it's a documentary. Oscar winning film maker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade followed the case of Michael Peterson from the days just after he was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife. The facts are simple: on 9 Dec 2001, Peterson called 911 in a state. He'd found his wife dying at the bottom of a staircase in his house. She died. The police immediately began to suspect him of murder rather than it just being an accident.
The documentary, overy 8 45 minute episodes follows the case in detail with incredible access to the entire defence team including Peterson and his family itself.
Michael Peterson is a novelist by trade, but almost as if he'd scripted it all himself (and if you don't know the outcome of the case, I'll try not to allude to it, but reading much further may give you a hint of the outcome), there are twists and turns, with dark secrets coming to light and stories from the past emerging.
What the whole case does illustrate is that the justice system in America is inherently flawed with the media access available. Since I wasn't in court, I don't know what absolutely went on each day, but from what we saw which was quite extensive, and then the summing up given by Court TV (which was showing the trial live), sometimes beggared belief. In the UK, we have to report "he said" and "she said" with no editorial viewpoints. This is completely the reverse of what Court TV seemed to be doing which was making judgments in the same way a commentator might on a football match. Reprehensible stuff.
And the sexuality of Peterson that came out in the course of the trial worked against him to an incredible extent. Innocent or guilty, I don't know, but I can't imagine that he could really hide his bisexuality from his wife of 17 years - families sometimes just "cope" with things like this, and even accept them. That was something that just couldn't be countenanced in a North Carolina courtroom. The relationship could not have been good because otherwise he wouldn't have had to see male prostitutes. I'd beg to differ.
So overall, a stunning indictment of a legal system that highlights bigotry that's prevalent in some parts of America, and that also leads you to understand that having access to vast amounts of wealth is really necessary to stand a chance of putting on a good legal defence. I'd be interested to learn if there've been any further developments since the verdict was handed down...
Sea of Souls
Sea of Souls was one of those programmes that kind of snuck out when it was on before. Starring the incomparable Bill Patterson, it's set in the X-Files department of a Glasgow University. So that's why they have their own parliament then?
The first series came and went without making much of a splash, so it was quite surprising to find it returning for a second series with nearly an entirely new cast. As before it's keeping its structure with two part stories, this time around spread over Saturday and Sunday nights. I tend to think that this is a mistake, with a greater available audience on Sundays, many of whom will be shut out of a story that kicked off on Saturday night.
The first story was really two stories and concerned a haunted house and the disappearance of a young man. To be honest, I'd have preferred two seperate stories rather than this kind of main-story and sub-story structure. And even with two stories, it felt like there was a lot of padding going on with a full 120 minutes to fill. You get the feeling that production partner, Sony Pictures International, won't have any trouble snipping ten minutes for international sales. It's worth noting that this is the same production partner that BBC Scotland had for Rockface, the disappointing mountain rescue drama that got shunted into a Sunday afternoon slot for burning off the second series episodes.
Sometimes you get the feeling that the BBC isn't meeting its regional quota of dramas, hence the recommissioning of this series, but then at least they do give a series such as this a chance to breathe. It's not actually that bad, and although by no means being unmissable, it's passable Saturday night entertainment. I'd guess that Dr Who going to take its place in the schedules when it finishes its run. With a large inherited audience from the lottery and Casualty, it's bound to do reasonably well (6.3m on Sat and 5.6m on Sunday according to this).
That ITV have brought back Ultimate Force for a third series is frankly something of a miracle. I'd hazard a guess that it pays for itself in international sales terms (I saw an ad for this series last autumn in Broadcast around the time of one of the big international TV sales conferences). It may be back for a new series, but evidently not all the cast thought that it was worthwhile, so a whole bunch of them were killed off in short order during a bungled attack in Tikrit. "Tikrit", incidentally, saw the best dressing up of an abandoned quarry since Dr Who. You couldn't actually see any of their faces you understand, since they were all dressed as Arabs wearing ghutras. But they included the previous co-star of the series. Since the solitary female character in the series back at base had been romantically involved with this character, she was summarily removed from her job.
I'd imagine that a certain type of person queues up at HMV on a Monday morning to be the first to buy the DVD of this sereies. I'm not in that group. A basic Ultimate Force story goes something like this. A group of bad guys are doing something bad somewhere. They'll end up holed-up in some base for a finale in which they'll be overrun by our heroic SAS force who'll then go on to shoot each and every one of them dead. Indeed, at the end of this episode, "Henno" (Ross Kemp) counted up the dead terrorists by emptying a few bullets into each of them as he strolled around the plane they'd just stormed. I'm sure the airline that had to pay thousands of pounds worth of damage for each round that went through the floor and damaged engines etc., will have been most happy.
With a wholesale change of cast, we needed a few new faces, including a new female character. She quickly became the regiment's first female despite warnings that SAS would quickly become the laughing stock of the British Army. But she'd performed gutsily in a series of humiliating exercises that saw her need to remove her clothes on more than one occassion. For the producers of the series, this wasn't enough female flesh on show, so we had the ludicrous sight on another SAS officer sharing a sauna with two buxom flight attendents as they awaited developments at the airport with a hijacked plane under siege.
I know I shouldn't take this sort of programme too seriously, the makers certainly don't, but with a bit more work, they could come up with something a little more relevant to today. Compare and contrast with Spooks, which is also primarily an entertainment show, yet one in which we get to face up to questions of the day that matter. They're not afraid to really address the issues.
In the meantime, we had an excellent ending to this episode with our female heroine joining all the male soldiers in the communal showers to show that she has the "balls". And while they're all showering off, we see a guidedog enter the showers, and the CO announces that he's introducing them personally to the Home Secretary. Does this go some way to explaining Kimberley Quinn?
I haven't exactly been overwhelmed by the Christmas fare this year, but this quite tickled me. Starring John Gordon Sinclair and Alan Davies, it was a fairly whimsical story set against a walk along the ancient Roman Road running from Chichester to London - Stane Street.
The story really isn't worth going into in enormous detail, since it turns out to be about something personal yet trivial in the scheme of things, but it was well made and well acted. I fear that the denizens of the Sussex/Surrey borders may be a little unhappy at the Straw Dogs/American Werewolf in London behaviour of their pub regulars. I'd suggest that most of the people living in those villages work in the City and don't support their local landowning, right-of-way blocking evil farmer.
And I guess that I'm probably the only person watching who was concerned about how Alan Davies' character was going to get his bike back from Brighton where he left it at the start of the story.
One final thing to say about this was that it ran to an unusual length for an ITV drama - 1 hour 45 minutes including ads. Good to see that not everything has to fit an exact mould (although ITV can hack some of their longer dramas down to size as they need to - I'm reliably informed that a recent Midsomer Murders managed to shed half an hour for its repeat. That's got to be a whole subplot!)