Here’s a strange thing: I just spent this evening watching ITV. At least, I spent 9pm to 11.45pm watching the channel. And it’s not even a Champions’ League Night.
Now you do need to understand that I don’t watch any of the soaps – especially not Coronation Street. I gave up on The Bill when that turned into a soap many years ago. And I especially don’t watch Britain’s Got I’m A Celebrity X-Factor. So even though ITV’s not had a bad year in terms of audience figures, in spite of the recession, I’ve not been an enormous part of it.
Football aside, I struggle to think of any drama series worth watching: The Fixer perhaps (although I doubt it’ll be coming back), or the odd episode of Law & Order: UK. But not a great deal else. Although it makes the odd decent two-parter even if I do wonder why they don’t think about making longer running decent dramas.
That’s what made this evening on ITV1 so different*. At 9pm we finally got to see An Englishman In New York, the sequel to Thames Television’s 1975 film of The Naked Civil Servant. That film had been utterly ground-breaking – something that almost nobody else could have made at the time. Certainly not the BBC, although perhaps Channel 4 might have tackled it had it been in existance.
It’s rightly regarded as one of ITV’s most powerful dramas, and yet the fact that this sequel is even appearing on the network becomes noteworthy.
In fact this film was made nearly 18 months ago, and the strange accounting techniques used in TV drama mean that it doesn’t get paid for until it airs. ITV tends to quietly pump out a few quality offerings around this time of year when most advertising budgets (with the exception of plentiful furniture companies’ sales) are extinguished and thus it can later point to them when it’s making some kind of public service case.
The sequel was a slightly forlorn look at Crisp’s life in New York as he at first enjoyed the freedom to express himself that he was now able to achieve (something that wasn’t the case in Britain). But over time, he became an ever more inward and even sorry figure. Hurt’s performance was powerful and you believed that this was an old man who, as he said, was required to stay with the body that he’d long ago divorced. The 70s and 80s New York setting felt real and this was a quality, well-scripted production.
After the news, it was the final episode in the final series of The South Bank Show with Melvyn Bragg. For this swansong, the programme featured the RSC who’d they’d first featured in the second episode. Watching this made me realise that I probably haven’t spent enough time with the programme in recent years.
In a Guardian piece today Mark Lawson (who once claimed to have seen every “SBS” episode made) drew our attention to Bragg’s closing words:
“The brave work is continuing,” he notes, “keeping this now well-established British institution full of new life as it moves into the future.”
I wonder if that’s relevant to British broadcasting as a whole rather than The South Bank Show alone?
What tonight gave us was a glimpse of commercial television back in the eighties or even the seventies. ITV still thought of itself as a public service broadcaster that just happened to have “a licence to print money” as Lew Grade put it. Of course Bragg himself became rich from his shares in LWT (along with many of his contempories), but still The South Bank Show continued.
It seems that its end came when its budget was squeezed. It’s obvious, even with a trip to the Ukraine in this edition, that it was already being made quite cheaply with a director who also did much of the filming. So perhaps it’s time to take one last look back at tonight’s page in the Christmas Radio Times to realise that even in 2009 it was still possible.
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* Unless you live in Scotland and don’t have access to Sky or Virgin Media. There STV thought that viewers would prefer to see a documentary on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in place of An Englishman In New York. I don’t doubt that Conan Doyle is worthy of such a documentary, but in place of this? That’s STV being cheap and nothing more. It’s good to learn that even STV is beginning to learn the error of its ways following some disastrous viewing figures – especially on Sunday nights when the rest of the ITV network is performing just fine. I love the expression “shortbread TV”.