January is probably my least favourite month. It has all the darkness of December without the delights of Christmas to offset it. The weather usually does its worst and we know we are on the way out of the darkest days, but it seems to take forever to notice it. TV was always the go-to distraction in these dark days, but in recent years broadcasters and streaming services seem to have concentrated on presenting all their best stuff at the end of the previous year (probably for awards purposes), leaving the January cupboard comparatively bare. But not this year. For the first time in years, I have found plenty to engage me and already have four things for the 2023 shortlist!
Sunday nights on BBC1 is usually key at this particular moment and this year, with the third season of Happy Valley scheduled, a strong start was pretty much guaranteed. One of the things I look for in a good drama is ambiguity, but it had been somewhat lacking in the central Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) character in the first two seasons. She was always so impressively in command, the calm and reliable centre of events, taking everybody’s troubles upon her broad shoulders and coming out on top in the trickiest of circumstances. One thing she seemed to have no trace of was self-doubt and that was a clear flaw. This time round she began to realise that maybe she should have trusted others, especially her sister and grandson, rather than trying to protect them by keeping important information to herself, though it took a falling out with them both and the intervention of the ghost of her dead daughter to bring her to this realisation. Maybe, in the end, her implacable hatred of her nemesis, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) was also open to question. Not before the end titles, for sure, but maybe something for her to think about as she walked off into her retirement, like a western hero who had won the final showdown and was heading off into the sunset. A fine ending to a very fine series.
Also on BBC1 on Sundays in January (though it had started in December), and also in its third season, was Jack Thorne’s adaptation of Philip Pulman’s His Dark Materials. Throughout, it had been a brilliant and engaging mixture of fantasy adventure and theological/philosophical themes and it continued in that vein to the end. The scenes in the land of the dead were particularly striking; redolent of Gustave Dore’s monochrome illustrations for Dante’s inferno. And the key character in the season was Ruth Wilson’s Mrs Coulter – like Cawood, somebody seemingly in command, though in her case for selfish and occasionally downright evil ends, but who came to a degree of self-realisation and did the right thing in the end. Another satisfying conclusion.
I don’t usually shortlist third seasons but am glad to make an exception for both these two. His Dark Materials built to a great climax and I had been close to shortlisting it twice before. Indeed, I noted in my blog in December 2020 that, given its provenance as a trilogy of novels, it was probably best to leave it to the end to consider shortlisting it, which has now come to pass. In the case of Happy Valley, I would certainly have included season 1 in my top ten of 2014, but the first two seasons had already been transmitted before I started blogging in 2017, so I am delighted to be able to shortlist the third on behalf of the whole.
Something which regularly adds to the air of gloom in January is the sombre programming which marks the period around Holocaust Memorial Day. It can be unfortunately easy to note its presence without engaging too closely with it, and many of the items have been seen before, but this year it contained two outstanding new pieces, both on BBC4; one of them an extensive look at the subject from a new angle by my favourite American documentarians, the other a piece of inspired documentary minimalism – Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The US and the Holocaust and Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening. The former was pretty much what you would expect from Burns and Novick, though no less impactful for that, and I don’t think I really need to say any more about it other than that it is automatic for the list. But the latter was a revelation.
The three minutes in question is a fragment of home movie, some of it in colour, shot in 1938 by a Jewish émigré to America, returning to his home town in Poland. It shows the Jewish community in that town, eagerly crowding around the camera and going about their daily lives. The full three minutes is shown, silently, at the start of the documentary, and for its remaining 66 minutes, you see nothing but images from those brief shots: enlarged, reversed, slowed down, every section of the frame examined for the minutest clues as to what and whom we are seeing and what the film can tell us. It is constructed like a piece of minimalist music, with constant repetition of the same material in different forms, and the more it is repeated, the more mesmerising it becomes.
It also draws you into the world of those people whose community will be destroyed in the coming years. The forensic nature of the enquiry does not lessen the emotional impact of the piece, given even greater strength by Helena Bonham-Carter’s restrained and questioning narration. For me as a career film archivist, it also spoke to many of my professional interests. The searching for clues in the background of the frames and the imperative to put names to the unidentified faces took me back to my cataloguing days. The presentation of the footage in its correct ratio and speed was also important. Digitisation was clearly vital to the manipulation of the images later in the piece, but there was no attempt to “improve” the quality of the images with the sort of software which can add frames, smooth motion and (worst of all) add colour where there is none, until near the end when a brief section was subjected to digital cleaning and Bonham-Carter asks the viewer if the process gives them any greater empathy with the people in the shot; a key claim of those, like Peter Jackson, who are fond of such manipulation. No answer is given in this film. Maybe some viewers would have said “yes”, but for me the moment begged the answer “no”, though maybe that was my own bias showing through (and I like ambiguity in documentary as well as drama, so it was well judged).
Above all, the documentary illustrates precisely how important film is as a historical record, when properly presented. I can’t think of anything, even in the complete works of Ken Burns, which makes that point more successfully and it is very gratifying to people like me who have devoted their time to ensuring its preservation. The section when all the faces are collated into one mosaic image becomes a permanent audiovisual memorial to those who probably have no gravestone.
So, four shortlisted programmes in the first month (and a bit) is a great start to the year. Maybe I’ll be making some choices at the end of it this time.
Despite the sparsity of my blogging this year, I could not let it end without offering my usual top ten TV titles of the year. I certainly did not manage to watch anywhere near everything I would have liked to, so the list comes with that caveat, but I did manage over the last few weeks both to catch up with some of the things I had not yet managed to view in full and to pay attention to some of the more interesting offerings over the Christmas period – the things which already-published lists from the usual suspects tend to miss, but I have often found that something creeps in under the wire in the year’s dying days. Christmas “specials” are often disregarded but have occasionally thrown up something exceptional (exhibit A – The Office). Let’s see if that happens this year.
I mentioned in a previous blog, that one of the things I had not yet caught up with was Peter Kosminsky’s The Undeclared War (Channel 4). I have now done so and have to say that I found it a little disappointing. The idea was great and, initially, the conceit of presenting imaginative visualisations of the intricacies of computer coding made it very striking. However, the more the plot developed, the more tiresome these interruptions became, holding up a plot which was getting a bit stretched anyway and giving you the space to contemplate that fact.
Last year’s BBC i-Player offering from Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of my Head was prominent in my best-of-year list. This year he gave us TraumaZone, a 7-part study of Russia between 1985 and 1999, covering the collapse of both communism and democracy. Unusually for a Curtis series, we did not hear his voice, so were left with a collage of fascinating archive material, cleverly juxtaposed and accompanied by captions which, while still in the distinctive Curtis style (“at the same time” even made a few welcome appearances) contained more explanatory information and less of the usual Curtis theorising. Indeed, the lack of his own voice, combined with the fact that he pursued an uncharacteristic chronological narrative, put even greater emphasis than usual on his archival choices and the points he conveys by their juxtaposition; and these were remarkable. Most of the material was shot by BBC News crews and most of what Curtis used was raw footage, without commentary, which could be allowed to run at length for maximum impact. It covered multiple facets of life in Russia (and, indeed, Ukraine), giving a fascinating in-depth look at the political, economic and social history of those times. In a year in which Russia has been a dominant feature of the international news agenda, the series also provided invaluable context for greater understanding of what is happening now. I make no apology for, yet again, including a Curtis series in my shortlist, though Can’t Yet You Out of My Head still remains, for me, the best thing he’s done since Pandora’s Box. TraumaZone is the next best.
So, onto those Christmas specials and there were four which particularly interested me this year. Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing (BBC2) followed the lead of many previous specials and took our heroes abroad for the first time. It was lovely and a very pleasant hour’s diversion, without being a great deal more, given that the three series so far have pretty fully explored the duo’s friendship. Detectorists (BBC2), another tale of male friendship, was exactly the same: it covered ground (no joke intended) familiar from the earlier series and ended in much the same way, with a lost opportunity but no regret. Still very enjoyable, though. I won’t say that the Inside No9 special The Bones of St Nicholas (BBC2) was disappointing because I have already noted in a blog earlier this year that the show has (unsurprisingly) run out of steam. Again, still watchable, but now a long way from the glories of its prime.
None of the above crack my top ten but the fourth of the specials I watched certainly does. Motherland has so firmly established its gallery of characters that it seems all it has to do is let them loose and that it did to wonderful effect in Last Christmas (BBC2). There were enough gags, moments of shock and subtle looks and asides to fill a season and here they all were crammed into what we are told will be the show’s final half hour. It trod a dark path with the lightest of steps and was sublime.
So, that makes 10. Once again, my shortlist is my top ten list: completed just in time and no narrowing down to do. For the first time, scripted drama and comedy fill only half of the ten slots. My top ten is:
Winter Journey (BBC4)
John Bridcut’s imaginative setting of Schubert’s greatest song-cycle in a winter landscape. A favourite director interpreting a favourite composer, it was always going to make my list.
Sherwood (BBC1)
A state-of-the-nation thriller to compare with the greatest, with a 40-year timespan and instant classic status. A great script served well by an outstanding cast. No second season, please – this was perfect.
Marriage (BBC1)
Stefan Golaszewski in minimalist mode. Initially perplexing, it stayed in the mind for weeks, thanks to the subtle direction and intense performances. Another season, please – this has much more to say yet.
How To with John Wilson (HBO/BBC2)
Documentary? Comedy? Social commentary? Philosophy? A bit of each and much more than the sum of these parts. And all done on the lowest of low budgets. A real cult classic.
The Sandman (Netflix)
Every time you felt this wildly imaginative fantasy was going really well, it changed direction and got even better. It was also unafraid to tackle complex psychological and philosophical issues. Innovative casting choices, too.
The English (BBC2)
Hugo Blick’s ravishing western, full of his trademark stunning visuals, dramatic set-pieces and reflective dialogue. If I had to choose a “best of the year”, this would be it.
Arena: Into the Waste Land (BBC2)
The BBC’s flagship arts programme at its best, with a thoroughly erudite examination of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land on the centenary of its publication.
The Queen’s Funeral (BBC1)
They had plenty of practice for this, but practice makes perfect and it was – just the right tone and a fitting sense of the end-of-an-era moment which it represented. Moving without being downbeat; spectacular without that being a distraction from the point. A true national moment
TraumaZone: Russia 1985-1999 (BBC i-Player)
See above for why I chose this.
Motherland: Last Christmas (BBC2)
….and this.
I have to re-state that this is very much my list, by which I mean that it reflects my own viewing during the year, incomplete as it was, as well as reflecting my tastes and what I regard as significant. When I look at other lists (The Guardian, BFI, Time Out, Radio Times etc) I find a number of things from streaming platforms to which I don’t subscribe, such as Disney+ and Paramount (Netflix, Amazon and Apple are enough for me), so I can’t comment on something like The Bear, which seems to have made a big impact and is something I am going to have to catch up with somehow. In addition, those lists are the combined efforts of a number of contributors, so they can obviously consider more. Nevertheless, I still find some anomalies between my approach and the other list makers – most notably, I like to give new work preference over returning series. For me, a returning series needs to show a significant improvement over earlier ones to be considered. I noted this in a blog earlier this year and it is basically a Peabody approach, rather than the Emmy habit of re-rewarding previous successes. Of course, a list like The Guardian’s, which has 50 titles, nearly all of them scripted fiction, is bound to contain a number of returning series and the inclusion of some of the excellent titles I mentioned in my earlier blog – Top Boy, Stranger Things, The Outlaws etc. – is no real surprise. What does surprise me, though, is that they could not find space in their 50 for outstanding original work like Marriage or The Sandman.
The last thing to note is the (very) high percentage of BBC titles in my list. I don’t think this is evidence of bias or lack of adventure on my part, but reflects that fact that the Corporation has had a storming year which, given that it has been its centenary, is highly appropriate.
The BBC has been a massive part of my life. I worked for it for ten years and then closely with it for a further twenty-nine, but it already held a strong place in my affections before I joined it and has continued to do so in my retirement. Its output has dominated my lifetime’s TV viewing, both for professional reasons and through personal choice (65% of my list of favourite British TV dramas are BBC productions and 90% of my list of British sitcoms). Former BBC employees have often been highly critical of the Corporation, not ever through any sort of animosity, but because they know that it is capable of reaching (and setting) the highest standards and are disappointed if it ever falls short. As it celebrates its centenary (which is actually the centenary of the radio service as well as the organisation as a whole, but TV is my main concern here) I was certainly looking forward to seeing how it would mark the occasion, especially through the use of archival materials, but felt that the very best way of doing so would be to produce some great new landmarks to add to the list of 100 which my former BFI colleagues have compiled here.
And, happily, that is what it has done. In my last blog I expressed the opinion that Sherwood was the best British drama series for a decade. Well, that accolade only lasted about 6 months! I did not use the term “a decade” lightly but was specifically thinking back to the last series which I would place higher, which is Hugo Blick’s The Shadow Line (BBC, 2011), number 6 in my Top Ten British drama series (see blog, February 2021). And whose work has now taken over the title of “best drama series for a decade”? Why, none other than the same Hugo Blick, back with his best series since, er, The Shadow Line.
It seemed very odd that the BBC should produce a western – not exactly a genre for which it is well known – but it seems perfectly natural that Blick himself should essay the form. You could argue that many of the essential themes and elements of his previous series – the blurred line between good and evil, the nature of trust, the stunning vistas, the dramatic stand-offs and shoot-outs, the search for revenge and uncovering a truth – make them surrogate westerns. And in The English (BBC2 currently and i-Player) they are all there in their natural setting.
All the other Blick hallmarks are there, too: a convoluted plot with a number of mysteries at its heart; characters coming to terms with their past and their destiny; the reflective dialogue scenes, interspersed with dramatic set-pieces; a female lead character; memorable supporting characters performed by outstanding actors (with a couple of juicy parts here for Blick stalwarts Stephen Rea and Rafe Spall); an ambiguous narrative which makes you both think and feel at once. It is also a great homage to the western genre, with numerous visual references to the classics, and the ending was perfect in showing how, as Stephen Rea’s sheriff predicts, the myth of the west (which those classics represent) replaced whatever may have been “the truth”. I was particularly delighted with the use of footage from the BFI’s Mitchell and Kenyon collection to make that point. Of course, it goes straight onto my shortlist and will be in my end-of-year top ten (well, I have already said Sherwood will be there, so how could it not be?).
One BBC drama which was certainly produced with the centenary in mind was the Doctor Who special The Power of the Doctor (BBC1), which marked the end of the Chibnall/Whittaker era and featured a number of previous incarnations of the Doctor, as well as his favourite adversaries. It was enjoyable, if a bit of a mish-mash, but was, of course, most memorable for the surprise regeneration of the Doctor as David Tennant. This re-unites him (for a few specials at least) with Russell T.Davies and one can’t help but feel that Davies thought a direct transition from the first female Doctor to the first black one would be too much for the more “traditional” fanbase and is thus keeping their loyalty by bringing back a favourite first. The revelation that we are getting an old doctor back came at just before 9pm on Sunday 23rd October. At almost precisely the same time, the BBC News app notification sounded on my i-phone to inform me that we wouldn’t be getting an old Prime Minister back, Boris Johnson having just pulled out of the contest for Tory leader, which I guess is what you call a win-win situation.
Turning to documentaries about the centenary and going back to my own time at the BBC, when I was the TV Archive Selector in the 1980s, I well remember getting regular visits from the legendary war correspondent Frank Gillard, who had been charged, in his retirement, by the Corporation with conducting confidential interviews with key BBC personnel and others, for use at an unspecified future date, but certainly with the centenary firmly in mind. He would pull up outside the South Block of the BBC Film and Videotape Library in Windmill Road, Brentford and together we would unload cans of 16mm film from the back of his Vauxhall estate and take them to “the cage”, a lockable and highly restricted cell in the safety film vault where the naughty programmes which nobody was allowed to see, like Yesterday’s Men, Dance of the Seven Veils or Brimstone and Treacle, were kept. The interviewees had been told that their contributions would not be allowed to be seen or used until after their deaths, in order that they should feel free to speak candidly. Several of them had already been used for documentaries about aspects of broadcasting history and I was, of course, keen to see how they would feature in the centenary programmes.
A number of the interviews turned up in John Bridcut’s How the BBC Began (BBC2), a two-part, three-hour survey of the Corporation’s first fifty years, presented thematically rather than chronologically. Bridcut had clearly been working on the documentary for some time and had himself conducted interviews with many of the key people who were still alive (though a lot of them, sadly, no more). As with his music documentaries, his approach to his subjects is empathetic rather than interrogative and he sometimes likes to film them listening to or watching archival recordings. As a result, the documentary was impressionistic rather than comprehensive, but contained plenty of interesting and enjoyable material.
For a more critical approach we would have to go back to David Dimbleby’s three-part Days That Shook the BBC (BBC2, August), though commentators were quick to point out that, being steeped in the culture of the BBC through both his own and his father’s careers, he was not necessarily the impartial observer he claimed to be. Where the Bridcut documentary focussed on the BBC’s first 50 years, Dimbleby’s was almost entirely concerned with the more recent 50, so together they form a diptych and it is little surprise that the former was about pioneering and innovation while the latter considered controversy and conflict.
Dimbleby, in the best BBC tradition, turned out to be a detached observer of the various issues he considered and was at times a very harsh critic, especially over the BBC’s handling of the Jimmy Savile case, both in terms of how he was allowed to get away with his crimes and how they were (or, more importantly, were not) reported after his death. This was truly a case of the disappointment at the failure to maintain the highest standards which I mentioned above and, coming from a BBC insider, carried more weight than the entirety of the Netflix series Jimmy Savile – a British Horror Story from earlier in the year, which was a good explanation of the phenomenon for an international audience, but not much more.
Among those interviewed by Dimbleby for his series was Emily Maitlis, who, along with the likes of Andrew Marr and Jon Sopel, left the BBC this year to pursue their own journalistic projects which are more akin to newspaper journalism in terms of the scope it gives them for expression of opinion. Nothing wrong with that at all and they are all doing good work, largely thanks to their BBC training. What I would reject though is the criticism of the BBC, whether implicit or, in Maitlis’ case, openly stated, over questions of “balance”, “impartiality” or, the perjorative phrase most commonly used nowadays, “false equivalence”. In a time when there is so much digital manipulation of opinion, we need a strong example of unbiased news coverage more than ever and that is what the BBC is specifically and statutorily there to provide. It may not always get to “the truth” of an issue but it is vital that it exists. This was brought home to me by the cartoon below, which I found on social media.
It is funny and makes a great point, but, thinking further about it, I came to the conclusion that “the idiots” must be given a say. If not, they will not be short of platforms for their ideas and will be able to say, with justification, that they have been censored by the mainstream media, which will give them further strength. Better to acknowledge their existence and challenge them openly. In a year which has seen so much political turmoil, I think BBC News has provided a true public service.
Still with documentary, the beginning of the BBC was not the only moment of great cultural significance in 1922, which also saw the publication of the “greatest poem of the 20thcentury”, T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land (a personal favourite, though I actually think Prufrock is even better), so it was highly fitting that this other centenary should be marked under the banner of the BBC’s most influential arts series, Arena. And a terrific piece Into the Waste Land (BBC2) was – given plenty of time for an in-depth consideration of the poem’s complexity, with recently discovered letters throwing new light on its meaning, interviews with erudite academic talking heads and an archival recording of the man himself reading his own words. Another documentary for the shortlist.
But it has not just been the programmes specially prepared for the occasion which have resonated in this BBC centenary year. It has sometimes seemed that events have conspired to emphasise the Corporation’s history and its centrality to our culture and our national life. One such was that warm summer night in late June when Paul McCartney took to the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. Just turned 80, he put on a stunning show featuring his music from the past six decades. It was BBC history, but only by nostalgic association – and, of course, it was brought to us by the BBC.
If I had to name just one thing which the BBC does, which I regard as the most essential and the most praiseworthy, I think I would have to say The Proms. The Corporation has run this fantastic music festival, a true national institution, since 1927, broadcasting all the concerts on radio and many on television, and its own orchestras feature prominently. This year saw the return of a full Proms programme after the interruptions of the pandemic years and the crowds flocked back. Tickets for the best concerts were hard to get, but I secured one for John Eliot Gardiner’s performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis on September 7th. It was superb and I was delighted to have been present at the festival in BBC centenary year and made a mental note to watch the Last Night on the coming Saturday. But the next day, something happened which ended the season early and which, more than anything else, provided the historic resonance I mentioned above.
The BBC’s hundred-year history has been closely associated with the monarchy. It was the Queen’s coronation in 1953 (the year I was born), which helped establish the BBC television service as a central part of national life and the symbiosis continued throughout her long reign. Her death on September 8th and the commemorative events of the subsequent weeks, as well as the accession of the new King, saw the BBC at its best. True, they had been preparing for it for a long time, but nevertheless there were important choices to be made about the extent and tone of the coverage and they got it pretty much spot-on. The day of her funeral was impeccably observed, the coverage was superb and the presence of the ageing David Dimbleby, who has been so closely connected with so many royal occasions, as commentator for the final ceremony at Windsor, was perfect. It truly felt like the end-of-an-era moment which it was. Certainly the TV broadcast of the year.
And, of course, the occasion demanded the extensive use of archive material from the entire history of the BBC, given that the Queen had been born in 1926. Together with the documentaries and the repeats of classic dramas which I mentioned in my previous blog, as well as the re-positioning of BBC4 as an archive channel, this meant that the archive has been utilised this year more than ever before. It is also now more accessible and appreciated than it has ever been, as you can judge from this Guardian piece. I have always been proud of the small contribution I made towards the creation of the BBC Archive and pieces like this, as well as the centenary celebrations, have only served to reinforce that feeling. The BBC may be facing an uncertain future, but its past is secure.
Long time, no blog – and an even longer time without a TV blog; in fact I haven’t produced one in 2022 before now. Apologies for that, but it has been a strange year. In addition to my continuing responsibilities towards my (very) elderly mother and learning-disabled daughter, my dear wife has been diagnosed with lung cancer and has undergone a lengthy course of chemotherapy. I have therefore spent a considerable amount of time driving and caring for three generations of those dearest to me, and, while I have managed to watch a reasonable amount of TV at the same time, getting my thoughts down about what I have seen has been less successful.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. I did start writing in the early summer and called the blog “Old Favourites”, for reasons which will become clear, but, having started, I didn’t finish, time went on without publishing anything and the TV landscape changed somewhat. I will therefore present this blog in three parts – the first of which should have emerged several months back.
Part one: Old Favourites
The only TV I have mentioned from 2022 so far was John Bridcut’s film of Schubert’s Winter Journey (BBC4, February) which fitted neatly into my previous blog about the music I was listening to on my drives. It was as wonderful as I had anticipated, given my love of the music and admiration for Bridcut’s work. Pretty much a shoo-in for my shortlist.
However, although I was finding plenty to watch and enjoy, it struck me around the middle of the year that virtually all of it was returning series of things I already know I like. Is this because that was the only good stuff on offer, or is it an indication that I am beginning to get too old to recognise and appreciate (and yes, to enjoy) innovative work, or maybe to relate to the behaviour patterns of the younger generations being portrayed? I have always been reluctant to shortlist things I have already included in previous years’ top 10s unless they have shown significant improvement on earlier seasons, but how could Star Trek: Picard (Amazon), Stranger Things (Netflix) or Top Boy (Netflix) manage to go one better on what they have already delivered? The answer was that they couldn’t, but they did provide me with my favourite viewing of the year to that point. Picard is, I think, the best Star Trek since the original series and promises much for the third and final season. Many thought that the considerably darker tone of this year’s Stranger Things made it the best so far, but I prefer to see it as a progression, as the characters (and the wonderful cast playing them) grow from kids to young adults. Top Boy continued its magnificent and riveting return and, of the three, is the one I would be most inclined to shortlist, but for the time being I won’t. They will be there, in abeyance, if not enough great new stuff shows up.
Old favourites were also in evidence on terrestrial TV, particularly the BBC. Inside No.9 (BBC2), an all-time favourite of mine, was back for a seventh season. Unfortunately, the amazing level of quality this series has maintained for so many years now seems unsustainable and this was the series where it failed to live up to the reputation which preceded it. Only A Random Act of Kindness was up to previous standards. It was too much to expect it to continue to surprise, which is its very essence, and too many episodes here were self-referential or covered already trodden ground. Mr King, for example, was a re-imagining of The Wicker Man, where the “religion” pitted against the forces of rural paganism was environmentalism. Nevertheless, that episode did contain some of the best laughs of the series.
The Outlaws (BBC1), which made my top 10 last year, returned swiftly for its second season and continued exactly as it left off, which was highly welcome though, again, not shortlist-worthy. Better Things (BBC2), in the meantime, came to a very satisfying conclusion.
Part two: Old favourites in new settings
At about the time I should have been publishing this blog, new things started to arrive, many of which were the work of my favourite programme makers, or which demonstrated older-style merits, or which simply had great casts of favourite actors. I thought that would provide a neat thematic way of ending the blog, so I put it into temporary abeyance, but have not been able to pick it up again until now.
The pivotal series was Sherwood (BBC1) – quite simply the best British drama series for a decade: up there with the likes of Edge of Darkness, Our Friends in the North, Holding On, Happy Valley and even The Shadow Line, all of which it had things in common with. It had the old-style merit of making you desperate to know what happened next but made you wait for the next transmission and was very cleverly scheduled – two episodes (of the six) every Sunday and Monday for three weeks, with tremendous cliffhangers at the end of the second and fourth episodes to increase the sense of anticipation (and with no recourse to i-Player). But it was not just a thriller – it was a social and political meditation on the state of the nation to boot. And the cast! Leslie Manville and David Morrisey leading a seemingly endless gallery of wonderful and reliable character actors who have populated the best British TV drama of the past 40 years, which is the time-span of the series. There is talk of a second series, but I really hope it doesn’t happen. This one ended conclusively and satisfactorily and deserves to stand alone as the masterpiece it is, rather than risk being downgraded by a sequel which would have no hope of replicating its impact.
I do, however, hope there are further series of Marriage (BBC1). The work of Stefan Golaszewki ranks very high in my canon and I was eagerly anticipating his latest, especially as it features Sean Bean, Nicola Walker and James Bolam. I wasn’t expecting what we got, though, and it was initially perplexing. His previous series, Him & Her and Mum, had been dramatic comedies presented in half-hour episodes with a real-time narrative and a single location. Here we had hour long episodes and a more traditional editing pattern. It was drama rather than comedy and the absence of Golaszewski’s usual wicked sense of humour also confounded expectation. It was slow and minimal but had real depth and stayed with me more than even Sherwood had done. There are so many unspoken background details which were hinted at and which I hope will emerge in future series. Unlike Sherwood, however, it was badly scheduled; its experimental nature made it unsuitable for the Sunday 9pm slot on BBC1, which carries very specific expectations, and the negative response it got from some quarters was, I think, a direct result of this. I hope that does not impact on any decision to commission more. Both Sherwood and Marriage go on to my shortlist and will be in my top 10 without a doubt.
There were two other new works from favourite programme makers I wanted to include in the blog: Peter Kosminsky’s The Undeclared War (Channel 4) and David Simon’s We Own This City (HBO/Sky Atlantic). However, at the time of writing, I have still not managed to complete my viewing of either, so will need to come back to them. And, in the meantime…
Part three: New Favourites
Clio Barnard’s The Essex Serpent (Apple TV) was handsomely mounted and excellently acted and directed, but took some time to get going. Indeed, it was only when it decided that the monster was a McGuffin and the real story was the love triangle that it actually took flight in the final three of its six episodes. Enjoyable, but not enough so to gain “favourite” status.
The Sandman (Netflix), on the other hand, is an instant favourite. It started well, with brilliant effects and an imaginative narrative and then went up a level, not once but four times! The fourth and fifth episodes brought the story of how the Sandman recovered his powers to a terrific conclusion and featured yet another stunning performance from David Thewlis. There was then the pivotal stand-alone episode 6, much remarked upon in the critical response and featuring two riveting strands, in the first of which the figure of Death, presented as a kindly young woman, wandered around Richmond carrying out her sad duties (shame she didn’t bump into Ted Lasso!), while the second was a cautionary tale on the perils of immortality as well as a clever history lesson – so much in a single 45-minute episode. The second main story of the series was a more densely plotted affair (and darker, including a conference for serial killers!) which was exemplary in its use of fantasy to address big philosophical themes. The section ended with the forces of hell about to launch an invasion of the dream world, but then the final episode went off in a completely different direction, with another two-part presentation: firstly a section presented in animation and echoing the graphic source material, followed by another cautionary tale about a writer’s Faustian pact to achieve fame, which came across like a Tale of Unexpected Mystery and Imagination. I expect the hellish invasion will have to wait for another season, which will be much anticipated. Another remarkably successful aspect of the series was the diversity of its casting, especially as regards gender, with the startling presentation of the character of Death matched by the brilliant performance of Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer.
The Sandman was a lavish production, with terrific sets, costumes and special effects and expensive actors. But you don’t have to have a big budget to make something striking and effective, just a genius for what will work. At the very opposite end of the budgetary spectrum we find How To with John Wilson (HBO/BBC2) which has a deliberately amateurish and “home-made” feel to it and it has become a big new favourite of mine. The two series we got this year were both made and aired in the US in the last two years, but it is new to a British audience so it is fair game for my 2022 top 10.
Wilson’s show is a hybrid of comedy and documentary, in which his approach to interviews and the “real” events he attends is similar to that of Louis Theroux, but all the surrounding material is a collage of randomly shot material presented in a humorous way to illustrate (or maybe inspire) his hilarious commentary and, very subtly, making serious points at the same time. He will start off investigating a fairly mundane topic, often in the style of a self-help YouTube video, but will then stray into the more profound implications of the subject, which you had probably not considered. A great example is the one called How to Cover Your Furniture, which turned into a meditation about what constitutes genuine experience. The voice over adds to the effect, Wilson’s halting and confused delivery covering the fact that he knows precisely what he is saying and trying to get across. You laugh, learn and think all at once – it’s pure genius!
So, that’s another two definites for my end-of-year list.
My recent viewing has also encompassed some very old favourites. This being the BBC’s centenary year, BBC4 has been showing a number of great archival dramas, inspired by a list of “game-changers” compiled by my former colleagues at the BFI. I was particularly pleased to get the opportunity to see in full for the first time, The Roads to Freedom from 1970. This was classic BBC studio and videotape drama of the highest order, still clearly a ground-breaking milestone all these years later. Another BBC milestone are the 1960s series of Johnny Speight’s Till Death Us Do Part, which still retains the power to shock and astonish. Too hot for the BBC to handle in today’s climate, they cleverly allowed all the surviving episodes to be aired on That’s TV.
The main centenary celebration is yet to come, though, so my next blog will be focussed on the BBC and what it means to me. I will also consider some recent documentaries and the monumental broadcasting event which the death of the Queen and the accession of the new King entailed.
I’m still on my regular travels to the South coast, augmented this season by some Premier League tourism such as my trip to Anfield in January, so I’m still getting through my classical CD collection at a rate of knots. In fact, the end is now very much in sight, but the biggest single-composer marathon is now just in its early stages. When I last reported in early November, Winter was just underway and I had reached the end of the P section in my alphabetical trawl through my collection. As we emerged from the darkness, I reached the end of the V section and, as I don’t have any discs by composers whose names begin with Q (does anybody?), I will be considering the R to V guys (yes, they are all guys) in this blog.
After the turn of the century (19th to 20th, that is) delights of Rachmaninov and Ravel – two very different styles, despite them being almost exact contemporaries – my R section is dominated by still-living composers. Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians must be amongst the most important works of the second half of the 20thCentury – I remember seeing it performed by Reich himself and his ensemble at a late-night Prom a few years back and it was mesmerising, as it is every time I play the CD. Probably more than any of the composers who emerged from the “minimalist” movement and rescued “serious” music from the blind alley it was heading down, restoring it to something you can listen to and enjoy while managing at the same time to move it in new and interesting directions, he has remained true to its original principles. Even his most experimental pieces, like the early and seminal It’s Gonna Rain, have an addictive quality.
I first encountered the music of Max Richter through his soundtrack to my favourite American TV drama series of the current century – The Leftovers. I think my favourite of his albums (and he does, unusually, seem to compose “albums” rather than “pieces”) is The Blue Notebooks, but the highlight of my listening on this occasion was to go through the full 8 hours of Sleep, a relaxing and soporific work designed to be played through the night while the audience nods off. It’s possibly not the best thing to listen to while driving, but I thankfully managed to stay awake and enjoyed it all. The box set of CDs also includes a blu-ray recording with the entire work, so one night I intend to listen to it in my bedroom, as intended.
I noted in my first blog about my musical journeys (A-B CDs, July 2020) that there are often single definitive recordings of works by contemporary composers such as Adams, Glass and Reich, though that was beginning to change. However, in the case of Terry Riley, who may well have been the original minimalist, there are a number of recordings of his seminal work, In C, and they are all very different, even in terms of the instruments featured and the duration of the performance. I have two versions, including the wonderful 25th anniversary concert featuring Riley himself.
So, after back-to-back variations on minimalism from Reich, Richter and Riley, I turned to the behemoth which is the letter S (a cornucopia comparable to B and M). Starting with the gallic whimsy of Saint-Saens and Satie, it then proceeds via the high German romanticism of Schubert and Schumann to a gallery of the most important composers of the 20th century, reflecting both the musical and political upheavals of that era.
Before getting on to that, though, I need to say a few words about Schubert: one of my personal favourites (in my top three or four, for sure) and another of my largest collections. In musical terms he is the very embodiment of the phrase “less is more”. All his is best stuff is written for five performers or fewer but is so subtle and affecting that it works so much better that way. I would struggle to think of a more perfect musical work than the string quartet D804, the piano sonata D960 or the string trio D929. The other late quartets and, of course, the string quintet contain movements and sections which freeze me in my tracks (again, not great for driving). Then there are the songs: a whole universe of emotion conveyed by just one voice and a piano. The song-cycles are the summit of his achievement and Winterreise has to be my favourite. I was listening to Schubert at the end of November/beginning of December, so not in the depth of winter, but it certainly takes you there. I very much enjoyed revisiting the cycle again on TV at the end of February, when John Bridcut’s much awaited film Winter Journey was finally transmitted on BBC4. Following Schubert with Schumann was an alphabetical imperative, but very much an anticlimax. His quartets are fine, but he is very much a Schubert wannabe.
And so on to the 20th century gang. Schoenberg, of course, preceded Schubert alphabetically, but the rest of them formed a formidable and exhilarating grouping which accompanied my travels through the depths of winter. I can’t really comment too much on the significance of Schoenberg because most of his works in my collection are from his early, late-romantic period, such as Gurrelieder or TransfiguredNight, rather than his later, massively influential atonal pieces. I understand the significance of atonal music and the experiment of serialism, but I don’t get either pleasure or interest out of listening to it and this, for me, is the crux of the issue as regards the music of the middle years of the 20th Century – who is it for? Much of the most avant garde work seems to have been written for the music expert rather than a general audience and thus becomes an academic exercise rather than living art.
However, the works of four other composers whose names also all begin with S tell a very different story about 20th century music. Shostakovich is, for me, the greatest composer of the mid-20th century and, indeed, his creative period stretches from 1925 (he wrote his first symphony when he was 19), to his death in 1975, so he literally spans the middle years of the century. His symphonies, concertos and string quartets are of consistent (high) quality, though you can certainly discern development in the symphonies and quartets. Some tend towards the experimental, while others, like the 12th symphony, are clearly written for a wider audience and this balance exists throughout his career. Sometimes you even get that balance within a single work and Shostakovich was capable of making sudden and wonderful shifts of mood and approach (the mad oompah march in the middle of the 8th symphony is a particular favourite of mine, especially on the Solti recording). If it hadn’t been such a dangerous and tragic situation, it would be tempting to speculate that the baleful censorious influence of the Soviet system and of Stalin in particular had the effect of steering Shostakovich in a direction which actually made him a better composer. Finding his way through the minefield certainly made him a more subtle one.
Jean Sibelius, by contrast, was in such total harmony with the Finnish nation and its aspirations that he became, and remains, its musical voice, much as Chopin was for Poland. Before this revisiting of my CD collection, I would probably have told you that he wrote two really good symphonies (the 2nd and 5th) and a few other reasonably good ones. Hearing them all in order, I now realise that all seven of them fall into the “really good” category, though the 5th does still stand out for me. There are many recordings of the complete symphonies, but the cycle by the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Alexander Gibson (on the budget Chandos label), is my favourite.
Continuing the theme of how shifting national fortunes in the turbulent early and mid-20th century affected composers whose names begin with the letter S, we come to the case of Richard Strauss. The vast bulk of his considerable body of work was composed before his association with the Nazi regime and the compromises that involved, but his style was not particularly affected by that association in the same way that Shostakovich’s was by his position in Soviet Russia – but then, Shostakovich spent the whole of his career in that position while Strauss could afford an easy semi-retirement with his artistic reputation already secure. Most Strauss is conceived on a grand scale, whether the orchestral works or the operas, though one smaller-scale late work I particularly enjoyed, and which I recognised as a gap in my collection as part of this exercise and acquired accordingly, is Cappriccio – an opera about the staging of an opera.
The one Strauss work I come back to time and again, though, and which means so much to me that it would certainly be on my fantasy Desert Island Discs list, is the Four Last Songs. It is staggering that this highly romantic piece was written in the ruined Germany of 1948 and it stands both as a lament for a lost culture and a defiant gesture against the prevailing musical direction of the time – the most beautiful of anomalies. Schwarzkopf’s version is rightly marketed as one of the “recordings of the century”, but Gundula Janowicz with Karajan and the Berlin Phil is the best of the three recordings I have.
The last of the four 20th century giants I am considering together was also affected by the upheavals of the century, but, unlike the other three, was not tied to one country, but was, at various times of his life, a Russian, French and American citizen. Stravinsky was certainly an innovator, though it is his early ballets which were mostly responsible for this reputation. The Rite of Spring is my favourite and the Bernard Haitink recording I have is exhilarating. I also enjoyed the Symphony in C and The Rakes Progress (Gardiner’s excellent version) from his middle, so-called “neoclassical” period, after which he turned to Schoenbergian serialism about half a century after it was first introduced at the time when he himself was actually making some worthwhile innovations. I can’t comment on any of it because I have no recordings – anyway, the minimalists were soon to appear to rescue the world of music…..er….haven’t I already said that? Looks like this is where we came in.
It also looks like I’ve spent far too long on the letter S, so I’ll skip quickly through the Ts and Vs (no Us, like Qs). I spent a few very pleasant hours in the company of each of Tallis, Telemann and Vaughan Williams and considerably more in that of Vivaldi (lots of concerto sets), but there are two big names that I just cannot take seriously any more, if I ever did, and, of course, part of this whole exercise was to weed out the stuff I won’t be bothering with from here on in. Tchaikovsky is now just pure mush and bombast to me – only the 6thSymphony is ever likely to impinge on my consciousness again. Verdi, I will admit, can at times be a great tunesmith – unfortunately, he seems incapable of embedding those tunes into anything with a semblance of musical coherence as a whole. He should have stuck to the “greatest hits” approach. The two of them will be joining Brahms, Bruckner and Grieg in my junk folder.
So, I am now on to a composer I am extremely familiar with and have been throughout my life, but whose works I am already really enjoying becoming immersed in once again. I have multiple copies of his lengthy pieces, too. He comes alphabetically right near the end of my collection, so I can now start blogging some musical lists based on my listening journeys of the last three years, as well as re-considering what his works mean to me. As the man said, it ain’t over until……
In the meantime, I haven’t been finding that much on TV to enthuse myself, but will be back to it in my next blog anyway.
A few weeks back, I left my shortlist of the year’s best needing just one addition to bring it up to the magic number 10. I noted that Landscapers (Sky Atlantic) had “started promisingly” and that I had a couple of things I wanted to see over Christmas. As it happened, the thing I was most looking forward to, John Bridcut’s film of Schubert’s Winterreise, was postponed for next year, so I am left with just two candidates to consider, both of them based on notorious court cases, though taking very different approaches.
Landscapers had indeed started well and it just got better. It was a wonderful mixture of fantasy and reality, with the mechanics of film-making used to emphasise the former and archive news coverage of the real events in the end credits for the latter. In the end, the fantasy won out, with cinematic end titles for the final episode and no more news. It was brilliantly conceived and directed by Will Sharpe and contained outstanding central performances from Olivia Colman and David Thewlis – indeed Colman joins the others on my Bafta roster. I don’t buy the criticism that it was too sympathetic towards murderers – it was a speculative psychological study which was also a very unusual love story and the alienation effects served to undercut our identification with the characters anyway. It is another excellent addition to the shortlist.
A Very British Scandal (BBC1) also had two excellent central performances, from Claire Foy and Paul Bettany, but took a more literal approach to its subject – the scandalous 1963 divorce case involving the Duke and Duchess of Argyll. If it didn’t reach the heights of its predecessor, A Very English Scandal (which made my top ten three years ago) it was because it lacked the wicked humour which Russell T Davies brought to that script and it desperately needed it. Well worth watching, but not shortlist-worthy.
So, my shortlist IS my top 10 this year and is:
Can’t Get You Out of My Head (BBC i-Player)
Adam Curtis’ best since Pandora’s box.
Together (BBC2)
Lockdown according to Dennis Kelly and Sharon Horgan
Help (Channel 4)
Jack Thorne and Marc Munden’s shattering story of the victims of covid.
It’s a Sin (Channel 4)
Top of so many end-of-year lists and with justification
Time (BBC1)
Jimmy McGovern’s riveting prison drama
The Underground Railroad (Amazon)
Barry Jenkins’ fantastic journey through the horrors of slavery
Listening Through the Lens (BBC4)
Great documentary about a great documentarist, Christopher Nupen
The Outlaws (BBC1)
The best thing Stephen Merchant has done without his mate Ricky
Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sky Comedy)
In it’s eleventh season, but better and funnier than ever
I haven’t written a blog about TV since May, for reasons which I have explained in previous postings, but I haven’t stopped watching as much as I can, so a general catch-up is well overdue and this will probably turn into a sort of review of the year. There are some significant things included on the best-of-year lists which have already started appearing and which I have yet to catch up with – Mare of Easttown and Succession among them – but I have 18 shows I want to comment on and, who knows, a shortlist may begin to emerge from which I can choose a top ten at the end of this month. I will look at these items in pairs, as there are some felicitous comparisons to be made along the way.
Covid has not only restricted and altered the programme-making process – it has also become, unsurprisingly, the subject matter and plot driver of some excellent new contemporary drama. Two of our finest writers, Dennis Kelly and Jack Thorne, responded to the effects of the pandemic and the lockdown with fine one-off pieces. Kelly’s Together (BBC2, June) mined the comic as well as the dramatic possibilities of an estranged couple thrown together and trapped in each other’s company by the constraints of lockdown. Sharon Horgan and James MacAvoy were terrific, whether striking sparks off each other, or confiding in us, the audience. All the frustrations and, inevitably, the tragedies of time under lockdown were there but it was much more – an intimate study of a relationship and human psychology.
The tragic part of Together was the death of Horgan’s character’s mother, alone in a care home, seen through Horgan’s helpless reaction to it. Jack Thorne’s Help (Channel 4, September), on the other hand, took us into a care home at the height of the first wave and made us look directly at the desperation of the situation. Not that it was all grim – like Together, the main focus was on the interaction of two characters and it also involved two very fine actors: Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham. But it was the section between the second and third breaks which lives longest in the memory – a single-take sequence in which Comer’s inexperienced care home helper tries valiantly, but ultimately unsuccessfully, to save the life of a resident reaching the final moments of the disease, while at the same time attempting to get help on the phone and run the care home on her own. It is a quite stunning and gripping 20 minutes of drama and brilliantly directed by Marc Munden. Together and Help are easy picks for the shortlist.
Two more of our very best writers gave us two of the best limited series of the year: Russell T. Davies’ It’sa Sin (Channel 4, February) and Jimmy McGovern’s Time (BBC1, June). Nobody but Davies could have dramatized the AIDS crisis of the 1980s in such a way – full of his trademark shifts from the acerbically witty to the devastatingly sad in the blink of an eye. Clearly a very personal project, it nevertheless hit a chord with its depiction of a helpless health service struggling to respond to an unprecedented threat. The final episode was extremely moving and also contained a stunning performance from Keeley Hawes – BAFTA will have a job on their hands to choose between her, Comer and Horgan next year. Fine acting was also at the heart of Time, from Stephen Graham (again) and Sean Bean, who seems to have undergone a wonderful late-career renaissance thanks to his collaborations with McGovern. Two more certainties for the growing shortlist.
Slavery and the history of racism have provided the background for a number of series, both fictional and factual, in the past few years. Watchmen and Lovecraft Country are two of the most prominent fictional ones, though they did not portray the actual experience of slavery directly. Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad (Amazon, May) does do that, but in a way which is both horrifyingly real and symbolically magical. Most notably, the “railroad” itself, which in reality was a network of sympathisers who helped runaway slaves escape from the southern states, is also presented as a physical entity – literally a railroad running in tunnels. This fantasy element elevates the series from a howl against a historical injustice to a piece of masterly storytelling, though without losing sight of the history which underpins it at any point, which is quite an achievement. Another achievement is that the white characters are not the (understandably) cardboard cut-out villains of the earlier series, but fascinating character studies in their own right, most notably Ridgeway, played by Joel Egerton. On the factual side, the three-part Exterminate All the Brutes (Sky Documentaries, April) should have been an instructive companion piece, being based on a major book about the slave trade and historical racism in general. In parts, it was just that, but director Raoul Peck also introduced regular anachronistic fictionalisations which made little sense and interrupted the flow of the narrative. Whereas such fictionalisation was a strength of The Underground Railway and elevated it to greatness, in Exterminate All the Brutes it was a jarring distraction which fatally undermined the effect of the documentary. The former is an obvious inclusion in the shortlist – the latter doesn’t make it.
Staying with documentary, Steve Mc Queen and James Rogan’s Uprising (BBC1, July) actually was the perfect companion piece to last year’s Small Axe films, covering much of the same ground using archive footage and eyewitness interviews and emphasising what an excellent series the dramas were. The two things should have been transmitted at the same time (and probably will on future repeat), but on its own, Uprising was a very good and effective archive documentary. Similarly, Blair and Brown: the NewLabour Revolution (BBC2, October) had all the relevant archive footage and talking heads, including the two main protagonists. Brown came across as too buttoned-up to give the answers you wanted, while Blair seemed open and responsive, but that was how he always came across, even when he was lying through his teeth, so a big pinch of salt, please. Both series were very watchable and instructive, but neither sufficiently extraordinary in terms of documentary form to warrant shortlisting.
Turning to music, Asif Kapadia’s 1971: the Year Music Changed Everything (Apple TV, May) contained a great amount of wonderful archive material, great music (of course) and fascinating backstories, but ultimately collapsed under the weight of its own ambition. Firstly, it was way too long at 8 hour-long parts and repeated itself endlessly. Secondly, it utterly failed to convince me of the premise in its title. Maybe it was the year that music reflected everything, but that could be argued of many years. The only thing it changed was music itself, but the same stricture applies. And where was Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep Cheep? Much more to my liking was a wonderful and somewhat unheralded BBC4 documentary on the work of the great music documentarist, Christopher Nupen, who certainly was somebody who changed everything, at least in the field of presenting classical music on television. Listening through the Lens (October) was the perfect title for this tribute to a film making genius and the tributes from the likes of David Attenborough and Melvyn Bragg, as well as generous extracts from his films made the case for that description fully. I loved it and am putting it on the shortlist.
Making connections between the remaining titles I want to talk about is getting tough, but The Outlaws (BBC1, October) and The Cleaner (BBC1, September) were series written by and starring Britain’s two tallest comedians. Stephen Merchant’s series was the best thing he has done without Ricky Gervais and succeeded at the tough trick of combining comedy with a thriller narrative. It had a gallery of great characters and was very well performed and created by all concerned. Greg Davies’ piece, though occasionally successful, was inconsistent. It struck me that he was trying to create something along the lines of Inside No.9, with macabre storylines and different guest stars each week. Of the two, only TheOutlaws makes the shortlist.
The next two series were things which I was eagerly looking forward to the return of, but which disappointed to the extent that I gave up on them half-way through. Fargo season 4 (Channel 4, May) was just too convoluted and sure of itself to engender any real engagement. The series has created its own style and cannot escape it even when it has taken it as far as it can, which I guess was bound to happen eventually. At least we had two wonderful seasons and one not bad one. Daisy Haggard’s Backto Life (BBC3, August), though, had only got to its second season before it found nowhere new to go.
I should also have given up on Your Honour (Sky Atlantic, March), but there was enough interesting material to keep me going despite the ludicrous coincidences we were expected to accept. In the end it was just ludicrous. Then American Rust (Sky Atlantic) started a few weeks ago with a similar plot device (an officer of the law is caught in a moral dilemma through personal involvement with a case), but there is, again, enough in the characters and dialogue to keep me going for the time being. I may yet give up on it as well, especially if there are many more shots of Jeff Daniels leaning on things.
My final pairing is two continuing and recently returned classics, still going strong and still drawing me in. Doctor Who: Flux (BBC1) was the best story from the Chibnall/Whitaker era and had the best single episode (Village of the Angels) since Peter Capaldi was alone in that tower. I’ve said it many times, but it is always at its best when dealing in multi-episode stories – though not, in this case, outstanding enough to make the shortlist. Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sky Comedy), on the other hand, is miraculously back to its very best – every episode has had me howling with laughter and that is enough to put it on the list.
So, my shortlist now looks like this:
Can’t Get You Out of my Head
Together
Help
It’s a Sin
Time
The Underground Railroad
Listening Through the Lens
The Outlaws
Curb Your Enthusiasm
So, we have 9 and there is some pretty good stuff there. I am confident there will be something between now and the end of the year to bump it up to 10 or beyond. Landscapers (Sky Atlantic) has started promisingly and I have a couple of other things to keep an eye on over Christmas.
Fifteen months ago, at the end of July last year, I wrote a blog about how I had been working my way through my classical CD collection on my regular drives to the Sussex coast to look after my elderly parents following my father’s fall, hospitalisation and rehabilitation. Not too long after he got home in the late summer, my father fell again and the cycle repeated itself, though at greater length this time. He was back home by late Autumn and in time for a restricted celebration of their 75th wedding anniversary in December. But in early February his third fall put him back in hospital and there would be no coming home this time. A care home was the only option and he was there until he passed away in August at the grand age of 96. All of this necessitated constant visits from myself, both to organise my father’s care and to look after my mother and to run their house and finances. I got to know the route intimately and observing the gradual seasonal changes to the countryside over the course of more than a year was a great solace. So of course, was the music. In my previous blog I described how I got through the composers beginning with A and B while travelling from A to B. Since then I have reached the end of the P section and further driving to the west country to take our daughter to her new college has offered added listening time, as has the return of football. So, here are some thoughts on composers and recordings in my collection from C to P.
Late summer 2020 brought the first changes to my drive since I began the regular route. Lockdown had eased, so there was more traffic about, plus the increase in agricultural vehicles on the country roads which that time of year brings. This gave me even more time to realise, as I had not fully done before, what a wonderful composer Chopin is: his second set of etudes (Op. 25), played by Pollini, are a delight and I prefer them to the more famous ones in the earlier dozen. The season also brought the renaissance glories of Desprez (or Josquin, though I have filed him under D) and Dufay – both composers of the first rank. I recently bought a bargain set of 34 CDs on Warner Classics called Josquin and the Franco-Flemish School, so I was able to revisit their world and that of a large number of their contemporaries, many new to me, this summer as well as last. It was good to have their tranquil company around the time of my father’s death.
My Desprez and Dufay collections are separated by just one disc of Dohnanyi’s lovely string quartets and then it was on to Dvorak. The DG Kubelik set I mentioned in my earlier blog gave me the opportunity to hear a full cycle of his symphonies for the first time (conducted by his best interpreter) and I was struck by how you can discern a definite progression by listening to them in order. Most composers of nine or more symphonies have their most outstanding works scattered amongst the set (think of Beethoven’s 3rd, 5th and 9th), but Dvorak’s just get steadily better. The earliest ones are very much influenced by Beethoven, but his own voice begins to emerge around the 6th and is fully formed by the 8th. But the best of Dvorak are his string quartets, particularly the “American”, which contains four equally striking and memorable movements. This got me thinking about the string quartet as a musical form, as it has become one of my very favourites and has proved a versatile platform for a good many composers from the 18th century to the present day. I had already enjoyed all of Beethoven’s remarkable quartets and Debussy’s single, but wonderful, attempt at the form and had Cesar Franck’s even better one about to come along a little further down the road. String quartets may prove a good subject for a separate blog one day and I’ll certainly be coming back to them several times before this one is out.
Koyaanisqatsi
By the time Autumn arrived, I had moved through E and F and was on to one of my largest composer collections (and certainly my largest by a living composer): Philip Glass. I have to admit, I was a bit daunted by the prospect of listening to so much of his music at one time, but I was amazed at how much I appreciated the variety of his output. The standard criticism of Glass is that his stuff “all sounds the same”, but I guess that is true of many great composers who establish their own distinctive sound (Mozart comes to mind). It’s just that with Glass, the variations are very subtle, but they are there and each piece has its own character. And there is such a wide range of forms – symphonies, concertos, quartets (brilliant ones!), operas, ballets, electronica, song cycles, solo piano, tone poems and, of course, all those wonderful film scores: the “qatsi” ones stand out because the music was an equal partner with the visuals in those films, but I think his score for Paul Schrader’s Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters is arguably the greatest film score of all in terms of its expressiveness and flexibility (I can feel another separate blog coming on) and it also supplied the themes for his finest string quartet. I have already blogged, a couple of years back, about his masterpiece Einstein on the Beach, and, thanks to ENO, had seen Akhnaten and Orphee on stage in the last few years. I’d not been to an opera since the first lockdown, but with Satyagraha re-opening the Coliseum recently, I couldn’t wait to get back and it was fantastic (both production and performance). One last thing about Philip Glass – it is wonderful music for driving to but is maybe just too good. Many times, I found myself going way too fast without realising I was doing it. The momentum of his music takes over and not just in the obvious pieces like The Grid from Koyaanisqasi, but throughout his oevre. Beware!
Satyagraha at ENO
Before winter 2020/1 set in and as the leaves fell on my journeys, I reached the end of G and, as with my previous negative re-assessments of most of Brahms and Bruckner (as described in last year’s blog), I determined that the works of Edvard Grieg are unlikely to be bothering me again. But winter brought Handel and Haydn to lighten the darker drives.
It struck me that Handel is probably the composer to whom one could most readily compare Glass, both in terms of the range of their respective outputs and, indeed, the musical construction of the pieces themselves. Handel’s music is littered with what I would (crudely) call “diddle-daddle, diddle-daddle” moments (think of the Arrival of the Queen of Sheba from Solomon), while Glass’ favourite equivalent would be “diddly-daddly, diddly-daddly” (I think real music experts refer to these as arpeggios, but I know what I‘m talking about, even if you don’t). Handel is also a key composer in the original instruments debate. I have two versions of The Messiah. I love and would not be without the Charles Mackerras recording on EMI, but that may be mainly for the presence of Janet Baker and I ultimately prefer Paul McCreesh’s version with the Gabrieli Consort on DG Archiv. And both Gardiner and Pinnock present marvellous recordings of the Fireworks and Water Music suites.
Haydn’s symphonies are really boring, I now realise. Only number 104 (104!) is any good and that is his last one. Part of the problem is that he rather overdoes it with the minuets, possibly the most tedious and predictable musical form of all and one which only really found its true level with The Wombles in the 1970s and their assertion that forgetting to be minuetting was letting the other minuetters down. His string quartets, on the other hand, are outstanding. There are lots of them and they are pretty much all excellent. Even minuets have a certain charm when played by a string quartet. I should also mention that, having used the term “Four Seasons” in my blog title and having not reached R or V yet, the only work called The (Four) Seasons I have listened to these past four seasons is the oratorio by Haydn.
But, before we say goodbye to H and winter, I should mention one particularly serendipitous moment while I was driving along listening to film music by Bernard Herrmann and a particularly severe downpour forced me to turn my wipers to maximum speed just as the Psycho Suite came on. Perfect!
I, J, K and L take up a mere 3 inches on my CD shelves, though it is only really J and L – I have no Is or Ks (not even Ives). I also really need more than one disc of each of Ligeti and Liszt, though one of Leoncavallo is perfectly adequate and you can guess the work. My 2-disc DG Archiv set of Orlando di Lassus was also not enough but has since been supplemented by a larger number of his works in the Josquin set I mentioned, allowing me a much greater appreciation of his glorious music.
Early spring brought me to another large collection and the composer who is probably my second favourite of all: Gustav Mahler. It isn’t that there are that many works – nine and a half symphonies, five orchestral song cycles and an early cantata – but they are big works and I have multiple copies of them all. The Kubelik and Haitink symphony cycles which I have are a great contrast, but are both very good, though the symphonic recording I treasure most is Horenstein’s 4th with the LPO on the budget Classics for Pleasure label. This is not so much because it is an outstanding performance (though it certainly is that) as because it was my introduction to Mahler at a college Music Club gathering 50 years ago this autumn. I borrowed the disc from a good friend for the Christmas holiday and never looked back. Recently I have been attempting to hear all the symphonies again in the concert hall and, before lockdown struck, had managed all but the 7th. A Proms performance of the 3rd by the Boston Symphony a few years back, together with one on the Berlin Phil’s digital platform, helped finally convince me that it is my favourite of his works (supplanting the 2nd). The way the final three movements fit together, from the gravity of “Oh, Mensch”, through the joy of “Bimm, Bamm” to the serenity and climactic affirmation of the gorgeous finale is just transformative. I have four recordings and loved listening to them all, especially on the longer journeys to the west country, which began for me (and my wife, Dejanka) when our daughter, Hanna, began college there at this particular time. Rating Mahler’s symphonies is a fairly futile exercise, though. I have looked at a number of lists online, some of them headed “from best to worst”, as though the term “worst” could possibly be applied to a Mahler symphony. They are all outstanding and my own attempts to put them in an order of preference failed miserably. I mean, how could I possibly put the first symphony last, as I ended up doing on every attempt? At the same time as I listened to his music, I read a biography of Mahler by Michael Kennedy, which had been sitting on my shelves for some years and which really enhanced the experience.
Before continuing with the Ms, which is another of those letters, like B and S, with a large number of major composers, I realised that I would need to buy a set of Mendelssohn string quartets if I was to continue my exploration of that form. And I’m very glad I did, because I had previously thought of him as a composer of bright and joyful music, but the quartets showed me that he also had an introspective side which I had not heard before.
And, as spring moved into summer, I was happily accompanied by two of the all-time greatest: Claudio Monteverdi and Wolfgang “Amadeus” Mozart. My favourite Mozart symphony is undoubtedly the Prague (no.38), mainly because it has three gloriously memorable and perfectly balanced movements, which also means that, unlike all the others, it has NO minuet. Young wombles may have been told that “if you minuetto/allegretto you will live to be old”, but that sadly did not apply to Mr Minuetting Mozart himself. Or, to quote one of my favourite Tom Lehrer lines, “it’s a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for five years”. Even so, there is just such a wide variety of wonderful and inspiring stuff in Mozart’s catalogue, the very best of which, for me, are his piano concertos, especially when played on an 18th century piano by Malcolm Bilson accompanied by the English Baroque Soloists under Gardiner. The set of six string quartets, dedicated to Haydn, aren’t bad either.
By early May, I had reached Mozart’s choral works and enjoyed another of those serendipitous moments when I drove home in a totally euphoric state after Brentford’s win in the play-off final at Wembley. Not only was it one of the first games it had been possible to attend after lockdown, but our victory got us back to the top division for the first time in 74 years. And the piece I put into my car music system was Exsultate, Jubilate. Exult! Rejoice! I listened to it twice. It was a perfect moment.
Bees up!
Then it was on to Mozart’s operas. There has been plenty of debate about which of Mozart’s four great operas is the best and I certainly have my own favourite, which is the Magic Flute. The main reason is, of course, the music – it just has great number after great number, from start to finish. Don Giovanni also has its fair share of stunners, but the other two are nowhere near. I have three other reasons for favouring Zauberflote: its mythic setting; the fact that it is in German, which, for me, is the best language for opera; and the fact that it dispenses with recitative (which drives me spare) in favour of spoken dialogue. I was also reminded that I had the wonderful duet “Bei Mannern welche Liebe fuhlen” played at our wedding. I have three DVD/Blu-ray versions of the opera (including Bergman’s film) and two CD sets. Bohm is great, but Gardiner, once again, is best.
I was well into summer by the time I reached the end of M, which brought me to best of all Russian operas – Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. There were two versions (1869 and 1872) and the Gergiev set on Philips has both, so I got to enjoy it twice.
Michael and his Band
I’ve got a lot of CDs of Michael Nyman’s considerable output and listening to them all together emphasised the range and quality of his work, which basically falls into two categories – that written for the Michael Nyman Band and that written for more traditional ensembles like orchestras and string quartets. The numerous film scores can also be divided like that, though the division tends also to reflect his work with Peter Greenaway and the later soundtracks. Listening to much of it brought back memories of performances I attended in the nineties. Two in particular stand out: a Festival Hall premier of the Upside- Down Violin, during which a young boy in arab dress started dancing on his seat a few rows in front of me – his parents tried to stop him, but everybody said to let him carry on, as it was very much in the spirit of the occasion. Then there was a rainy summer evening in Greenwich Park with my wife, soon after we met. I’m a really big Nyman fan, even though he is a QPR supporter.
O and P included two 20th century stylists. Firstly Carl Orff, whose Schoolwork provided perfect driving music for many hours and a reminder of one of the most perfect choices of music for a film: Terrence Malick’s use of it in Badlands (1973), exploiting its simultaneously naïve and sinister qualities. I can also never listen to Carmina Burana without remembering a Prom performance I attended in the mid seventies: it was a hot and humid August night and the heavy lighting required for colour video in those days (it was being recorded for broadcast) made the Albert Hall a cauldron – so much so that the bass Thomas Allen fainted during his first solo and knocked over the cello section in falling backwards. Anyway, a replacement walked out soon after and had a quick word with conductor Andre Previn. The next day’s papers revealed he was a music student who had been in the audience and volunteered to sing because he knew the part. Alas, this was not the romantic start of a big career – he had his moment in the spotlight and then was never heard of again. Then, when I reached Arvo Part, I was able to supplement my listening with reading (as I previously had with Mahler), using a book of conversations with the composer which my wife kindly gave me for Christmas last year.
O and P also brought glorious music by two masters from either end of the Renaissance period: Ockeghem (also featured in my Josquin set) and the divine Palestrina. By another quirk of the alphabet, Palestrina was immediately followed by the opera about him by Pfitzner. For me, Palestrina is one of the two greatest Italian composers, together with Monteverdi. Another great Italian, Puccini, was to finish off the listening marathon I am describing here. I would rate him the greatest Italian composer since Vivaldi and my collection of his operas includes a number of performances by the greatest Italian opera singer of all – Luciano Pavarotti.
Anyway, I’m still driving and listening just as much, especially with football back and Premier League grounds to visit, but I will return to that in time and will then blog some music lists. But next time, and after a long absence, it will be back to TV.
At a time when the restrictions of consecutive lockdowns were really starting to be felt in the television schedules, it was wonderful to be presented with the most outstanding offering in some time from a programme-maker whose signature modus operandi is entirely unaffected by (and may even have been enhanced by) the circumstances of the past year. Adam Curtis’ series utilise only archival footage and music, the vast majority of it from the BBC’s collections, and his own voice-over. It is not difficult to imagine him assembling them in total isolation, though the end credits indicate a certain amount of collaboration.
Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (BBC iPlayer) is, for me, the best thing he has done since his astonishing breakthrough series Pandora’s Box in 1992, although in the intervening years he has regularly delivered excellent and fascinating pieces, most notably The Century of the Self (2002) and The Power of Nightmares (2004), all for the BBC. It can sometimes be frustrating that his narrative seems to go off at unusual tangents, but this is only the case if you look at his series and single works as traditional documentaries, with set “rules” to follow, not if you look at them, as I like to, as works of art. It may seem strange to take this approach, especially as Curtis himself is pretty unambiguous that his intention is to present a documentary narrative supported by illustrative materials, but it is the way that those materials are assembled and presented that is unique to his approach and the choices he makes in the process of selection, assembly and the addition of music seem to me to be artistic and instinctive ones rather than logical and factually explicable.
This is most certainly true of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, and the use of the word “emotional” in the second part of the title is key here, implying as it does that what we are being offered is highly personal rather than objectively justifiable. This is his artistic style taken to its extreme, though, ironically, I also thought that the arguments presented in his narrative were more coherently developed over the course of the series (which almost followed a chronological progression as well) than in many of his previous works. Sections of it came across like a favourite archive series of mine, The Rock ’n Roll Years (BBC, 1985– 94) with exhilarating and thought-provoking combinations of music and images. Curtis’ voice-over and writing style is also very distinctive – he loves chronological links and the phrase “at the same time” recurs like a leitmotif.
The most obvious comparison here is to Curtis’ 2009 contribution to an immersive artwork called It Felt like a Kiss, made in collaboration with Punchdrunk Theatre Company and Damon Albarn for the Manchester International Festival. Clearly this was intended as a work of art, but the film which came from it contains Curtis’ trademark archival film and music combinations, and a series of captions replacing the usual voiceover, which is still very recognisably Curtis (even at one point including “at the same time”). The film can be seen on Curtis’ BBC website page here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003x62n
It Felt Like a Kiss also showcases Curtis’ ongoing obsession with Lee Harvey Oswald, who is one of the characters focussed on in Can’t Get You Out of My Head, though he is mainly approached in the latter through a more in-depth exploration of the life and thoughts of his associate Kerry Thornley, both before and after the Kennedy assassination. Thornley is one of several characters whose lives are used as case studies to illustrate Curtis’ various theses and the occasional intersection of whose trajectories allow for so many “at the same time” moments. Others featured include Jiang Qing (Madame Mao), Michael de Freitas (Michael X), black panther Afeni Shakur and her rapper son Tupac, transexual pioneer Julia Grant and Soviet dissident Edward Limonov. Curtis describes his aim in the series as to explore how we got to where we are now and, indeed, it covers a long historic span, mostly from the fifties to the present, though also, in one striking episode, delving back into the murky world of British imperialism in China. But this is history seen manly from the psychological perspective, particularly exploring the tension between individualism and the demands of society and so much is communicated wordlessly through the combination of archive and music, which, of course makes it almost as much a matter of the viewer’s interpretation as Curtis’ intention.
Curtis uses a wide range of archive material from around the world and never fails to find some amazing stuff, but nearly all of it is sourced from the BBC’s own collection (which, of course, contains material used in BBC programmes but not originally made by the corporation). The end credits include a list of “other archive sources” which is pretty brief and there are no other archive listings, so knowing where the material comes from is not possible, which is frustrating. In a recent piece for Sight and Sound, Curtis identifies and discusses a handful of the most striking extracts, but it would be really interesting (especially to an ex-archivist like myself) to be able to get information on it all. This could easily be digitally embedded or could be included in a commentary track, but I get the impression this may somehow undermine the mystique – do we need to know exactly what Curtis intended at every moment or should we be expected to accept the artist’s vision? I think this question goes to the heart of the issue of whether Curtis’ work is primarily documentary or artistic in nature and I find parallels here with the work of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, especially his 4-part epic Hitler: a Film from Germany (1977), which is similarly densely crammed with visual and audio references, some, but by no means all of which I get, but would still like a directorial explanation of, though I do worry that such a thing may spoil the effect.
Also in the Sight and Sound piece, Curtis explains how much the digitisation of the BBC’s archives has helped his work and made both finding and sourcing his extracts easier and quicker. This is a tremendous justification of the long and hard work done by my archival colleagues at the BBC over so many years and the Corporation’s commitment of resources to it. Their commitment to providing Curtis with an i-player platform for his work is also highly commendable (worth the price of the licence fee etc!) and Can’t Get You Out of my Head can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p093wp6h/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head
The slowdown in production continues to limit viewing just now (though there is ample football to fill the void), so it is back to list-making and to catch-up for the time being. Drama series are the subject or the prime focus of the most TV lists you can find. Even lists of just the “best TV” will be dominated by them. There is a need for some definitions up front – I am talking about series and serials, though most of the entries on my British list below will be what Americans would call miniseries, in other words self-contained stories told in multiple parts with a beginning and an end in the one “season”. There are two reasons why they dominate my list – they are what British TV has been best at and they are what I like best. In recent years there has been a trend, following the American model, for series which would previously have been self-contained to go to a second or third season, with the decision to continue often being taken after the original work has been made and depending on its success. In turn, this encourages the writer (singular, because there is usually only the one, following the traditional British model) to leave open the possibility of continuing the story. Sometimes this has proved well worthwhile (Happy Valley), but often has led to disastrous misjudgements which have spoiled the reputation of the original (Broadchurch, The Fall) and made me wish they hadn’t tried.
But I digress into a rant, which was not the point of this blog. To return to my definitions, I am only including anthology series where there is creative or thematic continuity: so, Black Mirror and Talking Heads qualify; Play for Today doesn’t. I have also, from personal preference, tended to privilege original writing for television over adaptations of novels, though the inclusion of a few of the latter has been inevitable. Finally, having included them in my earlier sitcom lists, half-hour dramatic comedies are not included here.
So, to start with the top 10:
The Singing Detective (BBC, 1986)
Dennis Potter’s masterpiece is unrivalled – a brilliantly complex interweaving of memory, fantasy, songs and fiction-within-fiction to produce a superb six-part psychological study of the (semi-autobiographical) protagonist. Much of the credit must go to director Jon Amiel, because the visual grammar is as important as Potter’s magnificent script.
2. Talking to a Stranger (BBC, 1966)
Writer John Hopkins and director Christopher Morahan honed their skills on the seminal series Z-Cars and combined to produce this searing four-part psychological study of a family in crisis for the Theatre 625 slot on BBC2. A landmark in the presentation of challenging drama on television, it gave an unforgettable role to a young Judi Dench.
3. Pennies from Heaven (BBC, 1978)
No apologies for putting two Potters in the top three. If anything, this was an even greater leap of the imagination than The Singing Detective – nothing like it had been seen before, though the device of having the characters mime to popular songs, as both an indication of their desires and a commentary on the action, has been much imitated since, but never used as effectively as here. Gripping, thought-provoking and, above all, highly entertaining.
4. Brideshead Revisited (ITV, 1981)
The finest literary adaptation of them all and a major milestone in the development of quality television drama shot on film, not to mention an enormous financial risk for a commercial broadcaster (albeit produced by Granada, the most public service oriented of the ITV companies). Everything about it is lavish – the locations, the period recreations, the casting – but it is also so much more: a riveting saga played out over 13 monumental episodes.
5. Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC, 1982)
The effects of unemployment in the early 1980s seen through the eyes of Alan Bleasdale’s vivid and unforgettable characters. Brilliantly written, acted and directed, it is of its time, yet speaks directly to us today through raw emotion and human empathy. Yosser’s despair will always remain the series’ touchstone, but every moment rang true.
6. The Shadow Line (BBC, 2011)
Writer/director/producer/sometime actor Hugo Blick is British televison’s greatest auteur and his first drama series, after a string of comedies, came as a blast of very fresh air. Stylish, gripping, full of wonderful set-pieces and mesmerising characters and totally unique in both its visual and narrative approach, it thrilled and provoked over six memorable episodes
7. Prime Suspect (ITV, 1991-2006)
Difficult now to remember the full original impact of this portrayal of the struggles of a female police detective both to be taken seriously by her colleagues and to solve a horrific crime, mainly because the gripping drama and the brilliant performance by Helen Mirren in the first and subsequent six stories are by themselves enough to secure its place as one of British TV’s greatest productions.
8. Quatermass (BBC, 1953, 1955, 1958)
The pioneering and experimental nature of live television drama in the 1950s found no greater expression than in Nigel Kneale and Rudoplh Cartier’s seminal science fiction serials featuring Professor Bernard Quatermass: The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit. Powerful, gripping and totally original, they were the event television of their day.
9. Days of Hope (BBC, 1975)
Ken Loach and Jim Allen are the prime exponents of socially conscious left-wing drama on British TV, and this collaboration was a rare series amongst the single films and plays they usually produced. Ranging over ten years from the First World War to the General Strike its four feature-length episodes traced the growth and ultimate betrayal of the labour and trade union movements through the story of a working-class family.
10. Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011-13, Netflix, 2015-)
The anthology for our times, Charlie Brooker’s bleak warnings about the direction our technology may be taking us are more than just fantastic ideas – they are full of wonderful writing, direction, acting and production value and the quality has been constantly maintained. Brooker is the guiding force, but other writers have made telling contributions and, although much of the production may have shifted to the US, it remains British in both origin and spirit.
In my sitcom lists, I followed my top ten with my next ten (11-20) but, in this instance, there are so many series I want to mention that I’m going to add another 15 to make a top 25:
11. Talking Heads (BBC, 1988, 1998, 2020)
12. The Street (BBC, 2006-9)
13. Blind Justice (BBC, 1988)
14. Utopia (Channel 4, 2013-14)
15. Cracker (ITV, 1993-2006)
16. Wolf Hall (BBC, 2015)
17. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (BBC, 1979)
18. Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-)
19. The Prisoner (ITV, 1967)
20. This is England (Channel 4, 2010-15)
21. Z Cars (BBC, 1962-1978)
22. Holding On (BBC, 1997)
23. Jewel in the Crown (ITV, 1984)
24. Top Boy (Channel 4, 2011-13, Netflix, 2019-)
25. I, Claudius (BBC, 1976)
…. and, even then, I have not been able to find room for Our Friends in the North, Traffik, Sherlock, Law and Order, GBH, Save Me or Shooting the Past!
I followed my list of best British sitcoms with a list of American ones and I will do the same with drama series: expect my US drama list later in the year (and expect an inverse ratio of series to miniseries). After that, I will give you a top ten drama series from that magical place “the rest of the world” and will attempt to combine the three lists to give an overall top ten. I wonder if this year will produce anything to crash into the reckoning?
TV for Keeps 