onsdag 27 mars 2013

Hang on - the bohemian painter's a baddie?!

I continue to be pleased with Mr Selfridge. It's a perfectly respectable costume-drama effort, and yes, it's better than The Paradise. However, it remains short of interesting villains, and when one of the characters suddenly shows his nasty side he proved a somewhat too - well - innovative baddie for my taste. The creep in question is not Mr Perez (if he keeps fading into the background, Victor will snatch his job), nor Mr Grove (a ginger cutie, but weak) but - Roderick Temple! That's right, the surely-completely-fictional bohemian artist that Rose Selfridge flirted with when she was at her angriest with her variety-girl-chasing husband. I was convinced that Roderick's only plot function was to show that Rose wasn't such a doormat as all that and could have had another man if only she'd chosen to. But no, suddenly he turns up again, charms the Selfridges' daughter Rosalie, ingratiates himself with the family, and makes lightly veiled threats to Rose - "come to my studio and I won't have to come here".

The immense unfairness lies in the fact that while I find this behaviour stalker-like and not at all attractive in an unshaved artist, it would probably be a completely different story if the roles were reversed. Imagine Mr and Mrs Selfridge had been a struggling artist couple, and Temple had been a succesful businessman. Imagine he would have used his money and influence to get a hold over the Selfridge family and lay siege to Rose. Well, it doesn't take much imagining really, because plots like that are common enough, and when they occur I'm usually all over the wicked money-man. So why not grant the same courtesy to a painter?

As a champion of the middle-class, I should be offended that middle-class villains - lawyers and businessmen, bankers especially, top the list - are such a frequent occurrence they've become well-worn clichés. After all, they have little basis in fact. When we have reason to be angry with our lawyer or banker, it's usually because we feel that he or she has messed up. Uriah-Heepish cunning plans to consciously do the clients down are, I imagine, quite rare. But one reason that these professions have to carry such a heavy villain-burden is that they do it so well - they can be portrayed as brainy, ambitious and power-hungry enough to make their plotting credible. Another reason is of course that various writers have used their fiction as a platform for bashing lawyers/businessmen/whoever has considerably more money than them. But turning your bête noire into a villain in a story can seriously back-fire. Your scoundrel can become so popular with the readers that he puts your right-thinking artist/worker/something-else-poor-but-honest hero in the shade. In sum, instead of berating the users of the middle-class villain cliché, I want to shake their hand for giving us middle-classers such good PR.

But that doesn't mean, surely, that the bad guy shouldn't be able to have another occupation entirely - bohemian painter, say? Well, it's hard  to make an interesting villain out of a drifter, and we are so used to seeing bohemians as unworldly - another cliché, if you like - that it's difficult to imagine one of them having enough sheer drive to make a success of the demanding role of villain. A baddie doesn't have to be middle-class (servants and leaders of pick-pocket gangs work well, just to name two examples completely at random), but having aspirations doesn't hurt.

I'm not sure all this is an excuse for not fancying Roderick. Maybe I'm turning into a villain snob? Be that as it may, the hunt for the next big thing costume-drama-villain-wise is still on.

söndag 17 mars 2013

The sad case of Anacrites - or, how to lose readers and alienate villain-lovers

For the second time in a short while, I'm distrusting my own judgement. I'm currently reading Master and God by Lindsey Davis, and though she's such a pro when it comes to Roman historical yarns, I'm finding it hard to warm to the book, or to the characters. Maybe, though, it's not the author's fault. Maybe, deep down, even my appreciation of a non-Falco Davis novel is poisoned by my resentment regarding Anacrites.

Lindsey Davis is the author of the hugely and rightfully popular Falco series, which follows the career of private investigator Marcus Didius Falco in ancient Rome during the days of Emperor Vespasian. Falco makes an engaging hero, mainly because of his sense of humour which shines through the first-person narrative. He has his trying points, though - for instance, he's a little in love with his own outsider status. Nevertheless, I can recommend the first ten books in the series - up to and including Two for the Lions - unreservedly. Then, in One Virgin Too Many, things slow down a bit, maybe because Falco's strangely ungrateful when he at last acquires the equestrian rank he has striven ten books to get (and what happened to the great wedding with Helena we'd been looking forward to?). In the next book, Ode to a Banker, the rot really sets in, and when things didn't improve in A Body in the Bath House I simply stopped reading the Falco novels. Well, all right, pace and plot improved in A Body in the Bath House. What did not improve, however, was the characterisation of Anacrites. Davis cooly and consciously ruins a perfectly good villain by making him increasingly brutal and ham-fisted, and humiliates him too by means of the Falco family.

So who is Anacrites, and why do I care so much that Davis broke him on her wheel? Well, he is the chief spy under Vespasian and a Greek freedman, sly and cynical. His relationship to Falco is strained most of the time, because Falco once took over a failed mission of his and completed it successfully (because of his contacts, as I remember, though Falco himself believes it was because of his superior skill). Sometimes, though, there's a thaw and they get along quite well for a time, until something new crops up which makes them enemies again. To sum up, Anacrites is - or was - the Clever Villain.

Only Falco doesn't think he's that clever. Because of the one botched mission, the PI actually believes himself to be smarter than the Imperial Chief Spy, which becomes a bit wearying after a while, because of course he isn't. Not, that is, until in Ode to a Banker, where Anacrites seems to have swallowed a bowl-full of stupid pills and confirms all Falco's smug assumptions. He gives Falco's mother bad advice on banks. He has an affair with her, but she also has an affair with an old neighbour (two-time Anacrites? Get away!). He shows interest in one of Falco's sisters, but she turns him down. In A Body in the Bath House, he responds in an ungentlemanly manner by having her lodgings wrecked - at the same time as he botches another spy mission. In one plot-line after another, Anacrites loses all his clever-villain cred., and it's just painful to watch. After A Body, I couldn't go on with it.

There are larger things at stake here than the destruction of a dreamy chief spy. By making him more or less into a figure of fun, Davis has shown disrespect to the villain-loving part of her readership. I'm not the only one with a weakness for baddies, happily, and I feel a particular fondness for authors who recognise villain-lovers as an important group of readers. That's one of the reasons I love Dickens. He put his villains through all kinds of misery, but he respected them, and he made sure most of his books feature at the very least one interesting "bad" character. Davis, on the other hand, by tarring and feathering a well-known and well-loved villain type (I mean - chief spy! Aaaah...), has more or less slapped the villain-loving community in the face, telling us "I don't need you, I only need healthy, sensible readers who root for honourable, under-dog private investigators". It is something it's hard to forgive. That's why the ghost of Anacrites may be getting in the way of my enjoying Master and God.

Falco book number ten, Two for the Lions, ends with the words "Anacrites was still alive". If only.

söndag 10 mars 2013

Could it be I'm not high-brow enough for Parade's End?

I'm hesitating about raining on Parade's End. I've watched two episodes and have not become enamoured with it, but I realise that this may, just possibly, have something to do with me rather than with any real flaws in the series.

I was wrong to assess Parade's End as a trying-to-catch-the-Downton-crowd project. Not that I ever thought it would be anything like Downton: the Beeb bragged so much about its braininess and classiness, it was pretty clear we would not be seeing heroes bounding out of wheelchairs in this drama any time soon. The script is by Tom Stoppard, which means the chances that any character would get away with using clichés like "revenge is sweet" in full earnest are nil (Mr Bates, in case you were wondering). I did think, though - or hope at least - that there would be enough epic period drama to reconcile the Downton crowd, of which I'm one, to the relentless high-browness of it all. Maybe Parade's End would be the new Bridehead Revisited, and relate to Downton the same way Jane Austen does to Georgette Heyer. Two completely different things when it comes to quality and ambition, yet if you like the one you will probably like the other.

But Parade's End has practically no costume drama vibes at all. Yes, its hero is upper-class and heir to an estate and consequently the costumes and scenery on show are exquisite enough. But they are inconsequential. The theme of the story is the hero's honourable but hidebound world-view and how it clashes with the changes taking place in early 20th-century England. Not surprisingly, you feel the realities of World War One are going to depress him a lot. But Tietjens, the hero, isn't some dim-but-nice lordling stopping his ears to what is going on around him (if he had been, I might actually have liked him better). He is very bright and well-read - something of a genius, we're meant to believe. He is fond of arguing that everything has been goint to pot since the end of the 18th century. What we've got on our hands here is a more-Burkian-than-Burke, pre-Peel, pre-Disraeli - in fact, pre-everything - conservative. It's not a question of "we have to do the decent thing, what, what" either. Tietjens doesn't found his world-view on sentiment. He thinks rejecting the Enlightenment and the changes brought about by the French Revolution makes sense.

Needless to say, I find him a bore of the first order. I may not be a barricade-stormer, but nor am I prepared to grant for a second that we would have been better off without the French Revolution and its ideas. It was the bourgeois revolution, all right, and I'm a member of the bourgeoisie. Worryingly, though, I wonder if it's supposed to matter whether we like Tietjens or not. The two women in his life - nervy socialite wife Sylvia and luminous suffragette Valentine - are richly characterised and extremely well acted by Rebecca Hall and Adelaide Clemens respectively. But otherwise, the characters are thin, and I believe consciously so. This is not the kind of drama where we are supposed to care overmuch about plot and character: instead, we should care about language and ideas. After all, the novel Parade's End is written by the Modernist author Ford Madox Ford. And though apparently dab hands at poetry, Modernists are not known for their epic story-telling.

It's embarrassing when you watch something high-brow and don't much fancy it. Of course, there is always the option of dismissing it as pretentious and the Emperor's new clothes. But what if it isn't? What if you're just too much of a simple soul to enjoy it? This is the uneasy suspicion I have about Parade's End. Of course Tom Stoppard writes beautifully, but language and ideas are simply not primarily what I watch a TV series for. It's depressing, because I suspect like many fans of middle-brow drama I'd like to think that I'm quite brainy and sophisticated enough to enjoy something really high-brow when it comes along. I'm just not too snobbish to enjoy a good yarn as well, even if it happens to be a bit soapy. Dramas like Parade's End - and The Lost Prince, which I tried and gave up on some weeks back force me to consider if soapy yarns aren't in fact my natural habitat, and whether I may be just as hopelessly middle-brow as I'm middle-class.

At the same time - are plot and characters really so unimportant? They were important enough for Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen and George Eliot. I should try watching The Hollow Crown soon to cheer me up, but if I don't like that either, then I suppose I can never lay claim to being a first-rate culture vulture. 

söndag 3 mars 2013

The Sarah Jane Adventures - Doctor Who surrogate™

It's time for objectifying again. While watching a singer in one of Sweden's many Eurovision Song Contest heats (the Swedish final is next week - let's hope we don't send the joker with the diaper), I caught myself murmuring appreciatingly "what a complete muffin". Sadly, he didn't qualify for the final. Never mind - the view was nice while it lasted, and the song was quite catchy too.

The expression "complete muffin" for good-looking male is one I've learned from the Doctor Who spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures. After having waited for months for the DVD release of the 2012 Doctor Who Christmas special (for pity's sake, we're in March now!), I finally gave up, overcame my shame in trying on something that has been so clearly labelled as a kids' programme, and ordered the first series of Sarah Jane. I needn't have waited so long. Yes, the storylines are simpler, the setting is earthbound - no leaps in time or space - and the aliens somewhat naffer than in the original, plus Sarah Jane has kid sidekicks rather than adult companions like the Doctor. But the writing is still good, and the spirit is the same as in the original series. No need for a Doctor fan to be ashamed of watching this.

That the spirit of the original is preserved is especially important. This is where the "adult" Torchwood, with its pessimism (even the exuberant Captain Jack seemed down in the mouth), misanthropy and bickering characters failed so miserably. Yes, true, I only saw half a season of Torchwood, but what I've read about it since seems to confirm that this is a series for doom-mongers. Now, Sarah Jane, like Doctor Who, touches on serious issues occasionally, but never lets them spoil your evening. The total impression is life-, earth- and human-affirming. The kid sidekicks are good and bring different skills to the team. Sarah Jane, the ex-companion turned investigative journalist, is an endearing heroine. On the whole, what's not to like?

I've always had a soft spot for the "meet the companion" Doctor Who episodes, and Sarah Jane exploits the same mechanisms in highlighting everyday phenomena that, somewhere in our unconscious, we find a bit weird, if not downright scary. In the first episode - still the best I've seen after the first three adventures - the aliens du jour try to bring humankind down by way of a soft drink, "Bubble Shock". From the first time we see one of the kid sidekicks watching a bright and cheerful commercial for the drink, we get an eerie sense that something isn't right. It pinpoints just how, well, spacey soft-drink commercials can be. All those bouncing, wide-awake youngsters. In the right context, definitely scary, as is the special "Bubble Shock" bus. It's free but requires its passengers to a tour of the soft-drink factory, where they are enticed into drinking free samples by a teenage-heartthrob guide (that's where the "muffin" comes in). Yep, it's a kids' adventure - a bit "Five defeat the aliens" - but a well-thought-out one with shades of the Pied Piper and Hansel and Gretel. I wondered if the bus was an over-the-top detail - would no-one really question a bus that's for free? - but then I read about the Google bus, so, well, I guess it happens.

The other two adventures I've seen so far don't quite measure up to the first one, but are enjoyable just the same, though one contained my least favourite Doctor Who aliens of all time, the Slitheen. The third adventure gave me a slight déjà-vu feeling as it reminded me of the Doctor Who episode "Tooth and Claw", which isn't one of my favourites anyway. Substitute scary monks with scary nuns, werewolf alien for Gorgon alien, Victorian Scotland for modern-day England, and there you are. As a Protestant, I do see how nuns and monks can be perceived as scary - even, sometimes, by Catholics - but one thing I would not accuse them of is switching their allegiances easily. Even in a sci-fi context, it's a bit of a big ask to see them as protecters of a hostile alien entity once, never mind twice. However, Phyllida Law is watchable as the confused old woman in an old people's home who holds the key to the mystery, and let's face it: an old people's home is another vaguely unsettling everyday phenomenon. Think By the Pricking of my Thumbs by Agatha Christie.

The next episode promises to involve laser domes. Again, something just a bit anxiety-inducing - great fun, I'm sure, but I wouldn't be that surprised if aliens were involved in them somehow.