Robin Brown

Every time I see Frank Field in the news he’s making another pronouncement on some aspect of the state and how it requires a radical overhaul.

This has generally extended to the welfare state, with particular emphasis on social security and pensions.

But Frank has recently branched out by claiming that the BBC should be scaled back to being a minority public service broadcaster with two TV channels (BBC2 and BBC4) and two radio channels (Radio 3 and Radio 4).

Field was, for a very short time, social security minister in the Tony Blair government, having been priased for his radical forward thinking on the welfare state.

That was until everyone realised that just about the only person who agreed with Frank Field was Frank Field. It has to be said, he was remarkably prescient on a number of issues, probably too much for his own good.

Double F was swiftly sent back to the Wirral, where he has spent the last ten years arguing that everything should be scrapped, scaled down or broken up – cropping up with a new headline every couple of years when he’s got another headline-grabbing report out.

Here’s Frank on the BBC in his report, called Auntie’s Dying: Long Live Public Service Broadcasting.

“The BBC cannot continue to impose a version of the poll tax on every TV household.

“They are chasing viewers by producing rubbish programmes which, frankly, would make the founders of the BBC turn in their graves.

On a pedantic note, the licence fee isn’t a poll tax. Just to be straight on this, you don’t need to pay the TV licence if you don’t want to. Ergo not a poll tax.

Field argues that the public-fund nature of the licence fee compels the BBC to produce populist programmes that mirror commercial TV’s offerings.

He believes that diverting the licence fee to other content producers, who bid for the right, is a better idea – and one that is more likely to preserve public sector broadcasting in the long run.

The cultural value of the BBC is clearly a subjective one, but Field seems to have applied his own personal philosophy to everything in life. Who’s he to say which channels and stations are worthy and which aren’t? His continued references to the Proms highlight a peculiarly fusty idea of what’s of value and what isn’t.

I actually agree with Field that the BBC is going about things completely the wrong way by chasing viewers, and the continued existence of BBC3 – surely due to be renamed PramFaceTV* anytime soon – is baffling to me.

The problem is, and always will be, differing idea of what constitutes good public service broadcasting. Field has his own idea, I have mine, everyone else in the country will have theirs.

His paper recommends asking everyone what they understand by public sector broadcasting.

Frankly, I’m with Sid Vicious on this one – these are the very people who lap up the dross from commercial broadcasters at the moment. I dread to think what would be on the Beeb if it were decided by Joe Public.

Field would dispose of BBC management and an independent body would decide which broadcasters got their hands on the licence fee cash. I don’t see how this could really be much different from the current situation, where a largely unaccountable elite decides what gets made.

Field has earned a reputation for thinking the unthinkable, but it’s rarely pointed out that many ideas previously thought beyond the pale are unthinkable because they’re fucking ridiculous.

There’s certainly a debate to be had over the ways the digital revolution is changing the broadcasting landscape, and the way the BBC and other terrestrial broadcasters are funded has resulted only in a fudge thus far.

The commercialisation of some of the Beeb’s output is also problematic, as is the reach and scope of bbc.co.uk – but I’d rather have the BBC in the muddled state it’s in at the moment than a neutered niche broadcaster envisaged by Field.

Despite its intention to save public sector broadcasting, I rather fear Field’s paper will be more grist to the mill for the Beeb’s many and varied enemies – generally ranged across the right-wing and generally for economic or political purposes.

They’ll be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of getting rid of a mortal enemy and competitor, plus all that lovely licence fee cash.

The BBC needs to be at the centre of British broadcasting, reaching out to as many people as it can while remaining true to its core commitments. I don’t think it currently does, but it only needs a little tweaking.

Under Field’s disastrous vision the Beeb would be cowed, a little-viewed curio amongst a sea of digital shite. His suggestions would be the first shots in the eventual destruction of public-service broadcasting.

I’ve always found it odd that while the rest of the world looks at the BBC in envy and admiration, in Britain we spend all of our time trying to destroy it.

*It was the BBC itself, lest we forget, that actually had the temerity to call a programme about teenage mothers Pramface Mansion.

It’s always said that Americans don’t do irony. Neither, it seems, do they do innuendo.

The news of Mollie Sugden’s death has propelled the hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy to the top of trending topics, only for Twitter to ban it and Mashable and TechCrunch to rage against Twitter spam, and subsequently display a total lack of humour about the issue.

TechCrunch:

“Still amazes me how stuff like that gets in the top list of trending topics. It shouldn’t.”

So, the Brits like smut – and Are You Being Served was gloriusly stupid, hilarious smut – and the Americans are humourless nerds. Who knew?

But the unlikely, and rather sweet, phenomenon does highlight a growing issue on Twitter – the explosion of spam followers and hashtag spam.

The fact that it was initially assumed to be more spam speaks as much of the problems Twitter is experiencing as of the typically myopic and pompous worldview of US geeks.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and stroke my cock.

EDIT: For any passing Americans, or others generally baffled by today’s events, here are some cracking pussy gags.

There was a lot of hoopla over the weekend over the identity of The Stig – Top Gear’s boiler-suited tame racing driver – after Jeremy Clarkson let it slip that his identity would be revealed in tonight’s new episode, the first of the latest series.

It was such a naked publicity stunt that I didn’t take much interest in it, but dashed of a quick piece from memory for the MotorTorque Blog, secure in the knowledge that there’d be plenty of search engine queries on the subject.

In the post I explained that the Stig would undoubtedly remove his helmet to reveal either Damon Hill or Michael Schumacher.

Clarkson would tease whether the F1 driver was, in fact, The Stig but it would evident to anyone with half a brain that thrashing a Honda Civic Type R around the Top Gear racetrack would not have been high on Schuey’s list of priorities as he was winning the last of his F1 titles.

This hasn’t stopped most news outlets reporting the news as if it were fact, regardless of the fact that it’s patently obvious that Schumacher has never been the Stig, apart from his exercise in hooning around the test track in a Ferrari FXX in a neat and rather blatant bit of product placement (Mike went on to reveal his love of the Abarth 500 and Fiat Croma) for both Fiat and Bacardi.

The news reporting riles me, as it’s so weak and lazy as to be insulting. It smacks of churnalism – the modern phenomenon of simply rewriting coverage from other news outlets, or press releases.

I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of churnalism, as almost every journalist in the land has to swallow their pride and dash off some rubbish based on online articles or PR bumph, but this instance is such a naked piece of headline-grabbing will-this-do? crap, which is actually untrue, that it’s quite insulting.

Needless to say the search engines are currently awash with ‘Michael Schumacher IS the Stig!’ headlines from news portals that have simply recycled each other’s reports, or cut’n'pasted Press Association articles.

It’s annoying for smaller sites when larger sites can wield their page rank to monopolise search engines with dross like this – inaccurate dross at that – but it’s even more useless for users, who find the SERPS full of the same article loosely rewritten.

Clarkson, Schumacher, Bacardi and Fiat must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Schumacher is The Stig reports:

The Guardian:

The mystery surrounding who is Top Gear’s mysterious test driver, the Stig, was solved tonight after Michael Schumacher revealed himself as the show’s secret driver.

Yahoo:

Michael Schumacher revealed himself as Top Gear’s mysterious test driver the Stig.

Channel 4:

Michael Schumacher has revealed himself as Top Gear’s mysterious test driver the Stig.

The former Formula One driver took off the Stig’s famous white helmet during an interview with presenter Jeremy Clarkson after the studio audience urged him to reveal his true identity.

Despite being told by mental health experts such as Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden that Susan Boyle’s breakdown is simply ‘exhaustion’ – that much-employed euphemism for calamitous mental meltdown – it’s clear that there’s more to it than that.

Anyone who saw Boyle’s initial performance would have also noticed that she came on stage looking one judge short of a panel, although they may have immediately forgotten about that when faced with her impressive performance.

When Boyle came on stage I cringed, like I always do if I’m unfortunate enough to be sat in front of a television whenever one of the modern-day talent shows comes on.

I don’t have a lot of interest in the X Factors and Britain’s Got Talents of this world, but more than that I despise the way that people who obviously have some mental health problems are lined up to be insulted and sniggered at. The looks on the faces of some people when they’re told rather bluntly that they’re talentless losers is awful to see.

The difference with Boyle is she’s very talented, whereas most are thrown into the pit to have their delusions and dreams sneered at by Cowell and company and crushed in front of an audience of millions. It’s astonishingly cruel.

I happened to be in a pub when the final of Britain’s Got Talent was on. Boyle looked about to pass out, burst into tears or simply freak out at any moment.

It’d be disingenuous to deny that Boyle’s strange appearance and mannerisms have not elevated her beyond your common-or-garden torch singer. That’s exactly where her appeal lies as a phenomenon and a brand.

Her odd background, her apparent crush on Piers Morgan (more proof, as if any were needed, that she’s bonkers in the nut) and her alleged tantrums behind the scenes all contribute to a more saleable story. And the spectre of a meltdown is always a tantalising prospect.

Boyle’s fame has really shown up these talent shows for what they are: point-and-laugh spectacles for the morbidly curious and only a half-step away from the Channels 5-style freakshows that populate the airwaves.

But ITV’s talent shows don’t even afford a shred of dignity that the ‘Boy Whose Arse Broke Down’-style documentaries do.

It’s easily forgotten that these shows are pretty much exactly the same as the Opportunity Knocks and Golden Shots of times gone by.

The reason a BGT thrives these days, whereas a plain old Opportunity Knocks would sink in the ratings is exposed by Boyle’s tribulations – the former is populated by people who are clearly not mentally or emotionally equipped to deal with a sneer from Cowell or boos from the audience, or really any of the pizzaz that comes with it.

Take the weirdos and sad cases out of modern talent shows and you’d remove the very reason for the current popularity. Sad, really.

• Image by Katcha via Creative Commons

It may sound like an unsuccessful pitch to the BBC from Alan Partridge, but against all expectations Extreme Fishing with Robson Green is one of the most addictive programme on TV at the moment.

I have no interest in fishing and my prior knowledge of Green stemmed from his assault on the charts with Badger, and his appearances in many tedious and/or earnest TV dramas.

Judging from these previous sources, one could fairly expect Green to be one of the most boring men in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What emerges from Extreme Fishing is an image of Green as an excitable, garrulous and rather childish ball of geordie energy. It makes him utterly loveable.

He leaps all over the screen with the unstoppable enthusiasm of a toddler, shouting and yelping to himself in excitement and keeping up a running commentary that you suspect he’d maintain if a camera crew were not in evidence.

Green’s monologue is peppered with ‘Why aye!’s and ‘Bonnie lad!’s, and he often makes an ‘extreme fishing’ mime to indicate his pleasure when noise precludes further speech.

“Yes! Get in! I friggin’ love fishing!” he shouts in one episode. That is beyond doubt.

When TV personalities comprise the anodyne or the self-aware, Green’s enthusiasm is magnetic and infectious.

His ingenuity and lack of side make for a rare sight on TV these days and he has enough natural charm and humour to make it obvious that he knows he’s an utterly ridiculous character. It makes him even more likeable.

In these miserable times, and on uninspired TV schedules, Extreme Fishing is a pleasing, and hugely unlikely, hit.

Well. Who’d've thunk it. In the end Red Dwarf – Back to Earth came up with the goods in the third and final episode, finally giving some meaning to the resurrected Red Dwarf.

In a twist that I’d suspected since about half way through the first episode, but turned out to welcome, it all turned out to be a dream. Normally this would count as a massive cop-out, and indeed it was here.

But I’ll be surprised if there’s a RD fan out there who didn’t welcome it, so far had the new episodes gone beyond anything that was recognisably Dwarf-esque.

Still, what we’re let with is, frankly, a sprawling mess of new episodes that feel at least two rewrites away from being a serviceable TV script. While the last episode of Back To Earth rescued the series from a terrible and bizarre end, it didn’t excuse the previous two episodes of utter dross.

Many of the faults still remain. The lack of a laughter track saps the programme of it soul; Doug Naylor’s leaden and amateurish direction is a distraction and annoyance; the lack of laughs is an obvious and debilitating problem; and the sheer post-modern meta-ism of it all is confusing and discombobulating.

But what works brilliantly, in the end, is all of the famous Red Dwarf touches. In the last ten minutes of the 90-odd that made up Back To Earth there’s humour, pathos and self-awareness.

Anyone who has followed the series cares about the characters and the series’ legacy, and the conclusion of the episode delivers everything a fanboy could want.

So, the gibberish and laugh-free first episodes finally make some sort of sense, albeit massively qualified. Was it worth it?

No doubt Dave thinks so, viewing figures for the pilot were through the roof – although they fell off a cliff the next day, no doubt a reflection of the terrible critical reception the first episode received – and will have delivered the biggest audience by far the digital channel has ever received, having been spun out over a Bank Holiday weekend.

I think that decision will have made commercial sense, but it absolutely crippled Back To Earth from a qualitative point of view. Even if you factor in the Dwarf-affirming climax, its return was not a success overall. There are still too many factors to bear in mind about what went wrong – and its problems are legion.

Back To Earth is, I think, a bit of a trailblazer in how digital television will start to encroach on typical providers for original programming. It will deliver content not driven by quality, but by commercial considerations.

It makes one wonder how a resurrected Doctor Who would have fared under a channel like Dave if the BBC had never come to its senses. Badly, is the inevitable answer – whatever you think of Who under Russell T Davies.

Does all of this matter at the end of the day? I dunno. I thought Red Dwarf was past it at series seven in the mid-90′s. Having plumbed the depths in the first four fifths, Back To Earth just about pulled it out of the fire.

But though I’d lap up another series as good as any of the first six, I’d abhor another effort like Back To Earth that risks everything for one last shot. I love those characters as I loved the series. I’d rather remember them in their pomp: heroic, hilarious, human.

Better dead than smeg.

• Edit: I wrote this, appalled, after seeing the first episode. For a more thorough and balanced analysis check out Back to Earth: In retrospect.

All my fears confirmed – the new Red Dwarf is as incoherent, not remotely funny and totally unfamiliar in tone as I suspected it would be.

It was like watching a particularly amateurish fan film that has somehow managed to reassemble the old cast, who just about managed to get through their lines while stumbling to rediscover their old characters.

Clearly under-rehearsed, the cast do their best but there was one single line in the whole 25 minutes that raised a snigger.

Whether understandably rushed, or whether the direction received was insufficient or confusing, Craig Charles, Chris Barrie, Danny John-Jules and Robert Llewellyn looked sadly out-of-sorts.

Without a live audience to riff off, the performances seem stiff and awkward, but the woeful direction is the worst culprit. For some reason – cost-cutting at a guess – Doug Naylor has taken the helm and proved to be one of the worst directors of all time.

Edits are rough, camera angles odd and the actors ill-at-ease. Worst of all, though, Back to Earth just doesn’t seem remotely like Red Dwarf. It’s utterly unfamiliar, so there’s not even the nostalgia factor there.

This is a common problem with TV remakes, now that everything is high-def or at least shot digitally. The Beeb’s Dwarf was traditionally filmed in the old BBC four-camera studios on videotape.

Dave’s Dwarf has multi-panning fast-editing unconvincing CGI shots that move it so far away from what we know and love, it may as well be a different programme.

Holly is gone, the sets don’t look remotely similar, the characters seem once-removed from the foursome they were in the original series.

Everything that was lovable and recognisable about it has gone as a result. In all honesty Red Dwarf lost it the second Rob Grant departed, and never looked to me to get anywhere close to the highs of the first six series.

As if to illustrate the seachange in quality and tone, Dave screened Gunmen of the Apocalypse straight after Back to Earth. It was a serious error that only served to highlight just how poor Back to Earth was.

I’ve recently been working my way through the boxset of Inspector Morse, a series I’ve always been vaguely obsessed by and one of the key series in British TV of recent years, as far as I’m concerned.

I got a recommendation from a friend that spin-off Lewis was worth a try, despite my scepticism, so I’ve caught a couple of episodes recently, which inspired me to jot down some thoughts on it.

Inspector Morse, it seems to me, was primarily a mood piece – the mysteries as a framing device to concentrate on the character of Morse. They occasionally seem incidental. Some of the plots are wrapped up in an alarmingly ad hoc manner, often depending on an unlikely coincidence or hard-to-fathom revelation on Morse’s part.

The focal point is always Morse himself. Portrayed by John Thaw this was a wise move – despite his range, Thaw looked like he was born to play Morse.

He’s not obviously likeable, vaguely misanthropic (or possibly a misogynist), a borderline alcoholic in all its boring and unglamourous reality, a man perennially without luck with the opposite sex and, at heart, rather miserable and lonely. He’s the centre of his own very personal and ongoing tragedy.

He’s an obviously rather hyper-real character though, with his Mark II Jag and vast intelligence that drips with classical, often obscure, knowledge. Sidekick Lewis is straight-forward as Morse is not, shows uncomplicated taste and common sense and often appears exasperated by Morse’s pretensions or high tastes.

As such he’s an obvious everyman and jumping-on point for the viewer. He seems almost deliberately underwritten in the TV series, as opposed to Dexter’s slightly hyper-real print Lewis – an ageing Welsh boxer who’s not even a policeman.

All of which makes it more impressive that Kevin Whately was able to imbue the on-screen Lewis with any charisma at all. He’s utterly believable without being boring, but it seemed to me that without Thaw playing opposite there wouldn’t be a lot to the character.

This made me pretty sceptical about the prospect of the TV series Lewis, as it was hard to imagine a less promising centre character for a flagship show. Still, as we saw with Taggart after the death of Mark McManus, these decisions often seem to be about the strength of a TV brand rather than anything in it.

Lewis sheds John Thaw, James Grout and Colin Dexter – three massive reasons behind the success of Inspector Morse – while retaining Whately, Ted Childs, Oxford and Barrington Pheloung, four equally significant ones.

The absence of Morse and Thaw weighs heavily on the programme, and seemingly on Kevin Whately. Ever the trusty sergeant ready with a quip of a ‘Cheer up, Sir’ in the original series, it’s quite shocking to see how old and depressed Whately looks in Lewis.

Without Morse as a potential misery centre, the character of Lewis has been beefed up to make him more tragic. His wife has been killed off in a road accident.

As if to emphasise Lewis’ misery he’s been given sidekick Hathaway (Lawrence Fox), who seems coolly nonplussed by everything and whose sole character traits seem to be his classical education, love of fags and his gangling walk. Replacing Grout’s Chief Super Strange is Rebecca Front as some utterly forgettable token female boss. Neither is a particular success.

Kevin Whately as Lewis and Laurence Fox as Hathaway in Lewis

Many of the old Morse staples are there: the academic settings and characters, the sometimes-convoluted plots and Pheloung’s sadly beautiful music. But I don’t think Inspector Morse was ever really about those things, music aside.

Certainly Morse sees himself as battling elements of evil – ‘There may not be a devil, but there’s devilry all right,’ he says in Masonic Mysteries – and the underlying themes in the series are grand and dark. Murders stem from the antagonists’ pride, envy, vanity, guilt, lust. It’s tempting to attempt to draw some classical parallels; Greek tragedies most obviously. At the centre is the weary, tragic, slightly ambiguous Morse.

Shorn of Thaw, and Morse, we’re left with the slightly sad sight of Lewis, and Whately, without his mentor and friend. In tonight’s episode Lewis urged Hathaway to visit an old flame to ‘lay the ghost to rest’. It seemed an extraordinary exhortation under the circumstances that brought about the series.

But while it would be easy to make a glib comment on this, Lewis still has merit. Its tone, both in fiction and in reality, is shot through with a melancholy that stems from the absence of Morse and the sadly premature death of John Thaw.

Where Morse is the framing device for Inspector Morse, his absence is the framing device for Lewis. All of which makes it an oddly compelling watch, again with the actual plot seemingly incidental.

The steadying hands of Whately, Childs and Pheloung connect with the ghost of Morse and make the series more than the sum of its parts. Replace any of those elements with other individuals and you suspect Lewis would be just another TV cop show.

Perhaps surprisingly, Whately aside, Pheloung’s incidental music is the key link between the two series. It’s a subtle one, but without it you suspect Lewis would be cut too far adrift from the things that inspired it for it to have any resonance.

So, Lewis is another mood piece, albeit one with an odd duality between fiction and real life. The essence of Morse remains, as does the memory of John Thaw. The whole thing is like an elaborate tribute to both men. It’s a unique television experience.