WHITE HEAT - MEDIUM COOL

So, the BBC is finally putting out a drama set in the moderately recent past, not in the 19th Century and not set entirely in a definitively middle class nor conscribed working class compartment. I am referring to ’White Heat’ which has not yet completed but already stands out amongst all the hours of dross about cooking, food and ’nature’ programmes that manage to completely avoid anything that could be construed as political content.

 It is ‘well produced’ it is not a comedy, thank God, and it touches upon some significant matters over a period that is still not properly documented or understood, especially by those that did not live through it. These are all points in its favour. Yet from the very outset it smacks of being written by committee. There is the frankly unbelievably contrived set up, a shared house with exactly one ’ordinary bloke’, one art student, one nice, intelligent middle class girl, one gay bloke, one black bloke, one Irish Catholic and the one very left wing one. This is all very well, but it is just too much to concede that such a perfect cross-section would exist. The minority report. Let it pass.

The look and feel of it is well neigh perfect, rather too perfect, the clothes all change at each calendar year and each character changes at the same time and never goes ahead or lags behind the fashions. This too is not a big problem, but manages to impart a certain fastidious detail which gives a visual authenticity which does not necessarily translate into social or economic veracity. The nice, intelligent girl works for the BBC, surprise, surprise, and in a significant move, the very left wing one has a rich Dad with a mansion and a private income. He is also ‘not very nice.’ Thus his politics are contrasted with his personal behaviour and the suggestion that Margaret Thatcher and her cronies may have been up to no good rendered a suspect judgement. The black character is almost too good to be true and arrested every time he goes out of the house, despite dressing in a suit and tie. He does not smoke and drinks responsibly. The Irish girl is naïve and acts as a sort of mother to the rest. In a particularly extreme attempt to pack a bit of everything in her younger brother appears briefly and is then killed by the IRA.

Another of the housemates, the pretty art student, is injured in an IRA blast in London, and falls into the arms of ’ordinary bloke.’ I should think the odds of this all happening to a small group of people living together in London in the Seventies is astronomically high, and it adds to a sense that in a veiled way, this is attempting to present a version of events rather than a coherent story. It is both trying to cram too much ‘fact’ in and then becoming rather unconvincing. Historical narrative or hysterical narrative ?

As is usual in these things no one is ever really short of money, there is always enough to go to the pub and most seem to have cars. In my memory almost no one who was a student from an ‘ordinary’ background had a car in those days. Even a phone was not always available in a typical shared house or flat. I never had a phone until 1980. And another thing, they are almost always talking about politics. Granted this was more widely the case in that period among the educated young, but not at the expense of anything else. There is a curious lack of day to day talk, what about music, football, films, the stuff people talk about when not making a statement ? 

I could have done without all the mooning about by the older versions of the characters in the present which adds little if nothing. Never mind, it is a half-way decent and overdue attempt to make a piece of intelligent drama set in the 70’s - 80’s, but do not confuse it with anything even close to the truth. I accept there can be no definitive version of a period and that as a character based traditional drama it neatly avoids any attempt to be a fuller or more incisive record of events. So as far as it goes it is fairly good, my worries are that it still smacks of being written by a committee, manages to avoid too much contention and wants too hard to cover all so-called minority interests while not upsetting anyone. And one glaring factual omission : I did not see a single pair of flares.