OLYMPIC CLAMPDOWN

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.

HALF-DEAD FOOTBALLERS & BOGUS REVERENCE

A heart attack suffered during a game of football is a rare occurrence and clearly one that is going to create a good deal of attention given the obsessive coverage of the mainstream media and seeming inexhaustible interest that much of the public take in the game. It is slightly surprising that it does not happen more often in the intensely physical world of professional sport. I noted it but knowing that a Premier League footballer would be given immediate care and attention hardly considered it to be of any great significance, people suffer heart attacks every day, albeit not usually live on air. It turns out that he survived and there was even a cardiologist in the crowd who, once he managed to get past the security guards which at first blocked his attempt to help, was crucial in keeping him alive.

Subsequently there were two developments both of which are typical of the hysteria, hyperbole and banal, bogus emotional rhetoric that inflates this ridiculous giant balloon of pseudo-serious populist pomposity which surrounds what was once a simple game of football. First there was the endless stream of people from the football ‘community’ ( shouldn’t that be business ? ) falling over themselves to make it clear how shocked they were and that the event ‘put football into perspective.’ This implies that the importance of football is normally not in perspective, so if not, why not ? The over familiar phrases of ’ our hearts go out to his family and loved ones’ or ’our thoughts are with him’ that are trotted out with all the meaning and conviction of the lines in a birthday card are surely more about gaining approval for those that queue up to be quoted and take the opportunity to give the sport the semblance of being a moral enterprise.

Then there was the less considered and stage managed response of someone watching on TV who made some instant comments on Twitter. This was not so reverential and certainly could be seen as offensive if one knew the player personally and were for some reason reading Twitter at the time of the incident. This provoked reaction from others on Twitter, almost all hostile, as far as I am aware, and somehow it got picked out from all the millions of other bits of irrelevant comment and inanity and the man who posted the offensive remarks was arrested and then sentenced to 56 days in jail.

To make a bit of a leap here there is plenty of stuff printed every day in the mainstream media that I take exception to, one could say I find offensive, and is presented with considerably more authority than a random Tweet. The BBC publishes their versions of events, usually without an editorial tagline, thus with no one as specific author, which I frequently totally disagree with. To make any comment that does not meet with their own editorial approval means it will not be published. I find their reverential attitude to sportsmen and women highly irritating. The fact that someone made one or two clearly ill judged comments on a platform that is not so closely policed and that were coming from a place much closer to reality of actual football banter was branded as something close to sacrilegious.

I am not saying all football banter is ’acceptable’ but it is what it is, it is outside of anything remotely like normal reasoned discourse. That is the whole point, and to somehow police it, while at the same time those in charge of the game and those who want to be associated with it for their own political reasons, mouth platitudes and cliché that are endlessly repeated, is a singularly pointless endeavour. Equally the term racist has become a crime on a par with GBH. Rabid footy fans will insult anyone in the opposing team strip, even if they have played five seasons for their own side previously, black or white. The fault lines are the colour of the shirt, primarily. And as for the football ‘community’ what is that exactly? Chelsea and Tottenham or Liverpool and Man United fans are obviously not part of a common community, that is the reality. It is a ridiculous use of the term that debases it as useful expression.

The fact that this is so is a poor reflection on the actual community. The absurd tribal allegiances that some people will adopt in the absence of anything better to believe in than a bunch of vastly overpaid, over-rated footballers who are no more than mercenary employees of privately owned companies trading under the brands of what were once football clubs are nothing to admire. To fiercely promote this rivalry and profiting from it and then turn around and be both sanctimonious and censorious is hypocritical in the extreme.