On Heroes

I recently attended the last in this year's SPARKS workshops up in Yorkshire.  It's been six months of intensive work with 3 bunches of writers.  My lot were developing TV series, and a damned good job they did too. And the other groups were working on feature projects, creating a wonderfully diverse range of projects.

I did a brief talk on one of my favourite shows, Heroes. Not everyone loves this show (Jeff Somers is agin it, and he's someone whose opinions I very much respect) but I find it exhilarating and fresh and, damn it all, wonderful.  But, as is always the way, when you have to teach a movie or a TV series,  you look at it with fresh eyes.

And what I discovered about Heroes, on a second viewing with notepad in hand, is how much of it is not great; and how little that matters. 

The stuff that's not great is, really, all the voiceover narration by the Mohinder character. On first hearing, it seems fine; but when you listen again, and focus in on the content - well, it's so much tripe really. It's all platitudes and generalisations, and doesn't advance the story. (And of course, almost all the of the 'science' that Mohinder spouts in his actual dialogue scenes is, um, pretty dodgy.)

And yet, this doesn't matter.  It doesn't matter because Mohinder's voiceover is there for a complex and subtle reason, and not because the narration is needed to move the story.  It was added, in fact, in post-production, always a sign of a panic last measure; and what it does is add style. 

There's a scene in Ep 3, which I screened, in which the Nikki character is burying some bodies in the desert.  (If you want to know why, you need to watch it.) It's classic thriller stuff, well shot admittedly, but very much the kind of scene you might get in any crime show.  So it could easily look, well, B movieish, or cheap tellyish.

But when the scene is played out with actor Sendhil Ramamurthy's beautifully spoken voiceover on top of it, it becomes special, and evocative, and stylised.  It's more than a woman burying bodies; it's a scene of sublimity and pathos.

This is one of the great tricks of the show; everything is stylised,  enhanced, 'more so.'  The colours are richer than life, with yellows and oranges and browns and fabulous set designs, and Indian streets stalls selling brightly coloured fruit, and shockingly bold shirts, and vividly rich lighting.  And the angles are cleverly chosen, bold and striking and disorienting, the shots develop swiftly and in a complex way, and every single shot has a three dimensional quality (something in the foreground, something in the background, something in the mid-ground, so the eye is constantly tantalised and entertained.) 

And the voiceover adds a whole level of stylisation on to this; it makes us aware that what we are watching is meant to be thought provoking and idea provoking and assumption provoking.  The voiceover teaches us how to 'read' what we are watching, in other words.

But Mohinder's prose, as I say, is painted on with a very broad brush; I have a feeling, really, that it was written in a hurry.  But I'm not carping, just observing; and the narration is spoken so beautifully that it's a pleasure to hear it, even if I often don't bother listening to it.

And I came away once more confirmed in my belief that American TV series are better than their British counterparts because they really really care about style, as much as they care about content.  Every great American show has its own visual aesthetic, its own style rules - from the jerky camera movements of NYPD Blue to the staccato explorations of urban New Jersey in The Sopranos, to the lush malice implicit in the cinematography of Desperate Housewives. Whereas British shows tend to be shot in one of two ways; cinematically (if it's high budget telly) and cheaply (if it's factory telly.)  But there's no real attempt to do what movie directors to - to create a unique visual look.  (Compare Spielberg's Minority Report, with Spielberg's ET, and compare them both to Spielberg's Schindler's List - they represent three totally different directorial 'looks'.)

After my brief talk to the SPARKS group,  we did a question and answer session, and it quickly emerged that Heroes  is a show which has really captured the imagination of almost all the writers present.  It's Marvel comics merged with prime-time US TV storytelling skills (Stan Lee even has a cameo as a coach driver.)  And it is, I would argue, one of the most visually beautiful TV shows ever made.

Later in the course of this residential weekend, we had a screening of the classic British film The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp, one of Powell and Pressburger's most outrageous, and funny, and satirical, and thought-provoking films. It features a very different type of hero - a moustachio'd Colonel Blimp who appears in the first scene as a figure of fun, and emerges after the film has told his story, as a man of romance, passion, and integrity, and heroism.  It's a homage to an old fashioned kind of British hero.

There are plans for another SPARKS workshop next year; I hope very much to be involved in it. 

On No More Bada Bing

Tonight was the UK screening of the last episode ever of The Sopranos.  After the US screening, some viewers wrote in demanding their subscription to HBO back, so bitterly disappointed were they by the final ep.  However, I found it well written, and moving, and intriguing.  Without giving too much away, I would just say that it has an 'open' ending, genuinely so.  But I wasn't disappointed at that; it's a show that's always been oblique, contrary, and unexpected, and to me it seems right that it ended that way.

The Sopranos is the show that broke all the rules - a genuinely hateful central character, vast amounts of subtextual storytelling, slow narrative pace, and character arcs that sometimes spanned years of real time. I loved the way that scenes would seem to ramble and lead nowhere, and yet would actually, and sneakily, advance the story. In one episode, Junior Soprano (Tony's Uncle) is teased during a golf match for his penchant for pleasuring ladies in a manner frowned upon by Italian Americans.  It's a throwaway moment; but this small incident sowed the seeds for Junior's later attempts to murder his own nephew.  Cunnilingus as a plot point; only in The Sopranos....

In some ways it was, for me, the most inconsistent of the great US TV series. Some eps were lame, some were pretentious; and even good eps (like the final ep) were sometimes marred by jerky bad editing, and poor matching of shots. But the characters were rich and gloriously awful and full of flaws; and the acting, always, was superb.

Why do we like Tony Soprano? Is it because he kills people? Is it because his life is more interesting than ours? Or is it because his life is actually just as crap and boring as everyone else's?

It's a show which managed to have its cake and eat it; it made us love and admire Tony and root for him to win, and it also made us despise his petty small mindedness, his bullying, his racism, his homophobia and his general nastiness.

In the movies, gangsters are glamorous; in real life, and in The Sopranos, gangsters are nasty little shits. And to be honest I've no idea how the show managed to make me despise and revile its main characters yet still draw me back week after week to watch them some more. 

The last ep ended with an RIP logo; the R was an upturned gun.  A nice final flourish. 

Now, what the hell else do I watch, when I want dark, resonant, bloodthirsty, gripping drama? 

On Buffy, and Vampires Slain

WHY I LOVE BUFFY

When I first started teaching screenwriting, I quickly learned the fundamental principle of teaching is to create a group dynamic; and the way to do that is, get them doing things. Even great orators (which I'm not) get annoying after a while. And the best way to learn is to listen a bit, then talk a bit, then do stuff, then talk about what went wrong...

And one of the simplest 'warm up' exercises for a group of would be television writers is to simply ask them what is their favourite show - ever. The one they'll stay home to watch, even when Dad is in a prison cell and needs to be bailed out.

The West Wing is a popular choice, among the many groups I've talked to. Smallville works for some people. The Sopranos is the answer many give; or Six Feet Under, or Spooks, or Shameless. It's rarer for anyone to name Eastenders or Coronation Street, but maybe that's because no one wants to admit to having such mainstream taste. (For many viewers, however, these are most emphatically their 'to die for' shows.)

When it's my turn to talk, I sometimes bluff and talk about The West Wing or When the Boat Comes In, or The Shield. But usually I admit the truth: the best ever show, for me, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Of course, I have to admit there are better and more profound television dramas but - er, actually no I don't admit anything of the sort! It's brilliantly written, brilliantly cast, brilliantly conceived, brilliantly sustained, extremely profound and resonant, and so damn sexy.

I wasn't a first generation Buffy viewer; when it first appeared I was caught up in life and career and couldn't see much of interest for me in a teen drama about a vampire slayer. Later, however, I watched the re-runs avidly and discovered a pure love for the series that no other series can evoke in me.

But why? That's the key question I ask myself, and the purpose of this blog. At some point, when there are more hours in the day, I want to write in depth about the series itself, and the relationship between Buffy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Coleridge wrote about the 'willing suspension of disbelief for the moment [which constitutes poetic faith]', and Buffy of course depends on a massive and extremely willing suspension of disbelief on the part of its viewers, and - anyway, that's for another day.)

But the question is: why? What does my (somewhat, in certain quarters) embarrassing passion for this teen show reveal about me? I like Power Rangers - but I wouldn't say so in front of a bunch of sharp-witted would be screenwriters. So what is it about Joss Whedon's Scooby gang that hooks me so?

Buffy is of course written with wit and savour and tang, which is something that matters a great deal to me (see the blog On Captain Jack Sparrow.) It has fast-paced storytelling and great narrative variety, which I love, and it has resonance and allegory, which I also adore. And it's funny as hell, which is a constant delight.

For me, though, deep down, when I come to really probe my own feelings, it's about bullying. Buffy is never bullied by peer pressure (or if she is, she learns a lesson fast); she's never bullied by jocks (she can beat the crap out of them) and she's never bullied by the real bullies, the vampires and demons who steal away young and sometimes not so young lives and who think they own the ****ing planet. Buffy looks so vulnerable and so sweet and so easily bullied; but in fact, she's a warrior.

I'm the opposite. I was always up for being bullied when I was Buffy's age. I wasn't the most obvious target, but I was most certainly a sitting duck. Once, I displayed a small amount of heroism and defied the class bully by shoving him feebly - then running away screaming with fear. He caught up with me, and I babbled in panic; then he shook my hand and befriended me. So I guess that counts as a happy ending. But all I remember was panic and indignity and not even being able to run away very fast.

Bullying in school is a terrible thing; but later in life, the forms of bullying get sneakier. Bullies use sarcasm, mockery, undermining, and authority to get their way. And I've lost track of the number of times when I've crumbled and given in to someone who isn't particularly smart, or right in his/her opinions, but has the calm, authoritative, faintly patronising tone that allows 'Them' to bully 'Us'.

I've been bullied big-time, and small-time, and the secret to defying it is not to feel defeated, even if technically you are. Giving in because some has the power to sack you is sensible conduct; feeling small and inadequate and inferior is just dumb. That's the power we give to bullies, which we shouldn't.

Attitude is all. I remember when I tried to learn karate in a dojo in South London, with a charismatic working class karateka called Sensei George (the inspiration for Sensei Eddy, a minor character in Debatable Space.) Let's take it as read that I am hopeless at karate; the point is that the first time I sparred, I was kicked in the head and Sensei George sympathetically told me to stand aside and take a break. The second time I sparred, I was kicked in the head, and George roared at me, 'That was your ****ing fault Palmer!' And he was right. If you want to do karate, you have to either duck better, or not wince when you're kicked in the head. That's attitude, and it empowers.

These days, I duck better, and wince less. And I give short shrift to bullies. But all that took a long time for me to learn. So I would give anything to have done as Buffy does, when I was Buffy's age - to kick arse, fearlessly, and never to show fear.

So that's really why I love Buffy. I like it because it's exceptionally well made drama; I love it because part of me is hooked on wish-fulfillment drama that allows me to be what I'm not.

There, I've saved myself twenty years of therapy bills to acquire that insight about myself.

Now it's your turn...should you choose to accept the challenge.

Tell us why you love Buffy.

Don't synopsise the episodes or discuss the craft and the writing - just tell us what it is about you that makes you, that special person which you are, love Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Assuming that you do - though I guess I kind of think that anyone reading a blog by a current SF like myself will share that particular passion. Am I wrong?)

The trick here is - you have to avoid all tricks and tell the truth about yourself. Otherwise, what you say won't make sense.

It may be that your reasons for loving the show are similar to mine; or it may be that they are very different. But in telling me those reasons, you'll be revealing something about yourself. (Not TOO much! you can keep your darkest deepest secrets for the new blog I'm setting up at mydeepestdarkestsecretsrevealed.com).

You can use the Comments section beneath the blog to reply. And remember, I'm looking for something that's more than a quick throwaway response - I'm looking for something that other users of the site will read and savour and learn from.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and inner dreams...

On Being Betrayed by a Friend

Harry has been a very close and valued friend of mine for a number of years. I'm not blind to his many faults, but I've always regarded him as a man of integrity, and someone I could trust. So it came as a bitter blow to me when he calmly and coldly announced that he was personally responsible for the assassination of Princess Diana. 

Harry then went on to explain, with ruthless logic, that she had to die because she was a liability to the British state. And he showed no qualms or remorse as he carefully explained how the 'hit' was managed.

Then I noticed that Adam Carter was hiding a smile, and I began to wonder - was this a wind-up? My guess was confirmed when Harry  admitted that he was merely being ironical. Yes, he had been responsible for a worst-case-scenario exercise which explored ways of killing the Princess. But the death itself was an accident; not an MI5/MI6 conspiracy as some people foolishly believed.

My relief was mingled with chagrin, as I realised that I had once again got confused about the difference between reality and fiction...Because Harry Pearce is not in fact my friend. Nor have I ever met him; nor, in fact, does he exist.  He's a fictional character in the hit BBC series Spooks; and the Princess Diana speech came in a Howard Brenton scripted episode at the end of series 4. 

I've always admired Spooks since its first audacious series.  But it is the later series which really capture my imagination, when the show developed an effortless ease and a deadly cutting edge.  It's a show characterised by fabulously understated acting, in which a look or a grimace can speak a thousand volumes, and defined by high-octane storytelling in which twist follows twist and the energy level never dips.

I've been watching the show obsessively for the last few weeks, in preparation for a workshop in Bradford on film and television writing (organised by Hugo Heppel, of the enterprising regional screen agency, Screen Yorkshire.)  Normally I'm used to teaching groups of 3 or 4; but on this occasion I was addressing a lecture hall of 100 + keen would-be writers.  It was a nail-biting experience, but made easier because I shared the teaching load with the charismatic and fearless Simon Van Der Borgh, a screen writer, film analyst and teacher who (would you believe it! considering how amazingly young I look!!) was my student when I was a lecturer at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield.

Simon analysed film structure and showed clips from the movie Sideways; I analysed television drama structure, and showed the Princess Diana episode of Spooks in its entirety.  It was extraordinary to see how well the TV drama stood up to this kind of close scrutiny. The episode is virtually a stage play, taking place during a 'lockdown' in the series' standing set. And there's one prolonged scene which consists of a character (Zaf) talking us through how Diana died. There were no guns, no car chases, just one man talking and talking; but it was spell-binding...And the star of the episode was Lindsay Duncan,  who gave a masterclass in scary menace.

Harry argues that it's not possible for men in his business to have friends - you can only have 'colleagues you would die for.'  But so long as the show lasts, he'll continue to be my pal, and trusted guide through the evil machinations of global politics....