Kathryn Flett on television: Mutual Friends, BBC1 | My Zinc Bed, ...

Tag : zinc

What she watched:
Mutual Friends BBC1
My Zinc Bed BBC2
Six Days One June BBC1
Ah, yes, here we go... the opening moments of Mutual Friends (BBC1), and right on cue we have The Chaotic Family Breakfast -comedy-drama visual shorthand for 'a busy middle-class professionalsuburban family'. Depending on the size of the kitchen and thefridge, and whether or not the latter is covered in magnets andchildren's 'art' or just stains, it could just as easily be saying'busy unemployed urban family', but the point is to establish thatwe will shortly be taken on a hurtling journey from scene to sceneand house to house, establishing who's who and why, during whichthere will be implausible attempts to make you laugh, cry and (atleast for those of us with a low tolerance for this sort of stuff)wonder which of the selection of very decent actors rounded up forour viewing delectation will be the first to appear in:
a) Jack and the Beanstalk in Tunbridge Wells
b) I'm a Celebrity...
c) The NOTW, for shagging a fellow cast member.
So clearly I'm not a huge fan of this mutant sub-genre, which, ifyou like your drama dramatic and your comedy comedic, tends notonly to fail on both counts but invariably feels like Big Mac TV -a one-off might be a secret guilty treat but two in quicksuccession will probably make you sick. Having said that, I'm notentirely immune (Cold Feet won me over eventually), but you do haveto be in the mood, and last week I wasn't, for all sorts ofreasons.
But even though I searched the schedules in vain for somethingsuitably envelope-pushing - a remake of Rashomon set in Newcastlewould have suited my mood - there are many very much worseprospects than an hour in the company of Marc Warren, AlexanderArmstrong, Keeley Hawes and Sarah Alexander.
So, to kick it all off there was a comedy-dramacide (Carl, thecatalyst, jumps in front of a train), a sub- Richard Curtis funeral(ie, the com and the dram are deployed equally heavy-handedly butsadly without the benefit of swearing) and a wake at whichconfessions were scattered like confetti. And it must be said thata wake with confetti is precisely the kind of thing that happens ina comedy-drama, though not actually this one. With Marc Warrenhamming it up furiously and Armstrong at his most irritatinglyPimms o'clock-ish, Mutual Friends attempted to meld its themes ofdeath, marital betrayal and imminent financial ruin with exchangessuch as the following:
(Small boy to recently widowed middle-aged woman) 'Is Uncle Carl inheaven?'
'Yes, darling, he is.'
'Good, now he won't be able to shag mummy any more!'
But in attempting to be all things to all viewers it failed,occasionally rather contemptibly, even if its director does knowher way around definitively chaotic kitchens, courtesy ofShameless.
I don't know if it's just me, but this kind of stuff, which mighthave provided a bit of light relief six months ago, now seemsawkwardly out of step with these difficult times. As the nightsdraw in and the economy doesn't so much falter as suffer a stroke,we definitely want as much comedy as we can get - laugh-out-loud,side-splitting, as-naughty-and-dark-as-you-like, envelope-pushinghilariousness - and drama that is brave and moving, sumptuouslylovely to look at and utterly escapist, but we don't really wantboth of them to meet in a dark alley, pull a knife on each otherand simultaneously expire like metaphorical Montagues and Capulets.
So, with alacrity, to My Zinc Bed (BBC2) which, being an adaptation of a play by David Hare, oozedfull-blown squeaky-boards and 'Can-you-hear-me-in-the-Gods?' Dramawith a capital D. I've said on numerous previous occasions that Iam not a fan of theatrical drama being turned into telly because itinvariably results in something even more unwatchably pretentiousthan a film by Stephen Poliakoff. But David Hare is not Poliakoff -and in all the right ways - so you can't blame him if somebodywants to adapt his work for TV, especially when you factor inplayers of the calibre of Jonathan Pryce, Paddy Considine and UmaThurman.
Uma Thurman on the telly. I don't know about you, but she's thereason I tuned in. To say the camera loves Uma Thurman is likesaying Big Brother housemates like a bit of attention. We don't getsuch luminous beauty on the box every day, and frankly it wouldtake a lot more than 70 minutes before I got bored of looking atit, even though I can think of better ways to deploy her. Uma everyday on Countdown? Bring it on...
So although the casting of Thurman as Elsa was a masterstroke whichnegated the need for much in the way of plot, there was one, whichis presumably why she signed up. Pryce played Victor Quinn, a richsvengali who had picked Elsa up from the floor of a bar inCopenhagen when she was dead-drunk and spirited her away to becomehis sober wife, which - no disrespect to Pryce - was pretty muchthe only way he could have pulled it off, even taking into accounthis gorgeous Nash house in Regent's Park.
Now a recovering alcoholic, Elsa rattled around being bored andrich, while her husband ran something in the City and, for noapparent reason, turned an interview with a recovering alcoholicpoet and writer, Paul (Considine), whose sobriety had gifted himwriter's block, into a job interview, employing him to writecreative business-speak to gild Victor's corporate lily. WhileVictor taunted Paul with the perfect margarita, and Elsa lookedequally longingly at Paul, there was, what with the prospect ofwagons being fallen off, inevitably trouble ahead. This being TheTheatre, it was a process which involved even more talking thandrinking, but it was quality dialogue:
'I'm a recovering alcoholic. I can't write, I'm blocked. What makesme write? Anger. And I have to avoid anger...' Paul told Elsa.
'You're not addicted to alcohol, you're addicted to blame,' sheretorted.
The theme was whether it is better to be drunk and creative orsober and blocked, and about whether love is merely anothermanifestation of addiction, all played out against a backdrop ofJackson Pollocks and pale Thurman-ish orchids placed on occasionaltables just so, without a chaotic kitchen in sight - an uncluttered'stage' which allowed space for dialogue to be uncorked and pouredout in stiff trebles with plenty of salt around the rim of theglass.
I could have hated it - fully expected to - but even whendistracted by Elsa's wardrobe (was it courtesy of Nicole Farhi, akaMrs David Hare?), I found myself enthralled. Perhaps it's only whenyou've been bludgeoned by a comedy-drama that takes big themes andreduces them to pratfalls dressed by Boden and set to a bossanovabeat that you can really appreciate the TV equivalent of designerdialogue and Mozart.
My Sky+ conspired against me, so the only one of Hugo Blick's threeconsecutive Last Word Monologues I managed to catch was Six Days One June (BBC1), in which Rhys Ifans played a Welsh farmer seeking a wife.In much the same way that the first few minutes of seeing UmaThurman in My Zinc Bed were all about her beauty and mega-wattcelebrity (until you realised that, hell, the woman can act) so SixDays One June was momentarily hijacked by Ifans's own weirdcelebrity trajectory: poor Ifans is acting up a storm, and all Icould think about was the fact that he'd been dumped by SiennaMiller in favour of Balthazar Getty.
But it didn't last long, thankfully, because Ifans is as 'proper'an actor as Thurman (and almost as blond), and so I stoppedworrying about whether or not he'd been dumped by phone or text andlet him get on with the business of being Hugh, whose search for amissus was revealed as half-hearted at best when we learned that,in six days one June, Hugh had briefly loved an antipodean sheepshearer who, in the manner of antipodean sheep shearers, wasn't awoman.
This Brokeback in the Valleys could have prompted a snigger - andof course a Welshman awkwardly confessing his emotions to cameraimmediately recalled Rob Brydon in Marion and Geoff - but it was toBlick's and Ifans's credit that Six Days One June was engaging andmoving in its own right, while Hugh's rural bachelor kitchen, withits exposed brickwork and kettle on the hob, was, it should benoted, equally beautifully cast. Needlework
In the latest of C4's feisty-femmedocs, Super Botox Me , the likeable, funny journalist Kate Spicer investigated theseductive world of Botox and beyond. At 39, and with an attractivebut undeniably lived-in face, a combination of journalisticcuriosity and pure vanity led her to have 40 Botox injections andsomething called a Fraxel Laser Facial, which left her looking asif she'd been blowtorched by a Dalek.
Spicer was amusing and honest about her ambivalence towardsprocedures which were painful but also painfully addictive. Theresults were fabulous, knocking five years off her age, which, foryour average female viewer of a certain age, was the problem. Beinga wuss about needles, I am still stemming the tsunami of time withexcellent haircuts, pots of SK-II skin cream and what I call'Photox': picture-retouching. But who am I kidding? For my 45thbirthday I'd be happy enough to look like Kate Spicer's Before,never mind her Afters.