tellymole.com

…why would you inflict such a fucking horrible TV programme on the nation?

It’s not often that I hate something within 30 seconds of watching it. But Fresh Ones’ BBC commission, ’Delicious Miss Dahl’ actually made me want to throw a brick through the TV, and one of her stupid little twee sash windows.

Floating around her faux-rustic designer kitchen, Dahl basically mimics a Nigella-esque food and literary wank-a-thon for the Laura Ashley brigade. I hated it so much that my hands are literally shaking with rage. I HATED this programme!

Now, some of my frustration with this self-indulgent, pretentious piece of shit is probably borne out of of the fact that I probably don’t fit into the target audience. Who is that, though? I can’t see who is actually going to have a use for the this programme. The recipes aren’t complex or original. We’re not seeing anything that anyone with half an ounce of cooking motivation hasn’t already done before. Chicken soup, bubble and squeak, some sort of salad thing. Yet, we’re treated to what seemed like about four hours of her unbelievably pompous babble on “how Winnie the Pooh is the embodiment of melancholy…” WHAT?? What the hell are you talking about? What the fuck do you even know about being melancholy anyway? Do you have a feeling of melancholy because you scratched your Maserati? Do you you feel a bit down because that rural health-food bistro had run out of your favorite elderflower juice? Fuck off. A few moments later, Dahl goes on to talk about how bubble-and-squeak from a ‘greasy spoon’ help to cure her first hangover… said with such a plum, I actually laughed. They don’t even have proper greasy spoons in Barnes or Oxfordshire villages, anyway. 

I don’t mind the floaty, lightweight composition of this programme so much. It’s shot well, it looks ‘nice’ (apart from the self-important links between recipes.. heavily-graded dirty frames shot through leaves, of Sophie, staring doe-eyed into space while loosly grasping a chunky, highly obscure piece of 19th century literature.)  It could be a good little programme. I can even put up with the fact that the thing is draped with a nauseating soundtrack.. exactly what I’d expect to find in a 30-something, middle-class woman’s CD rack - looking at the credits confirms that theme too.. a real floral estrogen-fest.

But I just can’t live with Dahl’s infuriating dialogue, though.  It’s pretencious, it’s sickly, it’s not patricularly helpful. I don’t care that she’s concocting a ‘bar room brawl’ of flavors or if she’s a ‘mushroom fiend’. That kind of talk actually offends me.

So this is a fairly short review of this programme, but as always - my main motivation for writing is when something really irritates me and I need to vent before doing some physical damage to my TV. To finish I’d like to put out a plea. Please. Do NOT re-commission this programme. If I ever accidentally stumble across it again, as I did today, it might actually ruin a decent chunk of my day. It’s that bad.

What I would like to see is a 1×60 of Sophie being force-fed McDonalds, made to live in a new-build studio flat in Thamesmead with a up-and-coming ‘grime’ MC called 8-Ball. She’d only be allowed to read Nuts magazine, wear clothes from New Look and drive an 11-year old Ford Fiesta. Working title, something like “Living Without Jus”.

I’ll probably make a few enemies when I say this, but in my opinion the vast majority of UK dramas are completely shit. Sure, you might be able to pull out a few exceptions here and there, but the fact of the matter is… when it comes to getting our fix of edgy, original, well-written, gripping (insert remainder of wish-list here) dramas, then we turn to America. And let’s face it, they do it remarkably well.

For any of those who are in denial about this fact, let’s just see what we’re dealing with here. Not that all of these US-offerings are my cup of tea, but let’s put our Being Human next to Ghost Whisperer, The Bill next to, well - pick a US crime drama (Law & Order, CSI, Cold Case, Without a Trace). Okay, maybe not The Bill.. it’s more of a soap. Life on Mars then. We’d have to enter Dr Who up against the likes of any of the modern Star Trek incarnations or maybe Supernatural or Heroes. Look at any of our offerings in recent years; Primeval, Survivors, The Hustle… I really can’t be arsed to list any more. Safe to say, for me, none of them cut it. And that’s when you put them up against the more ’sausage-factory’-like American shows. Throw amazing pieces of work like The Wire and The Sopranos into the mix and what we’re churning out becomes a laughing stock.

What’s wrong with them, you might ask? Actually, I hope you’re not asking that. I hope you know yourself that a good, strong UK drama series is something rarely seen. But for those of you who can’t put your finger on it… PRODUCTION VALUES warrants block capitals because its the first thing I notice when I’m watching another rubbish UK drama. I notice it from the opening establishing shots, from the unoriginal Audio Networks stock music, set design, lighting… it all seems to have been done on the cheap.

The other problem with watching a homegrown drama is that you know that you’re never really going to be able to get your teeth into it. 6 or 8 episodes is all you’re going to get.. 10 and you’re laughing, but that’s rare. The characters are therefore shallow, you don’t engage with them - you don’t care about them and when they finally disappear, you’ve forgotten about them as soon as the Series Producer’s credit is up. This past decade has been a wonderful time for drama fans.. but only because David Chase and David Simon have had me lost in their respective worlds for literally hundreds of hours of some of the best drama I’ve ever seen.

So. Another rant by The Mole? No. Well, in part, yes - I had to have a little pop at UK drama before making my main point. Taking all of the above into account and knowing what I know and feel about this country’s position in the drama-making industry.. if you’d said to me about a year ago; “Hey, they’re making a UK version of ‘Law and Order’, Bradley Walsh is playing the lead role” - I would have said… wait.. I did say; ”Bollocks to that”.  However, that was a year ago and tonight I found myself infront of the TV when it came on. To say I’m a fan on the original franchise is probably going to far, but I ‘like’ it. It’s a good formula. I like the way it looks and the stories are decent enough to kill an hour. I was expecting the UK version to be a complete pile of horse shit.

Wrong.

I was actually extremely surprised. It looked great. Walsh was decent. The story was good. The London backdrop was nicely integrated with the episode. I really, really liked it. The little things impressed me, the geeky details. The camera work was true to the original, shakey - slightly desaturated colours with a nice shallow depth-of-field. Good lighting, good locations. Usually when London is shot this beautifully you have the annoyance of it being in a Hollywood movie where it’s all red phoneboxes, bobbies, shots of Big Ben with 80’s-style two-tone sirens in the background. Not here, this was a well shot, modern London.

Aside from the seemingly high produciton values, the script (which on further research is apparently a re-hash of some of the best US episodes converted to UK scenarios) was also true to the original franchise, allowing the main players’ characters to develop over time but still giving you a nice bite-size brodcast hour’s arc with which to get your teeth into. The one downside to this Dick Wolf creation is that the tight-arses over at ITV, in true British fashion, have limited it to 7 episodes for the first series, 6 for the second. So it’s not all good news.

But, as this post’s title suggests… I’m taking this series as a major positive. Chris Chibnall (Torchwood, Doctor Who, Life on Mars) has come good on this one, picking up Exec and Writer credits on the series (No doubt under the watchful gaze of his overlord, Dick Wolf). He has dragged with him a bunch of producer and director types from the desperately awful titles above, which goes to show that if you SHOW British drama producers how to do it, they can actually get on with it and churn out something pretty decent…

..Think I’m being harsh? Go and pick up a DVD of Doctor Who, which looks like it’s been shot on the cheapest HDCAM they could find, in a corner of TC2 with a set made entirely of cladded polystyrene before being edited by retarded chimps, graded by a 19-year old work experience boy and some cheap explosions whacked on with After Effects for good measure. The sad thing is… I’m not actually far off!

Then watch this: Not ground-breaking. Not necessarily your cuppa, but well-made British drama. Not too cheesy. Not too cheap. Let’s just hope someone notices and the quality of this ITV programme becomes a benchmark.