Lockdown, Lowdown from Scotland…
By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart
British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV.
And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…
Between Netflix and Amazon Prime, Sky Go and the various platforms that terrestrial TV in the UK uses to archive their programs, there has been a lot to watch. Lockdown has given us the opportunity to go back, put on the kettle and remind ourselves of just how good the programs of the past were.
Or has it?
The opportunity to see how things evolve has been further enhanced by the ability to do the one thing we could not all those years ago – binge watch! In the past, series were stuck on weekly, with the water cooler moments designed round the cliff-hanger of the last episode which made you want to watch the following week.
It was great stuff. It was regimented and we all loved the way it meant that at a certain time, on a particular day, the family or all our friends sat to watch something and then had to wait till we could phone or talk directly to people all about it the next day! There were no instant opinions.
But it was also deeply frustrating.
Leaving us hanging for seven days meant we could over discuss what had happened and come up with outlandish scenarios that were never likely to happen. Until they sometimes did, and we castigated the program with, “that would NEVER happen!”
Oh, and if we forgot it was on, we missed it.
Until the days of bulky VHS video recorders we either sat and watched it “live” or had to pretend we saw it when it was poured over.
And so, our memories were tested. Mine certainly was.
Due to lockdown, I have indulged on revisiting a few long running series on the BBC i-Player – as well as on other platforms as mentioned above! I have perhaps, even over indulged. Recently it has been to watch Spooks or Mi-5 as it is called in certain countries.
It ran for 10 seasons, from 2002 to 2011 with one spin off and one film.
It introduced me to Mathew Macfadyen, Rupert Penry-Jones, Keeley Hawkes, Hermione Norris and so many more.
I had a memory of one episode, and thought it was the first episode which saw one of the most shocking television events – a death so gruesome that it was seared into my brain.
Now, more known for wining Celebrity MasterChef and snagging one of the major presenters as her husband Lisa Faulkner was, in 2002, the subject of the largest number of complaints that year to the Broadcasting Standards Commission.
Traditionally in the UK, there is the “watershed” of 9pm where parents have been warned that anything before then was family viewing.
After that time the kids needed to be in bed.
In the second episode, not the first as I had thought, of this long running serial, character Helen Flynn died. That in itself was not shocking.
Characters in any crime/spy related drama often had short shelf lives. The fact that she was introduced in the first episode as a main character meant it made us sit up and pay attention.
The fact that she goes undercover in the second episode, having been an admin person was never seriously seen as an issue. The way characters would start with being in a menial job and then brought into the drama to challenge audience prejudice was standard fare. So, she used to be in the typing pool and now she is undercover trying to pretend she is a swinging wife as they chase a racist terrorist. All seems plausible enough. We can all get on board with all of that – can’t we?
Well, we did.
And then came the shock. She and her pretend husband, Mathew Macfadyen as MI5 officer, Tom, are kidnapped. The racist organizer has them in a restaurant and takes them into the kitchen. Unable to get them to confess he takes Lisa’s character’s hand and puts it into the deep fat fryer.
It is on.
Terrifying enough, you think as she screams, and we wince.
They still don’t tell.
He then sticks her face in it.
Scream, squeal, shout and recoil!
The sensibilities of the British population were outraged, and people complained bitterly. Of course, this was before the internet, so they wrote letters, tutted at the screen and moaned in supermarket queues. Outrage there was. Eight more seasons followed though they never quite got to the same level of controversy thereafter.
It’s a great series to watch and I am now well into season two. The end of season one was exceptional and left us with the kind of cliff hanger that defined the best of British drama.
And so I am off to the BBC i-player for the next episode – till next time… Bye for now…
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