A Tory drama for today

by Ben Soton

 Roadkill: 4-part mini-series (2020) on BBC1 and currently also available on BBC iPlayer. Written and created by David Hare. Director: Michael Keillor. Stars: Hugh Laurie, Millie Brady, Helen McCrory, Saskia Reeves, Patricia Hodge, Olivia Vinall, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Sarah Greene, Iain De Caestecker, Danny Ashok.

In few political dramas does the Prime Minister state their allegiance. Roadkill, the BBC’s latest Sunday Night political drama, is an exception, where Prime Minister Dawn Ellison (played by Helen McCrory) openly states she is a Conservative. This is perhaps not surprising because its creator, the veteran playwright David Hare, has never shied away from the theme of contemporary politics in his dramas.
Hugh Laurie plays the up and coming Cabinet Minister Peter Lawrence. Laurie has come a long way since the nineties, where he was typecast as playing well-off thick people; notably Bertie Wooster in Jeeves and Wooster and the Prince Regent in Blackadder. Recently Laurie has successfully played a number of serious multifaceted characters, such as the arms dealer Richard Roper in John Le Carre’s The Night Manager.
   Television drama reflects reality. Also, politicians, and for that matter ordinary mortals, have skeletons in their cupboards. This includes having had sex with people they were not married to – tell me something I don’t know! In Roadkill, however, Dawn Ellison takes a very high-handed view. Against Lawrence at least, who has some very big, as yet undecomposed, skeletons in several cupboards.
  The Great Offices of State, in this country are Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary. Which is why Lawrence is disappointed when offered the post of Justice Secretary. Like all politicians Lawrence wants to be Foreign Secretary when in fact he’s after the premiership. As a result, the Prime Minister sees him as a threat and uses his skeletons against him.
  Roadkill also plays into myths the establishment would like us to believe. Lawrence is a ‘man of the people’, who allegedly worked his way up from humble origins. Due the warped right-wing narrative however, being a ‘man of the people’ goes hand in hand with being an NHS-privatising, Trump supporting neo-con.
  Being left-wing, on the other hand, means coming from Hampstead, frequenting dinner parties and supporting the European Union , a narrative with its origins in the Brexit debate. A debate from which the real left, who have no time for NHS privatisation or the EU’s neo-liberal, imperialist trading bloc were largely excluded. Lawrence also has a slot on “AlltalkRadio”, intended to be a parody of the far-right radio station TalkRadio that regularly parrots nonsense about the upper-class being an oppressed minority. They also delve into comedy however, when they call the fake-left dilettante Owen Jones a Stalinist.
  The drama also touches on some of the contradictions within conservatism. There has always been a conflict between those who simply want to preserve the status quo and whose mindset is based on nostalgia, whilst on the other hand there are those who believe in the marketisation of every possible area of society including the Health Service. Peter Lawrence is very much of the later persuasion. A few years ago, Tories in Winchester were divided over the sale of the local bus station; the discussion, which I understand may have involved an element of corruption, resulted in a local Tory finding himself in a mental health facility. Will Lawrence experience the same fate – it couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.

Do they mean us?

by Ben Soton

Us. Based on the book by David Nicholls. Four-part television comedy series, shown from 20th September at 9pm on BBC1; currently available on BBC iPlayer. Director: Geoffrey Sax. Producers: Roanna Benn, Greg Brenman and Tom Hollander. Starring: Tom Hollander and Saskia Reeves.

For some time, I have pointed out that the BBC tends to create dramas about people whose lives are totally detached from the rest of the population. The latest Sunday night drama, Us, is no exception. Based on a book written by David Nicholls, the drama centres around the Petersens, a well-off London couple facing divorce and their teenage son. Douglas (played by Tom Hollander) is a scientist, and his wife Connie (played by Saskia Reeves) is an artist; their son Albie (played by Tom Taylor) is about to start university.
    I am not one who argues that to be working-class you must reside in a council flat and exist on a diet of pie and mash and drink brown ale. Assuming Douglas and Connie receive enumeration in the form of wages they are indeed working class. The lifestyle of the characters in this drama is still a considerable improvement on that of the rest of us, however.
    Many of us go through divorce. It is usually an unpleasant experience, especially regarding children and the division of money and property. In Us, the Petersens go on a holiday across Europe, which to me seems a rather enjoyable, even a holiday-of-a-lifetime, experience.
    Us could be best described as a coming of middle-age drama where Douglas, who insists on sticking to a tight itinerary, discovers that he is basically boring and lacks spontaneity. Meanwhile, generational differences are exposed when Douglas wants to view historic buildings and Albie, who is arguably too old to be holiday with his parents, wants to make friends with the opposite sex.
    The drama is interlaced with flashbacks to the 1990s, when the couple first met. This is when I decided that Douglas and Connie were never compatible in the first place; however, in one flashback to the 1990s Douglas’ character impressed me. At a dinner party the young scientist is confronted by a New Age hippie who states that he does not like all these chemicals, Douglas points out that the human body is simply a collection of organic matter. This is something we should be aware of when confronted by anti-rational arguments that oppose scientific logic in the fight against COVID-19.
    Another argument for watching Us is that in an era of travel bans and quarantines, many of us are unlikely to experience a foreign holiday for some time. Travel is an important part of the drama and the idea behind it is that you can discover yourself at any age.

Animal Magic?

by Ben Soton

His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. BBC1 at 8pm on Sundays from 3^rd November.

BBC1’s latest Sunday night drama, His Dark Materials, is now on its fourth episode. An adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy consisting of The Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, this is a fantasy set in a strange alternative reality; a dystopia ruled over by an authoritarian regime called the Magisterium, with analogies to the Catholic church or any system of domination and thought control.

This is the second attempt to put Pullman’s works on the screen; the 2007 film The Golden Compass, an adaptation of The Northern Lights, was considered a failure and criticised by some fans of the book. Secularist organisations claimed the book’s anti-religious message had been diluted whilst the religious lobbies predictably condemned it.

In this television adaptation, leading characters are played by Ruth Wilson as Mrs Coulter, James McAvoy as Lord Asriel and Dafne Keen as Lyra. 

In this strange world humans are accompanied by a daemon, some kind of alter-ego in animal form, and zeppelin-style balloons dominate the sky. The attention of the all-powerful Magisterium is drawn to Oxford, which is also the home of the story’s main character, an 11-year-old girl called Lyra.

Lyra holds a secret that could threaten the rule of the Magisterium. The story features a group of people known as Gyptians, a reference to gypsies, who form the world’s underclass. We also see characters travel between alternative realities, including our own. So far, we have seen the disappearance of Gyptian children and talk of a trip to the North Pole.  Large numbers of the Gyptian children have gone missing and they are gathering in London in search of them. Is the rule of the Magisterium under threat?

Pullman’s trilogy has been viewed as a re-telling of John Milton’s 17^th Century poem Paradise Lost. In fact the term ‘His Dark Materials’ features in Milton’s work. Whereas Paradise Lost tells the story of Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden by defying God’s instruction, Pullman’s work glorifies a young child who defies a petty-minded god-like institution, the Magisterium. For this reason, the book’s anti-religious and anti-clerical message has brought criticism from some Christian organisations; Bill Donahoe of the Catholic League in the USA described it as “Atheism for Kids”. On the other hand, the books have actually been endorsed by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who states the positives of opposing religious fundamentalism.

Pullman has a relevant message in today’s world. The power of religion is no longer what it was; however, we live in a world where information is controlled by powerful, billionaire-owned media network that presents a world view at complete odds with reality.

In the case of the anti-Semitism row within the Labour Party, we are now seeing lies presented as facts. Meanwhile the supposedly impartial BBC presents articles in the Tory newspapers as news stories in their own right.

Whilst over the last 30 years wealth and power have been concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, in Britain opposition is seriously limited with even the right to strike effectively illegal. When the head of the Magisterium enters our world, he would not feel out of place. We have our own Magisterium to deal with and if you are reading this paper you are playing a small part in the resistance.