When we saw the Grauniad doing their usual patronising nonsense towards the old BBC version of Edge of Darkness (as opposed to the new movie, famously described as a vigilante thriller by fat Irish tosser and Murdoch shill Eamonn Holmes earlier this week) we were spitting feathers over on Twitter And we weren't alone. Among those offended by the Guardian's 'if it's not the Wire it doesn't count' attitude was our old chum Frank Collins, acclaimed TV blogger and contributor to the Dr Who site Behind the Sofa. So we asked him for a couple of words on the nonsense they'd written. Instead he delivered this. We run it in full with great thanks to Frank, and the disclaimer that it's probably the only time you'll see anything quite as reasoned, intelligent and well written on TheThumbcast.com. Cheers Frank - you're making us look vaguely respectable. When “The Guardian's top 50 television dramas of all time” list ran on their TV&Radio Blog on the 12th January many commentators were quick to voice their incredulity that Edge Of Darkness, Troy Kennedy Martin’s groundbreaking nuclear thriller cum eco-parable from 1985 hadn’t made the list. To add insult to injury it was dismissed from the list, along with several other programmes, because only two of the TV critics indulging in this exercise had voted for it and “on the basis that these (programmes) were the hobby horses of fanatics”.
This obviously ruffled some feathers, including mine, and on the 20th January the TV&Radio Blog responded by including the series in its TV Club discussion. An analysis of the first episode of, what is considered by most discerning folk, a great drama using some rather tired and clichéd yardsticks was offered as some form of recompense to the already aggrieved.
Edge Of Darkness is now, without a doubt, preserved within that catch all descriptor of ‘archive television’, which these days seems to denote anything not made in the last five years. Well, at least nothing that matches up to The Wire, which The Guardian seems to believe is the ultimate television text in front of which all other television drama must prostrate itself and deem itself not worthy. If anything could be described as a ‘hobby horse of fanatics’ then it has to be The Wire. HBO’s much acclaimed drama has been the centre of attention of many mealy mouthed media suitors who have used it as an excuse to snobbishly look down their noses at those unfortunate social pariahs who either didn’t think it was that good or hadn’t watched it at all. A case of an over hyped Noughties drama used as a discriminating principle to sort the boys from the men when it comes to assessing all good television drama, then?
Edge Of Darkness and The Wire are chalk and cheese as far as their actual conception, production and execution are concerned. I’d argue they’re both very comfortably situated, and appreciated, within the continuum of ‘quality television’ but because one is made in the 1980s then it simply can’t be as good as the other, can it? TV Club reviewer John Crace seems to take the attitude that Edge Of Darkness is some doddery old pensioner that’s worth patronising on this occasion because its narrative moves more slowly, at best describing the first episode with, “There are no quick-cut scenes here. Budgets were larger and audiences less TV literate (or presumed to be), so each shot seems to last an age and the narrative develops leisurely.”
Surely, the shoe is on the other foot here? Most contemporary drama is edited within an inch of its life for fear of actually losing the precious viewer, A viewer often held hostage to fortune because many of today’s television dramas tend to believe that surface is preferable to depth. Narrative is often driven on by a series of short scenes somersaulting over each other to get to the moral lesson some 50 minutes later and accompanied with music cues that tell the audience what to feel at any given moment. Back in1985 we had decent enough attention spans, we were literate viewers and we were given an opportunity to feel on our own terms (after all, I was there). Edge Of Darkness was not about presuming the audience were tele-illiterates; quite the opposite if you look at how many critics of the time clearly saw it as an example of ‘quality television’ and how, as John Caughie in his BFI TV Classics: Edge Darkness (BFI 2007) notes, looking at the development of British television drama, it can be “seen stylistically as the result of a very productive creative tension between a popular television drama and a directors’ cinema.”
It was a critical and popular success (a rapid repeat on BBC1 after its original transmission on BBC2 was almost unheard of back in 1985) which any drama would give its eye teeth for these days, including The Wire (where, on transmission its critical success far outweighed the impact of its rather lacklustre viewing figures). I would also argue that even The Wire is fairly slow in comparison with other contemporaneous dramas (compare it to Fox’s hyperactive 24 for example) and it too is surely burdened by the same critical worthiness proscribed to Edge Of Darkness. Equally, Edge Of Darkness was lauded as much, by critics and academics, for its own radical approach to making drama.
I’m not sure what John Crace really expected. His critique is based on an assumption about the age of the programme and how it was made but without offering little other context. If you look at the Top 50 list there are plenty of other examples from television made in the same period that shows that this particular group of critics are happy to place Brideshead Revisited, surely one of the slowest paced and indulgent television dramas on the list, in second place below that drama ‘du jour’, The Sopranos. So when a programme was made shouldn’t really come into it and if you’re a decent enough TV critic then surely you should analyse a drama series based on how effective the actual drama is rather than use a description of “union meeting rooms, student bars, driving rain and soggy cigarettes” as what you think is significant in a television programme made in 1985.
Watching ‘old television’ is not always an exercise of finger pointing at how slow scenes are, how poor the production values are or how ‘retro’ it all seems. These should be contextual givens to be easily hurdled over and to offer them up as a supposedly decent analysis in lieu of any proper examination of why Edge Of Darkness is seen as ‘quality television’ seems rather condescending. Similarly, isn’t it a bit glib of John Crace to dismiss swathes of other 1980s drama with “was it just that everything else on TV at the time was a bit rubbish?” when putting Edge Of Darkness in its place in television history. Within the same period of its original broadcast we had Potter’s The Singing Detective, The Jewel In The Crown, The Life And Loves Of A She Devil and The Monocled Mutineer, Hardly a cultural desert. Memory is an unreliable witness, I’ll agree, and every decade is littered with dramas and comedies that don’t stand the test of time but to dismiss the entire output of the period is terribly shortsighted.
His worst sin is to criticise the drama’s imagery within the context of today’s rapid fire, blink and you’ll miss it, visual manipulation and to attach a meaning to some of the images that has clearly not been thought through. He dismisses the repetitive use of shots of the trains carrying radioactive material around the country as a simplistic signifier that “we are watching a serious eco-thriller”. John Caughie’s book about Edge Of Darkness offers us both an analysis of its visual and narrative significance that goes beyond those expectations:
“The train carrying the container runs through the narrative like the musical motif that accompanies it (Michael Kamen and Eric Clapton’s incidental music), a figurative image rather than a literal one, a recurrent metaphor without a narrative cause or effect, binding together London, the North and Northmoor.”
That train forms a direct line through the narrative, which is itself non-linear, is structurally entirely fitting with the messy paranoia of the conspiracy thriller mode, and pegs the chapters of the Edge Of Darkness novel together. It’s a single rhythmic note, a repeated meme, in the story and reflects the lead character Craven’s own one-track obsession in trying to piece the convoluted story together.
Edge Of Darkness was a breakthrough for television drama as it did symbolise the move away from the theatrically styled ‘single play’, a standard trope of British television production, and towards a form of television drama that was more cinematic and more novelistic in its approach to narrative and the possibilities of the television medium. Historically, it also synthesised within its political thriller and eco parable format the political landscape of Britain stretching from the mid -1960s to the mid-1980s. It’s the lasting statement of Troy Kennedy Martin, a writer who championed an auteur form of television that would match similar forms within cinema.
Rightly, Crace does praise the first episode, particularly its atmosphere and the central performance from Bob Peck but his review of the episode is problematic when you seek to analyse Edge Of Darkness as a whole. By its nature the series is novelistic, with distinct chapters, and it reveals its narrative and visual pleasures by necessitating a complete viewing of all six episodes. Crace’s review is somewhat reflective of similar reviews in 1985 when a weekly episode-by-episode viewing (no PVRs or BBC iPlayer existed then) generated as many negative reviews as there were positive. What Crace does ultimately flag up is the problematic act of reviewing television made nearly 25 years ago, how dramas must be judged on their own merits without the baggage of comparison to today’s glossy production standards and how, in the end, a critic can communicate to readers why a drama made in 1985 retains the accolade of ‘quality television’.
Whilst I wouldn’t expect him to pursue the likely perceived pretentiousness of John Caughie’s in depth academic analysis, by simply trotting out a review that sums up the first episode as ‘it’s so 80s, it’s slow and there are too many shots of trains in it’ you won’t convince anyone wondering what the fuss is about to go and watch a brilliant piece of British television drama.
