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My youngest son at the age of 21 decided to come and live with me, having fallen out with his then girlfriend with whom he was living. This was intended as a temporary measure which was to last 4 years, one house move, require him to have met his future wife and me, to get offered a contract in the US !

But for all that, he is good company and we shared, probably still do, an interest in high quality drama no doubt, something to do with his childhood ! Over those few years we shared many moments; Michael introduced me to Ronin, Jackie Brown, LA Confidential and we shared Shawshank, Pulp Fiction, Leon, Saving Private Ryan and so on. We were already hooked on ER, ‘discovered’ The Sopranos, The West Wing, Six Feet Under and even for a time, enjoyed NYPD Blue but…

Not The Same

Due to a generation difference naturally our ‘cultural memories’ of both time and place are totally different, so too ultimately are our personal tastes. But never-the-less, out of mutual respect we ‘tolerated’ and tried to engage in each other’s cultural idiosyncrasies, enjoyed the ‘common ground’ and learned to look at things and discuss them quite objectively.

I would also add that because my life then as today was spent in looking at PC Monitors, I was not a great TV fan so, not bothered whether I watched or not although, I would make specific time slots for programmes I liked. One of these was an American cop drama called NYPD Blue and had a main character called “Sipiwitz” played by an actor called Franz Joseph (I think). Although along the way, we hadn’t discussed it, one evening whilst watching this we came to the same conclusion, it just wasn’t worth watching any more.

In & Out of Character

It was my Son who in the case of NYPD pointed out the “problem” with the character Sipiwitz was that due to the script, ‘he’ was totally inconsistent with normal human behaviour. Okay and as we know, in the States, all drama series are written by teams of copyrighters and these teams will vary from one series to another on the same programme so, there will be the odd ‘continuity problem’ however… Without boring you with a drama plot I can barely remember, the simple fact was that the ‘character’ would have specific and consistent behaviour patterns.

Whilst in the real world, we all do have repeat behaviour patterns such as being attracted to the same type of person which you could describe as “character based” stuff embedded within us but, we also have “learned behaviour” which is the product of our life experiences so that after grabbing a red hot poker once, we tend not to do it again. Over the years, I have known and had to deal with some emotionally erratic people but oddly over a period of time, even they become highly consistent and predictable in their behaviour patterns. Why any script writer or author, would ignore these basic facts so that they write behaviour which is totally “out of character” into a script, is hard to understand.

Why Does it Matter ?

I think that it does because the one thing that makes us watch a drama in the first place and continue to watch further episodes is that the characters are plausible and whether they are “flawed” or not as human beings, we engage with them and in a sense “care about them”. Now this might be because we recognize something of ourselves or the people we know, in them but equally could be because we “aspire” to be like them.

However you look at it, the one thing that does and has always worked is a “consistency” in the characters being portrayed because from that flows the “credibility” of their actions plus, the credibility of the whole drama whether play, film or TV soap. The acid test is to look at the scribblings of Bill the Bard from Stratford Upon Avon, I cannot think of a play or characters within any of his plays which are inconsistent and therefore undermine the whole drama.

I can remember a conversation with a successful owner of restaurants and bars concerning interior design and design “themes”. He employed professional designers and never claimed any design expertise but was a stickler for details, the right door furniture, light fittings and so on, his reason based upon experience was that the whole venue had to look exactly right if it was to succeed. Although few of his customers would be interior design experts, if something was wrong be it this or that, they might not be able to say that it is the “wrong light fittings” for the theme but subconsciously, they would know that something is not quite right and one negative leads to another…

Last Bank Holiday

Although an absence of TV watching wouldn’t bother me, I will spend some time during an evening watching the odd programme but mainly to keep my 87 year old Mother company. There were two programmes that I will mention, the first “Ultimate Force” which is a drama series about the SAS is hilarious, if the SAS was actually like this, they would have been disbanded decades ago because of an inability to shoot straight ! I suspect that it isn’t meant to be taken that seriously, more a case of a given time slot to fill, a set budget and trying to build a script that bridges the two rather than anything to do with real covert operations.

There is a BBC series called “Waking the Dead” which is about a Police Cold Case Unit and although an interesting idea, the lead character is someone you would slap frequently if ever you had the misfortune to work with someone like him. The script has this character as a bad tempered person who mainly shouts at people and never listens to anything anyone says. The actor who plays him Trevor Nunn is an experienced chap but these scripts have him looking like an over-acting idiot, the character just isn’t plausible.

However last Monday, it sort of fell into place with a drama called “Kiss of Death” and I really do wonder who thought that this was worth making using our TV Licence Fee. I watched this 90 minute bit of drivel in amazement, I have never seen anything so poor in years. It was some kind of Police Unit investigating a murder, severed limbs by the Thames but what made it totally unbelievable was that these “policemen and women” didn’t talk or listen to each other, all they did was shout at their colleagues. Rather like the SAS drama mentioned earlier, if this was the way the real Police acted, they would be disbanded as a health hazard.

It was only later I read that the writer behind this was Barbara Machin who is apparently responsible for “Waking the Dead” and that sort of fits as this author clearly believes that “real emotion” is communicated only by people screaming at each other incoherently, bet she lives in a fun environment ! There are some things that we do quite well in this country but these kind of drama series does not appear to be one. American TV produces a lot of dross but also quite a few gems too but the thing that does strike you is that even the worse of them is technically of a very high standard, we need to study and learn from this I would suggest.