Don’t waste time on this stupid Game
Television, by Matt Rudd
Game of Thrones is like Marmite. Or, to be more specific, like an old jar of Marmite: a sticky, cloying, unmanageable mess that half the population can only be fond of because it reminds them of when they were spotty teenagers obsessed with fantasy roleplay, naked women in Viking hats and toast. Halfway through the first episode of season four, an episode so hotly anticipated it crashed the HBO server, I did not understand anything that was going on.
This was my fault, because I have a life and I hadn’t watched the previous three seasons. But I don’t want to be unreasonable, so I paused the episode during a particularly onerous orgy and sat through three episodes of season one, which was like watching paint dry. High-gloss paint. The really slow-drying stuff. Then, because I know GoT fans will be itching to say I didn’t give it long enough, I watched another one. After which I asked a friend, someone I had thought quite highly of, but no longer do, because he is a Thrones aficionado, to bring me up to speed.
He said: “So the blonde girl is the mother of dragons. She’s created an army of freed slaves. Then there’s mad King Joffrey. There’s a 700ft wall of ice, beyond which is an army of White Walkers, who are undead. And there’s Charles Dance. Oh, by the way, Dance’s daughter is sleeping with Dance’s son. Then there’s a dwarf. And…” And so on, for slightly longer than it would have taken to watch the whole thing.
What I found most disturbing is that this apparent grown-up was completely, breathlessly serious when explaining all this. Even the dragons. It was as if he was updating me on Ukraine, or Breaking Bad, or the painful decline of a much-loved pet, rather than this load of unmitigated tosh. With dragons.
At which point, fully open to the apparent joys of this phenomenon, I watched the second half of the first episode of the fourth season. Setting aside the plot, which is Shakespeare for Dummies by Dummies, let us get to the acting. I honestly thought I had been given the spoof of Game of Thrones instead of the thing itself. The actors looked terribly serious when saying things like “The war is over. The king is safe”, or, worse, “You can’t tame dragons”, but it was obvious they were really thinking: “Christ, I hope my mum doesn’t watch this.” If it had been comedy, it would have been brilliant.
The dialogue doesn’t help. It’s 21st-century Sunderland (goodies) v 21st-century Surrey (baddies), with the odd patch of 21st-century Californian where someone’s thin grasp of the script has slipped. The sets are Musketeers in Mallorca. Then there’s the bonking and the swearing. This is, I’m led to believe, half the appeal. The raciness helps fans convince themselves they’ve moved on from that awkward Dungeons & Dragons phase.
For gruesome, gripping Middle Ages drama, Return of the Black Death was a much better bet. The year 1349 is one of those distant dates reeled off by desperate history teachers, a 1066 with fewer arrows and more buboes. The Black Death was the most lethal catastrophe recorded in human history, a pandemic that nearly wiped us out, but, you know, it was a long time ago. Here, we had 25 skeletons dug up from the path of Crossrail on London’s Charterhouse Square. The DNA of the plague could still be found in their teeth. Nobody clarified whether it was safe to start mucking about with the plague-infected teeth of 14th-century corpses. The archeologists weren’t even wearing Hazchem suits. But, other than the nagging fear that Channel 4 might kickstart Black Death 2, and the relentless Gregorian chanting to ramp up the tension, this was an accomplished programme — Time Team without Baldrick being a smartarse.
Sometimes stories are better told through simple, straightforward documentary. The BBC’s factual coverage of the First World War centenary, for example, has been excellent. Paxman’s big sweep was everything an armchair historian could want, and the rerelease of the Great War Interviews of the 1960s is as good a reminder as any that you don’t need rising strings and a disapproving dame to be engaging. Truth done truthfully is enough.
The Crimson Field was the exact opposite of that. It lacked the confidence to rely on the real story of field nurses in northern France and relied instead on all the stereotypes of unchallenging mainstream drama. We had the bossy but kindly matriarch matron, the innocent posh girl with early hints of grit, the Emily Pankhurst protofeminist and, most tediously, the pantomime ugly sister, who, in case we hadn’t spotted all the earlier signposts, concluded the episode by scoffing a cake meant for wounded soldiers. Five female characters treated as plot devices.
Despite lots of blood and bandages, the field hospital itself was oddly sanitised. This man is dying of a neck wound in order to stop this nurse leaving the hospital. That man has shell shock in order to demonstrate matron’s kindliness. Everything was there to develop the script. No moment escaped the rising strings. Everything was done with an easily distracted audience in mind. They still got me when the physically fit but mentally damaged Lance Corporal Prentiss, played movingly by Karl Davies, got packed off back to the front. It was the bally violins, damn them.
Undeniable, on the other hand, was a masterclass in seamless plot and character exposition. Jane, a 30-year-old still struggling to rebuild her life after witnessing her mother’s brutal killing 23 years earlier, spots the man she thinks is the murderer — a consultant oncologist, a much-loved father and husband, a pillar of the community. At first, you assume it must be him, because it so obviously couldn’t be. Then he becomes less whiter-than-white, so you assume you’re being tricked into thinking it will be him, so you cunningly decide it won’t be. By the end of part one, it could go either way.
A nice, straightforward Did He Do It, then? Well, no. It was more interesting than that. It explored not just the purgatorial grief of an unresolved murder case, but the extent to which memory can and cannot be trusted. If it can carry off a convincing ending, five stars.
If only the murderer had let Jane’s mum be and gone on an estate-agent rampage instead. The researchers on Under Offer — Estate Agents on the Job are to be congratulated. They have assembled a group of the most estate-agenty estate agents in the land and got them to agree to be filmed, then edited, for television. Finding people who are unaware of how cruel the fly-on-the-wall documentary can be must be hard these days. But they have outdone themselves this time.
There was Gary, the infinitely superior Mayfair agent, with his Igorish assistant, Ernesto, who sold houses for £40m with consummate rudeness and bouffant hair. There was Lynne, the unprepossessing Co Durham agent who sold houses in Pity Me for £1 with her Robin Reliant. And there was Dave, a man toying with the bungalow-buying dreams of an elderly and infirm couple in Birmingham. “They would have thrown darts at me last week, but now I’m willing to bet I’m three or four on their Christmas-card list,” he said to camera, with a reptilian grin. Why do the reptilian grin? Does he not realise reptilian grins don’t play well on television?
Most estate agenty of the estate-agenty estate agents was Lewis, from Exeter, who described himself as a David Brent-esque manager. Which is to say, he wants us to know he is in on the joke; which is to say, he isn’t. This is an estate agent so toe-curlingly embarrassing, you’d buy a house off him just to make him go away. Maybe that’s his trick.