This week, the UK government is telling television producers that they must only make terribly British shows. O-kay…
You think of all the things going on and going wrong in the world, you think of all of them just going wrong in the UK, and this is what the government focuses on. You could presume that it’s a front, a distraction, something they think we will go for while they get on with the serious business of running the country, and I’d be okay with that. I’d even be happy enough if I thought they were just insulting our intelligence. Insult me, fine, just run the country for the benefit of the people in it instead of solely, exclusively for the benefit of the people in the Cabinet.
Anyway. Deep breath.
The government did also fire the person who, presumably, was going to implement all of this terribly British crap. They fired him one hour before he was due to give a Royal Television Society speech about it.
His identikit replacement stood up at the RTS and read his speech. I’m not entirely sure she put any more effort into the project than he had.
We’ve been here before and it has scared me before.
David Cameron, when he was Prime Minister and had a spare moment between a bacon sandwich and destroying the union, told UK filmmakers to only make hits.
If you just said something along the lines of oh, for god’s sake, hang on, there’s a little more. He may have been shockingly stupid, but he did think to give us all an example. The King’s Speech. Make hits like The King’s Speech, he said, easy.
The King’s Speech is a very good film by David Seidler. It concerns a man most of the audience hasn’t heard of, who spends 90 minutes or so struggling to make one speech. I liked it very much, but it doesn’t really have Marvel Cinematic Universe written all over it.
Today anyone making The King’s Speech 9: Chelsea Drift would presumably be told to make it more terribly British.
That totality of stupidity, the stupidity without a sliver of daylight between the stupid bits, is here coupled to a totality of arrogance. I hear this and I think of international relations, the economy, the million things I do not understand about running a country and I have to conclude that neither does the government. If they’re this stupid about something I do know, I mean stupid to this degree and to a depth so deep only their arrogance is still visible, it’s hard not to conclude that they’re the same about everything.
So the UK government is laughable and in as far as anyone listens to the UK anymore, we are being laughed at.
Look, I would be ashamed to compare television production to Britain’s history of rather more gigantically regrettable moments, but stupidity and arrogance are always the ingredients.
And that is what we British do terribly.
Okay, no, I was going to stop there because that reversal of “terribly British” into “British do terribly” is an ending. Screw endings, though, I need something to lift me back up. I only get to talk you once a week, let’s not leave it like this.
Instead, let me tell you this. Lately television is the chief thing that have been getting me through the week. Specifically “Only Murders in the Building” and, while I wait the impossibly long seven days between episodes of that, I have at last been getting into “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” too.
One of those shows is so new it isn’t over yet. The other is fifty years old. Fifty. Half a century.
You can’t ever make something deliberately to last half a hundred years and counting. But you can try. And that would be damn sight better than setting out to make shows featuring red buses, village greens, or fucking afternoon tea.