Picnic Books

 I’ve got to admit this – I’m fast becoming an ITV4 addict!  I mean, come on.  THE PRISONER, MINDER, THE SWEENEY and THE PROFESSIONALS.  What’s a poor boy like me to do except succumb? 
         I’ve already explained, in previous blogs, why I think the convergence of kitchen sink realism with the underworld crime thriller produced much of what was best in British film, literature and TV during its golden age.  I don’t want to repeat myself too much here.  Beyond the sociological reasons that I have cited in previous blogs, I remind myself that much of what is best in British film was always rooted in British TV and if the latter goes into decline so will the former.  Mike Hodges worked on World in Action before switching to drama and his first movie, SUSPECT, was a TV film for Euston Films.  It was on the strength of this that he was hired to make GET CARTER.  This was not just the best British film of the 1970s but the best film of the 1970s.  I mean, the yanks produced some masterpieces during the same time frame.  THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE, ATTICA, SERPICO and, of course, Scorsese’s canon, culminating in TAXI DRIVER.  I’m fairly sure that Schrader’s remake of THE WAGES OF FEAR is a 1970s movie as is BLUE COLLAR (also by Schrader).  lately, I’ve been watching THE FRENCH CONNECTION a lot as I get my head around a car chase sequence in the TV film of STRAIGHT TO HELL - based on my own novel.  But GET CARTER – man, what a film.  
          This symbiosis between TV and film making in the UK also explains why the closing down of English Regional Drama at BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham was such a blow – I’ve already slammed the axing of PLAY FOR TODAY on previous blogs.  Without Philip Martin’s GANGSTERS (which launched the careers of Paul Barber and Saaed Jaffrey and was the first generic series in Britain to have a predominantly non-white cast) Stephen Frears would not have been able to adapt MY BEUTIFUL LAUNDERETTE in 1986 in quite the way he did.  Along with THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY and DEFENCE OF THE REALM this was one of the best British movies of the 1980s.  But by the late 1980s the cultural depository that generated these great works was gone.  To my knowledge, BOYS FROM THE BLACK STUFF was one of the last things to be made by English Regional Drama and Trevor Griffiths (who gave us MADE IN BRITAIN, by Alan Clarke, and OI FOR ENGLAND) was working for the Open University as an academic by the end of the decade.   In the 1990s, the best British movie was FACE by Antonia Bird, which had similar roots in her excellent TV work, including CRACKER.  But was it the best movie of the 1990s, when the Americans were bringing us stuff like NARC – probably my favourite 1990s film?   In TV, too, HBO often steal the march on what is best on British TV, e.g. with THE SHIELD and THE WIRE – a point well made by Irvine Welsh in The Guardian recently.  This saddens me in no small measure when the best film director working in Hollywood (Paul Greengrass) is actually British.
        I’m also indebted to ITV4 in other ways.  In my PHD thesis on British Crime Fiction (which I’m hoping to publish as a book) I largely laud praises on THE SWEENEY for challenging hitherto sanitised images of the police on TV while dismissing THE PROFESSIONALS for justifying para-state forces that operate outside the law.  I still sort of agree with what I wrote but with qualification.  There were 55 episodes of THE SWEENEY and some were patently better than others.  Troy Kennedy Martin and Ranald Graham generally wrote the best scripts.  But Ranald Graham ALSO wrote for The Professionals and these scripts are generally a cut above some of the others.  The one where Body is framed as an assassin is a case in point and there was another on ITV4 this week that was a peach.  It concerned the abduction of an Israeli goverrnent minister by criminals who wanted to sell their prize to the highest bidder.  Looking at the opening (which I had never seen before) was exactly like looking at the film of my own script based on the Aldo Moro assassination – almost frame by frame.  Of course, the abduction in THE PROFESSIONALS episode was probably based on the Moro assassination, right down to the involvement of the Mafia and Comerra but not (in this Professionals episode) of Italian Army Intelligence, P2 and the CIA.  For that you’ll have to wait until I get a producer for the Moro piece – the previous one tragically died of the MRSA bug in 2005!
          Watching the aforementioned episode of The Professionals also reminded me of a draft script I was asked to write about a year back to re-make the Len Deighton thriller, THE IPCRESS FILE, starring Michael Caine.  In my version, the abducted scientists were British Asians working in the defence industries (similar to those murdered in the 1980s) and the culprit a fictionalised BCCI.  Palmer becomes a cop investigating the abductions because the idea of a conscript in coldwar Berlin being involved in the black market, then coopted by Army Intelligence and MI5 doesn’t work in a more contemporary setting.  The cop in my version is approached by an Asian British gangster whose privately educated son (groomed to be part of the British establishment in his father’s place) has gobe feral and become an Islamic Fundamentalist.  He’s involved in the kidnappings and the father wants the cop to track down the son before the US led crackdown on leaks in the British defence industry leads to his son being killed.  It has occurred to me that with a little reworking, this storyline could explain how a character based on Martin Shaw’s DOYLE in the original Professionals came to be working for CI5.
          As for the Body character, he’d have to change, too.  I’m currently working on a storyline  (for which I thought SPOOKS on BBC1 might be a natural home) in which an Asian British soldier banged up for killing his race attackers in a Didcot type scenario is recruited to infiltrate al-qaeda in a privatised rendition centre in Eastern Europe.  It has occured to me that this could be the new Body character in a new Professionals – or is this so far from the original as to constitute a new series.
          I’ve heard from my contact at ITV that there are indeed plans to resurrect MINDER (with Shane Ritchie as Arthur Daley) and THE SWEENEY (with Ray Winstone as Jack Regan).  Part of me welcomes this while another part asks why original new series aren’t being made instead.  When I proposed MCGREGORS BRIEF to the BBC, about a dodgy ex-RUC Special Branch cop working as a down at heel private eye in Birmingham, blackmailed by MI5 to carry out their deniable operations, I was told it was too much like Murphy’s War to warrant development funding.  My idea of the wife of a bent cop working as a private eye solving crimes with the help of her husband’s criminal contacts was deemed too Linda LaPlante.  Sometimes you feel you can’t win.  If resurrecting the prestige series of Britain’s golden era offers a window of opportunity to writers like myself then bring it on.       

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 12:33 am and is filed under Enemy Within by Roger Cottrell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.