February 18, 2008
Brit TV
Amy and I love a lot of British television. The Office, of course, is one of our all time favorite shows. We love watching the British What Not to Wear, and, although we like the American version, are amazed at how much more sophisticated the British version is.
We love Top Gear. We love older British comedy. We love the BBC version of Kitchen Nightmares and really any British reality TV. The thing that amazes us is when the ads for Torchwood or Dr. Who come on. There was also this story about a British woman who fell in love with an American man and one about a women’s prison.
From the previews alone it is clear the Brits don’t do drama.
What gives?
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24 Responses to “Brit TV”
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I wonder whether it’s a consequence of the slashing of arts funding (still generous by US standards). BBC1 produced loads of programming you might classify as drama in the 70s and 80s, great stuff (The Singing Detective, for instance).
As for commercial TV, I’m so out of it these days I don’t know what ITV is doing. They too used to produce some fine offerings in ‘the dramatic line’.
I wonder if it’s due in any part to the reserved nature of most Brits. Comedy is a wonderfully indirect way of expressing emotion, whereas drama is so, you know, dramatic.
Cindy, I think you’re on to something.
I do agree, Deron (and Cindy), that the veiled expression of strong emotion that characterizes much comedy is a core element of ‘the British character’ (if such a thing exists). “Making molehills out of mountains,” as Wyndham Lewis, I think it was. expressed it.
But there’s an awful lot of drama in the Mah-sterpiece Thea-tah/Merchant-Ivory vein that the Beeb (and ITV) produced once-upon-a-not-so-distant-time. So I’m looking to socio-economic explanations for the current output, while recognizing that Brit-pop culture overall inclines toward indirect modes of expression.
I’m too lazy to look this up, but I’ve always assumed that Merchant Ivory films fared better in the US than in Great Britain. I’m also too lazy to look this up, but weren’t they filmed (initially, anyway) in India, rather than the UK?
I tend to think of most dramatic films coming out of the UK as being aimed at an international audience, whereas their television is aimed at the locals. And in that sense, I think the national sensibility comes into play and would explain the relatively higher number of good comedies to good dramas.
That said, I readily admit to not knowing a thing about any of this. It’s just fun to ponder.
Cindy, I know less than zero! No, tell a lie . . . but I am just jibber-jabbering right now. It is fun to ponder.
My reference to Merchant-Ivory films was not perhaps to the point. What I had in mind was not literally the films of Merchant and Ivory, rather cine- and tele-films of the type associated with the ‘Merchant-Ivory’ name. Filmed adaptations of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century novels, ‘literate’ screenplays, actors with plummy accents. Come to think, those are ready made for the US (and international) markets.
(And you’re right, of course, about Merchant-Ivory and India [as: the Indian subcontinent, not India Amos]. And while I am not much of a Merchant-Ivory fan, I do love their early (1964? too lazy to check) film Shakespeare Wallah.)
What I’m pondering now in terms of your excellent observation about local (vs. international) audiences is . . . what are we labeling ‘drama’? A couple of soap-operatic offerings pop to mind, hugely popular amongst a large chunk of the British audience: the long-running Coronation Street and, a bit more recently, EastEnders. But are they ‘drama’?
These classifications-by-genre mess up my mind.
“Brits don’t do drama”.. interesting idea but what about…the Soaps (East Enders is surely dramatic enough for anyone!) Or the light drama like Doc Martin, Kingdom or Midsummer. There’s the historical dramas like Lark Rise To Candleford. And cheesy Sf drama like Primeval… quite a bit really.
I’m a bad librarian and generally eschew classification altogether (as you’ve no doubt recognized, Sheila, if you’ve contemplated the horrifying task of assigning categories to my complete set of uncategorized posts). I was just classifying drama as “not funny.” That’s as deep as I go. So I guess the real question is whether those British “not funnies” are good. Damned if I know. Let’s ask Deron.
Yeah! That’s it! Let’s ask Deron!
“Eschew classification”. “Bad librarian”. Oh, how rich! Yes, Cindy, trying to place ancient cluster-posts in categories makes my head hurt . . . and leads me into the temptation to approach classification ironically!
You know, the line separating archivists from librarians grows blurrier every day (y’all are many, where we are few), but Way Back When I thought to take a crack at the archivist racket, I believe that I decided to Stick With It because Way Back When, classification was for librarians.
Hello! Hello? Anyone awake? Okay. I am most sincerely [hinh] sorry for spouting shop-talk here on clusterflock. As well as sorry for being a lazy slattern who would like to explain it all in a way that makes a difference to anybody but can’t seem to jump over the hump of lassitude.
(Oh. And one more idle observation: If I’m so averse to classification schemes, how come I adore Linnaeus and Roget? I guess because they did all the work.)
You adore Linnaeus and Roget because they used the word “taxonomy.” That’s a whole lot better than classification.
And, Sheila, honest to Pete, I have been sore tempted to classify posts ironically. I’ve also wanted to create new categories, like Cooch and Poop.
Quit readin’ my mind, Cindy! (On second thought, don’t.) Of course I prefer taxonomy to classification. It sounds like so much more fun — and something that smart people do, too!
I may start tagging posts with terms such as cooch and poop, for what it’s worth. so y’all might want to take a look at your old posts.
sorry. I’m just back from home depot. I’ll jump in shortly.
The funny thing is, I almost never mistake somebody mentioning the country for somebody mentioning me. It’s like they’re two different words. In fact, I can recall only one occasion in my life when I was momentarily confused.
Then again, my memory’s not too good these days. Sorry—what were we talking about?
Outsourcing.
Hi Jon, I know this will probably dig the hole deeper, but what I was attempting to suggest was that Brits don’t do drama well.
And no, I’m not talking about historically. I’m just talking about tv.
Do they sell emoticons at Home Depot?
Only if you’re American.
That solves it, then. Brits don’t do drama.
Maybe they don’t show any of the good Brit drama on BBC America because they want to appeal to Americans who typically enjoy crap on TV.
The Prisoner from the 1960’s is another good British series. They should re-run that instead of showing that new Dr. Who shite.
OH, Cindy and Sheila: I just tagged a post with “cooch”.
You mean ‘beaver’?
P.S. Oh, Amy. You said, “The Prisoner.” I knew it had to start sooner or later. And I’ve been dreading the moment, in a sense, because I’ve feared what opening the floodgates would unleash. Feared both the revelation of a ‘trainspotting’ aspect of my self and the possibility of fellow trainspotters picking up on it. Annoying other ‘flockers and friends with geekish references.
Out with it. I am one of those Prisoner aficionados. Not so bad as once-upon-a-time. No longer sport a button bearing the trademark image of the penny-farthing bicycle. But you could get me going with just the least little reference.
Matter of fact . . . No. No. No, Sheila. Don’t go there.
“Be seeing you.”
Deron.. im not sure what you categorise as “drama”. Do you mean cop shows, or Desperate Housewives… or Dramatisations of books/plays etc. I’m not being augmentative it just seems maybe UK Tv transmitted in the USA is very selective, as i’m sure we get selected high lights of US Telly..
Just stumbled across this blog and thought i’d leave opinions…it’s certainly an interesting thought.
I think there are strong merits in Deron’s original thoughts. The standard and quality of British Television has diminished greatly over the past 10 years, thanks in no small part what i’ll call the “Simon Cowell Factor”. British networks have realised reality television, although never really scratching the cerebral itch, is cheap and populist, and as such matches the expectations of those who need ratings (the BBC) and those who needs advertising revenues.
What frustrates me is that American television is prepared to push the boundaries in the drama it creates, whereas British drama seems now to stick to tried and tested formulae. Programmes such as 6 feet under, The West Wing, Sopranos, Heroes & now Dexter all became (or have become) event television for me, all incredibly brave and utterly different in their own way. British Television executives seem happy to stick to Crime stories of one sort or another or period drama - i get quite concerned that people still have a perception of England as some sort of Dickensian timewarp - and i find them tiresome.
We do have some quality drama, but whereas American drama can be introduced to other audiences, quality British drama is almost entirely parochial. Shameless (Channel 4) is a classic example of this; a programme so British in essence it simply wouldn’t make sense to anyone outside of these shores. Other examples of this sort of programming are available, but they are becoming rarer and rarer; it’s cheaper for Britain to import American drama - it’s more expensive than we are able to produce and fulfills the needs of the mass audience. Sadly, this is inevitable at the behest of the contemporary British scriptwriter, who cannot get his vision made because the budgets for drama have been spent on buying the rights for Heroes, or something similar.
Masterpiece Theater will ocntinue to do well, because the owrk is timeless and there will always be a requirement for quality period drama in Britain, but this needs to work alongside the likes of Life on Mars, Spooks, Prime Suspect, Shameless et al, certainly not in place of it, which i rather fear is the way it’s going at present.