The overwhelming impression given in television of urban Scotland in the Eighties is of a land where people had discovered neither vegetables nor lightbulbs. The Field of Blood on BBC One last night went no way towards correcting this: as tenebrous as you might expect for a mini-series about child-killing, everything was shadows.
Can journalists write good plays? Sarah Helm has been a Washington correspondent for The Independent during the first Gulf War in 1990, reported from Baghdad in the mid-1990s, and was based in Jerusalem for three years. So her debut play about the Iraq War, which stars Maxine Peake and opened last night, is grounded on a career of watching the Middle East.
The world of the media offers plenty of opportunities for satire, but the idea of a comedy about sub-editors at first glance seems odd. After all, the sub-editors, or subs, are hardly journalism’s most glamorous beings: these office-bound nerds spend their working days correcting the spellings of journalists and cutting their copy, while penning pun-heavy headlines and writing captions to pictures. Yet, as R J Purdey’s play - which was a sellout hit at this venue last year and now returns for another run - makes clear, there is some comic juice to be squeezed out of the dreams and tribulations of these worker ants.
As a journalist with a sense of pride about what we reptiles can achieve, sometimes I shudder at the awfulness of what passes for journalism. The licence fee in theory confers on the BBC some moral purpose higher than that of the base commercial stations, doesn’t it? (Given that it implies Commercial = Bad, Public Service = Good.) So a BBC Three documentary on shoplifting should probably be an example of higher journalism? Maybe something that rams home deeper truths either about the distinction between good and bad, or about disturbed individuals?
Why make a documentary about Italia 90? It’s just another tournament that England didn’t win, isn't it? If the World Cup hosted by Italy in 1990 deserves exhumation, it’s for its trickle-down impact on football as we live and breathe it now. Hence the subtitle that won't make it onto the billboard outside cinemas: The Inside Story of a World Cup that Changed Our Footballing Nation Forever.
Let’s be honest, you never expect much sense from BBC Three. You don’t count on it for, say, depth of perspective. The channel which each week spews fresh torrents of hectic DayGlo entertainment in the specific direction of a desensitised demographic tends to steer clear of the big subjects. War and such. Girls on the Frontline, therefore, did not inspire much hope. That title. On any other BBC channel, it would have been women, not girls. Still, a camera crew was allowed to follow several women on a six-month tour in Helmand province.
Variety, the most venerable entertainment trade journal in America, is sacking its chief film and theatre critics, including the man for whose film reviews many people read the magazine, Todd McCarthy.
When roused, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the sullen, leather-clad, metal-pierced heroine ofThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is as ferocious as the panther her physical presence evokes. Forced to perform oral sex on her legal guardian, then raped by him, she returns to his apartment, fells him with a stun gun, binds him naked, makes him scream with a dildo, plays him an incriminating “candid camera” video of his attack on her, and tattoos “I am a sadist pig and a rapist” on his chest. Well, you may conclude, he had it coming.