The Spirit of the Stairwell

The golden age of British television is well and truly over. Anything with even the tiniest, weakest spark of creativity and originality has long since been extinguished – drowned in the murky swamp water of what passes for modern television listings. It’s a simple mathematical formula, so straight forward that even the current specimens of pond life masquerading as TV executives can understand it without getting their crayons out to write it down.

Reality television and lifestyle shows cost next to nothing to make and pull in millions in ratings. All you need to do is commission another vacuous mess starring either a washed up celebrity or ordinary members of the public with ‘special’ talents (ie. being more irritating than scabies) and then sit back and watch the cash roll in. Why hire actors with screen presence and charisma? Why avail yourself of directors with vision or writers with a story to tell? You’re not going to make any more money off of it so why bother?

It’s not a problem unique to the UK, American television (historically laughably weak compared to its British counterpart) also suffers from the same blight. The difference is they have the money to support both the tat and the sublime ideas that come along every once in a while and make the whole thing worthwhile. And that’s why they’re currently wiping the floor with us when it comes to quality drama. If you haven’t seen these series then I suggest you stop reading the blog right now and go out and buy some box sets. They are, in order of jaw-dropping-disbelief-if-you-haven’t-seeniness, the following:

The West Wing, Firefly, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Dollhouse (actually anything by Joss Whedon – Buffy, Dr Horrible, even Angel in later series), The Sopranos, Arrested Development … I could go on but this has already turned into a rant and I haven’t even got to the point yet.

*Deep cleansing breath*

The fact is that even with the current British system, good shows do slip through occasionally, normally sitcoms like Outnumbered or Pulling – modest shows that hide their radical hearts behind genre tropes – wolves in sheep’s clothing. There are also some shows with massive ambition and creativity that are successful despite it all and against the odds – but that’s just basically Dr Who (and I’ll devote a whole series of podcast to that soon).

Finally there are aberrations, new shows from channels that are ironically also the main culprits when it comes to pumping excrement into the schedules – the BBC3s and ITV2s of this world, full to the brim with Top 100 shows and programmes about other programmes hosted by foetuses in designer clothing. The worst of these is E4, which is like T4 but all the time and just as unwatchable.

However every now and then E4 will have a go at original programming and surprise itself. Skins is awesome. The Inbetweeners is laugh out loud funny.

And now there’s Misfits, a show which you can guarantee started with an executive walking into his editors office and saying something like “Alright, hear me out, it’s X-Men for the Skins generation.”

And that’s exactly what it is but despite all that it’s pretty damn good. The characters are interesting, it’s actually fairly funny and the concept is great – young offenders get hit by lightning and get superpowers themed around their deepest desires. A disgraced athlete with the ability to turn back time, an awkward recluse who can turn invisible – that sort of thing. The powers are well handled, the actors range from fine to quietly impressive and the whole concept is milked for every last joke, twist and scare it can provide. I’d take a hundred episodes of it over anything Big Brother, X Factor or Strictly Come Dancing have ever produced.

It’s hugely derivative of course (Marvel’s Runaways, the aforementioned Skins, Buffy, it even nicks some stylistic and thematic tricks from quality BBC fare like Life on Mars and Being Human) and it’s not always as funny or as clever as it thinks it is but what it does have is a rough, brash confidence that allows the viewer to overlook these failings and concentrate on what it does well. Which is deliver twisted, memorable stories a cut above most things currently on British TV.

Consider this the first Stairwell recommendation of the new year.