Dipso tale is hard to swallow

Feature writer

Saturday 7 July 2012

In Blackout (BBC One, Monday, 9pm), Christopher Eccleston's character Daniel is a drunk.

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Mark Smith

Did you get that? A drunk. In case you should fail to understand this fact, here's a shot of him slugging from a bottle of vodka. And here's another. And another.

Now here's Daniel telling us he's a drunk. "I'm a drunk," he says. "A hopeless drunk." Now here's Daniel's wife (Dervla Kirwan) doing the same thing. "There are times when you've had a drink," she tells him, "that you have such a look it's like you're not even here." Does anyone actually talk like that? Maybe she's drunk as well.

It turns out she gets it from Google. "While you were out last night," she says, "I was looking on the internet." And she produces some print-outs about blackouts so she can explain to Daniel what they are. And then she's off again: "I watched you and I couldn't stop you turning into someone who didn't want to live and I hated you for it." Presumably Daniel has to listen to this kind of stuff all day. No wonder he drinks.But it turns out there's another reason for the boozing: council official Daniel is stressed out because he's secretly involved in some kind of corruption. We know this because we endlessly cut to a scene between him and a hardman played by David Hayman. The latter has only three lines and they are all from The Sweeney. "I own you, Danny boy," he says at one point, without laughing. But that's David Hayman for you. Professional.I do get what it's all supposed to be about: it's supposed to be noirish. It's supposed to be about flawed people in a broken city, and admittedly the director tries to achieve this with the visuals. The city, for instance, is shot Blade Runner-style, with the camera soaring in over dark skyscrapers. Even Eccleston, with the rain running down his face, looks a little like Rutger Hauer.Eccleston is also pretty convincing as a man damaged by alcohol: his eyes hang open, his cheeks sag, sweat pools in his pores. But the problem is the script. Not only is it filled with those terrible moments of over-explanation reminding us Daniel is a drunk, it's infected with cliche and fatuous improbabilities. We are expected to believe, for instance, that Daniel would be the only one in a crowd to spot a man leaning out of car with a gun.Even worse, we get no sense of why we should care about Blackout and what kind of link it has to us. We don't mind that soap opera is detached (whatever terrible things happen in the real world, Rita will still serve sweets in the Kabin), but new prime-time drama such as Blackout should be wired in, like The Matrix, to who we are.Perhaps the producers realised this at the last minute, which might explain the tacked-on speech by Daniel about corruption, but it just wasn't enough.There is a crisis in banking and politics, economics and class happening right now, and almost all of us are affected. Yet where is the BBC's response? Robert Peston may talk about it constantly but the drama department is silent. All it does is give us unlikely stories that it's impossible to care about – stories of nobody-people living in far-off, nowhere-places.

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Dipso tale is hard to swallow

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