In The Young Ones, Rik was famous for his poetry, writing about Cliff Richard and totalitarian vegetables, but if he'd ever extended his talents to drama, The Casual Vacancy (BBC1) is what he'd have come up with.
I can imagine Rik, sitting at the kitchen table in yellow dungarees, determined to write a drama which would really stick it to Thatcher and 'the pigs'. A drama with absolutely no subtlety, where 'the kids' are being hassled by 'the fascists'. He'd create some posh, rich people who want to grab all the good stuff for themselves, and we'd know they were baddies because of all their plotting, bitching and betrayal. Meanwhile, 'the kids' would be stuck out on the council estate doing their best to survive and look after their cute little toddler brothers.
My response to the clunking stereotypes in The Casual Vacancy has been one Rik might have favoured: sticking two fingers up to it.
It started off well, back in its first episode, where it introduced itself with a weird League of Gentlemen feel. We were presented with a pretty English village but there were little stabs of unease and decay; there were skips and sex shops, obscene graffiti and grubby men chewing gum. There were stolen TVs and neglected children. I liked how immediately unsettled everything was. They gave us the scenario of the usual Sunday night drama, then poked holes in it.
But it became obvious that this enticing atmosphere was created by the beautiful setting and clever camerawork, nothing more. Once the characters came bumbling onscreen, playing one-dimensional roles with forgettable dialogue, the pleasing, sinister feeling vanished.
Indeed, the alluring little village, which had initially seemed spooky, lapsed into the same fate as the characters: it lost its hints and tricks and double-meanings and became merely a pretty English village. Likewise with the Fields council estate which didn't grow into a symbol of social control and class war, but simply stayed a repository of junkies, tracksuits and stolen tellies. It could have been lifted straight from the set of Rab C Nesbitt.
Characters were easily divided into goodies and baddies, with the Mollisons being a couple of pensioner Macbeths who were fighting for social supremacy rather than a crown. There was the frustrated wife who wore slutty clothes and sported dyed red hair whilst constantly sucking on a wine bottle. These were indicators, children, of her horny frustration and dissatisfaction. Then there was the violent man who shouts at his wife and dangles his son off a bridge to show (sigh) that he's a bad man because, in the absence of a cape and a top hat, how would we know he was bad?
Some reviewers have criticised The Casual Vacancy for being a grating example of lefty politics, childishly keen to show the posh people in a bad light but that's not so. If it was intended as a lefty assault then the residents of the council estate wouldn't have been insulted as they were, able only to speak in obscenities, sitting slumped on sofas with the curtains shut and a needle in the arm, their ears sagging under the tacky pull of monstrous metal earrings. They're a mucky lot, those poor people, and they don't work or look after their children and when they do go to school they go in tiny hotpants and very soon get pregnant.
Ah, but maybe The Casual Vacancy was cleverly trying to mock middle-class perceptions of the poor and of themselves? That's why their own trivial concerns were so inflated whilst the poor were so grotesque. If that was the aim, then it would be more suited to a short comedy sketch, not a three-part series.
So I don't accept this was lefty propaganda, written in the student union. The rich and the poor are both subject to the same clumsy treatment which suggests nothing other than mediocre or lazy writing.
But if so, why did the BBC jump to film this novel? I think it's simply because it has the Rowling name on it. Anything she writes will go straight to Number 1 in the Amazon charts. This happened with The Casual Vacancy despite generally poor reviews, and it happened with her subsequent crime novels once it had been revealed that she was the author behind the pseudonym 'Robert Galbraith'.
The novel was selling quietly until someone lifted the gate and the sheep all poured out and charged down the hillside and into the shops to buy it. Anything with her name on it will sell.
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