LET’S go back to the 1990s for a minute, specifically 9pm on the 23rd of October 1990 when the first episode of Twin Peaks was shown for the first time in Britain. I’ve been rewatching the series over the last few days and it is still one of the most extraordinary pieces of television ever shown: eccentric, sick, twisted, incomprehensible, unsettling and, to make things even more confusing, funny. But it has also got me thinking: could the future of television be the past?
The announcement of the Bafta TV awards at the weekend has only emphasised the feeling. Never have the winners of the awards been so pedestrian: soap operas, crime dramas, more crime dramas, yet more crime dramas and Michael McIntyre. Television is now in a ghetto of its own making, a ghetto of predictability. Twin Peaks may be coming back at the weekend, but what would be the chances of it being commissioned for the first time now?
A look back at the Bafta awards of 40 years ago is also enlightening. The winner of the best actress award this year was Sarah Lancashire for Happy Valley, which was no more than a tweak of an extremely familiar format. By contrast, the winner of the best actress award 40 years ago, in 1977, was Sian Phillips for her part as the twisted Livia in I, Claudius, the BBC’s adaptation of Robert Graves’s great novels. Forty years on, the BBC has no interest in adapting serious literature.
The same applies to plays. Take a look at the list of nominees for the Bafta TV awards in the 1970s and you will see how serious TV was about theatre. One of the nominees for best actor in 1974 was Laurence Olivier for ITV’s adaptation of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The three-hour adaptation was shown on Saturday night. Saturday night!
Elsewhere, TV was adapting plays or commissioning new ones all over the place. The 1975 nominations included The Evacuees, a play directed by Alan Parker and written by Jack Rosenthal about his experiences during the Blitz. There are many other examples in the 1970s, but the category of single play no longer exists in the Baftas because television has long given up on the form.
The point is that a brief glance at Twin Peaks and the kind of shows winning awards demonstrates where TV drama is malfunctioning. First, producers and commissioners are caught in a dwindling number of formats, led by crime and soap. But within that, television is obsessed with character and specifically putting characters through terrible trauma, usually at the hands of someone wielding a knife or a gun. The idea is that we put our characters, usually women, into hell and watch them break, but it’s a hideous obsession that panders to a desire to leer and gawp.
I think television can be more than that, and can learn from the past when producers were led by concepts as well as character. Twin Peaks does feature the murder of a young woman but it is also the apogee of conceptual television: the stars aren’t the characters; the stars are that weird room where people speak backwards and the "presence" in the woods. I just hope that when it returns this weekend, Britain’s producers and commissioners will be watching.
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