TELEVISION drama has come a long way since the days when a couple of cameras were shoved into the same room as a small scale stage production, resulting in a claustrophobic one act monologue which always seemed to be bathed in an unearthly white light. Bad Boy Blues was claustrophobic too, but deliberately, stiflingly so; set mostly in the interiors of cars, with occasional forays into the interiors of tatty family houses and an even tattier nightclub. The story was simple enough - two buddies, one black, one white, grow up together in Brixton; one becomes a good guy, the other a bad guy, they separate, then are reunited at a funeral - the drama lay in trying to work out which was which, as expectations were constantly undercut in a series of cleverly managed flashbacks.
What was dazzlingly clear from the beginning was that white guy Paul was, on a scale of one to 10 (one being a sadist, 10 a psychopath), completely off the end. Handsome, fashionably dressed, frighteningly articulate, the sort of chap who launches into a discussion of the role of emotion in Woody Allen films as he's fitting together a particularly nasty looking piece of weaponry with the intention of blasting a total stranger off the face of the earth, Paul might have walked, like Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo, straight through the celluloid of a Quentin Tarantino film.
Come to think of it, the whole thing was very Tarantino, complete with balletic violence, blood spattered clothes "I'll have to get this dry cleaned, look!" yells teenage A.D., as teenage Paul batters the school bully to a meaty mess - and dubious morality. The latter surfaced when it was revealed that grown up A.D. was an undercover cop. By then things had become so tense we were prepared to clutch, gasping, at any straw of hope; ah, well, if he's a cop that's all right then. But it wasn't all right. Bullets flew and T shirts exploded in an orgy of graceful slo-mo. Everybody betrayed everybody else. Everybody, or everybody who mattered, died. It was depressing, but do you know what? The immaculate pattern of flashbacks and flash forwards never once faltered. That's TV drama for you.
FROM fictional drama to the real life kind, as six plummy young undergraduates and a token mature female worker took to the north Peruvian jungle in Seven Go Mad In Peru. On paper it looked like a barmy idea; on screen it looked downright dangerous, especially after a bit of frank introductory footage of the intrepid travellers.
Hooray Henrys one and all - with the possible exception of the token mature female worker, who held a car boot sale to raise the price of her trip - they held forth on the meaning of life, and the meaning of life in the jungle in particular, as they lounged by the pool at the luxurious country home of expedition leader William. "I do love the rain forest," gushed Bruce, pint in hand. "It sounds corny, but I do feel at home there."
Hard lessons were obviously in store. But what, William was asked, was the point of it all? William tossed his curly head and said he hoped everyone would find themselves, and that they'd all find each other. Cut to a scene deep in the Peruvian rain forest. What they found were insects hundreds of them. Insects that bite and scratch and sting and do appalling creepy crawly things down the inside of your shorts. Never mind, said William. We're bonding. Like hell we are, said everybody else.
Now if you'd been asked to bet on the outcome of this expedition, you'd have had no trouble spotting that it was going to end in failure. There were five men and two girlies. William predicted that the girlies - he actually called them that, and pointed out that they were not only girlies but vegetarians as well, for goodness' sake - would find the going tough.
Sure enough, the girlies balked at a menu of poisonous snake and stewed parrot. But that wasn't what made them leave. They left because they realised - after eight weeks of slogging, half-starved, through primary rain forest - that communicating, let alone bonding, wasn't high on the boys' list of priorities. The boys, the girlies concluded, just wanted to kill things and eat them. "We were supposed to get to know each other, but it just isn't happening," said the token mature female worker, a likable person called Laura. "They're obsessed with food, and they're greedy and selfish." The only surprising thing was that she had to go all the way to the Peruvian jungle to figure it out.
"WE all remember where we were and what we were doing on this day in 1966," proclaimed John Motson, introducing this action replay of England's finest soccer moment, The 1966 World Cup Final, in optimistic anticipation of a repeat performance at the forthcoming European Championships. I don't. But never having seen this match, ever, I watched it out of curiosity; to see if football has changed much in the intervening period. It has.
Take the strips, for starters. I mean, we all know the shorts were shorter in 1966 - but what about those figure hugging little shirts? It could have been an early episode of Star Trek. Bobby Moore would have made a fine Captain Kirk, all pecs and pride, while Martin Peters was for all the world like a skinnier version of Mr Spock.
Commentators have changed, as well; no adjectives or analysis, no flights of fancy, no lists of statistics sullied Kenneth Wolstenholme's workman like minimalist delivery. To those of us reared on James Richardson's Gazzetta Italia, it was all a bit grim and proper. Of course there was plenty to get nostalgic about - weren't the fans well behaved, wasn't 4-3-3 a fascinating formation, didn't Jackie Charlton look well? - but let's face it, watching soccer in black and white wasn't for the fainthearted. Today's game may be slowed down by back tackling and histrionics and protracted post goalscoring celebrations, but on the whole it's a far more colourful affair. And that includes skin colour.
THERE were only two colours in For God And Ulster, an RTE documentary devoted to the definition of Protestant culture in the North; and no prizes for guessing what they were. It began promisingly, raising the business of why it is that rugby fans can stomach an all Ireland rugby team while soccer fans can't - but quickly degenerated into a "D'ya wanna be in my gang?" scenario, with an Orange historian hurling the words "Irish" and "Republic" towards the camera like calculated insults, and a nice wee woman from Dundonald purporting to have just discovered that working class people from both traditions are actually the same underneath the banners - "we all love, we all hurt, and we all grieve the same." Well, so do working class Serbs and Croats, and look what happened to them.
This being the third of a series of four programmes, it's obviously unfair to judge it on its own, but it must be said that its scope was breathtakingly narrow. Naturally Ulster Protestantism looks bleak and militaristic, it' all you show of it are a few scenes of drummers from flute bands; naturally the same Protestants will profess be amusement at the idea of "Irishness" if "Irishness" is defined simply as Irish language and traditional music. Where does Seamus Heaney fit into all this? Or young Northern rock bands like Ash? And if, as the programme asserted more than once, the Ulster Protestant heritage is so closely linked to that of Scotland, why not look at the ways in which Scottish culture has broken out of the kilts and shortbread routine and redefined itself, via Billy Connolly and Trainspotting? No wonder we always get the same answers on the North, when we always ask the same damn questions.
RUTH Rendell gets the creepy treatment in the first instalment of Master of the Moor (ITV, Thursday), an eminently watchable three part murder drama, which carries distinct echoes of Thomas Hardy and Benjamin Britten in its fascination with the nastiness beneath the surface of English rural living. It revolves around a young man named Stephen who spends most of his time on "the moor", writing about it for the local paper.
Stephen played by Colin Firth, but looking considerably more dishevelled in his waxed jacket than he ever did in Mr Darcy's trousers, even when Elizabeth Bennet told him to take a running jump - is an impassioned environmentalist who is tuned in to the moor's every mood; alas, he is less tuned in to the moods of his beautiful but unhappy young wife who, wandering disconsolately around the village, spots an exceedingly handsome young chap in the local pet shop window - and before two commercial breaks have passed, she has acquired a kitten and a lover.
Stephen, needless to say, knows nothing about all this. He's too busy finding bodies on the moor. By the end of episode one he has found two - which bodes ill for Stephen, but bodes well for tellywatchers for the next couple of Thursday nights.
