Dave Hill's Big Britain

Alan Bleasdale's Liverpool

As Ringo put it:

"You've got both sides of the coin. There's yin and there's yang. You've got some really nice posh restaurants, then, two miles away it's not so pretty."

Twas ever thus. That goes for everywhere else too, though with Liverpool both sides have somehow always seemed more vivid than in other places. Here's a slice of that - and why it deserves to be City of Culture.

Alan Bleasdale's Boys From The Blackstuff changed British lives. Liverpool remembers it well.

Sense & Sensibility

According to my wife, all TV adaptations of Jane Austen novels are good because they all make her want to re-read the books. She's just re-read the following to me:

"Edward Ferrars was not reccommended to their good opinion by any peculiar graces of person or address. He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing. He was too diffident to do justice to himself; but when his natural shyness was overcome his behaviour gave every indication of an open, affectionate heart."

The version of Ferrars we see in the new BBC Sense And Sensibility does not strike me that way. He is definitely handsome, as are all the suitor males. He doesn't seem terribly shy, either. That's the glamour of telly for you, I suppose - or, rather, the glamour factor modern telly demands.

Britz

I enjoyed the first episode of Britz last night, though partly for the rather technical reason that I like trying to read scriptwriters' minds. As reviewers have been observing, rather ungenerously, writer and director Peter Kosminsky's film was at times a slightly forced blend of spook thriller and social commentary, with the two sometimes getting in each other's way. But that might not be all Kosminsky's fault. I can't help wondering if Britz isn't to some extent the consequence of the Channel 4 publicity tail wagging the filmmaker's dog. The billboards and other advance hype all urged us to be ready to be offended, shocked, thrilled by the controversy and so on, making me suspect that the very commissioning of the film depended more than it should have on Kosminsky being judged likely to provide enough content of the type to justify such a sales pitch. The Home Office's sympathy with the British Muslim Forum's call for the programme to be withdrawn only added to the sense of self-fulfilling marketing prophecy. Popular culture (literally) can't afford to be ignored, but when the relationship between commercial and creative considerations is wrong you end up with, well, something that's not as good as it might have been.

Bent Telly

Phoney phone-ins and other deceptions in British TV are nothing new. Several years ago I was invited to be part of the studio audience for some contrived bear pit show put on by LWT. It was split into two halves. The first was hosted by that old Scottish sexpot Andrew Neil, the second by a younger one, Nicky Campbell. I was in the second half, when the discussion was about blondes. Two examples of blonde women - one a former Bond girl (apparently), the other a publicity-seeking copycat chick lit author - sat on the stage in order to be insulted as airheads, bimbos and gold-diggers by the assembled hooligans.

My job was to make a smart-arsed, pop culture pundit intervention at a moment of Campbell's choosing. A carefully rehearsed quip about Madonna and ice cream went down like a lead balloon, whereupon the shrieking and finger-pointing by "ordinary" members of the public kicked off again. Much of this was led by an aggressive cockney brunette. At the end as we all filed out I heard her apologise to a blonde audience member with whom she'd crossed swords. "It's nothing personal, love," she said, tossing her mane. "I'm blonde meself. I just had it dyed for the show."