IT used to be said there were just six or seven themes in all drama: love (happy or unhappy), ambition, revenge, jealousy, mistaken identity, madness and confused identity. The notion has an uncomfortable Coles Notes reductionism but it is not without merit. Now, television drama appears to have decided that central character types should be limited to three cops, docs and frocks.
In themselves, there's nothing wrong with police drama, medical drama or costume drama but there are other stories in the world. After last week's doc drama, The Fragile Heart, this week we got cop opera from Inspector Morse and frock opera from Jane Austen's Emma and Anne Bronte's The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall. Cops and docs and frocks have always featured heavily in TV drama but never has their dominance been so great as it is at present.
It's a ratings game, of course. Cops, dealing with murder and garishly (or in Morse's case, subtly) drawn battles between good and evil, have an obvious appeal. Likewise docs, with their life and death dramatics. But it is the revival of the frocks which is most intriguing. It was the introduction of wonderbras and wonder breeches in last year's Pride And Prejudice which made costume drama sexier than ever. Suddenly, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy had, respectively, the uplift and firm purpose of Jayne Mansfield and Tom Jones. Viewers loved it.
So, P&P's producer, Sue Birtwistle, and adaptor, Andrew Davies, were given another crack at Jane Austen. Not only that, but the drama was titled Jane Austen's Emma, indicating the new sexiness of an author who, let's be honest, has not normally been read for cheap thrills. It's not that Ms Austen's novels are not moral and brilliantly drawn - albeit within a very limited, class-based range. They are. But they have become eminently marketable because the smut which wins ratings can be covered with the sauce of culture.
Anyway Emma, played earnestly by Kate Beckinsale, left you in no doubt about the snobbish cruelty of her match making experiments in selective breeding. Austen's distinctions between morals and manners were, if anything, melodramatised. But that's no bad thing. What rankled throughout though, was the exclusion of so much of humanity from even being considered worthy of participation in the ironies and hypocrisies of the morals v manners conflict.
That is hardly Jane Austen's fault. Written in 1815, Emma was as much a product of its times as Cracker is of ours. Fair enough. But, because its moral base is, to a late 20th century audience, so confined by class, the story exudes, albeit inadvertently, the same sort of snobbish cruelty which it derides in its title character. The context for us of its finely drawn social ironies is, ironically, one of historical irony.
Not that invalidates the story and the argument can be made that its narrowly based moral milieu has a universal significance. But part of that significance is to realise that many classics - even the new sexy-ised versions - are, by essentially safe, conservative entertainment. Even that is admissible. TV drama, after all, has no obligation to ferment revolution. But the safeness, bowing to marketing, has gone too far. Relevance to the lives of today's viewers has been compromised.
There's a further irony now about the compression of the number of character types favoured by the head honchos in television drama departments. ITV's major drama productions are sponsored by a bank. A hideous voiceover tells viewers to post letters, make tea feed cats and deal with sundry minor household chores before they settle down for an evening of dramatic entertainment.
As this vile and patronising rubbish is being told to us, a camera pans across a night time urban landscape. Tower blocks, town houses, suburban semis are shown. It's cold outside but there's an enticing, warm, yellow glow from the windows of the assorted homes. But there are stories behind those windows - stories with the great, timeless themes of love, revenge, jealousy and all the rest."
With a few notable exceptions, big production television drama is ignoring them.
So, the mega money goes on cops, docs and frocks while soap opera, with its limited budgets and limited forms, is left to reflect the present and the drama of ordinary people's lives. The result is that, as in a Jane Austen novel, there is selective aggrandising of small areas of human experience at the expense of the lives of the patronised licence fee payers, who are advised by a smarmy voiceover to feed cats and make tea. In short, TV drama is telling us all that we never had it so good.
When Mr Knightley (Mark Strong of Our Friends In The North fame) invites (contrary to the novel) the underclass to the wedding banquet for Emma and himself, he assures the peasants that he will act responsibly towards them. It sounds like old Tory patronising - though it could be the New Labour version too. Either way, TV drama appears to have decided to behave in similar fashion. Like the politics of our time, too much television has opted for timidity.
FINBAR'S Class reached episode nine this week. It's an amazing form of television, more choreographed than coherent, a strange conjunction of Fame and Brookside Realism laced with light entertainment is disorientating, yet there are inventive elements to this hybrid teen opera. Sex and drugs and rock n roll are rightly featured as are Dubs v culchies conflicts, promiscuous parents, violence and gambling.
Still, the realism is more stovenly than gritty and issues are never quite resolved.
To be fair, there are benefits to this, seeing as artlessly contrived, usually smarmy, endings are staples of American TV. Certainly, the series shows great energy and enthusiasm on the part of its young cast and their dialogue is, generally, realistic. It's just that the singing and dancing - the salute in the direction of MTV - too often emphasises the sense of showbiz, of unreality of market driven yoof culture, at the expense of a sense of meaning.
But clearly, there is talent and commitment here. This is the second series of Finbar's Class and while it's managing (just about) to mix hard edged relevance with ephemeral fluff, it will probably have to choose between straight drama, perhaps with a pop music soundtrack, and light entertainment next time around. The drama is the way to go, for this series says some things worth saying, before sugaring them with a choreographed dance routine.
SPOTLIGHT cleverly, if rather obviously, titled this week's offering Our Friends In The North. It focused on President Mary Robinson's visits - 16 in all since she took up residence in the Phoenix Park - to the North. Predictably, nationalists are pleased by her visits; unionists, with some exceptions, are not. Really, it made depressing viewing.
David Campbell of the UUP called Mrs Robinson "the embodiment of Irish nationalism". Perhaps the argument could be made about the office she holds but to personalise the charge in this way is absurd. Recalling that Mary Robinson resigned from the Labour Party over the Anglo Irish Agreement and that she has regularly sought to foster friendships with unionists, the programme made Mr Campbell's phrase preposterous.
Certainly, it would be quite a surprise to most rational people to discover that Mary Robinson had a "Tiochfaidh Ar La" tattoo concealed beneath her Louise Kennedy creations. Anyway, it was the President's handshake with Gerry Adams which appears to have most upset unionists. "It would be like Her Majesty the Queen shaking hands with one of the "Shankill Butchers," said Chris McGimpsey. "It was a betrayal," said Eoghan Harris.
Such points of view were deeply held. But, as ever, with the North, there's an opposing point of view from the other side. Her Majesty the Queen may not have shaken hands with the Shankill Butchers but she has decorated military men whom nationalists see as scarcely better. To them, that is betrayal. And so it goes. Can some folk not accept even parity of betrayal or parity of insensitivity?
Mary Kenny attempted to justify a dodgy, if superficially seductive, analogy between the Virgin Mary and Mary (Robinson), Queen of Ireland. The most meaningful contribution came from Billy Hutchinson, who has met the President five times. A loyalist (working class unionist) to the core, Mr Hutchinson is keen to continue with such cross Border meetings so long as the Union remains secure. His stated position is coherent and reasonable.
Overall though, it made depressing viewing. Old footage from 1970 showed Mary Robinson and Bernadette Devlin. At the time, Ms Devlin was the political and intellectual star; Ms Robinson a valued bit player in Irish public life. Twenty six years on, they've had contrasting weeks. Then again, one of them comes from the fox hunting, Catholic gentry and the other does not. Perhaps Jane Austen's criteria really are more relevant than I had supposed. You can see which woman gets to wear the fancy frocks.
THE latest "last ever" Inspector Morse was sensible enough (unlike the recent "last ever" Cracker) to stay on home turf. Oxford, with its mix of erudition and pretension, is an essential element of the Morse code. This week's episode was titled The Daughters Of Cain and when the metaphors weren't Biblical, they were Shakespearean.
"Is this a dagger I see before me? I'd rather see a pint," said Morse at one stage. The murderer, this time, was a woman who was suffering from a brain, tumour which led to her losing control of her speech. Still, she was able, in a deathbed scene, to confess to her crime by quoting from Shakespeare's Scottish play. It takes clever writing to make such stuff convincing and reinforcing the smugness of viewers is always a risk. But, it worked. There is a cosiness about Morse which can be objectionable but if we must have cops, docs and frocks, he's a good cop, alright.
FINALLY, Brookside. Far removed from the gentle ironies of Jane Austen, little Jimmy was withdrawing from heroin this week. Having recently provided incest for all the family, the Liverpool based soap offered a smack special this week. This was grim TV indeed, with, a terrible starkness. Certainly, Brookside is now regularly closer to social documentary than traditional soap opera. In itself, this is commendable. But there are risks too.
Depicting cold turkey must, of course, be grim and stark. But starkness - without pushing it towards over the top Hollywood dramatics - is not simple to convey. There was, unfortunately, a dullness about Brookside this week. Partly it had to do with the writing and partly too, because on soap opera budgets and schedules, only so much can be achieved. The idea was worthy. The pity is that it didn't have a slice of the cops, docs and frocks loot to make it more convincing.