TV Review: The attack of the feature-length episodes continues unchecked. If a plot can be neatly wrapped up in an hour, then why not stretch it out to an hour-and-a-half? If a detective drama can stumble over a corpse and corner the fiendish culprit in 60 minutes, then why not force-feed it some unnecessary plot twists until it's bloated to two hours?
They tell us that our attention spans are shorter than the snap of an elastic band, that they have shrunk to the point where we get bored even waiting for the television to warm up. And yet programmes regularly make their epic journeys from opening titles to final credits, by which time the viewer has often grown a beard and missed the early years of the children's lives.
They don't always perform in the ratings. Figures wilt steadily as shorter, more attractive programmes come mincing through the schedules. Despite the risk, Monday night had two feature-length dramas. In the BBC corner, weighing in at 90 minutes without ad breaks was the quirky detective offering of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. Some day one of these programmes is going to be interrupted by a banner and a brass band and a man in a sparkly tuxedo announcing that "this quirky detective is the millionth quirky detective to pass through our television sets".
In the ITV corner, coming in at a weighty, telly-stand-straining two hours, was The Cry. It was the choice offering despite getting fewer ratings. In this polished psychological drama, Sarah Lancashire plays the mother of a stillborn child whose attempts to save what might be an abused baby may hide darker motives. But at two hours long, with another episode next Monday, it is less like entertainment and more like television that holds you to ransom. For all its delicate plot work and honesty, it's nothing that couldn't have been delivered in four one-hour parts. Catch 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there, while the ads are on somewhere else, and it doesn't feel as if you've missed much in between.
The Forsyte Saga on Sunday night was 90 minutes long with toilet breaks, but managed the trick of seeming to have been shorter. Costume dramas have had a sticky time of late, but this was ITV remaking a series that had once been an enormous success. When first filmed in 1967, church services and sporting fixtures were rearranged so that 18 million viewers wouldn't miss this tale of Victorian sexual repression and widening family faultlines. ITV's version is simply a slicker one. There are no special effects to update, no anachronistic hairdos to sort out. The language has been spruced up, though. Did the rigid upper classes really refer to their fathers as "dad"?
Anyhow, The Forsyte Saga turns out to be quietly entertaining. And I mean quietly. It is drama played out in silences, in glances and flirtations, bowed heads and pursed lips. Conversations are short, and emotions pinched at the source. When the dialogue does come to life, it is in the gossip and commentary of the family as they gather for the engagement parties that form the beginning of each act. They are a Greek chorus, speaking from the sides of their moustaches and fans. Meanwhile, the camerawork glides smoothly over the dinner table, or enhances the grotesque nature of the characters by shoving itself close up.
Rupert Graves is strongest as Jolyon Forsyte, a man who has left his loveless marriage and scarpered with the French governess and is thus estranged from his father (Corin Redgrave, buried under facial hair and burst blood vessels). It's a lesson lost on his cousin, the hidebound, cold Soames Forsyte, played by chiselled if a little monotone Damian Lewis. He is determined to buy the free-spirited but indebted Irene Heron (Gina McKee) whether she loves him or not.
"Will you do me the great honour of becoming mine?" he asked.
"I will marry you, Mr Forsyte," she replied. If you agree to marry a man whom you have yet to refer to by Christian name, then things are destined for disaster.
In Uncle Jack and the Boom Boom Music, Sir Jack Leslie sang a karaoke version of Like A Virgin. Well, sang is an approximate verb. You got the feeling after a couple of bars had crashed from his mouth that Jack may have never actually heard the song before. Madonna would have been spinning in her pointy bra if she'd heard it.
To be fair to Jack, he is 85 years old and has arrived at modern popular culture like a ramraider into an off-licence. This was a documentary with a tone as wonky as his singing. It was an educational history video colliding with an episode of The Word. Holding it together, however, was the rather sweet Sir Jack, a self-proclaimed eccentric from a family proud of its eccentricities and determined to keep them up.
Jack's particular speciality is that, at this late age, he has found himself utterly addicted to clubbing. He can't hear the stuff without leaping about the floor like Yosemite Sam. When he tires of that, he prowls about the floor, hands like claws, eyes so wide you fear they'll pop out and drop into a clubber's cleavage. In the discos of Monaghan, it seems, he's a star. They've probably seen quite a few things in the discos of Monaghan, so his popularity should not be taken lightly.
Jack is a tremendously likeable character, given to that slightly batty detachment associated with the landed gentry. He survived the bullets and madness of Dunkirk and spent the war in a German POW camp. He lived for 40 years in Rome, before returning home seven years ago. At 85, he is still single, which means he can go out whenever he pleases, thank you very much. His niece used to think he was going to the pub to play croquet, when in fact it was karaoke he had taken to. If you know a pub in this country in which croquet is played, move to another pub.
The bittersweet nature of the tale came through his revelation that dancing releases him from regular depressions. "It is like being locked in a steel coffin and dropped three miles down into a sea of black ink," he explained. For his birthday, then, his niece brought him to Ibiza, so that he could leap about at Manumission, the world's largest nightclub.
Jack described the dances of his youth, where couples didn't dare touch cheeks. Manumission is a place where girls dance naked, and men covered in feathers dance in cages. He was introduced to the crowd, where he prowled and hopped and jigged to the delight of thousands of young people. Then he was carried off the stage by four muscular men in sailor's uniforms. Not quite Dunkirk, but almost as noisy.
This Wednesday's Prime Time traced the story of Dr Michael Neary, the Drogheda obstetrician alleged to have carried out unnecessary hysterectomies on pregnant woman over two decades. An emergency hysterectomy is generally an operation that will need to be carried out in one in every 3,000 births, but in a six-year period during the 1990s, he carried out 39 of them.
THERE are 65 separate legal actions pending against him, with the support group for victims hosting 69 women; women who were sent into immediate menopause, some while still in their teens. One 19-year-old, for instance, had her womb removed after the birth of her first child, only for that child to die after six weeks. Yet many of the women thanked him for it at the time, trusting him when he said that it was done to save the lives of them or their children. Among the victims, there are deep wells of guilt and loss.
Many of these procedures were carried out simply because it was the only form of sterilisation allowable in a hospital run by the Medical Missionaries of Mary. The shaky ethics of that rationale crumble under the fact that none of the 69 women asked to be sterilised in the first place. Dr Neary has been suspended for several years, while he and the women await the report of the Medical Council, an organisation which makes its judgments in camera.
The last medical body to examine the case, the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, recommended that, with his 46 per cent malpractice rate, he should undergo six months retraining. It seemed as if his was a managerial job in which the responsibility was towards office stationery rather than people's lives. A British obstetrician who has examined Neary's career said, "I keep coming back to this word, 'astonishing' ". Only, you feel, because he couldn't find the right word to put on it.
