The Antecedents Of The Detectorists

yes that is the great Toby Jones with Mackenzie Crook

Mackenzie Crook's new(ish) BBC show The Detectorists initially appears to come from a toxic legacy. When I first heard about it I was uncomfortably reminded of the long running BBC 1 comedy Last of the Summer Wine which no one of my generation ever willingly watched. However back in the days of 3 channels in the 1970's you had very little choice between Summer Wine, an awful Bob Monkhouse gameshow on ITV and some Open University programme about vulcanism on BBC 2. Summer Wine seemed to be on every Sunday night for decades just after the doleful Songs of Praise and pretty thin gruel it was too. It was basically about 3 old blokes who acted like kids in rural Yorkshire. Beautifully shot on location in Holmfirth in the West Riding, Summer Wine was a comedy of friendship, class and manners with a style of humour so broad that it could only have appealed to the demographic who enjoyed music hall in the 1930's. 
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The Detectorists is set in Essex and is about two blokes who are part-time amateur treasure hunters. As the title suggests they use their metal detectors to look for gold or silver but usually only ever find Coke can ring pulls and pennies. Like Summer Wine The Detectorists is a rural, gentle, comedy of friendship, class and manners but its antecedents lie pretty far from Summer Wine. Mackenzie Crook first came to the public's attention playing Gareth in Ricky Gervais's The Office and his deadpan brilliance was often the comic heart of the show. The Office drew on many comedic traditions: the silliness of the Pythons & Spike Milligan but also the satirical work of Beyond The Fringe and especially the dry irony of The Larry Sanders Show and what Chris Morris was doing on Channel 4 in the 1990s. After The Office Crook then went on to do notable stage work, appearing in the first production of my favourite play of the last five years: Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem. Jerusalem explores what Englishness actually means today (if it means anything at all) and in a very funny way clashes together such diverse elements as: Samuel Beckett, Roald Dahl, Pete & Dud, George Orwell, William Blake & Chris Morris again. 
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Mackenzie Crook has taken all of these antecedents for The Detectorists and thrown in a healthy dose of the Ealing comedies and Michael Powell too, especially the early classic films I Know Where I'm Going, A Canterbury Tale and A Matter Of Life And Death. Gentle, patient and filmed in a dreamy sunlit Essex & Suffolk of rolling wheat and barley and rape seed fields The Detectorists is funny but more than that it's very sweet (not however cloyingly sweet). I think I was perhaps the only person in the world who was disappointed when he learned that Trainspotting wasn't actually about train spotting. I like shows about geeks, nerds, weird hobbyists & outsiders. Trainspotting was - yawn - about heroin addicts. We've seen a million movies about junkies. Junkies are boring narcissists. Real life trainspotters are fascinating. Why do they do it? What do they hope to get out of it? What drives them? What do their wives and girlfriends think? Do they have wives or girlfriends? Are there female trainspotters? Similarly those blokes you see on the beach with their metal detectors. What the hell are they up to? The Detectorists takes you inside that world and of course it's not boring at all. Trainspotters like Detectorists are heroes standing athwart the march of history attempting to impose order where there is only disorder and trying to salvage information or artifacts from the chilly embrace of entropy.
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The Detectorists is a wonderful little series with a proper opening title song (a great one too by Johnny Flynn (click this link and you'll see what I'm saying)) and is worth looking out for if it ever makes it to your country or if the Beeb ever repeats it. It certainly deserves a second season. As they used to say in Russia: long live the sun - may the darkness be hidden.

The Swimmer As Hero

(a post from the blog's infancy)
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I had never heard of Charles Sprawson's Haunts of the Black Masseur - The Swimmer as Hero until I read a review of the book by JG Ballard in an essay collection. Ballard endorsed it so strongly that I ordered it immediately from Amazon.com. It is a cultural and literary history of swimming through the ages, enlived by Mr Sprawson's own swimming exploits: learning to swim as a boy in India, bathing at Pliny's house in Como, dodging Russian tankers as he attempts the Hellespont, lounging in the pools of Hollywood. Sprawson is one of those people who have read everything and he must have dozens of notebooks full of swimming references which he generously doles out for our amusement in lovely, streamlined prose. Byron gets his own chapter as do the Romans, Greeks and German romantics and many likely and unlikely figures in between. The book is charmingly illustrated and bound. It would be flawless but for the fact that it lacks an index. Though published by the small University of Minnesota Press it has been continually in print since 1993; so I would urge U Minn to hire an indexer for the next printing and if they don't Mr Sprawson should jump to Penguin or NYRB who would, I'm sure, love to have him on their lists. Charles Sprawson's interview with the BBC is miraculously still available here.

I Claudius

I read in The Guardian last week that HBO is planning to remake the 1970s BBC series I Claudius. Reaction on the right hand side of the sheugh seems initially to be hostile. I Claudius is regarded as a classic and one of the high points of the BBC in the 1970s along with Kenneth Clark's Civilization, David Attenborough's Life On Earth and Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man. In college I read the Robert Graves novel I Claudius and liked it very much. It's Graves's second best book after his brilliant memoir Goodbye To All That which is a must read for anyone interested in World War 1 and its aftermath (it's also a must read for anyone who has struggled through the ghastly E E Cummings novel/memoir The Enormous Room). After college I read Graves's sequel to I Claudius, Claudius The God which isn't quite as good, but I had never seen the TV series until a couple of years ago when I rented it from Netflix. I was pretty surprised to discover that this "classic" was actually very cheesy. Hammy, badly lit, filmed on cheap, wobbly sets, the BBC's I Claudius reminded me more of Blake's 7 or Dr. Who than the high art I had been expecting. The acting was poor and over the top and the art direction valiant but ultimately doomed by the BBC's limited budget. The scriptwriters cut out much of the novel's nuance and almost all of the humour and the whole thing is actually quite embarrassing today. If I were HBO I wouldn't worry about the critics from the UK who say that they are going to spoil a classic, those critics are either demented old luvvies or they haven't actually seen I Claudius for a long time. 

Sherlock Holmes

The much hyped new BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes finally hit Channel 9 tonight. It's a modern spin on the classic story starring Benedict Cumberbatch (who played the pederast in Atonement) as Holmes and Martin Freeman (from The Office (and if the rumors are true the upcoming Hobbit)) playing Watson. Watson is an Afghan war veteran (like the original) who needs a place to crash in London and by dint of some strained plotting ends up in a flatshare with a chap called Sherlock Holmes who claims to be "the world's only consulting detective" - an amateur who helps the police (I guess he doesn't watch Monk). Anglophile cat owners of a certain age will love this show with its Byronic hero, its English accents, its occasional wit and its supposedly London locations. (Like Dr Who its all mostly filmed in Cardiff, and a Cardiff shout out can be the only explanation for one of Holmes's more tortured deductions early on). I enjoyed the genuine chemistry from the cast in episode 1 and the acting which was uniformly excellent. The script could have been tighter especially the third act which lifted a famous scene from The Princess Bride, as the key plot point. Inconceivable! as Wallace Shawn might have said.
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There were a few interesting action scenes and like Guy Ritchie's movie of last year we got to see how Holmes's mind worked, although I found many of his deductions pretty dodgy (this too, however, reminded me of the original stories).
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On the whole the new Sherlock Holmes isn't terrible which, paradoxically, is not a good thing. It will encourage the BBC to continue digging in the nostalgia mine and we can expect yet more verions of Robin Hood or Pride and Prejudice or another Dickens adaptation and lots more Dr Who. They will all star terribly nice young actors and be well made and done tastefully with just a smidgen of the gothic to thrill you as you watch in your favourite cardigan and slippers. Perfect fodder for everyone who wants to forget for an hour or two that death is coming and it'll be here soon and it will last forever and ever.

Stieg Larsson = Tupac

When I heard the news that there was a second unpublished Stieg Larsson novel lurking on his long time girlfriend's laptop I wasn't surprised. Like Michael Jackson and Tupac, the late Mr Larsson is destined to become more prolific in death than the poor chap was in life. This is an exciting development for Larsson fans and bad news, obviously, for misogynistic Russian pigdog incestuous rapists.
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Any spoilers? Well, I've heard that in books 4 and 5 Lisbeth Salander gets even bigger breast implants than the ones she got in book 2 and Cally Blomkvist turns over more filthy stones in that hypocritical, poisonous, cess filled, putrid, neo Nazi, kakistocracy that we foolish bourgeois dupes in the West call, er, Sweden.  

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion - The Adam Curtis Edition

Adam Curtis is spoken of in hushed tones as some kind of prophet or seer dispensing truth to a few wise acolytes from a windswept, er, studio in the BBC . He makes documentaries and this one in particular, The Trap, has been recommended to me by several people. The uploader on YouTube feels that its contents are so dangerous that it is bound to be taken down soon by Google, the CIA, the US Government and possibly David Icke's lizard beings who run the universe. It is an "analysis" of Isaiah Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" and explains how Berlin's idea of "negative freedom" now shapes the modern world.
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Its certainly a visually arresting TV show but my God it is shallow undergraduate stuff and it is quite amazing to me that anyone can regard this as somehow "news". You study Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty in your very first week in a contemporary political philosophy course and then you spend the next year or so reading all the detailed criticisms of Berlin's view. Berlin was wrong Curtis says in the dramatic big reveal at the end of his show. Oh yeah, which way wrong? The way Ronald Dworkin says he was wrong or the way Robert Nozick says he was wrong or the way Alasdair MacIntyre says he was wrong or the way Charles Taylor says he was wrong? Berlin is merely a starting point for the whole communitarian/liberal debate that has been raging in philosophy since the late 60's. It's staggering that Curtis seems to be unaware of all of this. It gets him into embarrassing trouble: for Curtis to say that the idea of "positive liberty" has been "hidden and forgotten" (or perhaps, duh, duh, duh, suppressed) is absolute rubbish. Has he had read any philosophy book or paper written in the last 40 years? Now that Marxism is toast this is all that political philosophy departments ever argue about. Entire conferences, books, etc. etc. have raged on the idea of positive versus negative liberty. The very first philosophy tutorial I ever had was on Michael Sandel's criticisms of John Rawls's book length treatment of Berlin.
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Ironically Curtis is part of the problem that he claims to be worried about in his other documentaries - i.e. the dumbing down of TV. He's clearly spent a lot of time in the BBC archives finding footage and music for his programmes, but that time might more profitably have been spent in a library. The Trap is very thin gruel indeed, containing big exaggerated theses, no counter examples and no nuance; it proves what Neil Postman said two decades ago: TV is a medium for communicating images not ideas.
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If you are interested in the whole concept of positive and negative liberty and the role of freedom in a democracy (from the left and right and from all places in between) check out these books as a starting point:

Friedrich Hayek - The Road To Serfdom
Karl Popper - The Open Society and its Enemies
Two Concepts of Liberty - Isaiah Berlin
A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
Taking Rights Seriously - Ronald Dworkin
Anarchy, State and Utopia - Robert Nozick
Sources of the Self - Charles Taylor
After Virtue - Alasdair MacIntyre

Incidentally I'm going to pitch an idea to the BBC for a TV show called Charles Darwin The Hidden Prophet which will be an analysis of this unknown nineteenth century biologist and the conspiracy of silence about him and his controversial ideas.

Home By JG Ballard

Dont know how I missed this when it came out. Its a film by the BBC based on a JG Ballard short story. If you don't know Ballard this is a nice introduction to his universe. All 7 parts are on youtube; Anthony Sher is fantastic: