Graham Higgins Illustration

TV giveth and TV taketh away.

This week a browse through BBC iPlayer unearthed an episode of The Persuasionists which the BBC would like to persuade you is a comedy, set in an advertising agency.

I should own up at the outset: I am no enemy of truly gawp-inducingly bad comedy. I own a DVD of the On The Buses movies and on slow Bank Holidays when life feels empty and pointless I confirm this like a hangover victim slugging hair of the dog by watching one of these leery, nudge-wink charmless spectacles. The sensation is, if not death of the soul, then the local anaesthetic administered in preparation for its extraction.

The Persuasionists is a Martian comedy of the kind the BBC likes to commission; writer Jonathan Thake has observed and analysed the ingredients of farce and created a synthetic compound which bears as much resemblance to humour as a glass of cherryade to a bowl of cherries.

The acting is so exhaustingly over-the-top that the BBC has thoughtfully pre-laughed it to save the viewer the trouble of summoning a guffaw. If you can’t be bothered to switch off, all that remains is to point a glazed expression in the general direction of the screen and wait for the rigours of Newsnight.

Contrast and compare with a show from 1998, The Cops, inexplicably not officially released on DVD and brought back to my attention by my son Matthew,  as a set of bootlegged DVD’s off eBay.

Tony Garnett, writer of Cathy Come Home and Kes, is credited as Executive Producer and oversees a sustained essay in British humanist drama, an early example of faux-documentary handheld camerawork prowling around seemingly unremarkable dialogue vignettes. Establishing shots and exposition are minimal, crediting the viewer with the intelligence to retain and accumulate fragments of information about the plot and characters as they build and laminate into a Breughelian scene rich with grubby detail.

Apparently Greater Manchester Police withdrew cooperation by the end of the second series because it showed the force in an unsympathetic light. Viewed 12 years on, the characters appear flawed and scarred by rank-and-file infighting and thwarted attempts to find emotional stability against the demands and pressures of a working/waking life.

The mise en scene is unremittingly and unflinchingly bleak, not only in the unglamorous settings but the inarticulate squalor of expectations and ambition.

The Cops demonstrates the impoverishment that these settings wreak on men and women in and out of uniform (though the ubiquitous civilian track-suits and trainers remind you, as Zappa said from the stage ‘Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform; don’t kid yourselves’) and like Fielding the writers home in on the arbitrary and pragmatic nature of Law in the no-man’s land on the fringes of the moral and material poverty-line.

Here’s one of those examples of writing that places trust in the actors to add value to a low-key script and relies on skilful editing of deceptively, or archly, ragged peek-a-boo shooting.

The cast of characters is extensive and fleshed out in a succession of brief sketches. If there can be said to be ‘main’ characters, these would be John Henshaw in a career-defining performance as gimlet-eyed old-school copper Roy and Katy Cavanagh as rookie community cop Mel, but this choice is invidious amongst a cast scrupulously not-acting but behaving.

Given that The Cops is hard to come by and then  ironically only in dodgy home-made video-transfers it hits hard to think that The Persuasionists will likely appear soon on DVD to take its place on someone’s shelf next to a Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps collection.