The Way: The Wait

 "It affects everyone in a family, doesn't it? When one person is suffering."

Well then. Where do I even start with this materpiece?

Obviously, on the surface at least, this is all about the small boats, the obsession of those of a certain ilk who, you know, don't want to do the obvious solution of just bloody processing refugees properly. And, of course, it's a simple role reversal, that obvious satire trope that we know so well, with Owen wryly asking Anna what the Poles will make of all these Welsh people going over there, taking all their jobs.

And, of course, the episode really runs with this, with a refugee camp on the Kent coast, trying to get to the Continent. It's very well done. And yet... there's far more subtext than this.

Slowly, over the course of the episode, the character arcs resolve. Dee and Geoff reach a mutual understanding and closeness, Geoff finally realises that he has ironically done to his son what his own father did to him. Owen is no longer emotionally numb, and he and Anna are in love. He forgives Thea.

And Geoff, of course, redeems himself in the inevitable way.

Yet even this is part of a deeper subtext. Oh, there's the irony of the Welsh Catcher being himself Welsh- plilosophical, no fool, but disdaining the luxury of principles. There's the worrying idea of AI being used for "predictive policining". But, deeper than this, there's the need for new stories, not the same old tired ones that have the glitching Internet revealing that the human imagination is stuck on nostalgia, stuck in the past. Huimanity cannot keep reliving old stories. It must throw away the weight of history, of old tropes, and live in the present. 

This is inspired... and very, very Adam Curtis. And so the various Arthurian and mythical references are pointedly thrown back in the sea.Wow.

I understand this wasn't a hit. I don't care. It's genius.

The Way: The Walk

 "Am I going mad? Or is it the world?"

After a first episode, highly impressive in itself, setting up this new dystopia, now we get to explore it. The Driscolls (and Anna) are refugees in their own land after Thea, putting family before Fascism, organises an escape for her brother, and the Driscolls are on the run in what is suddenly a bleak exercise in the picaresque, complete with surrealoism and family drama.

And it's brilliant. The Driscolls have been framed by an establishment which uses its client ,media, and deepfakes, to scapegost not just Owen but all of them. And yet, with the conceit of Qwen's withdrawal from drugs, we have surreal moments like the talking teddy bear, tempting him not to go to tomorrow but to come to the safety of yesterday. Again we have Simon, the homeless, riddling savant, getting drunk in a bleakly disused holiday camp- andthe brief footage of the cheery advert is a stroke of real genius.

Equally fairytale is the Welsh Catcher, a villain from the Brothers Grimm. Fitting that the escape into England should be via Hay-On-Wye, town of bookshops. Then there's the motif of the underwater bell, a nod, like last episode with the sword in the stone, to Welsh folklore, the many lands said to have fallen beneath the water.

Yet the realism is superb too. We think, in our first world comfortds, that we will never be refugees, on the run, with nothing. Yet, as Anna says, "It happens. All the time. All over the world". There's the GCHQ helper who helps because "First they came for...".

And there will always be those who not only conform but do so with enthusiasm. The English volunteer border guards are truly chilling. The deep irony of one of them cheerfully and casually uttering racist slurs against the Welsh to a Black man he sees as English is nicely done. But sois the whole thing, the directing and cinematography remaining utterly sublime. This is superb telly..

The Way: The War

 "What is it that rises up the moment it falls?"

I was made aware of this series the other day at work, I looked it up... and not only is it scripted by James Graham, he of This House and Brexit: The Uncivil War, but it's co-directed by Michael Sheen and the one and only Adam Curtis, whose uniquely philosophica; and visually extraordinary documentaries have made a huge impression on me and my world view. Watching it immediately became imperative, and I care not that I'm juggling so much other stuff on this blog.

The first thing to note is that it's shot beautifully, cinematically, artistically, exquisitely. The acting, from a fairly unknown cast aside from Sheen, is extraordinary. The cinematography is perfect too, reflecting the dull, hopoeless world of those dependent on the ever-moribund steelworks in Port Talbot. In today's world, globalised yet beset by populist nationalism, the industrial working class lives in ignored despair.

We have two viewpoint figures. One is Own, emotionally numbed, mentally ill and seeking human connection in the most literal way possible, sex, yet without meaningful communication with the lady concerned. Connection, and yet not connection. And then we have Geoff, alienated from the militancy of his family and community because he recalls how a strike destroyed his father, the ghost of whom is played by Sheen himself.

The pllot unwinds masterfully, introducing so many characters and allowing things to get out of control as the strike unfolds and draws support from across Wales. I'm not sure the conceit quite works of the national strike ending at Offa's Dyke, and Wales being cut off from the rest of the UK and put under martial law, but at the same time this is a scenario pregnant with so many allegories in our scary modern world, from the nature of power to the right to protest to borders and migration.

Throughout there's this very Adam Curtis sense of hopelessness, that politics has long since lost its power to change things and that fight is mere expression of despair, yet perhaps worthwhile just for that.

We have,of course, some nice little moments that ouncture realism. The red monk, Geoff at the end with the sword from the Port Talbot stone... Arthurian allusion? 

This is spellbinding telly. Superb.

The Crown: Season 3, Episode 6- Tywysog Cymru

 "Fancy being the heir?"

"Not if it means going to Wales..."

This is yet another outstanding episode, our first to focus on Charles as a young man rather than a child- Josh O'Connor plays him with aplomb, safely negotiating a path between acting and impersonation. But the script (with James Graham co-writing) is magnificent.

It's horrifying to see Charles at 20, clearly having been denied much of a childhood, being denied a youth too. It's awful so see him trying to reach out to a room of fellow students in Aberystwyth but have the door slammed on him by youths with hair and clothes appropriate for students in 1969, while he stands there in his ever-present suit. He can never belong, and even his family (though his rapport with Anne is lovely) are very cold fishes, as we shall see.

For much of the episode it seems as though the theme is going to be Welsh nationalism, Certainly we, through Charles, learn much of the Welsh viewpoint and it's interesting to see Charles relationship evolve with his republican, nationalist tutor Edward Millward (not a very Welsh name!) from insulting ignorance to true mutual respect as he slips some sympathetic sentiments into his speech which, well, may not have actually been said in his real investiture as Prince of Wales, but are a nice bit of artistic licence.

But all this is undermined at the end, after the warm parting with Millward and his "You did well". The Queen finally receives a translation of the speech and immediately sees through it... his sentiment about Wales being ignored, not listened to, are all about himself. He's exploited the Welsh no less than many of his forebears. And we end with an argument about how a monarch can never be seen to express an opinion lest the whole edifice collapse. At the same time, this is an impossible thing to expect of someone. I 'm sure this theme will recur.

The solution, of course, if one is not a republican (and I, remember, am St Augustine's republican- "Lord, grant me a republic, but not yet"), is that it's only right to allow senior royals to decline the succession and retire into private life if they find this an overly onerous requirement. The gilded cage of royalty must carry the hope of parole. The lack of this sensible reform will, I suspect, lead to much further angst in future episodes...

Brexit: The Uncivil War

“Referendums are quite simply the worst way to decide anything. They’re divisive. They pretend complex choices are simple binaries- red or blue, black or white.”

It’s interesting watching this so soon after the National Theatre production of another James Graham play, This House; the parallels are striking, from the focus on back room operators rather than big political names to the introduction of each character as either "Remain" or "Leave", paralleling the uses of constituencies in This House. And, of course, the script is superb- human, philosophical, witty and awfully clever in how it presents the Brexit referendum as a coherent narrative.

Benedict Cumberbatch is superb as Dominic Cummings, unconvincing Mackem accent notwithstanding; this Leicestershire lad is married to a Geordie and knows these things. Cummings is, of course, much more well known today as Boris' puppet master and devotee of the driving-based eye test. This is a fascinating character study of a highly intelligent and capable man and a campaigning genius- I like how his clear campaigning methods are juxtaposed with those of the useless Remain campaign- whose sheer talent in this area should not be mistaken for a coherent or clever political philosophy. We are already seeing how his campaigning talents do not transfer to governing. Yet there's no denying his talents in the campaigning arena, especially against the uselessness of his opponents, unthinkingly rolling out the Clinton '92 "economy, stupid" campaign after a quarter of a century and not for once presenting Brexit as the massive surrender of sovereignty that it is, or speaking to those who have been forgotten by such campaigners.

We see both Cummings' arrogance and his unlikely charisma as well as, interestingly, as much of a clash between the two Leave campaigns as between the two opposing sides. And the script does not let Cummings off the hook for his "dead cat" methods of lying, nor for either the cynicism of letting Farage and his rabble of not-racist-buts talk about immigration, nor for his own mendacity about seventy million Turks. And yet the use of Bill Cash and Bernard Jenkin as foils allow even a Remainer like me to enjoy Cumming's effortless batting off of an attempted coup. One would think I would find this depressing, given the awfulness of its subject matter. It's a real credit to the script and to Cumberbatch that I don't.

This House (National Theatre Live, 2013)

"A Conservative Government eventually falls because they believe themselves entitled to power. And Labour Governments always fall because they don't."

The National Theatre are streaming one free recording of a play on YouTube, and for one week only, until Thursday I believe, the chosen play is James Graham's funny, tragic, human and wonderful tale of politics and desperation charting the Parliamentary struggles of the Labour Government between 1974 and 1979 and that fatal confidence vote.

It's an interesting experience to watch a stage play via a recording, and a reminder of the way the medium uses clever staging instead of boring realism- hence the dances as Commons votes and, most wonderfully, the use of a big blue cloth and David Bowie's "Rock and Roll Suicide" to evoke the moment where John Stonehouse (look him up) does his Reggie Perrin thing. In fact there's a superb use of contemporary rock throughout, much of it Bowie- particularly clever is the use of "Five Years" to evoke the various MPs who die during the 1974-79 Parliament.

We see few Government or Opposition ministes, at least no more than cameo's; this is the story of the two teams of whips, all of whom we come to know. It's a splendid ensemble performance, although I fear the two standout performances- Phil Daniels as Bob Mellish and Vincent Franklin as Michael Cocks- are on the Labour side. But there's plenty of politics- we have hints at the Tory shift to the right under Thatcher and the end of the Butskellite consensus; Labour's future in terms both of Militant sabotage and the slow replacement of all those working class men with young professionals, represented here by future Chief Whip Ann Taylor.

This is dramatic, funny, thoughtful; an examination of the game of politics, the stakes and the moral compromises involved, and of course the often enormous human cost. It's a wonderfu production of a wonderful play

Coalition

"I'm worried about Nick. He's in a bad place."

"Sheffield?"

I tend to write up my blog posts late these days, what with having become a father for the first time in February, but I just had to get this one out before the General Election and what looks like being a much more tortuous set of coalition negotiations over what could be a lot more than six days.

Also, cards on the table time: I'm on the left of the party, and some way to the left of all of the party's Cabinet ministers, with the possible exception of Vince Cable, but I've always voted Lib Dem until now. And the only reason I won't be voting Lib Dem on 7th May because I have now moved to a Tory/Labour marginal where a Lib Dem vote is fairly pointless under First Past the Post (why oh why is there not a site where I can swap my vote with a Labour supporter in a threatened Lib Dem seat?). I may not be a supporter of Nick Clegg (see below) or Orange Bookers generally, but I don't demonise him as many Labour tribalists do, but he hasn't been good leader since 2010 for various reasons, although he does have genuine achievements to his name and can, on the whole, be proud of his career. This one-off drama, with Clegg taking centre stage, is rather good at showing both his vices and his virtues.

Coalition is as good as this sort of thing tends to be, although you can never get a huge amount of dramatic depth out of a fairly straight reconstruction of recent political events. Obviously the standout cast member is Mark Gatiss who, as every review and preview has said, steals the show as a weary yet still dangerous Peter Mandelson, but all the portrayals ring true.

We begin not with the night of the election but with the leaders' debates, and those heady days of Cleggmania when everything seemed possible. This gives context for the slight deflation felt by many Lib Dems on election night, but the absurdity of election night is best portrayed by David Cameron receiving a call of misunderstanding congratulations from the Governor of California. Hasta la vista, baby. We also establish the relationship between Clegg and Donald Sumpter's elder statesman Paddy Ashdown, both a more left-wing and more substantial figure than Clegg, first shown consoling his protege on the mildly disappointing results, showing him to have rather more steel to him; it's not hard to see that the authorial voice sides with Ashdown rather than Clegg. So do I.

The morning after the night before sees Cameron make his big offer of coalition and Ashdown's prescient remark that "They'd string us up." The personal relationships are fascinating here; Camerpn subtly shows his dominance by insisting on immediate negotiations without sleep, and Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell puts pressure on both parties for a quick deal. Soon there are parallel negotiations going on with Labour, and the contrasts between Clegg's two suitors are fascinating; the Tories are hungry and devious, while Labour are half-hearted (sans Mandelson, a bit), unprepared and saddled by the fact that they simply haven't got the parliamentary arithmetic. Clegg's relationship with Gordon Brown is awkward, while Cameron runs rings round him; a Con-Lib coalition was inevitable, but a Blair clone like Clegg does not a good negotiator make and the script implies, not unfairly, that he was at least partly motivated by the prospect of power. He could have held out for a better deal, Brown leaving Number 10 prematurely notwithstanding. And, although a coalition of course makes it understandable that both sides have to compromise on their respective manifestos, that tuition fees pledge was different. It should have been inviolable.

Clegg's ultimatum to Brown- that he has to leave as PM for a coalition to happen- is both awkward and terrible, and Clegg is right to feel guilt. Brown deserved better, and Clegg cannot feel aggrieved if Labour were to make a similar demand in a week's time. Still, I have no doubt that all sides will be much better prepared. 

There's a nice cameo from Michael Crichton as an ancient Tory backbencher who remembers 1974, reminding us that Cameron too faces pressures, but the dramatic focus remains on a harried Clegg and a dignified Brown. We're reminded of how haphazard the final hours were, with Cameron becoming big PM, in the dark, before negotiations are complete. There will not, I suspect, be such chaos next time.

We end with the rose garden, and actual footage, bizarre in retrospect. Looking back the whole understanding of how coalitions were supposed to work looks extremely naive. I'm sure all parties are now much, much wiser.