Culture: An f##ing great British success story

While Hollywood blockbusters are no longer, you know, busting blocks, new music that sticks seems too rare, and what is left of the social media I dare still touch has become a bot infested Chat GPT generated swamp of dystopia, it needed some inspiration to relieve the creative gloom at Wave Your Arms this month. 

So thank you then to the UK, to Blighty, this Emerald Isle, and the good citizens of this rare corner of the planet for restoring much faith.  The evidence follows, and it is compelling. 

Exhibit #1: Hytner and Hockney

I am just back from Nicholas Hytner’s revival of Guys and Dolls at The Bridge, which took centrally staged immersive theatre to new levels, exploding with song, dance and joy.  While the vibrant production in a great venue was life affirming in the moment, a more lingering thoughtful time of affirmation was found at the new Lightroom venue in Kings Cross, where Hytner (again) has curated and produced a three-dimensional audio-visual wonder; in a retrospective, self-narrated by David Hockney.  The show called ‘Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)’ transports you through the thoughts, inventiveness and imagination of the greatest living artist in the world, via canvas, iPad paintings, and photography. We are moved from LA to East Yorkshire, via the Opera to Northern France, on floor and walls, in front, beneath, between and behind.  The music score written by Nico Muhly is also profoundly good.  If you were underwhelmed by a similar recent attempt to make an immersive ‘Van Gogh’ exhibition work well, then this show will reassure and revitalise your sense of the possible.  The fact that Hockney was personally involved in its creation has clearly and creatively paid off, and I understand that it will extend its run to October 2023. 

Exhibit #2: Forsyth’s Gold   

The BBC was once an undisputed cultural crown jewel export for the UK.  Unfortunately, it now finds itself increasingly at a nexus of the ‘culture wars’, amidst arguments over social media ‘censorship’ (benching a football host for a weekend and then capitulating almost as quickly), and just this week embroiled in a row with Elon Musk about its funding and a perception of “bias”. My own view (humbly) is that for the intact full-service BBC to survive, or thrive, it will need to continue to tread an enormously difficult tightrope of impartiality, so should neither genuflect to the left or right.  As soon as it editorialises on social issues, it risks aping the progressive CNN and NYT.  If it feels compelled to berate like the upstart GB News, or Fox News, it merely becomes just another “voice”, or opinion promoter, not a reporter, or news broadcaster of record.  But wherever it goes editorially, in a world where there are already a myriad of other channels and online services, it will only have any chance of surviving into the next decade if people continue to tune-in, tap, swipe, or request the BBC out of choice, not obligation.  If the future model for the BBC’s survival ends up being voluntary subscription (rather an archaic television license tax) then it will have to continue to produce shows like The Gold.  It does not have to compete with others to produce hundreds of hours of low common denominator rubbish, just make more productions like The Gold.  The six-part TV series, written by Neil Forsyth, is a wonderful piece of television drama, on a story rooted in a part of London (and Kent) I have lived in throughout the past thirty-odd years.  It was brilliant, particularly in how its sense of “period” setting in the mid-1980’s was so precisely and evocatively done.  As a bonus, in Jack Lowden’s brilliant enigmatic portrayal of Kenneth Noye, the director and production team had casted genuine gold of their own.   

Exhibit #3: Armstrong’s Succession  

HBO’s Succession, barely three episodes into Season 4, just had its ‘Red Wedding’ moment, with a shock akin to the Game of Thrones massacre that curve-balled a global audience who hadn’t managed to wade through two-thousand pages of George R.R. Martin’s voluminous source material, to already know that they were about to see the violent demise of protagonists aplenty.  In Succession, Logan is an ignoble king in his own modern world, amidst a market tempest, but does not react like Lear, bemoaning his lot and howling at the skies, while his kids battle for the spoils.  Here, months after surviving a stroke and a similar haemorrhage of just about every close relationship he’s ever touched, he strides the stairs to his private plane, whimsically engineering another humiliation of one of his kids and a loyal executive, and calls out for a more “aggressive approach” in his business empire.  He then simply dies, off-screen, on a toilet, fumbling for his mobile phone.

Succession is often singularly credited to Jesse Armstrong, a British author, screenwriter, and producer. He is even younger than I am, and clearly a genius, but he is also terrific at harnessing other British writers like Georgia Pritchett and Lucy Prebble and a US based production crew to create something distinctively set in the US, about a great American dynastic family, running a US media empire, but infused with something that reeks of British comedy.  It is their fusion of a peculiarly British sarcasm (born out of the sweary political masterpiece that was Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It) and some imagined (but I understand deeply well researched) unpacking of billionaires’ psychological hang-ups and psychosis that works so well.    

The episode formula is in a way simple enough, and yet distinctive for not being driven by the predominant emphasis of modern screen-entertainment, which is overly issue driven and message fuelled and too often sincerely, but awfully written.  Succession is the combination of great writing, acting, direction and production, in a creative combination that makes the drama fizz and the flawed characters pop. Over the four seasons the plot splutters, then stutters, repeats again some similar refrains (just like our own real less-high octane versions of life) but we root for the broken protagonists because the stakes are enormous.  The writing is visceral, and cruel, and almost Shakespearian in its iambic-pentameters of f-bombs, innuendo, sarcasm and sibling on sibling disdain. It’s a show about hurtfulness and emotional harm. If like me, you persevered through the dullness of the pandemic inhibited Season Three, sit back because now the gloves are really off, the bullying patriarch is grave-bound, and I cannot wait to see how this mess pays off in the final seven shows.