![]() ![]() And that's remarkably rare in today's TV landscape. But what all of these shows had in common was characters with clear, firm, fearlessly expressed points of view. The post millennium TV 'golden age', meanwhile, saw British drama dwarfed by US imports like The Wire and The Sopranos which offered universality by probing the dark heart of unchallenged, unrestrained capitalism.ĭrawing a line between Porridge and The Wire might seem like a tenuous exercise. The best of it, exemplified by the work of Chris Morris, self-reflexively critiqued the medium itself. Accordingly, the decade's keynote TV began to gaze inwards towards family, friends and workplaces - think Cold Feet and This Life. By the '90s, the Soviet Union had collapsed and it was decreed in some quarters that history had ended. These were shows with real energy and vitality with ideas that unnerved and polarised and characters who clearly articulated their creators' visions. Even ITV's hardscrabble recession fable Auf Wiedersehen Pet looks surprisingly pointed and gritty in retrospect. Or the visionary strangeness of The Singing Detective. Looking back, the asylum really does appear to have been left in the hands of the lunatics.īut what of the '80s? Consider the unashamedly polemical fury of Boys From The Blackstuff. A querulous and dissenting career criminal with whom we're supposed to identify and sympathise? A pair of suburbanites who reject conformity and materialism and mock their aspirational and conservative neighbours mercilessly? A man driven to suicidal despair by the world of work and the intangible nausea generated by a settled but bloodless family life? And all of these played for laughs? The 70s were weird. What oddly subversive pieces of mainstream, prime-time entertainment they now seem. Porridge maybe, or The Good Life or The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin. ![]() Think of a contemporaneous show which is now established as a key component of the British TV canon. Is there a common thread running through current British TV? Consider the '70s, where we join Milner, Jessica et al as they stumble around in the power blackouts and wallow in the filth of the winter of discontent. And, as he juggles with the lingua franca and events of the '70s, his series has plenty to tell us about today's TV landscape too. But even so, Kelly plays audaciously fast and loose with dates, means and motives in order to construct his disturbing, mischievous thesis. Were the assassination of Airey Neave, the 1979 vote of no-confidence in the Labour government and the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster linked? Of course not. As such it's both an astute critique of conspiracy theories and a willing participant in their possible creation. Utopia reimagines the present and future by reinventing the past. ![]() This season two opener is a bravura exercise in the detournement of real-world history in order to milk its story-telling, myth-making potential. What were the roots of the Janus population control conspiracy? How did the protein containing the Janus DNA end up in the bloodstream of tormented Tank Girl Jessica Hyde? And how did Milner become so jaw-droppingly cold-blooded? The first episode of this second run takes us right back to the beginning. In early 2013, the first season of writer Dennis Kelly's conspiracy thriller Utopia made a splash on C4 thanks to its expertly calibrated mixture of tangled plotting, jarringly atmospheric direction and stylised ultra-violence. Both Milner and Wilson himself know that he's at the mercy of forces way beyond his control. Because nothing much beyond that will be expected of him. He probably won't be capable of anything much beyond acting as a bewildered patsy. And the thing is, Wilson's doubts are entirely well-founded. Exchanges like this are inevitable when the paranoid but creative vigour of the '70s meets the impotent languor of the current decade a decade so indistinct and underpowered that it doesn't even have its own nominal abbreviation. MI5 operative Milner is telling conspiracy theorist-turned double agent Wilson about the requirements of his new job. ![]()
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