Last Night's TV MY ZINC BED BBC2 WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? BBC1
Einstein successfully predicted that a massive heavenly objectwould be able to bend light, in a process known as gravitationallensing. He didn't, as far as I know, fully explore the applicationof this theory to the field of television drama, but big stars canaffect our observations here, too. To watch Uma Thurman in My ZincBed, David Hare's television adaptation of his own stage play, wasto contend with a kind of distracting optical shimmer, in which thecelebrity kept on threatening to blur the character she was playing.That's really Uma Thurman, you thought. Uma Thurman! - on the BBC -and jammy old Paddy Considine gets to snog her!
I'm not exactly sure who should get the credit for the fact thatthis effect didn't ultimately overwhelm Hare's drama. Hare himselfwould obviously be a leading contender for supplying a script thatdanced with implication and paradox. Jonathan Pryce would have apretty good claim, too, for a performance that brilliantlydemonstrated how understated screen acting can be and still draw youin. But perhaps the best reason was the fact that Thurman'scharacter, Elsa, is supposed to exert attractive force over the menwho encounter her. She is the gravitational centre of the piece, andunless she's got some kind of irresistible pull, it won't work.
This wasn't a drama that displayed any anxiety abouttheatricality, as television adaptations of stage originalssometimes do. It is, in fact, self-consciously melodramatic in itsstyle. "In my own life, nothing that has happened, nothing that canhappen, compares with the strangeness of a single summer," said Paulat the beginning, making a promise that the flashback scenes thenfulfil, with their account of a strange game of temptation playedout by Victor Quinn, Pryce's internet millionaire, and thepenniless, ex-alcoholic poet he adopts as an emotional plaything.The voice-over narration and the sudden extravagant bursts ofemotions sometimes gave it a melodramatic, film-noir feel, as ifFred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck had played these parts firsttime round, in a fever of black-and-white close-ups.
But where a noir film would have concluded with revealedmechanism, a plot crafted to reveal that all along there had onlybeen one innocent and one victim, Hare's drama ended less tritely,reasserting its central paradox - that excluding addiction from yourlife may also mean excluding passion and intensity - without clearlyspelling out who had done what to whom. There were scenes thatseemed to present Victor as Mephistopheles, including a sequence inwhich he talked Paul through the preparation of a perfect margaritaas his guest looked on with tortured longing. But there were alsomoments at which he seemed to be suffering from events that had runout of his control. And throughout, the dialogue teased and hintedin a way that is utterly alien to the plaintext cliches of mosttelevision drama. Paul's lost love in the play is a televisionactress. "She was a doctor in one of those series where they go tothe laundry cupboards and make love," he explained at one point, andthat brief reference to a different register of small-screen dramajolted you into a realisation of how unusual this kind of speech ison television. Instead of deploying cliches, it interrogated them.Instead of simply conveying information, it played with ideas.Instead of being thuddingly one-dimensional, it glanced in thelight, as when Victor said: "You must say goodbye to Elsa, too, Iinsist", and we couldn't be sure whether he was being genial oradmitting how much he knew about her affair. This isn't,incidentally, because theatre is inherently superior to telly. Itisn't. It's simply because Hare is more interesting than mosttelevision writers. It was thrilling, anyway, as heady as a goodstiff drink to someone who's been on the wagon for months.
In Who Do You Think You Are?, Jerry Springer explored hisprematurely truncated family roots, travelling to Poland and Germanyto find out what happened to the grandmothers he'd never known, bothof whom died in Nazi concentration camps. His ignorance of history -both familial and European - was a little surprising. He hadn'theard of Theresienstadt at all, where he discovered that one of hisgrandmothers had died in the camp hospital, the thinnest of silverlinings to an overwhelmingly black cloud, since it meant she hadn'thad to endure the transports to Auschwitz. But even for viewers morefamiliar with the bureaucracy of extermination, there were movingrevelations here. In a Gestapo document, Springer found a list ofthe possessions that had been confiscated from his grandmother atthe time of her "resettlement", which even included the depositmoney due to her from the gas account she'd been obliged to close.The murderers forgot nothing. Like many Jerry Springer programmes,it ended with a little homily from him about the importance offamily, but this one was infinitely more heartfelt than most.
t.sutcliffe@independent.co.uk
