Film, Media and Music
This chapter explores two of the shorter and less successful series, based on novels, that were produced in the Thatcher era – The Day of the Triffids (1981) and The Tripods (1984–85) – and assesses how each of them is responding to the Thatcherite landscape, both artistically and in terms of the new economic restrictions: the tighter budgets with which to make television. The chapter shows that The Day of the Triffids provides a kind of template for characteristics that would become front and centre in the Thatcher era – self-interest, Machiavellian behaviour, cynicism – but also remains quite faithful to the source material. The Tripods presents more of an engagement with the neoliberal tropes of the Thatcher era, updating and inventing many of its characters and scenarios to reflect this new environment.
This chapter analyses some of the most salient examples of science fiction television produced before the Thatcher era, arguing that generic science fiction television in the 1970s, the decade before Thatcher’s election, aligns itself in broad terms with modernist ideas about technological and teleological progress – the advancement of humanity; the faith in, and simultaneous dread of, technology – as well as simplified moral positions assuming a certainty and objectivity. But this chapter also shows that the moral dilemmas more commonly faced by characters in the 1980s are beginning to surface here. On ITV the spectre of ‘Americanisation’ was beginning to loom, while on the BBC science fiction was treated with a more aloof attitude. In both cases, however, there is a stable hierarchy, with the authority of the middle-class white man at the apex. There is an ethos of collectivism found in most of the series here: people work in teams, and rarely is the individual prized over the group. This reflects the social-democratic nature of the post-war consensus era. The authority of the white male leader, seen as benign, is largely taken as axiomatic. This was to radically alter in the Thatcher era, buckling under the pressure of what Stuart Hall called the ‘authoritarian populism’ that these Thatcherite series negotiate.
This chapter explores the significance of the ordinary in Columbo (NBC, 1971–2003). It shows how the titular detective figure is distinguished from other detectives not only by his raincoat, cigar and manner, but also by his connection to the ‘everyday’, enabling a mode of detection based on suspicious deviation from custom. Peter Falk’s embodiment of the detective as eccentric everyman is played off against the ostensibly ‘epic’ gladiatorial structure of the drama, the high-society setting, and, most markedly, the high-and-mighty villain, whose key flaw is hubris borne of self-imposed exile from normal interaction. With close reference to a single exemplary episode, ‘A Friend in Deed’ (1974), this chapter examines how stylistic choices and performance features help sing the virtues of groundedness, empathy and close attention to what people ordinarily say and do.
Draws together all the strands of the book’s analysis, and compares the series to show similarities, examining how science fiction from the Thatcher era can be explored as commentary on its political context.
This chapter examines the interplay between David Banner (Bill Bixby) and his alter ego the Hulk (Lou Ferrigno) in The Incredible Hulk (1977–82). While David is presented as an everyman in pursuit of a stable life and the Hulk a monstrous force, thus aligning David with the everyday and the Hulk with figures from epic literature, the chapter dismantles this apparent binary. The analysis maps the situation of David and the Hulk in relation to heroic mythologies, both classical and national, and the ways in which these are negotiated though ritual and variation. The Incredible Hulk’s episodic series structure is identified as a significant means through which everyday routine and epic adventures interact. Tropes that recur in each episode offer ritualistic pleasures but also sites where, through modification in how they play out, intersections between David and Hulk are traced. The chapter’s close analysis focuses on two structuring tropes of the show’s formula: the Hulk’s rampages in which the green Goliath showcases his bodybuilder physique that connotes heroes of epic literature, and the lonely David walking off into the distance at an episode’s end, evoking the Westerner of American frontier mythology. The instances of these tropes that are analysed – one of Hulk’s rampages in ‘Homecoming’ and David walking away at the end of ‘Nine Hours’– facilitate exploration of how the show negotiates ideas of masculinity, monstrosity and heroism while reflecting on the value and possibility of a stable everyday existence.
Epic / everyday: moments in television appraises an eclectic selection of programmes, exploring and weighing their particular achievements and their contribution to the television landscape. It does so via a simultaneous engagement with the concepts of the epic and the everyday. The book explores how both the epic and the everyday inform television’s creative practice as well as critical and scholarly responses to TV. It argues that a fuller consideration of these two modes can revitalise TV criticism and interpretation, enabling fresh perspectives on the value of television, its essential qualities and aesthetic significance. The contributors to this collection come from diverse areas of TV studies, bringing with them myriad interests, expertise and perspectives. All chapters undertake close analysis of selected moments in television, considering a wide range of stylistic elements including mise-en-scène, spatial organisation and composition, scripting, costuming, characterisation, performance, lighting and sound design, colour and patterning. The range of television works addressed is similarly broad, covering UK and US drama, comedy-drama, sitcom, science fiction and detective shows. Programmes comprise The Incredible Hulk, Game of Thrones, Detectorists, Community, Doctor Who, The Second Coming, Years and Years, The Americans, Columbo and Lost. Epic / everyday is essential reading for those interested in how closer attention to the presence of the epic and the everyday might enhance our critical appreciation and enjoyment of television.
The British science fiction television series Doctor Who (1963–89) interwove the epic with the everyday, and this was a key component of its popularity and continuing cultural significance. This chapter examines the Doctor Who serial ‘The Chase’ (1965), an epic journey in which the TARDIS time machine is chased by the evil Daleks to a desert planet, then to the Empire State Building, the sailing ship Mary Celeste, a Gothic haunted house and finally to a futuristic metal city. By 1965 Doctor Who was losing its initial appeal; it had become everyday, and ‘The Chase’ is in some ways an attempt to raise the stakes by using ambitious special effects and exotic locations despite the restrictions of the programme’s rapid, low-budget production. At the same time as it proclaims Doctor Who’s epic ambitions, the serial’s journey begins from, and includes extended scenes in, the TARDIS, a time-travel machine that is also the everyday home of the protagonists. Studio-bound drama, characterised by talk and not action, alternates with jumps between exotic, other-worldly settings. In ‘The Chase’, Doctor Who explores the alternatives for what television science fiction can be. The serial’s epic journey ends by bringing the Doctor’s human companions home to the London of 1965, to look askance at their and their viewers’ everyday present. The chapter argues that ‘The Chase’ interrogates the value of long-running television programmes to domesticate the epic’s seriousness and scale, and to explore its alignment with everyday human experience.
This chapter discusses the interplay between what would conventionally be described as ‘foreground’ – the central plane(s) of attention – and ‘background’ – all the stuff further back – in the NBC/Yahoo series Community (2009–15). It suggests that the distinction between them is problematised throughout, with the express purpose of reterritorialising the genre’s cliched preserve of the ‘everyday’ in the context of its supposed opposite, the epic. The everyday interactions that sitcoms tend to prioritise are either counteracted by or contingent on seemingly marginalised events which, in their varied range and expansive scope, indicate a fictional world of epic proportions. If Seinfeld, famously, was a show about ‘nothing’, this sitcom is, one might say, about everything, all at once. The chapter looks at three tropes – the background as parallel story, the background as active participant, and the background as foreground in-suspension – so as to understand how the show interrogates its mise-en-scène to reconceive its generic convention of the everyday in the context of the epic. Foreground and background in Community, and corollary to that the categories of the everyday and the epic are, this chapter contends, not so much opposite ends of a continuum as that they are two sides of a Möbius loop; one is always already a quality of the other.
Game of Thrones (2011–19) is an epic fantasy television show by virtue of its themes, plot and scale, thus adhering to literary, cinematic and televisual notions of what constitutes the epic. Although the epic cannot be reduced to a single element of the show, it is epitomised by the ‘Epic 9s’, the label applied to the ninth episode of Seasons 1 to 6. Each episode in this category is visually spectacular, invokes elements of epic narratives and is the plot point each series works towards. Each Epic 9 episode also purposefully juxtaposes the epic with the everyday, combining the two to construct a highly complex narrative that has challenged televisual norms whilst catapulting the plot into a new phase and continually reworking the landscape of the show and television as a whole. The chapter focuses on the last of the Epic 9s, ‘The Battle of the Bastards’. The battle itself is epic in scale and in narrative terms. It provides visually spectacular elements that produce reactions of shock and awe, punctuating the narrative landscape with pivotal moments that draw a line under the seasonal progression of the show while simultaneously introducing new possibilities and directions. The Epic 9s therefore build upon the themes, values and relationships that are deeply embedded in the narrative, rendering Game of Thrones a series of epic moments that are built on the foundation constructed by the everyday, ensuring the binary opposites are irrevocably linked within the show and the wider televisual landscape.
This chapter examines the final moment of the second series of Detectorists (2014–17), first transmitted on 5 December 2015. The series follows metal-detector hobbyists Andy (Mackenzie Crook) and Lance (Toby Jones) as they attempt to deal with the mundanity and underachievement of their daily lives by searching the fields around their Essex homes for buried treasure, invariably without success. However, in this scene, Lance finally discovers a gold, jewel-encrusted Saxon aestel; the treasure we as viewers have seen buried beneath the crowd for two series in the show’s credit sequence. This moment offers the excitement of the great find that the characters have always craved; a fulfilment of a quest to create an ‘epic’ moment in ordinary lives. Yet this chapter argues that Detectorists is a series that strives on a series of levels to make the everyday itself, epic. Detectorists’ comedy derives from empathy, from a recognition of our own struggles, pain and even joy. It confers dignity on the ordinary and everyday and on its characters, and John Ellis’s theories of television ‘working through’ are examined in this respect. The aesthetics of the series also explore this binary, making the familiar landscapes seem as beautiful and as extraordinary as possible. The chapter concludes that metal detecting becomes a metaphor for digging deeper to find out the truth about our everyday life, the buried treasure that was there all the time. This becomes the epic narrative.