Monday, 27 July 2009
Imagine This
I'm going to ask you to try to imagine something. Imagine that everything you ever did, however high as a kite it might have sent you at the time, always felt hollow because there was only ever you doing it, because you had to plan it, get there, get back and always do it on your own. Imagine that you never had any active encouragement to do anything you wanted to do and did. No-one stopped you, but no-one helped you either. Imagine whenever you did things with other people, you never quite knew why. Imagine half the sex you had was faked (oh yes, men can have fake sex too). Imagine looking at the world and wondering why people did what they do, and when you tried it, wondering what you must be missing out on because otherwise what's the fuss? Imagine that no matter where you are and who you're with, at the back of your mind, you don't want to be there. Not because you don't like wherever and whoever it is, but because you just went there faux de meiux. Tricky, isn't it? Keep trying. What you'll have problems with is getting the exact feeling of emptiness, the exact sound of a hollow steel drum from your insides, the exact way the feeling of pain sweeps through you when you heard the sounds of laughter in the next room. Now imagine that nothing seems to be able to make you feel better – not even drugs and booze and movies and chocolate and sex, not even all of them together. Except maybe for a moment. Which fades.
Friday, 24 July 2009
Why Soaps Aren't Drama
There is a fascinating series to be written about a real hospital: how people lie around in casualty for hours because there is only one decision-making doctor and he's in an emergency surgery for the rest of his shift, how people with cancers are turned away as being pregnant or suffering from indigestion, how doctors don't dare call consultants at the weekend and one consultant would rather leave a patient suffering than deal with another consultant's case – Private Eye's On The Rounds or any of the medical blogs will give a writer and producer endless material. A few dozen hours spent with nurses and disenchanted NHS managers will give them the inside stories and the touches of realism you need.
That series is not Casualty, Holby City or any of the others currently on British television. None of those hospitals is recognisable as any I have ever been in. Where are the groups of nursing assistants gossiping at the admin desk but doing nothing? Why is a consultant wandering around the ward waiting for something to happen? Why are the staff talking in English voices? How did any patient get treatment within three hours? How on earth did they find a nurse who knew the patient's name? And where did they dig up the awful chavs who have family rows by the hospital bedside? If there's one thing that impresses me about hospitals, it's how quiet, considerate and well-mannered the visitors are – and my local hospital is the West Middlesex. What are doctors doing having affairs with nurses or each other? Have you seen real doctors and nurses? Would you have an affair with them? Anyway, that myth grew up in the time when a fair number of nurses came from the same strata of society as the doctors – rather as airline stewardesses came from a similar strata as their passengers in the Fifties and Sixties, when airline travel was for an elite, not you and me.
You have to like your characters to tell stories about them – even the bad guys, in fact, especially the bad guys. You can't like them unless you let them into your head. And who would want to let the endless parade of chavs, dysfunctionals, mediocrities, uglies and nobodies who make usual people in The Bill? It's as if there is a guideline that attractive, intelligent, well-balanced and communicative people must not be portrayed.
You also have to understand the world of your characters, and by the nature of the job of writing, what most writers understand is the world of the freelance and the edges of the State arts bureaucracy and the BBC. They have never worked in a public- or private-sector management role and don't know what happens there. They haven't worked on the railways, in a hospital, a local council, a bank, a retailer or anywhere else. They have no idea how modern corporations and institutions work. I'm not expecting every writer to be Neil Simon, but they ought to do better than the utterly unrealistic portrayal of journalism and politics that is State of Play. Any journalist who behaved as the Kelly MacDonald character did would never keep a job on a national newspaper.
The major employers of writers in the UK are the Big Soaps. Soap operas have strict conventions, the most important for our purposes is that the characters cannot develop, only suffer random setbacks that result from the clash of circumstance and their static character (in tragedy, the setback arises from the character, not a car crash). Hence no-one can learn, there is no development: slimy Nick Cotton is down but will return, as nasty as ever, in a few episodes' time. In a Soap, these defined and stable characters meet life's insults, challenges, whips and scorns and fight back, break down or run away and cry, as they might. But never change – even when they are written out. (Okay, the best cop show ever made – The Shield – has the structure of a soap opera, as does The West Wing. Sometimes it can work. )
Soap characters live in the most heavily-populated town in England: Denial. They cannot believe this could happen, nor that you could have done it to them. What were you thinking? You're in trouble now, this could ruin everything. I can't believe this has happened. It can't be true. Not only are English soaps are set in Denial, they are set in the lower-income end at that, Denial-by-the-Industrial Estate. This limits the characters even more, as they have no money or time for any moments of contemplative life, their every waking moment taken up with the daily round, dodging, diving, grafting and, oh yes, drinking tea and beer. This ensures the viewer never thinks to ask why the characters don't do something about their lives. The Soap inhabitants of Denial are nothing like the people who really live there but a parade of stock characters, who appear in every Soap, sometimes wearing a stethoscope, sometimes pulling a pint, sometimes teaching a class.
Because the Soap cannot countenance change, it is not drama. Drama is about change: characters develop through meeting or not the circumstances they find themselves in. The Soap therefore has to substitute conflict and confusion for drama (there's nothing wrong with either as plot devices - Romeo and Juliet has a plot based on the conflict between the Capulets and Montagues, but it's a love story). Writing conflict and confusion is a lot easier than writing drama: all you need are people shouting at each other because they thought that he was cheating on her with Sally Evans, when all he was doing was hiding her birthday present there. It's why Soaps are reassuringly unrealistic, as our daily lives are carefully organised to reduce the possibility of conflict and so little happens in them that there is very little room for confusion.
Soaps corrupt writers. A writer's job is drama, and there is no drama without change, development, a character's strengths holding them up through a crisis as their weaknesses threaten something fundamental about their existence. This can be done without guns, crossed messages, mis-communication and fist-fights: it can be done without conflict. Eric Rohmer's charming little ditties are drama on exactly this level.
That series is not Casualty, Holby City or any of the others currently on British television. None of those hospitals is recognisable as any I have ever been in. Where are the groups of nursing assistants gossiping at the admin desk but doing nothing? Why is a consultant wandering around the ward waiting for something to happen? Why are the staff talking in English voices? How did any patient get treatment within three hours? How on earth did they find a nurse who knew the patient's name? And where did they dig up the awful chavs who have family rows by the hospital bedside? If there's one thing that impresses me about hospitals, it's how quiet, considerate and well-mannered the visitors are – and my local hospital is the West Middlesex. What are doctors doing having affairs with nurses or each other? Have you seen real doctors and nurses? Would you have an affair with them? Anyway, that myth grew up in the time when a fair number of nurses came from the same strata of society as the doctors – rather as airline stewardesses came from a similar strata as their passengers in the Fifties and Sixties, when airline travel was for an elite, not you and me.
You have to like your characters to tell stories about them – even the bad guys, in fact, especially the bad guys. You can't like them unless you let them into your head. And who would want to let the endless parade of chavs, dysfunctionals, mediocrities, uglies and nobodies who make usual people in The Bill? It's as if there is a guideline that attractive, intelligent, well-balanced and communicative people must not be portrayed.
You also have to understand the world of your characters, and by the nature of the job of writing, what most writers understand is the world of the freelance and the edges of the State arts bureaucracy and the BBC. They have never worked in a public- or private-sector management role and don't know what happens there. They haven't worked on the railways, in a hospital, a local council, a bank, a retailer or anywhere else. They have no idea how modern corporations and institutions work. I'm not expecting every writer to be Neil Simon, but they ought to do better than the utterly unrealistic portrayal of journalism and politics that is State of Play. Any journalist who behaved as the Kelly MacDonald character did would never keep a job on a national newspaper.
The major employers of writers in the UK are the Big Soaps. Soap operas have strict conventions, the most important for our purposes is that the characters cannot develop, only suffer random setbacks that result from the clash of circumstance and their static character (in tragedy, the setback arises from the character, not a car crash). Hence no-one can learn, there is no development: slimy Nick Cotton is down but will return, as nasty as ever, in a few episodes' time. In a Soap, these defined and stable characters meet life's insults, challenges, whips and scorns and fight back, break down or run away and cry, as they might. But never change – even when they are written out. (Okay, the best cop show ever made – The Shield – has the structure of a soap opera, as does The West Wing. Sometimes it can work. )
Soap characters live in the most heavily-populated town in England: Denial. They cannot believe this could happen, nor that you could have done it to them. What were you thinking? You're in trouble now, this could ruin everything. I can't believe this has happened. It can't be true. Not only are English soaps are set in Denial, they are set in the lower-income end at that, Denial-by-the-Industrial Estate. This limits the characters even more, as they have no money or time for any moments of contemplative life, their every waking moment taken up with the daily round, dodging, diving, grafting and, oh yes, drinking tea and beer. This ensures the viewer never thinks to ask why the characters don't do something about their lives. The Soap inhabitants of Denial are nothing like the people who really live there but a parade of stock characters, who appear in every Soap, sometimes wearing a stethoscope, sometimes pulling a pint, sometimes teaching a class.
Because the Soap cannot countenance change, it is not drama. Drama is about change: characters develop through meeting or not the circumstances they find themselves in. The Soap therefore has to substitute conflict and confusion for drama (there's nothing wrong with either as plot devices - Romeo and Juliet has a plot based on the conflict between the Capulets and Montagues, but it's a love story). Writing conflict and confusion is a lot easier than writing drama: all you need are people shouting at each other because they thought that he was cheating on her with Sally Evans, when all he was doing was hiding her birthday present there. It's why Soaps are reassuringly unrealistic, as our daily lives are carefully organised to reduce the possibility of conflict and so little happens in them that there is very little room for confusion.
Soaps corrupt writers. A writer's job is drama, and there is no drama without change, development, a character's strengths holding them up through a crisis as their weaknesses threaten something fundamental about their existence. This can be done without guns, crossed messages, mis-communication and fist-fights: it can be done without conflict. Eric Rohmer's charming little ditties are drama on exactly this level.
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
Living With Yourself: Part Five
We had reached the bit where you were extolling the virtues of grinding it out, keeping a stiff upper lip and behaving like a professional when I was stuck in a job and life I didn't like. I should spare everyone my feelings and get out, leaving behind such a huge pink cloud of goodwill that people will wonder why I left.
That would be called “denial” and it is very definitely a Bad Thing.
You see, for those of you who haven't been there and don't know – it's not like having a headache or a cold or a cough. It's like having a permanently bad knee, or tinnitus, or air bubbles in your retina which cause blank patches, or an ache that won't go away because the bones didn't quite heal right. When something happens to you, gentle reader, you get upset, you get angry or down in the dumps: that's the emotional equivalent of a cold. You can “move on” from that – if you can find somewhere to go - or you can adjust, behave professionally, take it in your stride. What happened to us is for life. We can learn some tricks – they teach you to “manage” tinnitus, which means they can't cure it, and you can “manage” it, but it doesn't go away – we can manage our behaviour and reactions, but the underlying emotions are still there and if the trigger is too strong, blooey – we're off. Would you say to someone born with a dodgy heart “so you have a dodgy heart, get over it”? Maybe if you're that insensitive. What we have is like a dodgy heart – no, metaphorically, it is a dodgy heart. If you're a normal person, you have no idea what I'm talking about, and if you do know you might not believe that your emotional stuff is as permanent as a physical condition, but it is. The deep emotional stuff is as debilitating, hampering, disabling, disadvantaging, irritating, upsetting and painful as any serious physical injury.
So when you say words to the effect of “grind it out”, “get over it”, “you need to move on”, ask yourself what you're really asking us to do. It's okay to ask that we stop moaning around you – if done with some firm kindness, that's not insensitive. Are you asking that? Or are you honestly suggesting that we leave behind emotions we can barely name caused by incidents we can't even remember in the same way you left behind the carpets when you moved house?
That's one of the things you don't get. We often don't know where it hurts, what hurts and what effect that hurt is having on us. Get an abscess on your foot and you will soon wind up with pains all through your back as you adjust how you walk and hold yourself. If you don't know what's happening, are you going to connect the neck pain with the foot problem? We know something wasn't right, but we don't know what because we don't know how it was supposed to be. That's another of the things you don't get. You can, in the end, look at your foot and you know you're not supposed to have an abscess there – we don't know what's right and wrong, what was us and what was them.
Does this stuff really last as long as this? We really can go into our late middle age with it? Doesn't it fade away? Like the colour of the spines of books exposed to sunlight? Wrong analogy. It's cracks in walls, too much sand in the cement, trees drying out the soil in your foundations; it's the way your face changes as you get older and you did nothing to make it look like that, it just happened; it's the way your body just decided it would not recover from that collision in the rugby match so quickly. The soul might be immortal, but it is not ageless. It wears and tears and cracks and you have to go round fixing it.
Call no-one normal until they are dead. And then call them lucky. Lucky that nothing happened in their whole lives that hit one of the weaknesses in their morale, identity, character or emotional make-up. Lucky that if it did, they had friends, relatives or colleagues who could help them, people to tell them how to handle it, that it isn't their fault, that, yes, actually that boss / girlfriend / boyfriend / relative / whoever is a Bad Person / degenerate addict / thief / psycho and you are best off away from them. What you don't get is that we never had anyone like that.
The question is: what can we change, what do we have to live with and what won't we give up?
That would be called “denial” and it is very definitely a Bad Thing.
You see, for those of you who haven't been there and don't know – it's not like having a headache or a cold or a cough. It's like having a permanently bad knee, or tinnitus, or air bubbles in your retina which cause blank patches, or an ache that won't go away because the bones didn't quite heal right. When something happens to you, gentle reader, you get upset, you get angry or down in the dumps: that's the emotional equivalent of a cold. You can “move on” from that – if you can find somewhere to go - or you can adjust, behave professionally, take it in your stride. What happened to us is for life. We can learn some tricks – they teach you to “manage” tinnitus, which means they can't cure it, and you can “manage” it, but it doesn't go away – we can manage our behaviour and reactions, but the underlying emotions are still there and if the trigger is too strong, blooey – we're off. Would you say to someone born with a dodgy heart “so you have a dodgy heart, get over it”? Maybe if you're that insensitive. What we have is like a dodgy heart – no, metaphorically, it is a dodgy heart. If you're a normal person, you have no idea what I'm talking about, and if you do know you might not believe that your emotional stuff is as permanent as a physical condition, but it is. The deep emotional stuff is as debilitating, hampering, disabling, disadvantaging, irritating, upsetting and painful as any serious physical injury.
So when you say words to the effect of “grind it out”, “get over it”, “you need to move on”, ask yourself what you're really asking us to do. It's okay to ask that we stop moaning around you – if done with some firm kindness, that's not insensitive. Are you asking that? Or are you honestly suggesting that we leave behind emotions we can barely name caused by incidents we can't even remember in the same way you left behind the carpets when you moved house?
That's one of the things you don't get. We often don't know where it hurts, what hurts and what effect that hurt is having on us. Get an abscess on your foot and you will soon wind up with pains all through your back as you adjust how you walk and hold yourself. If you don't know what's happening, are you going to connect the neck pain with the foot problem? We know something wasn't right, but we don't know what because we don't know how it was supposed to be. That's another of the things you don't get. You can, in the end, look at your foot and you know you're not supposed to have an abscess there – we don't know what's right and wrong, what was us and what was them.
Does this stuff really last as long as this? We really can go into our late middle age with it? Doesn't it fade away? Like the colour of the spines of books exposed to sunlight? Wrong analogy. It's cracks in walls, too much sand in the cement, trees drying out the soil in your foundations; it's the way your face changes as you get older and you did nothing to make it look like that, it just happened; it's the way your body just decided it would not recover from that collision in the rugby match so quickly. The soul might be immortal, but it is not ageless. It wears and tears and cracks and you have to go round fixing it.
Call no-one normal until they are dead. And then call them lucky. Lucky that nothing happened in their whole lives that hit one of the weaknesses in their morale, identity, character or emotional make-up. Lucky that if it did, they had friends, relatives or colleagues who could help them, people to tell them how to handle it, that it isn't their fault, that, yes, actually that boss / girlfriend / boyfriend / relative / whoever is a Bad Person / degenerate addict / thief / psycho and you are best off away from them. What you don't get is that we never had anyone like that.
The question is: what can we change, what do we have to live with and what won't we give up?
Monday, 20 July 2009
Employment Update
The Manager called on Saturday morning (!) to tell me that I hadn't got any of the jobs I had applied for – which, given that he had told me that he would oppose me getting any of them, wasn't such a surprise. I agreed to dodge the process whereby I got the “at risk” letter and had to look for another job in the company, and go straight for a role a grade lower. (I keep the same money and conditions.) Which was what I was expecting (2:1 on; 2:1 against, compulsory redundancy).
Now what I have to do is focus on the positive side. I started the year assuming I would be out of work by now. I have a job. Now I can get on with the house, have a holiday, buy some toys... Work will still suck, but I can live with that if a chunk of the rest of my life is making progress.
Now what I have to do is focus on the positive side. I started the year assuming I would be out of work by now. I have a job. Now I can get on with the house, have a holiday, buy some toys... Work will still suck, but I can live with that if a chunk of the rest of my life is making progress.
Friday, 17 July 2009
The Metaphysics of Juries
I'm on Jury Service this week. The first trial was stopped short when the main witness for the prosecution – a twenty-year-old girl whose boyfriend, the Crown were about to allege, had put a knife in her back during a drunken argument – maintained in contradiction to her statement to the police that it was an accident. The Crown dropped the charges, though frankly I think they would have had a good run at it despite her testimony – and we returned a verdict of Not Guilty on the judge's direction. At least we were sworn in. The second case plead out at the last minute, so we never even entered the Court. The third one is on-going, so I can't comment.
The thing is this. Down in the waiting room, the usher calls out fifteen or sixteen names. You sing out when you hear yours and line up, to be taken to the Court. At this point, you are not a Jury, because there's fifteen of you and you haven't been sworn, but you are more than a bunch of guys following someone in a black cloak. You're a Jury-In-Waiting. Not a Jury, and yet one. In-Waiting, a sort of limbo, each juror in an incoherent state of being and not-being a juror, only fixed in one eigenstate or the other by being called by the Clerk and swearing-in. In a state of Waiting, ready to do what's needed, excluding all other things, but yet no acting either. It's an old phrase from a more expressive time.
It's my third time, but they changed the rules a couple of years ago. Once you were done after the third time. Now they can call you every two years. If they do call you, don't try to get out of it – do your duty. It's mostly sitting around, but juries are so important that every Labour and the odd Conservative government tries to get rid of them, or restrict the cases they can hear. When you speak as a Jury, no-one can ignore you, gainsay you or contradict you, you are forbidden by law from explaining your decision and they can't ask. Only God-like senior judges in courts of appeal can over-rule the twelve of you.
The thing is this. Down in the waiting room, the usher calls out fifteen or sixteen names. You sing out when you hear yours and line up, to be taken to the Court. At this point, you are not a Jury, because there's fifteen of you and you haven't been sworn, but you are more than a bunch of guys following someone in a black cloak. You're a Jury-In-Waiting. Not a Jury, and yet one. In-Waiting, a sort of limbo, each juror in an incoherent state of being and not-being a juror, only fixed in one eigenstate or the other by being called by the Clerk and swearing-in. In a state of Waiting, ready to do what's needed, excluding all other things, but yet no acting either. It's an old phrase from a more expressive time.
It's my third time, but they changed the rules a couple of years ago. Once you were done after the third time. Now they can call you every two years. If they do call you, don't try to get out of it – do your duty. It's mostly sitting around, but juries are so important that every Labour and the odd Conservative government tries to get rid of them, or restrict the cases they can hear. When you speak as a Jury, no-one can ignore you, gainsay you or contradict you, you are forbidden by law from explaining your decision and they can't ask. Only God-like senior judges in courts of appeal can over-rule the twelve of you.
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
The History Boys
I'd been wondering if I should watch The History Boys for some time, any reluctance caused by the trailers which suggested that it was Stand and Deliver in an idyllic Yorkshire setting. A friend told me I really should see it, so I did. Stand and Deliver it sure ain't. It's probably the most cynical exercise in... I have no idea in what. Pandering to everything bad about the English. Where the hell do I start?
It's set in 1983. It has to be. In 1985 British teachers started a campaign of strikes that ended in 1987 with the Teachers' Pay and Conditions Act. In 1986 the two-tier syllabuses and examinations at sixteen – GCE's for brighter pupil's and CSE's for the rest – were replaced with a two-tier examination called the GCSE based on a common syllabus. In 1985, Britain was the only country in the world that taught elementary calculus to under-sixteens: after the GCSE, it became possible to get an A-level without knowing the derivative of sin(x). 1983 is British education Before The Fall. It's Britain before the Fall of the 1984/5 Miner's Strike, after which the Left had no moral centre.
The History Boys themselves have astounding confidence, memories like fly-paper, the concentration of astronauts and a security about their sexual identity that means they no hang-ups whatsoever about the well-meaning but gently gay Fat Teacher feeling them up as he gives them rides home on his motorbike, despite the fact that only one of them has a girlfriend (the school secretary, this being the only school in the world where the secretary isn't about a hundred years old.) They are what big, well-financed sixth-formers look like from the outside – but not on the inside. They are introduced to us as the best the school has ever had.
The History Boys says it's about education, the idealism of the Richard Griffiths character versus the cynical tricks of the Stephen Campbell Moore character. Griffiths will educate them – as well as make them learn poetry by heart (they quote Stevie Smith – Stevie Smith!) and the endings of camp films and plays by heart – but Moore and his tricks will get them into Oxbridge. It says it's a feel-good movie, but a feel-good movie has to have something at stake for our heroes, and there is no chance in hell these History Boys are going to fail. Not one. They have no weaknesses, their families don't exist and the whole thing takes place in an idyllic valley somewhere near Sheffield. Sheffield was one of the most prosperous town in the country, but by 1983 it was closed for business. The Full Monty was set in Sheffield in 1972 and it didn't get any better afterwards.
My friend gets very cross with me when I criticise a film for being “unrealistic”. He thinks I mean that the clothes were wrong or that the bus was the wrong type. I can live with that. Except when the story depends on it. Teenage boys are not relaxed about sixty-year old teachers groping them and they would not have the relationship they have with the character if he did – but then, if they did, and he didn't, the whole ending would disappear in smoke. And that's what the whole thing is – a smoke-and-mirrors magic trick written for people who want to be deceived. The lie is that it's all painless: that excellent A-level results (especially in 1983) could be gained while learning the ending of Brief Encounter, whereas that much work leaves people changed for life. It was A-levels and the university interviews that was the rite-of-passage. University and a degree was the reward for A-levels well done. The myth of pain-free life. Any time you can put that in a movie, you will find a willing audience in Britain.
If I'd been given the script? Well, the Sexually Confident One would have had three girlfriends in the course of the film. His mate would have been pining for some unattainable beauty and caught having a shag with an all-too-attainable one. No homosexuality and the Campbell Moore character would have gone to Jesus College, Oxford. We would have seen how good Rudge was at Rugby – that would have been my opening scene. We would have seen a Saturday afternoon in Sheffield so we understood why they wanted to leave. If they really cared about history, they would know where the best courses for their periods were – that discussion would have been in there and I would have sub-contracted it to a History teacher at a top public school. We would understand why they want to go to Oxford or Cambridge – contacts, CV, Footlights (one of them is a demon pianist and the other sings), whatever. Why were they interested in History? A few hi-jinks involving drink, soft drugs and someone else's girlfriend. Edited highlights of a real Oxbridge interview. But mostly we have to care that they get in – and not just because, well, they would, wouldn't they, because how could you not want to go there? Each one of them has to have a failing they need to overcome if they are to get in, and since there's eight of them that's enough story for anyone. And that's why you're going to care – because you want them to overcome their faults. Oh, and one little thing: at some point we the viewer get to see how much a conscientious A-level and Oxbridge History student has to read. The sheer pile of books, lingered over for one minute of it and we're sold on these guys being serious.
It's set in 1983. It has to be. In 1985 British teachers started a campaign of strikes that ended in 1987 with the Teachers' Pay and Conditions Act. In 1986 the two-tier syllabuses and examinations at sixteen – GCE's for brighter pupil's and CSE's for the rest – were replaced with a two-tier examination called the GCSE based on a common syllabus. In 1985, Britain was the only country in the world that taught elementary calculus to under-sixteens: after the GCSE, it became possible to get an A-level without knowing the derivative of sin(x). 1983 is British education Before The Fall. It's Britain before the Fall of the 1984/5 Miner's Strike, after which the Left had no moral centre.
The History Boys themselves have astounding confidence, memories like fly-paper, the concentration of astronauts and a security about their sexual identity that means they no hang-ups whatsoever about the well-meaning but gently gay Fat Teacher feeling them up as he gives them rides home on his motorbike, despite the fact that only one of them has a girlfriend (the school secretary, this being the only school in the world where the secretary isn't about a hundred years old.) They are what big, well-financed sixth-formers look like from the outside – but not on the inside. They are introduced to us as the best the school has ever had.
The History Boys says it's about education, the idealism of the Richard Griffiths character versus the cynical tricks of the Stephen Campbell Moore character. Griffiths will educate them – as well as make them learn poetry by heart (they quote Stevie Smith – Stevie Smith!) and the endings of camp films and plays by heart – but Moore and his tricks will get them into Oxbridge. It says it's a feel-good movie, but a feel-good movie has to have something at stake for our heroes, and there is no chance in hell these History Boys are going to fail. Not one. They have no weaknesses, their families don't exist and the whole thing takes place in an idyllic valley somewhere near Sheffield. Sheffield was one of the most prosperous town in the country, but by 1983 it was closed for business. The Full Monty was set in Sheffield in 1972 and it didn't get any better afterwards.
My friend gets very cross with me when I criticise a film for being “unrealistic”. He thinks I mean that the clothes were wrong or that the bus was the wrong type. I can live with that. Except when the story depends on it. Teenage boys are not relaxed about sixty-year old teachers groping them and they would not have the relationship they have with the character if he did – but then, if they did, and he didn't, the whole ending would disappear in smoke. And that's what the whole thing is – a smoke-and-mirrors magic trick written for people who want to be deceived. The lie is that it's all painless: that excellent A-level results (especially in 1983) could be gained while learning the ending of Brief Encounter, whereas that much work leaves people changed for life. It was A-levels and the university interviews that was the rite-of-passage. University and a degree was the reward for A-levels well done. The myth of pain-free life. Any time you can put that in a movie, you will find a willing audience in Britain.
If I'd been given the script? Well, the Sexually Confident One would have had three girlfriends in the course of the film. His mate would have been pining for some unattainable beauty and caught having a shag with an all-too-attainable one. No homosexuality and the Campbell Moore character would have gone to Jesus College, Oxford. We would have seen how good Rudge was at Rugby – that would have been my opening scene. We would have seen a Saturday afternoon in Sheffield so we understood why they wanted to leave. If they really cared about history, they would know where the best courses for their periods were – that discussion would have been in there and I would have sub-contracted it to a History teacher at a top public school. We would understand why they want to go to Oxford or Cambridge – contacts, CV, Footlights (one of them is a demon pianist and the other sings), whatever. Why were they interested in History? A few hi-jinks involving drink, soft drugs and someone else's girlfriend. Edited highlights of a real Oxbridge interview. But mostly we have to care that they get in – and not just because, well, they would, wouldn't they, because how could you not want to go there? Each one of them has to have a failing they need to overcome if they are to get in, and since there's eight of them that's enough story for anyone. And that's why you're going to care – because you want them to overcome their faults. Oh, and one little thing: at some point we the viewer get to see how much a conscientious A-level and Oxbridge History student has to read. The sheer pile of books, lingered over for one minute of it and we're sold on these guys being serious.
Monday, 13 July 2009
Living With Yourself: Part Four
The therapeutic idea of normality is one thing, the common idea, found in counselling and every twelve-step meeting in the world, is something else entirely. This is normality as fitting-in, being able to make the right noises and gestures at the right time, feeling part of where you live and work, recovering quickly from life's upsets, and somehow being able to live without any one person's approval and brush of any one person's disapproval, gliding through the world in a haze of well-balanced equanimity. This is the goal of many people who have had chaotic emotional lives that led to substance abuse. I understand why, but it's not something I'd hold up as an ideal. It's a little too Buddhist for me.
Some things about ourselves we can change at any point in our lives – which is why there is almost no excuse for dressing badly, not being able to cook and being badly-groomed after the age of thirty. The only acceptable excuse is that you will be ostracised by the only peer group you have for not wearing a track suit and white trainers.
Other things are a little more difficult. We can learn to change the way we react to events that happen more frequently than events that happen infrequently: commuters eventually don't even notice that the train is ten minutes late – unless they have been standing since entering Zone 6. No-one ever learns to react with resignation or equanimity to being made redundant, and nor should they (though some people are overjoyed because it's what they want). And some things pass straight through some people while upsetting others deeply.
In common with many people from my background, I don't do bonding and I don't do fun. No fancy dress, fairground rides and paper hats at Christmas. No pub crawls, treasure hunts or bungee-jumping. I went paint-balling once and I'd like to give it another go when most of the others aren't all ex-South African Army Rangers (no, I'm not kidding, some of those guys could vanish into the ground right in front of your eyes.) I don't do mentors, father-figures or authority either - I respect your expertise and ability, but not your position. I don't believe in compliments much either: managers use them because they have been told to and women use them because they think it will make up for saying no. I can take collegial comments on my work, but those biannual appraisals? Any criticism of my work or behaviour threatens my very survival. Because you're plotting to sack me and I'll be without an income. Because you're going to pass on the pay rise and I'l be five percent or more less well-off next year than this. Because you've stored this up for five months and not done anything to help, because all you do is look for faults, because you have nothing constructive to say or do.
Get the idea? You may be unfazed by appraisals, being told no, by fake compliments from your manager, and be able to go happily on the company bonding outings while listening to the most crass motivational codswallop. I can't. It hits all sorts of primeval stuff.
Is it “who I am”? No, it's “how I behave when you do stuff that hits my nerve”. My having nerves there may make me a little hard to work or live with, given you think it's acceptable to behave like that. (If you don't think it is, but you do anyway because that's the game, that's what “lacking integrity” means. If you were wondering.) My having nerves there may mean I'm going to have a hard time finding somewhere I can settle, but that doesn't mean I'm “wrong”. If I wanted to stay in the employment environment I'm in, I would have to work on this stuff. I would have to play the game. One of the reasons they play the games is that the work they do is marginal at best and redundant at worst. They could vanish overnight and no-one would notice the difference for months. I'd prefer to do some real work.
We fit into our environments more or less well. We are under no obligation to fit in, but then the environment is under no obligation to support us if we don't. Sometimes the answer is not to change ourselves but to change our environment. Get another job, another partner, another neighbourhood, move your son to another school, change the gym you work out in. Sometimes we can do this, and sometimes the economy sucks and we're stuck for a while. How are we supposed to behave when we are stuck somewhere we really can't function?
I know what you're going to say: grit your teeth, grind it out and stop complaining. How's that working out for you? How much do you drink? How well are you sleeping? How much weight have you put on? How's your libido these days? How did you feel when you saw the office after that holiday? Just how much did your guts twist?
Some things about ourselves we can change at any point in our lives – which is why there is almost no excuse for dressing badly, not being able to cook and being badly-groomed after the age of thirty. The only acceptable excuse is that you will be ostracised by the only peer group you have for not wearing a track suit and white trainers.
Other things are a little more difficult. We can learn to change the way we react to events that happen more frequently than events that happen infrequently: commuters eventually don't even notice that the train is ten minutes late – unless they have been standing since entering Zone 6. No-one ever learns to react with resignation or equanimity to being made redundant, and nor should they (though some people are overjoyed because it's what they want). And some things pass straight through some people while upsetting others deeply.
In common with many people from my background, I don't do bonding and I don't do fun. No fancy dress, fairground rides and paper hats at Christmas. No pub crawls, treasure hunts or bungee-jumping. I went paint-balling once and I'd like to give it another go when most of the others aren't all ex-South African Army Rangers (no, I'm not kidding, some of those guys could vanish into the ground right in front of your eyes.) I don't do mentors, father-figures or authority either - I respect your expertise and ability, but not your position. I don't believe in compliments much either: managers use them because they have been told to and women use them because they think it will make up for saying no. I can take collegial comments on my work, but those biannual appraisals? Any criticism of my work or behaviour threatens my very survival. Because you're plotting to sack me and I'll be without an income. Because you're going to pass on the pay rise and I'l be five percent or more less well-off next year than this. Because you've stored this up for five months and not done anything to help, because all you do is look for faults, because you have nothing constructive to say or do.
Get the idea? You may be unfazed by appraisals, being told no, by fake compliments from your manager, and be able to go happily on the company bonding outings while listening to the most crass motivational codswallop. I can't. It hits all sorts of primeval stuff.
Is it “who I am”? No, it's “how I behave when you do stuff that hits my nerve”. My having nerves there may make me a little hard to work or live with, given you think it's acceptable to behave like that. (If you don't think it is, but you do anyway because that's the game, that's what “lacking integrity” means. If you were wondering.) My having nerves there may mean I'm going to have a hard time finding somewhere I can settle, but that doesn't mean I'm “wrong”. If I wanted to stay in the employment environment I'm in, I would have to work on this stuff. I would have to play the game. One of the reasons they play the games is that the work they do is marginal at best and redundant at worst. They could vanish overnight and no-one would notice the difference for months. I'd prefer to do some real work.
We fit into our environments more or less well. We are under no obligation to fit in, but then the environment is under no obligation to support us if we don't. Sometimes the answer is not to change ourselves but to change our environment. Get another job, another partner, another neighbourhood, move your son to another school, change the gym you work out in. Sometimes we can do this, and sometimes the economy sucks and we're stuck for a while. How are we supposed to behave when we are stuck somewhere we really can't function?
I know what you're going to say: grit your teeth, grind it out and stop complaining. How's that working out for you? How much do you drink? How well are you sleeping? How much weight have you put on? How's your libido these days? How did you feel when you saw the office after that holiday? Just how much did your guts twist?
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