Читать книгу A History of Television in 100 Programmes - Steve Berry, Phil Norman - Страница 6

When the BBC asks a question, it isn’t just a question, it’s a ‘viewer participation programme’.

Grace Wyndham Goldie, Listener, 2 March 1939

IN BBC TELEVISION’S BRIEF life before the war, drama meant the theatre: simple studio productions of acknowledged classics or extracts from a show currently running in the West End. These unofficial trailers were either recreated in the studio (with as much of the theatre’s scenery as could be blagged) or occasionally and chaotically broadcast live from their home turf. Champions of theatre broadcasts claimed the presence of an audience added atmosphere and upped the actors’ game – the fact that the cameras often ended up chasing them about the stage, like a football match filmed by a bunch of drunken fans, was a small price to pay.

Visuals took a back seat at first. Early TV equipment produced low-definition pictures in murky black and grimy white. Faces had to be held in tight close-up to enable recognition, and wide shots couldn’t be that wide due to the Beeb’s tiny Lime Grove studios. Sets and lighting just about did the job, and nothing more. Directors couldn’t cut between cameras – a change of shot had to be done by mixing, which could take several seconds. With all these restrictions, wrote the critic Philip Hope-Wallace, ‘the television screen is much less a stage … than a checking-board helping us listen to good talk.’11

The first step on the road to the modern drama series was taken by what critic Grace Wyndham Goldie, later to run the BBC’s current affairs department, called ‘an interesting experiment in presentation’.12 Mileson Horton had made a name for himself in the mid-1930s writing ‘Photocrime’, an immensely popular series of whodunit photo-stories starring the intrepid Inspector Holt, published in Weekly Illustrated. These bare bones procedurals, simply told and visually direct, were just what TV producers were after. Horton was hired to script a series of twenty-minute Holt adventures for the small screen.

Take a typical episode of Tele-crime, ‘The Fletcher Case’. A man’s body is found sprawled on the floor of his bedroom, with a gun in his right hand. It looks like an open-and-shut suicide case for Inspector Holt. Just as he’s about to leave the scene, the phone rings. Holt’s constable answers: it’s the victim’s niece. The victim, it turns out, was left-handed! Murder! It’s a race to the family house to stop the killer striking again. But too late! Another family member has been offed. Holt assembles the suspects and hears their stories.

After fifteen minutes of this, Holt and company fade from the screen, replaced by the gently smiling face of continuity announcer Elizabeth Cowell: ‘Well, who did do the murder? Viewers have now all the evidence necessary to detect the criminal.’ There follows a few moments’ reflective pause for the audience to flex their minds, then it’s back to the house for a rapid denouement.

The guess-the-culprit interval was an early bit of audience participation that didn’t last the pace (although it was revived for Jeremy Lloyd and Lance Percival’s 1972 panel game Whodunnit?). The rest of Tele-crime, though, set the mould for the detective series, the backbone of popular TV drama ever since.

The crime thriller, like most genres, is a self-concealing art: done well, the writing and direction are taken for granted; done badly, they’re sitting ducks. ‘In an affair of this kind,’ observed Wyndham Goldie, ‘nobody expects any depth or subtle characterisation, but the people in the story must be made just sufficiently interesting for us to care which of them is hanged.’13 Television evolves not with quantum leaps of genius, but by continuous tinkering. Tele-crime may have long vanished into thin air, but look at the foundations of any current drama series and you might just glimpse the smudgy, over-lit face of Inspector Holt.