Deceased chicks, headless bodies and obsessive cleaning, on the set of new crime series Whitechapel
TO this day I can remember putting down Birdsong, the novel, and thinking what a simply brilliant film they could make of it.
All those years on, Sebastian Faulks’s classic World War One novel – (it was written in 1993, and is now on the A-level syllabus) – has finally made it to the screen. Not the cinema screen, but a sumptuous three-hour TV drama in the safe hands of the BBC and with an adapted screenplay by Abi (The Iron Lady, The Hour, Shame) Morgan no less.
Eddie Redmayne plays our hero Stephen Wraysford quite brilliantly. He is younger than I pictured him in the book and says surprisingly little in the constantly shifting settings of 1910 Amiens and the horrors of trench warfare just six years afterwards.
Redmayne is a slightly awkward, aloof, laconic and not especially popular infantry officer who seems to seek solace from the horrors of the trenches with his memories of that special summer in northern France just before the war. The portrayal of life in the trenches is grim but stunning. Interestingly some of it is shot in bright, bright sunshine, the polar opposite of many people’s darker perception of the trenches. But there’s also the horror of the tunnels deep underground in which German and Allied troops dug constantly at incredible risk to themselves and in close proximity to their foes. Above ground, meanwhile, the simple, understandable act of an exhausted soldier, Jack Firebrace (the excellent Joseph Mawle) facing the firing squad for falling asleep on sentry duty is a reminder too of the daily battles on their own side. It’s difficult to recall trench warfare better depicted on the small screen.
All this contrasts starkly with Stephen’s extraordinary love affair with Isabelle (Clemence Poesy), trapped in a loveless marriage with a business mogul to whom the Englishman goes to spend the summer at his factory. Eventually the simmering attraction between them explodes into life in a really credible, passionate way. Extremely well cast they are, if anything, even more suited than I remembered in the book.
There are some beautiful scenes together, especially outside when you can constantly hear the chirping of birds in the background while they look lingeringly at each other or make love against a tree yards away from her own family. When her husband finally discovers the betrayal, you are almost cheering for them to flee the house until you come slam back to earth with the other image of Stephen, with his whisky and the 1,000 yard stare. Birdsong has been a long time coming and the BBC have done a grand job of faithfully dramatising the novel. Faulks too must be pleased. His second book, the extremely impressive WW2 French Resistance novel, Charlotte Grey, made it to Hollywood more than a decade ago. Great actress though she is, not even Cate Blanchett could do the book justice. Birdsong, BBC-style, has definitely been worth that 19-year wait.
After last week’s rants about BBC3, nobody was more surprised than myself to be tuning in so quickly again, on this occasion to Junior Doctors: Your Life in their Hands, a fly-on-the-wall look at newly qualified docs working at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, one of London’s busiest. Starting on Black Wednesday, that day in August when the young pups arrive (and mortality rates rise six per cent) to put what they’ve learned in the labs and lecture theatres into practice in A&E, rheumatology, surgery and so on. There were some fine moments, not least when of our young heroes asked a patient if he had any other medical conditions. Without pausing, he replied: (“I suffer from”) “chronic headaches, VP shunt, hernias, thyroid problems, Klinefelters, high arched palate and long arms. At which point he knocked over a jug of water. The young guns did remarkably well. Eventually, for example, the ridiculously young-looking Andy finds a vein to put a needle in, Ameith sends a woman home who has poured vodka in her ear to cure earache and so on. The most capable so far looks like Lucy. Wonderful manner and calm under pressure. She’ll go far. There is, of course a but here. Why do the BBC3 producers feel the need to bleed in so much music and so many pointless production gimmicks. Let the people tell the story. A spot of clever editing is worth a million pointless electro backbeats.
Channel 4, of course, practically created the genuine fly-on-the-wall with series like Cutting Edge. This week they unleashed the frankly terrifying Party Paramedics where we were given a ringside seat at the seventh circle of hell. That hell being Colchester on pay day Friday, an extraordinary and frankly depressing view of the English in drink. Party paramedics – or something like it – is what will soon be hitting the streets of Northampton. In Colchester, the SOS team of paramedics and volunteers treat the completely plastered men and women who pile up before their eyes. Like this would-be patient: “Are you epileptic or diabetic?” To which the muppet responds, brilliantly: “Who?” Or this: “Why do you drink?” “I drink to get drunk, why else would you drink?” (Cue Beavis and Butthead snigger). In C4’s safe hands, it was both alarming and entertaining. It also left you in total admiration for the completely non-judgmental approach of the SOS guys. As one said: “We don’t do drinking any more. Only because we’ve been there and done it.”
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