Channel VisionRobert Kirby
To borrow a Clive James phrase, you couldn’t see the planet for the atmosphere – in this case the dust. The first episode of the much vaunted Rhodes turned out to be a slightly reconditioned but otherwise standard-issue western. The only noticeable difference was in the accents of the characters. Not much else deviated. The diggings and mining village were identical to those of a thousand Standoff at Death Creeks or Tall in the Saddles, the saloon and its whores were as shapely as nostalgia could make them, the script about as musty.
Martin Shaw, as Rhodes the elder, confined his portrayal to some humid glowering and the occasional flatulent grunt. As the younger Rhodes, Joe Shaw played unerringly to script and direction, in other words, as an odious smartarse, getting up everyone’s nose but, of course, being proved right all along. The rest of the piece was played at a frenetic pace; no one seemed capable of communicating except at the top of his voice, action was all at the double.
Most tedious of all was Alan Parker’s music. Never scored for anything less than full orchestra, this was a flowery pastiche of every maestoso Hollywood theme ever written. Swooping away in the background, this flamboyant rhapsody seemed never to stop. Nor did the overt racism of the white characters, laid on with a shovel lest we miss it. Amongst all this hostile bigotry, Cecil John came across as a rather repulsive missionary for today’s white liberal denomination.
All in all, Rhodes is pabulum, a pity considering the lavish proportions of the investment in it. You don’t need to venture much more than a few minutes into the first episode to see that, for all its noise and bustle, history and portrayal are curiously spiritless. The heavy-handed references to British colonialist avarice, the wish to make the entire world “English”, are so hackneyed as to be boring. One out of 10 for this shallow production.
Another disappointment last week was the first episode of Dennis Potter’s Karaoke. Along with a companion piece, Cold Lazarus, Potter wrote Karaoke during the last few months of a miserable death by cancer. In his last television interview, he expressed the wish that these final two works be produced in collaboration by the BBC and Channel 4 – which they were.
Karaoke extends a recurring Potter theme, the absolution by personal fantasy of often painful reality. In this case the fantasy is that of karaoke bars, where businessmen sing popular songs to backing tracks in front of large video screens. It is an interesting variation of Potter’s habitual stitching into his scripts of popular songs – he deemed them to be latter-day psalms.
In his best work by far, his 1986 The Singing Detective, Potter explored the intertwining hallucinatory worlds inhabited by the central figure, a minor thriller- writer, undergoing treatment in hospital for a particularly ruthless form of the skin ailment, psoriasis. Potter was to deny the work was in any way autobiographical – he suffered from the same extreme form of psoriasis – as again he might have claimed that the central figure in Karaoke was not a dramatic extension of himself. In Karaoke, Albert Finney plays a writer suffering from a terminal disease and becoming paranoiac about the mauling his last work, entitled Karaoke, is undergoing in production.
Such counterpoints are hard to explain away, but harder still is to acknowledge that these last two works are not nearly of the singular brilliance of The Singing Detective, Pennies from Heaven, and others. Potter’s was an astonishing gift, his passionate belief in television as a medium for serious artistic enterprise was almost unique. Why, one wonders, has The Singing Detective not yet been shown in this country?