Robert Kirby CHANNEL VISION Two of my unfortunate viewings recently have been of American versions of established British favourites: the quite disastrous Payne and the somewhat embarrassing Fitz. As most of us will have recognised, the former is based on the quite marvellous British series, Fawlty Towers, the latter on the just as marvellous Cracker. What is puzzling is how anyone could have bothered to produce these two pallid copies. Is there a population out there composed of people so slow and insular that they need to have their televisual entertainment diluted, sanitised, rendered as easy-to-digest, non- allergenic pabulum? The answer is an obvious yes, otherwise why would they continue to do it? The market for dumbed-down, meticulously inoffensive television must, in the first instance, be in the American trailer parks and, in the second, afloat in that darkened sea of uptight, anus-fearing Christian gentility which makes up so much of the American middle class. -Neither shall ye offend nor shall ye set down bad examples to thine demographic gibbering classes.+ So reads the second commandment of American television networks. Cracker, in its Manchester configuration, with Robbie Coltrane playing a boozed-up, profane, gambling, hugely overweight, farting family and social calamity was a hero far too vivid for the Bible belt. You can just hear the programme conference: -Let us unsharpen him, gentlemen. Let us replace his bottle with some politically correct opinionating, have him only slightly heavier than the standard issue, give him mild girlfriend trouble rather than a disintegrating marriage, throw in a couple of token blacks and we+ve got a monocultural winner on our hands. We will again speak directly to the heart of America+. (And to cretinous SABC programme buyers.) The same dictum has been applied, so the stories go, to the British series Absolutely Fabulous. Bought by the grotesque Roseanne Barr, Ab Fab was quickly expurgated of all the coke-sniffing and bad language, the drunkenness reduced to an occasional glass of wine. Patsy became about as nymphomaniacal as a nun. Such are the works of producers cowed into submission by their sponsors. In this case it is encouraging to hear that the series was a consummate disaster.
In Payne, the rather limited John Laroquette rendition can more easily be assimilated by the dumbstruck masses than the antic brilliance of John Cleese – never mind Prunella Scales and Andrew Sachs. Average- strength Americans are apparently so self- absorbed, they can+t relate unless it+s just down the road. What is more puzzling is why the SABC – having itself quite recently broadcast Fawlty Towers, and in the knowledge that M- Net also has – decided to show this seventh- rate imitation? The same applies in the case of Cracker/Fitz. The pioneer had long since been aired by M-Net. Some time back American producers made a bold attempt at refashioning a particularly English success of the Sixties, Steptoe and Son. In its original form this was a product of the inspired team of Alan Simpson and Ray Galton, who wrote radio+s immortal Hancock+s Half Hour and its television follow-up. Steptoe and Son was about a dying breed, a couple of London East End rag-and-bone men. It was a wonderful celebration of an unabashed English lower class. Transferred to the US, the rag-and-bone men were renamed trash merchants, swopped races along the way and became an entirely lovable black father-and-son enterprise in the joyful slums of some city. The American version+s departure from core was in that along the way it completely lost that dearly precious ingredient of the English soul: compromise. Steptoe was full of sore compromise. Politically the father was fiercely reactionary, quite content to be what he was. Up against him rubbed his son, a bag of cultural and political pretension, intent on moving up in the world. He intimately knew and could whistle those fragments of a Brahms symphony contained on three old 78 records he+d found in a skip. In the American version all such comedic friction and comment was scraped away and the duo were, instead, made warm and lovable. The series ran for years and was immensely popular. I can think of only one British series which, in its American modification, was even nearly as good as its founder: the New York rendition of Johnny Speight+s inspired creation, Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, which came out as Archie Bunker, the prototypical urban redneck. Apparently bigotry is a quality which transmogrifies smoothly?