Beckett On Film - RTE1, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday
Teletubbies - BBC1, Sunday
Happiness - BBC2, Tuesday
Teachers - Channel 4, Wednesday
Beckett On Film finally arrived this week. Going to see Beckett is one of those things that so many people always mean to do, really want to do, know that they should do, but instead put aside in favour of an endless loop of Coronation Street, TV movies and seeing who comes next on the Late Late. So, after hanging around waiting for us to come to him, Beckett came to us, courtesy of RTE, doing what licence-fee money can do when it doesn't need to be pumped into a night of Eurovision.
Luckily, Michael Colgan absolved us of our ignorance on Sunday night in Check the Gate, which followed the making of the films. If you got past documentary-maker Pearse Lehane's infuriating attempts to muscle in on the grandness of the project with his inane twittering ("It might change the world"), then you would have caught the director of the Gate saying: a whole other audience will get this, and if they don't, then we shouldn't have made them. And, with that, those of us who count ourselves among the whole other audience breathed easier, as we hovered our fingers over the speed dial to the RTE complaints office.
You wouldn't have wanted to wander upon it unsuspected. Beckett can do some very strange things to your mood, depending on what condition your human condition is in. Before you adjusted your mind, though, you might have needed to adjust your set. Stuck on RTE 1 this week, you would have found yourself fiddling with the remote control, slamming the telly, hovering on a kitchen stool with the antenna stretched towards the heavens, desperate to see what had happened to the colour on your set. Where had it all gone? Did I buy a black and white licence by accident?
It was only with the showing of Act Without Words 1 on Thursday, the sixth play out of this week's seven, that there were primary colours to fill the screen. But, apart from that, it was either black and white or film with the colour scrubbed out, bleached, pilfered.
If you recorded the programmes, you would have had worse trouble wondering what the Hell had happened to the tape. It seems stuck on loop. All the characters are repeating the same things over and over, going through the same motions to the same camera angles. Turn it off and turn it back it on again, and you might be a little confused as to whether the tape is at the beginning, the end, or anywhere at all. The video must be broken. RTE must be broken. Am I broken? Is this some Beckettian twist to the proceedings that has us all trapped in this tortuous loop? What's on the other side? Turn it off and turn it back on again, and you might be a little confused as to whether it's at the beginning, the end, or anywhere at all. The video must be broken. RTE must be broken. Am I broken?
Did I already say that?
A lot of the productions were not easy viewing. With Footfalls, Rockaby and That Time, disembodied voices jabbering away over the sight of characters repeating their actions time and time again was the closest thing to watching radio drama. When it did work, it was often because it fitted into recognisable television conventions and genres: What Where, with its dystopian sci-fi edge; and Act Without Words 1, with its cartoon-ish tale of a man trapped in the desert and taunted by an unseen presence offering water that was always just out of reach. The latter was the only one with a soundtrack other than silence, Michael Nyman's score was soothing after all that sand-paper silence.
Of course, the thing about it is that viewers can do what the Beckettian characters are unable to do, which is just switch over to another existence on another channel. They don't put too many plays on television any more, plumping instead to adapt the great sweeping romantic novels, or the dark complexity of crime novels. TV plays have few characters, static cameras, fixed sets and too many uncomfortable silences; a combination that tends to get the remote control trigger finger itching like that of a bank robber on his first day at work.
On Monday night, though, Waiting For Godot adapted beautifully, propelled by dialogue that was delivered by a cast on intimate terms with the characters, and on a set that, while never-changing, had a character all its own. And it gave us closeups of Johnny Murphy, his face like a sack of doorknobs, that you can never get at the theatre. If I do get one image repeating on me after this week of Beckett, I'm quite happy to let that be it.
NOT that Beckett isn't already on the telly most days anyway. I wandered across the Teletubbies early last Sunday morning. A group of characters trapped on a surreal set with an unseen presence manipulating their movements. A voice delivering orders from a mysterious speaker. The constant repetition of scenes as the Teletubbies shout, "Again, again". There's a thesis in there somewhere, I tell you.
These days the human condition seems to be one that exists in a perpetual state of irony, as two new comedy dramas pointed out this week. The weaker was Happiness. The whole point of writer/star Paul Whitehouse calling it this is, of course, because it is based on a character who is living a life filled with anything but happy things. His wife has just died (hit by an ice-cream truck); he's not sure if he's that sorry about it; all his friends are losers; he's a bit of a loser himself; and he has doubts over whether his job as the voice of a cartoon kung-fu bear with a nurse's hat and Y-fronts is a real job. Distractions come in the form of spotting Whitehouse's Fast Show pals turning up to add over-the-top set pieces. If the distractions had come with laughter, though, it might have been a whole lot better.
TEACHERS has no such troubles. No sniggering at the back now please, but what kind of drama can possibly portray a school in which the pupils are more mature than the teachers? This week of all weeks. Poor Simon is in trouble for breaking into the school. He whizzes to class on his mountain bike with his bag on his back; can be found in the toilets with the bad boys; gets hassle from his da for coming in late; hasn't done his homework; and fancies a teacher. The joke is that Simon is not a snotty-nosed little runt, but one of the teachers. This could have been the drum-roll to an obvious punchline, except that the script treats the whole thing with such wild abandon that, from the off, it is pure joy to watch. It wears its This Life influences on its sleeve to the point where Simon is played by Andrew Lincoln, who was the rather runny Egg in the BBC2 drama. But, better than that, it is Grange Hill for grown-ups, even if that means grown-ups who haven't quite grown-up yet.
It succeeds where other school dramas so often fail, because it takes the earnestness out of things. Teachers makes the young teacher an idealist only to the point that it is ideal for his own ego, and manages to take all the cliches of the genre and ransack them for jokes. It fizzes along at such a rate that you don't want to take a sip of tea in case you miss a sight gag or a line, or splutter into your tea when you laugh. In fact, you could watch the show twice, the second time around just focusing on all the bits going on in the background. There is a chalk-outline of a murdered sheep; somebody flicks a cigarette off a height, and there is a little scream from below; the teachers gather in the pub as the cars outside are stripped down by thieves; a teacher opens the door of a classroom to be met with a blast of wind and the roar of a lion.
At one point Simon, feeling very smug with himself, sets off on a swagger down the corridor as the rock music charges up the moment, only for the record to scratch to a halt as he gets told he's really an idiot. That comes from Miss Page, scary in the way that people who never blink are, and a woman with a sense of humour set to kill.
He asks Miss Page, "Jenny, would you like to go for a drink with us?"
"That would be lovely," she replies. "Right now, I'd rather nail my own head to the table." You can tell why Simon fancies her.
The only problem is that it's on late in the evening, when all our kids are out roaming the streets, or rapping with the homies, or trying to bring down the Government, or whatever it is that young people do these nights. It should be on during school hours. Pretty soon, these may be the only teachers they get to see.
