During 2014 there was only one TV programme on and that was the crime thriller 'Broadchurch'. Well, that was according to the shrieking, exciteable, so-called critics (heh!) who never stopped ululating in praise of it. Needless to say I didn't watch it not least because since the late and truly great, Bernard Levin, went to that 'Great Theatre in the Sky' I have never trusted any of his successors - although Quentin Letts in The Mail isn't bad. Also, I must confess, the fact that its 'star' was David Tennant put me off immediately. He is the only 'luvvie' I know who acts with his eye-balls. They bulge, they stare, they swivel and I will not be surprised if one day they revolve! I once watched a TV version of his 'acclaimed' Hamlet. 'Dire' is the only word that springs to mind.
Anyway, over the holiday period the congregation of Broadchurch worshippers in the media waxed lyrical over its genius and urged us all to watch the second series which began last night.
It was beyond awful!
To be fair, Tennant's eyeballs did not play the full part usually demanded of them and so that was a relief. However, the rest of it - storyline, story-telling, directing, sound, actors' enunciation, background non-music ... all of it was atrocious. Regularly throughout but for no particular reason a deep reverberating sound effect would build up which drowned the already indecipherable voices of the actors. I suppose this was intended to build up moments of tension but as there were virtually no such moments in the story so far told they were pointless.
As my mind wandered - well I couldn't make out half the dialog so what's a body to do? - I took notice of the action. Two incidents raised a cynical snort from me as being typical of some arty-farty director determined to make his film 'look good' even if it defied commonsense. Thus, we had two scenes in which characters in the story met with each other. Insted of doing so in their homes or offices or the pub, they did so on a beach beneath an enormous cliff - such a lovely shot, darlings! We have such beaches round here and you would no more choose to meet anyone there than on the peak of Mt.Everest because it takes forever to get down onto such a beach and even worse, it nearly kills you climbing back up again afterwards!
The other scene that defied reality showed a late middle-aged lady sitting alone in her countryhouse wearing earphones as she listens to a 'talking book' with her back to the french windows. A lady friend calls and helping herself to the 'hidden' key outside opens the doors and enters. The lady inside, instead of yelping in surprise' dropping the 'talking book' and giving her friend a bollacking for startling her, simply raised an enquiring eye-brow. Realistic - or twaddle?
And then there were what I might call the, er, 'artistic' moments which reduced me to giggles. One was a long shot of our 'hero', Mr.Tennant, striding manfully after his eyeballs across a greenfield. What that was supposed to signify or add to the story I do not know but, darlings, it did look very, very artistic! Then there was a fairly long close-up shot of Mr. Tennant's half profile as he stared off into the wild blue yonder. I imagined the dialog on set ran something like this:
DT: What am I doing?
Dir: You're thinking, darling.
DT: Yeah, OK, but what am I thinking about?
Dir: Well, darling, your, er, problems ... or something like that.
DT: But in this story I seem to have a lot of problems so which ones do you have in mind?
Dir: I don't know, sweetie, I just want you to look, you know, brooding . . .
And so we looked at Mr.Tennant brooding, and Mr. Tennant looked at whatever he was 'brooding' at, and he thought whatever it was he was thinking, and I thought - what a load of bollacks!
