Page 6 - 13_Bafta ACADEMY_Judi Dench_ok

academy first person
a director’s season
Stung by press criticism of his winter schedule, Nick Elliott, ITV’s Controller of Drama, bites back trumpet- ing that his ‘upmarket’ line- up runs the gamut from ‘edgy’ to plain ‘stunning’
Is it right for a commissioning editor to be proud of a season of drama? I mean, all we do is send producers a cheque and sit back for others to do the work. Don’t we? I wish. Anyway I’m inordinately proud of the quality and range of drama that ITV, in spite of any cash problems you may have read about, is offering this winter.
But the season has started predictably for me. On Christmas Eve, the morning after we broad- cast Andrew Davies’ Othello, a dimwit in The Times described ITV’s drama schedules as “seas of bland, middle-brow pap, stretch- ing as far as the eye can see.”
This is the sort of reviewer that either never actually watches tel- evision regularly or never notices TV drama unless it’s labelled “seri- ous” by the presence of car- riages, period frocks, a Dame or even a Sir. Even so he must have missed our remarkable adapta- tion of Nicholas Nickleby.
And in his pomposity would not last year have even consid- ered sparky, fresh contemporary drama like Bob And Rose, Cold Feet, The Russian Bride, The Innocent, Tough Love, Perfect, At Home With The Braithwaites, Bad Girls, Anybody’s Nightmare, My
4
Beautiful Son and Hot Money. Some of it tackled very serious themes such as police corruption and date rape; some of it was just fun. Or isn’t drama allowed to be fun? Tell that to Shakespeare.
The truth is journalists cannot stand television. They feel threat- ened by its enormous popularity and, indeed, the tabloids would be very thin indeed if they had no television to feed off. The broadsheets have different rea- sons to fear us as increasingly commercial television is targeting upmarket and young audiences. So, by taking more of the adver- tising money aimed at these audiences, we directly threaten papers like The Times.
My job is still to get big audi- ences which we do with Coronation Street (still for most weeks the most watched pro- gramme in Britain), with its promis- cuous (five nights-a-week!) sister Emmerdale and with other much loved programmes like Heartbeat. And for big volume audiences we’ve introduced live- ly new series that avoid the pre- dictable routes of cops and docs, like Bad Girls, At Home With The Braithwaites, Fat Friends and Footballers’ Wives. This is the engine of the ITV schedule.
But, increasingly, our sales teams want “quality” audiences to whom they can sell expensive airtime for banks, airlines, new technology, cars and so on and they look to drama to provide them. Money is more important than share alone - especially these days.
Let me highlight some of this winter’s upmarket treats, from edgy contemporary drama like The Jury, Bloody Sunday and Blood Strangers to great thrillers like The Swap and The Vice and to stunning adaptations of classic novels and plays like Othello, Micawber, Hornblower and The Forsyte Saga. And, since this is written for BAFTA, instead of focusing on those oft-cited but deserving heroes, the writers and the actors, let me describe this season through the work of less- fêted stars, the directors.
One fully realises the value of a good director on those occasions when a dull or barely competent director gets in on the act (slow, dreary, overlong sequences; life- less performances and relation- ships one cannot believe; plod- ding camerawork and editing; or, almost worst of all, self-indulgence that cries out “look at me, I’m the director”). Equally the reverse is
sometimes true when one sees, as on ITV this winter, the work of really talented directors.
Over Christmas, as I’ve men- tioned, Geoff Sax brought his spe- cial qualities of intelligence, humour and flair to Andrew Davies’ Othello. It was a directori- al tour-de-force. And in this New Year there are many other exam- ples of directors with a special and unique talent.
If we find a great thriller that needs gripping and very filmic tension, with the performances, photography and attention to detail that a thriller must have, then our first call is to David Drury. David has done Trust and Tough Love in the past. This winter’s The Swap (Jemma Redgrave, Michael Maloney, Jonathan Cake) is fantastic.
And I don’t know anyone bet- ter than Andrew Grieve to direct something like Hornblower, involv- ing special models, difficult sets and filming at sea and in the big Pinewood tank. Watch his new two-parter called Mutiny, in which David Warner stars with Ioan Gruffudd, to see what I mean.
Before The Jury, Pete Travis had directed Cold Feet. A pretty good credit. But with The Jury he becomes really hot. This serial by