High Concepts, part 2
Idea for a show: "Speed Detectives". Basically, all those Morse/Poirot/Miss Marple programmes that used to be on, but aren't any more because people stopped watching them. They're just too slow for the modern audience. The only interesting bit is the last five minutes, when the Great Detective explains the whole puzzle, providing flashbacks to the only interesting or dramatic moments in the preceding two hours. I reckon that with two minutes of set-up and three of conclusion, you could get through six cases in a half hour program. Would get good audiences with the kind of people who like filling in the blanks they missed from the crossword solution in the next day's paper.
Idea for a sitcom: "All The Browns". William Brown, Paddington Brown, Gordon Brown and James Brown, all in the same house. I haven't really got any ideas for what sort of things they might do, but the concept itself is surely worth at least a lunch. Come on, TV producers, you're killing me here.
Clearly you don't watch CSI, which has been doing that for ages (speed detection, not the house browns).
ReplyDeleteAs for the house, what about Chesterton's Father Brown and for surrealism The Stranglers' Golden Brown?
I thought at first you were suggesting remaking Marple or Poirot with the lead characters using large amounts of amphetamines. Certainly for Marple I think that would be a winner.
ReplyDeleteWhilst drunk last night I came up with "The UK", a reality TV show featuring Lyndie England, Jimmy Wales, Tim Ireland and Baroness Scotland locked in a room forever.
ReplyDeletefar from "not being on", all of these programmes are on ALL THE TIME, on eternal repeated loop -- however i think the death knell for this genre was spelled by llllawrence llllewelllyn bowen...ever since sherlock holmes, the function of the english detective story has been to allow the reader/viewer -- in the company of someone we are not terribly like and whose views we can pretend to disavow -- to enter some poor citizen's home and sneer at the curtains, decor as synecdoche for the unsatisfactory way said citizen organised his life
ReplyDeletea century ago, we gained entry on the back of some ghastly rupture in said citizen's life -- and all the classic murder series you name follow this ruling, complete with much attention paid to the look of the house of the victims and/or perps -- but LLB realised it was just as good TV, if, yes, much swifter (and more sensibly house-market related) if we dispensed with the murder (every difft kind had been committed) and the expensive set research and design, replacing the latter with the for-free R&D of ordinary householders, making the pretext for entry and humiliation the fact that it will be on TV nation-wide
Miles Kington had a one-minute detective. Play merry hell with the ad breaks.
ReplyDeleteBoring. Memento is a better idea: tell the story in reverse.
ReplyDeleteBLT, that's the opposite of Orwell's Decline of the English Murder. He thought the perfect murder always happened in an entirely respectable household of the professional classes.
ReplyDeleteOf course, he also thought this was on the way out. But looking back on the antithesis he provided, it seems kind of nostalgic itself; there ought to be a film with Kate Moss.
The lassie who shot taxi drivers, right? Definitely worth filming. I'd be cheering her on; can't stand taxi drivers. You could give her a DC Comics type backstory about being a mild-mannered commuter who cycled to work until her best friend got knocked down and killed by some nasty little middle-aged skinhead in a black cab, and now she Stalks the Night for Revenge.
ReplyDeletetoo long since i read orwell: was he talking about fictional or actual murders? either way, the work being done by "perfect" and by "respectable" in that summary makes it hard to grasp what he WAS actually saying, beyond cheerful contrarian provocation re social mores...
ReplyDelete(viz "perfect" is an aesthetic or vicarious enjoyment-index judgment supplied by the reader; and "respectable"can surely only mean "seemingly respectable BUT ACTUALLY dot dot dot")
dorothy sayers short stories -- lord peter wimsey and montague egg -- are a good source of how the more tabloidy kind of drive-by slaying was getting into semi-highbrow genre fiction in the 20s and 30s: egg is a travelling wine salesman, so the venues of the deeds are pubs, bars and shops; and there's not the same pressure in a short story for some largish yet half-isolated place, or the piling up of carcasses in a puzzling sequence with multiple suspects eliminated chapter by chapter
the classic sherlock h scenario is possibly something like "the norwood builder", who's somewhere uneasily between successfully established artisan and comfy lower middle class -- it's holmes's bowen-esque gift for reading the meaning of interior decor that allows him to see what the police, who tend (in conan doyle) judge by more superficial class indicators, have entirely missed
Orwell was talking about real murders, blt. The classic English murder, he reckoned, was carried out by a respectable middle-class man, who would poison his wife.
ReplyDeleteit's holmes's bowen-esque gift for reading the meaning of interior decor that allows him to see what the police, who tend (in conan doyle) judge by more superficial class indicators, have entirely missed
No it isn't.
You must admit that Sherlock Holmes would have been a great host for "Through the Keyhole" though.
ReplyDeletei must reread the orwell -- though it still sounds a bit fudgy ("classic" = crippen and maybrick and er that's pretty much it; no "red barn" or ratcliffe highway or charlie peace or acid bath or or or)
ReplyDeleteobviously i stick stoutly by my very annoying and trivial reading of sherlock h -- it's all about his eagle eye for clothes and shoes and shades of paint and brands of ciggies and the way the rug is lying
There is definitely a niche (possibly an attractively-lit one, with a plain, understated valance and countershaded paint) for a detective whose success is based entirely on his knowledge of fashion and interior-decoration minutiae.
ReplyDelete"Honestly, Inspector, I despair of you. You persist in assuming that the Russian Mafia was involved in this killing, despite the CCTV footage clearly showing a man in a Savile Row suit leaving the scene. For Russian organised crime, it's Armani or nothing. And note here, where we've enhanced the image? That tie's by Ferragamo. Last season's collection. Your suspect is an American, working in the insurance business and earning around $160k, married with no children and a former college footballer. And when you arrest him, Inspector, ask him from me where he got those fantastic loafers."
one of the neat plot points in silence of the lambs is that clarice starling (= not male) spots that the murdered girls are being skinned by a professional clothes-maker
ReplyDeletein CSI they regularly pretend that there is a vast instantly checkable police database of all man-made materials (esp,textiles and paint) to any magnification, which converts what's interesting about this kind of specialist knowledge into ones and zeroes, thus cutting out all human judgment (the secret agenda of CSI: "the evidence never lies BUT ALL HUMANS DO: rid us of the latter and the world will once again be crime-free"
heh the csi i just watched was ripped totally off a lord peter wimsey short story (about a murderer who's also an artist, who makes sculptures by copperplating live victims)
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember that the BBC once showed a detective series featuring Richard Griffiths as a detective/chef, who solved mysteries through his knowledge of their food-related aspects. I think they went through two or three series before someone thought it was a bit daft having quite so many food-related murders happen in such a short space of time.
ReplyDeleteThere was also "Rosemary & Thyme", the garden-centre detective series starring Felicity Kendal as Rosemary Forcedpun and Pam Ferris as Weakidea Thyme.
These were Sunday evening shows, no? On Sunday evenings TV viewers have about as much interest in reality as a major auditing firm.
ReplyDeleteI think the template for "all those Morse/Poirot/Miss Marple programmes" was actually "An Inspector Calls". The point isn't the actual guilt of one suspect but of the venality of everyone involved (especially if they're posh and/or rich).
ReplyDeleteIt's an interesting theory but as An Inspector Calls had its première fifteen years after the first Miss Marple story, does it hold water?
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, there's a fascinating-fact-of-the-day to be had in looking up where the play was premiered.
the secret agenda of CSI: "the evidence never lies BUT ALL HUMANS DO: rid us of the latter and the world will once again be crime-free"
ReplyDeleteI thought the most obvious common theme in all three CSIs is this: look how beautiful, sensitive, intelligent, responsible, and honorable the cops are! Or at least 99.9% of them.
Incidentally there was a Soviet show back in the day, Experts Investigate - exact equivalent, the original. In France CSI is translated as Les Experts.
Ach, Justin, that's another top-of-the-head theory bitten the dust.
ReplyDeleteAbb1, the concept's not new, there was a BBC series The Expert (shown in the US too, and apparently Quincy was based on it) with much the same premise. I wouldn't have thought of that if it weren't for the French title for CSI.
But I don't think you're right about CSI. It's about scientists, not cops. (Grissom is of course named after the Mercury and Apollo astronaut. Virgil in Thunderbirds was named after the same man.) Hence passenger to Gary Sinese last week, "What are you, a rocket scientist?" CSI is pure materialism. We're nothing but gore and snot and the path to truth is empiricism, scepticism, and rationality. Hooray for America! Bet Sarah Palin is not a fan.
CC, you may have a point in respect to the original Los Vegas series (still, a lot of melodrama there), but what about the other two, Miami and NY? In those, isn't imaginary science just a pretext to sell all those super-clever, super-brave, and super-sensitive cops?
ReplyDeleteOther way round - you don't use the scientific method to sell hot people, you use hot people to sell the scientific method...
ReplyDeleteImagine, though, that a corrupt cop secretly reconfigured that mass spectrometer to report rhodium instead of platinum. Or randomly swapped the foreign keys in the vitally important database of the tablespoons.
ReplyDeleteThat would've been an interesting episode.
Yeah, wasn't there an episode of The Wire where inexperienced lab assistant slapped the same label on the DNA evidence collected from 30 different murders? Now, that certainly does sound like a real science story.
ReplyDelete