I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
Inspired by Scarfolk, the English town that still lives in the 1970s, we’re continuing with this ‘ere blog’s latest feature: Charley says.
The 1970s was a terrible time, of course, where the risks to people from everything from electricity cables to water to other people could not be overstated. It was horrifying. Particularly the rabies.
To save the public from these threats – and themselves – the British government authorised a series of public information films designed to scare the living daylights out of anyone who watched them. And each week, I intend to scare the living daylights out of you with a public information film or two – watch them, as they might just save your life.
This week: electricity sub-stations. Don’t even think of playing frisbee near one, Jimmy.
There seems little point in giving Family Tools a full review, what with it being largely rubbish, but also having received the lowest ever ratings for a comedy debut on ABC, but for the sake of completeness, I feel I should at least mention it.
Anyway, cast your mind back a little way and you’ll recall a terminally unfunny BBC3 sitcom called White Van Man. Starring perennial BBC3 favourite Will Mellor, it was all about a man with dreams who had to give them up to take over his dad’s handyman business. Fairly typical then of UK sitcoms: working class guy has his dreams crushed because of family (cf Steptoe and Son, Only Fools and Horses) – cue the bittersweet humour.
Bizarrely, despite the original not actually being funny, ABC decided to pick up a US version to series. Of course, no way is all that misery and frustration going to wash in the US, the land of dreams and achievement. Who has time for that in a sitcom? What a downer. At least, that was the thinking at ABC, which did the standard thing of modern US sitcoms and made Family Tools all about a buffoon (Kyle Bornheimer) who fails at everything. Nevertheless, when he has a heart attack, his father (JK Simmons) reluctantly hands over the family business to him because there’s no one else who’ll take on the job.
And, amazingly, it’s even less funny than White Van Man. Whereas most of the original’s attempts at humour revolved around Will Mellor’s frustrations at the stupidity around him, Family Tools‘ humour revolves around Kyle Bornheimer’s amazing witlessness – it’s almost like they started with a name (‘White Van Man’ doesn’t translate into American English very well) and modelled the show on that. No one’s that much smarter than Bornheimer, but he’s an idiot. And you must laugh at idiots, mustn’t you, particularly if they’re working class.
No one comes out of this well, not even old pros Leah Remini (King of Queens) and JK Simmons (The Closer, Oz, Law & Order), who appear to have had subtlety bypasses. The script has all the humour of an anthrax alert and the production values, geared up at every stage to say to viewing-idiots “This is funny!” in case they hadn’t realised in their near-vegetative states, will set your teeth on edge.
An often-asked question these days is “Why is there so much good American TV on at the moment?” Look at Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Boss, et al. Why are these shows all getting made now?
Scratch below the surface of the broadcasting schedules and you’ll soon find two of the main answers:
Cable TV, which caters to smaller audiences and looks to differentiate itself from the mass market through quality by giving writers creative freedom, largely unfettered by the FCC rules that stifle ideas on network TV.
The large-scale demise of the independent American movie scene – all the writers who would normally have written intelligent, thoughtful dramatic movies have instead gone over to cable TV, where that creative freedom and the ability to study characters in long-form drama are a constant intoxicating appeal.
One of the biggest names in the independent movie scene is, course, Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival, which has its own US TV channel as well. Up to now, that channel’s task has been to promote and air independent movies, but it’s now looking to branch out into original dramas. It’s no surprise, therefore, that for its first ever drama, not only has the channel gone to the producers of Breaking Bad for a quality product, it’s commissioned possibly the most indie-est of all indie movies masquerading as a TV show.
Daniel Holden (Aden Young) is released from death row after new DNA evidence shows that he might not have been the man who raped and murdered his 16-year-old girlfriend. After 19 years in jail, Daniel has to learn how to live again, his life having been on hold for so long. But having originally confessed to the crime, he also has to deal with the people in town who still believe he killed his girlfriend. Meanwhile, his family has to deal with the completely different Daniel who’s returned to them.
Sound like fun? No, of course not, and despite becoming quite an incredible bit of drama, it suffers from the biggest flaw of a lot of indie movies, now stretched out and writ large over an entire season of episodes: nothing happens.
