TV

The panel discussed the years TV.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

WARK:
Tom, perhaps it's no surprise that on Newsnight we particularly like compelling political drama. There was State of Play but, for me, the biggest and best of these dramas, this year, was The Deal. I thought David Morrissey's performance was a tour de force.

PAULIN:
Absolutely. I watched it about two nights ago again. I was so moved by it, it seemed to have gained even more. The tragedy of Gordon Brown as David Morrissey portrays him, this man, brilliant politician who will never be Prime Minister came over more and more strongly. Like a Shakespearean History play, bits of Othello kept coming in, strangely, for me as well! Very, very powerful, magnificent piece of television.

BONNIE GREER:
Can I stick up for drama, full-stop. I am just sick and tired of reality television. I wish it would stop. Nothing is more real than drama, than fiction. The fact that we have these two guys for real, if we had had a camera in there, we wouldn't have got the beauty and the layer that this production gave us. So I agree with you. It was wonderful.

WARK:
The audience actually looks to drama sometimes to amplify and understand events. That worked very well in Holy Cross as well?

BONNIE GREER:
They also look to drama to go beyond that. It's not necessarily about amplifying things that are factual but to take it to another level where you begin to encounter yourself as a human being. It's about humanity at the end of the day. It's wonderful because it puts it in a larger context other than the idea of politics, which is quite small.

MORLEY:
What's happened with the rise of reality television which is why the Stephen Frear's thing, The Deal, sticks out so much, and other things of that ilk is that reality TV has enabled TV companies and TV executives to take away the unpredictability of the creative talent, the writer and somebody dreaming up ideas, and they have replaced that with people who are so desperate to get on television they don't protest in the way that creative talent would. They are much happier with ordinary people, they can bully them around, so they don't have to deal with creative talent who have a point of view, that want to do difficult and dangerous things, from their commercial point of view.

WARK:
What about Wife Swap?

MORLEY:
As horrible and manipulative as it was, it created moments of high tension.

GERMAINE GREER:
Yuck! If you are watching a spoilt brat of a wife, suddenly finding herself with eight of somebody else's kids living in a council house instead of her bijou residence, what you are actually looking at is somebody being tortured.

PAULIN:
No. It was the other wife who was being tortured. She went through it fine. The other poor woman, God help her...

MORLEY:
The misnomer is that it's reality television. It can't be further from the truth. It's not.

GERMAINE GREER:
The reality is they are actually being tortured. It's enough to drive people insane.

PAULIN:
It's voyeuristic. Dreadful

WARK:
You had endless amounts of costume drama this year as well. You had Boudica, Byron. You have just had Steve Coogan as Pepys.

BONNIE GREER:
Charles II, the problem with the drama is he is the least psychoanalysed monarch that probably this country has ever had.

WARK:
I think there were more problems with it than just that!

BONNIE GREER:
There was, but I was sitting there thinking, "Why is this guy brooding, why are they misinterpreting this man's life." He was an incredibly interesting person and none of this was.

WARK:
Tom, your great TV moment?

PAULIN:
Great television, after The Deal, was the Secret Policemen, the extraordinary television programme about all these racist police recruits. The other great thing was, I think it's one of the best things they have ever done, which was the South Bank Show on Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said which is intensely moving, two great men of peace. It was Edward Said's last month, of his life, it was very, very moving, very powerful and Barenboim was absolutely wonderful in it. Then you have moments when Edward Said was talking with his usual passion right at the end. That was very powerful. Bremner, Byrd and Fortune were terrific; Between Iraq and a Hard Place was marvellous, absolutely essential, brilliant television.

MORLEY:
I think the Richard and Judy Show is coming on a power. Seriously. I think they have got something about them that makes them great television artists. But that may be just someone who adores Wife Swap, saying that!

BONNIE GREER:
I liked Meera Syal's film for the Big Read, I did like that, because for me the layer of it was that this book moved a young British Asian woman, and that she could actually relate a book that was so out of her experience, we would believe. She melded those two things together. It was a great. I love that film.