2005-11-16,+The+trouble+with+television,+Guardian

= The trouble with television is that it can't stop shoving liberal values down our throats =

The Guardian, London, Monday November 14, 2005 Mark Ravenhill A few years ago I thought I might make a living in television. And so I found myself attending a course for prospective directors of ITV drama. At our first seminar, led by an ageing gentleman in a black polo neck, we were told the key, in his eyes, to directing TV. "Just remember this one golden rule," he said. "It's all soap opera. They may say its a classic serial, they may call it a cutting-edge drama, they may bill it as cops, they may set it in deep space, but actually it's all just soap, soap, soap." He proceeded to show us clips from old television programmes he had directed - The Onedin Line, The Brothers, a Dickens here, a Thomas Hardy there, a Doctor Who - calling as the video clips rolled by: "You see - soap! soap! soap!" And for those old TV shows - shot in cramped studios with slender budgets - probably every subject or genre was pretty much reduced to the same sudsy formula.

But today? Today producers, directors, programmers are proud - often rightly so - of the production values of their shows. I'm a long-standing devotee of Doctor Who (I attended my first fan convention when I was 10 and, yes, I was wearing the scarf), and it's been one of the greatest thrills of my year to see Russell Davies and his team lovingly take the knackered old Doctor and give him such a brilliant respray.

In production values, yes, a great deal of television drama has changed. But at its core? I have my doubts. Last Christmas I attended a party at a television company I'd once attempted to write for. As I wandered bemused among clusters of people talking about "overnight share" and '"aspirational drama" and "a vehicle for Sarah Lancashire", I spotted a woman I knew, an actress who was now writing for television. As she looked as gloomy as I felt, I paired up with her.

"The thing about TV drama," she said after a few ladles of punch, "is whatever they commission - docs or cops or drama-doc - what they really want is a little half-hour or 50-minute morality play." I almost understood her, but I wanted more. "TV drama hates a loose ending - it hates an unanswered question," she explained. "Script editors and directors and producers always feel they have to teach the viewer something. They always want you to get to the scene where you say, 'And the moral of the story is ...' It's very boring to write."

She's right, of course. There's a tablet of commandments in soap opera (Lou Beale has them with her, I imagine, on Mount Walford) - a set of liberal values. "Be true to yourself"; "talk about your feelings"; "learn to forgive and move on"; "accept difference"; and "you're still family even after the murder/arson/substance abuse". Most of the plots of the soaps are generated when one of the characters strays from these commandments and the others rush around the Street or Square or Village trying to get them back living by these liberal values until - whoops! - another character slips and the game is on again. And again and again. The message is clear: learn these values or be ostracised by your community and banished to panto in Crewe.

This teaching of moral values is spreading across the TV drama spectrum. The wards of Holby City now live by the same principles, as do the cops at Sun Hill. Even Billie and the Doctor had to learn this time around, in a way that Tom Baker would never have done, that "Daleks have feelings too", and "you can travel in time but you mustn't forget your family". It seems there's nowhere in time or space, or the TV schedule, that can fully escape what they call in American sitcom script meetings "hugs and learning".

Which is odd, given that the philosophers tell us we're living in a morally relativistic age, an age when TV programmers like to scoff at the Rada vowels and patronising tone of previous eras of television. In fact TV drama today has a model of the perfect citizen it wants us to be: a liberal, sensitive, communicative person. And it wants to teach far more than drama ever did in the days of my tutor with the black polo neck.

There is hope. I watch QVC for several hours a day. On a shopping channel, they don't want to teach you anything. They're just desperate to sell you something, a product that you're never in a million years going to buy - Diamonique ("a branded diamond simulant"), or a Marie Osmond doll. You can sit for hours and just say to the TV: "No way." And for once the power is yours and there's no liberal producer, no lesson to be learned and you're totally free of soap, soap, soap.

From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1641855,00.html