I just
watched Utopia, the channel 4 series about eugenics. Interesting. Well written
storyline, pushed all the right buttons, but it was far more interesting as an
insight into current british tastes in TV than anything else. Three things
characterise this series: language and
blood and nonchalant killing.
The
language is amazing. It’s like they wrote the script, sent it in, and the
thoroughly modern editors or producers said ‘come on Dennis, not enough fucks
in it. Put some in’. So Dennis, not a swearer himself particularly, put some
in. But not being very good at it, either swearing or dialogue, he put them in
in all the wrong places and had the wrong people using it. Then the producers
saw that there were still not enough fucks in the series and asked Dennis to
put in some more. But his ineptitude caused him to put them in even worse
places, so bad in fact that the rather mediocre actors often had a hard job of making the fucks
sound genuine; delivery was almost always flat which it usually isn’t with
fuck. I suppose the film, as a thriller was supposed to be thrilling, but the
result, at least from where I am, was rather more humerous than I imagine they
had intended. Some pretty corny dialogue puctuated with inappropriately placed
stilted and monotone fucks and of course the gratuitous violence, certainly
caused me to raise a fucking eyebrow or fucking two anyway. Most memorable was
“Ah shit. Glock 22. She’s CIA. Means she knows next to fucking nothing”
delivered like it was a request for three baps in a bakers after a long queue.
In the second series, slightly fewer fucks, well in the first episode anyway
set in the 70s (I can’t be bothered to watch the rest, too samey) but we had
the surprisingly late introduction of the ubiquitous british ‘cunt!’, which I
hadn’t noticed in the first series. I imagine that the second episode, set back
in the present, will be again peppered with fucks. Remarkable was the almost
total lack of any of the lesser swear words or those useful little discourse
markers and space fillers apart from fuck, you know, the words people use in
real life. Really odd. Maybe, just a theory here, the censors won’t allow too
many other swear words in as too shockingly near to reality. So, well done BBC.
The second
thing that characterises the series is the british love of blood and brains
being sprayed onto walls. They do love that. It’s repeated ad nauseam every
chance they get and even when it’s not necessary at all. It’s obviously
designed to gratify the overweight peroxide blond and tattooed fastfood eating
brits called Gary and Madison shitting themselves with excitement at each spray
of blood and I imagine it succeeded. There certainly was a lot of it. Again, well done BBC, know your
audience and all that.
The third
thing that stood out for me, something I’ve noticed a lot in UK films over the
years, is this inclusion, almost obligatory, of the disinterested and
nonchalant execution. Has violence has become so commonplace in the UK that people are not worried by this trend in
TV programmes? Probably yes. I suppose in a country so sanitised by the
censors, anything they can get away with is taken as far as humanly possible,
even if it does defy all logic and reality.
So all in
all I was rivetted to this series. People’s heads being sprayed everywhere,
extreme violence, interesting scenses of torture and fear written in to as many
scenes as possible and not a fuck in sight, but plenty of fucks in the stilted
every-day fucking conversation. Excellent work BBC.
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