Dec 8, 2002
Monarch of the Grim
Oh dearie me. Not so long ago, I was saying that Monarch of the Glen is a guilty pleasure for a Sunday night. Well, I was wrong.
It was a cheesy pleasure, and now it’s unbearably poor.
The main problem is that it seems to have turned into a scottish version of an inner city hospital drama – McCasualty – a show in which various things happen, the script is ludicrously full of holes, and the whole plot is tied up genially within an hour-long episode. It’s so neat. It’s so planned. The show used to be all long-ranging plotlines, developing genial characters and shambolic antics in a jovial way, but this series demonstrates a new urgency to get each plotline tied up within the hour, in case the viewers don’t come back next week.
The BBC drama Casualty was a lot like that too, as far as I remember from watching it – though it’s been a good five years or so since I last saw an episode the whole way through. The thing about Casualty that always really bugged me was the sense of foreboding that seemed to hang over the establishing scenes in each episode.
There’s a woman picking up her kids from school. There’s a bloke at home making beans on toast. There’s an old lady trying to change a lighbulb. There’s a builder whistling on the way to work. By the end of the show, at least one of them will have flatlined, two others will be permanently disfigured, one more will have had a close shave and assorted others will have come into the Casualty department either bleeding from a gaping wound or in search of an injured relative.
Unlike ER, in which the plot revolves around the interactions of the hospital department staff, and those who come in injured or dying appear only fleetingly, in Casualty, the action is centred on the patients. As soon as someone not in a hospital uniform appears on screen, you know something nasty’s going to happen to them or someone close to them – it’s just a question of when.
See, they simply wouldn’t show the character unless they were about to become impaled on a fence or hit by a falling toilet or whatever. It’s all so foreboding – you feel (or at least I did) like shouting at the characters on screen “No! No! Don’t do it! Don’t leave the house! Go back to bed until the camera crew have gone!” but they never do.
So a while back, I came up with a plot device to make the whole thing a bit less doom-laden. What happens is that in every episode, you have the usual student going down to the shops, the bloke fixing his roof, the woman running for a bus, the family heading out for a picnic. Bad things will happen, oh yes, but one of these situations is a red herring.
So out of these four scenarios, three will end in blood and tears as usual, but one won’t. The trick is that the sense of foreboding will remain, but at the end of the episode you’ll see the family enjoying their picnic under a tree without the niggling feeling that they’re about to be struck by lightening or charged by an angry bull, or whatever.
So I pitched this to a Casualty script editor at a party in Southwark a few months ago, spurred on by a glass of wine. He seemed pretty receptive about it – but it’s possible that his enthusiasm was equally fuelled by his choice of tipple. In any case, if you see the changes come through in the way the programme is put together, remember: you read it hear first….
