There are three things you need to get right if you want people to watch your TV series, episode by episode;
1) Create a world people want to revisit
2) Create characters people want to see again
3) Create a story which people want to watch
In other words, make your fictional characters do and say things in a world which is interesting enough for your viewers to tune in repeatedly.
From the USA Sky now have the totally incomprehensible Fortitude - so complicated and full of horrid selfish animal killers no-one I have watched with has ever known what the hell is going on or what the half the characters are called, but so engrossed and bewitched are we by this incredible "world", we are glued to it anyway. Stunning shots of the lake ( or is it a fjord?) at night, with an ice wall suffusing the world with nocturne blue. Wow, when can we go there for a vacation? We think it's set in Iceland, but it could be anywhere really cold. So cold nothing can die there -we are told it is forbidden- and nothing ever decays there. It would be like dying in the fridge, you will be preserved forever. Unless you are the preacher as played by Christopher Ecclestone, who does manage to die, and even loses most of his vital organs having been treated like Mary Kelly or any other of Jack the Ripper's victims. Who dunnit ? Is it some long dead monster from prehistory awakened by mining? Well it can't be a person as arresting as Sophie Grabol, smarter now she's dumped the jumpers of her previous hit The Killing. But still quite memerising as the star of the show, chief of the island, and quite clearly charisma queen of the Arctic.
On the other side the BBC aired its big hope of the spring. Set at the opposite end of the earth, it's probably filmed in Docklands, so little do we see of the outside. The Banished told a miserable tale of convicts setting up shop down under, in the time when all Brits were evil, not just some as in Fortitude. The world is the most woebegone, disease ridden cesspit imaginable. In the same way Midnight Express killed tourism in Turkey for 20 years, this series is doing Australia's tourist board no favours.
Women are constantly in danger of being raped or married. The men are all raping murdering wrong uns. Racism there is none however- phew. But Thingy Rind Tutt (the good looking cool one from the Barclaycard adverts he did with Hollywood superstar Stephen Mangan) ends up on tip toe with a rope around his neck. We are not sure why - no-one I watched it with had a clue - the norm around here I am afraid. He wanted to marry the girl, but wasn't allowed, or something. He had had to be held back when the girl was lashed by the British wrong uns. So not all Brits are bad, Russell Tovey is the other convict who has survived months of hell on a rat and scurvy struck ship, only to almost plead with the red coats to flog him so the girl's reputation isn't besmirched. As if ! Who is the girl? No-one round here the faintest, but that won't surprise you by now. It ended with the noose tightening round Thingy Tutt Rynd's neck as the bucket his last toe clung to began to topple, and the other woman shouted words at him that might be the saver, in a replica of my daily trials with the whims of the local cash machine. You have three attempts to get your password right, it will not spit back the card, but spitefully holds it in its jaws as the seconds count down to a weekend of begging..get it wrong and you have two more attempts to shout the right word or it's all over. Desperate, the other woman shouts "Crucifixion" and everything stops. The bucket comes up right, everyone relaxes, the boss comes out , and just like my money and my card being returned to me, Julian Tutt Rynd lives again. Why? I won't even begin to explain about the bafflement on my sofa.
Suffice to say The Banished is grim, rancid, ragged and depressing. What is good about it? Rynd Tuttle and Tovey...but I would rather do battle with the local cash machine than sit through this sorry mess again.
Now what is that password anyway? If you try and fail, and then fail again, try "Crucifixion", it works in Oz apparently.
#Fortitude
#Extras
#stephen Mangan
#BBC
#TVseries
