Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer in The English. Photo / Supplied
Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer in The English. Photo / Supplied
Yesterday, the nominations for this year’s Bafta TV awards were announced. Leading the pack are This is Going to Hurt, based on Adam Kay’s memoir about the life of an overworked NHS junior doctor, and The Responder, starring Martin Freeman as a demoted police officer fighting personal and professional problems in a fictional Merseyside constabulary.
While both are strong contenders – in particular the former, a highly accomplished adaptation crowned by a star performance from Ben Whishaw – I feel that some things have been unjustly overlooked.
Diego Luna as Cassian Andor in new Star Wars show Andor. Photo / supplied
The English, Hugo Blick’s startlingly original revisionist Western, was the best thing on TV last year, yet failed to secure nominations for Best Mini-Series or – despite Emily Blunt’s career-best performance – Best Lead Actress. (Male lead Chaske Spencer, at least, is up for Best Lead Actor).
There’s also Andor, which I assumed was going to be a turgid anoraks-only addition to the Star Wars franchise, yet defied my expectations with its intelligence and taut storytelling. The Disney+ show received a sole nomination in the main categories, for Fiona Shaw in the Best Supporting Actress category, and missed out in the Best International Programme category.
I realise that tastes are subjective, that awards are always going to leave some people disappointed, but in my view these two shows – original, brave and more interesting than any other TV drama released last year – should have led the race to May’s big ceremony. The fact that they won’t suggests to me a wider malaise when it comes to the current cultural climate: there is a crisis in storytelling.
Let me explain. All the shows nominated tell a story of sorts, but they are not necessarily driven by a strong narrative in the way that The English and Andor are.
Ben Wishlaw and Ambika Mod in the BBC television series This Is Going To Hurt. Photo / supplied
This is Going to Hurt feels like a series of vignettes, for example, while the Single Drama nominee I Am Ruth, which featured Kate Winslet as a woman whose daughter is rendered virtually comatose by social media, is part of a modish drive towards a type of drama which jettisons any discernible plot in its drive to hammer home a message.
As for Bad Sisters, the Irish black-comedy thriller starring Sharon Horgan, that’s just high-end trash.
Another thing that holds back our desire to tell stories is the obsession – galvanised in recent years – with true life. There’s a Bafta nod for The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, based on the case of John Darwin who walked into a police station in 2007, more than five years after he had faked his death in a kayak accident off the coast of Co Durham.
There’s also the latest, critically mauled series of The Crown, relating the travails of the Windsors in the 1990s – although any resemblance to reality was in this case purely coincidental.
Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Princess Diana in The Crown's new season. Photo / AP
What The English and Andor both show is the power of the imagination. Both expertly conjure entire worlds; take you somewhere new and startling; reject any predictable tropes.
Admittedly, The English does take inspiration from historical events, but very little felt familiar in its brilliant, sometimes bizarre story of a prim Victorian lady hellbent on revenge. Here was a history that could have felt like self-indulgent steampunk fantasy, but was instead expertly shaped into something psychologically real.
The crisis in storytelling is not confined to TV drama. Literary fiction is particularly susceptible at the moment, and here the picture is even more fraught and complicated. As well as an obsession with real events, the mainstream publishing industry is also tying itself in knots about identity, authenticity, lived experience: depressing words and phrases that stifle creativity.
What this means, in part, is a drive towards things such as autofiction, which discard anything outlandishly fictional in favour of a story not so dissimilar from the writer’s own experience (or in some cases creating a story that is pretty much exactly the same).
Martin Freeman in The Responder. Photo / Supplied
I’ve enjoyed many examples of the above: for example, Vanessa Springora’s Consent, about the author’s grooming by a man in his 50s, and one of the bravest books I think I’ve ever read. But the problem is that such works blur the line between what is real and what is not. You could not question the authenticity of Springora’s story – and thus ambiguity goes out of the window. In lesser works of autofiction, there is an overarching moral directive and the imagination is made redundant.
The strange thing is that “storytelling” has become a buzzword recently. Look at any publisher’s or author’s website, and you’ll find them paying testament to its importance, in a sort of hushed tone that suggests a reverence to our forefathers gathering around a fire. Yet this feels disingenuous in a climate where truth – or, dare I say it, “personal truth” – is given credence above everything else.
Thinking again of TV drama, I am reminded of some of the great works of the past (some Bafta-winners, some not), such as Dennis Potter’s strange musical fantasies Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, which helped us to understand the human condition by juxtaposing the everyday with bursts of outlandish lip-synching. One mode informed the other, and while there were elements of autobiography, it was well masked by Potter’s dazzling creativity.
Even something like Boys from the Blackstuff, Alan Bleasdale’s story of unemployed Liverpool Tarmac-layers in Thatcher’s Britain, combined hefty political commentary with something far stranger, as we witnessed the solitary figure of Bernard Hill’s Yosser Hughes lose all sense of male pride via a sort of hallucinatory nightmare.
Ultimately, we need to start investing in the minds of budding young writers who can deliver a narrative in the same way as Potter or Bleasdale or Blick have done. It’s all about learning to trust the imagination again – a trust that currently feels breached.
