Taking The Piss

I was already losing confidence in the urologist when, after asking what medication I had been put on, he had to turn to his computer and Google the name to find out what it was. After that it went downhill, with him more interested in poring over the new x-ray to try and locate the kidney stone while I kept asking when could I start eating properly without the abdominal pain and projectile vomiting resurfacing.

With no proper answers forthcoming, in the end we just pored over the sectional images from the CT scan from three weeks back. At least there he could see the stone, which seemed to please him no end, and also helpfully point out the size of the swollen, infected kidney, which was nice. Still, running back and forth through what was essentially an electronic flick book, it was a damn sight more interesting than anything I had seen over the past two weeks.

Having said that, while laid up and pretty much pumped full of my daily allowance of painkillers, flicking through the channels I did happen across an episode of The Saint on ITV4. When it comes to the old ITC dramas from the 1960s and 70s, I was either too young to watch them or they simply passed me by, although I do have a vague memory of catching perhaps one or two episodes of The Persuaders!. Once I finally got around to seeing enough episodes to become reasonably familiar with the material I can’t say that I was particularly impressed.

Since these shows were of their era it was always going to be unfair to watch The Champions or Randall and Hopkirk [Deceased] two or three decades on and try not to compare them to Alias or NYPD Blue or whatever else was on at the time. This particular episode of The Saint, however, came within a few days of the last episode of Ashes to Ashes. Not knowing it had inexplicably been commissioned for a third series, I’d watched it to see just how they were going to flush this massive turd and it was difficult not to weigh one up against the other.

While there was something rather formal about the staging of the inevitable fisticuffs when it came for Simon Templar to give the scoundrels a good drubbing, and the odd piece of back projection proved to be almost as distracting as seeing how many empty parking spaces there were in Central London, The Saint still had a rather ingenious double-cross plot to fall back on that made a lot of sense. Of course another episode might tell a different story, but in this instance it knocked the spots off the utter bone-headed stupidity of Ashes to Ashes.

Although I wasn’t a fan, at least Life on Mars made some slight attempt to contrast the different methods of policing, even if it was really just an excuse to dress up and play at being The Sweeney. Ashes to Ashes, based on that series finale, had tossed everything of value off and degenerated into a dumb cartoon. If they took away the guns and the juvenile behaviour revolving around what might have been a deep-fried penis, it could have been dumped in the Saturday evening slot that everyone is slavering over.

Back in the first series of Spooks one of the neophyte agents gets her head pushed into a deep fat fryer, which pretty much nailed the show’s colours to the mast. In Ashes to Ashes, interrogating some schlub in a chip shop, Gene Hunt takes his man out back to dunk him into the water bath the raw potato slices are being dumped into. Even in my partially zoned out state, it was pretty clear from the camera angle that while the actor was thrashing his arms in the water, his head hardly came close to the water let alone get pushed below the surface.

Later, during the rather silly bullion robbery, when the Audi Quattro piles in to knock down the bent copper, the actor/stuntman/whatever jumped in the air long before the car’s front bumper got anywhere near him. Piss-poor storytelling, sadly, seems to be a given nowadays when it comes to most BBC drama, but as some kind of compensation can’t we at least have decent production values to make it look like someone onboard was at least trying to make an effort?

When you look at how far American drama has progressed, contrasting, say, Gunsmoke to Deadwood or Dragnet to Life, it’s disappointing and dispiriting that the episode of The Saint, which was originally broadcast the same year as those earlier US shows, was the most intelligent hour of British-made drama I had seen on television that week.