For months, even years now, friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances and the tramp who lives in a shopping trolley at the bottom of my road have all been telling me that I really should check out The Wire. You know The Wire, it’s the HBO crime drama that nobody watched but has gained cult status and huge critical acclaim. And yes, it’s on my lists of seminal TV shows that I will watch before I die. I’ll be passing that long line of box sets in HMV or wherever sometime soon, and season one will catch my eye…
This got me to thinking (as these things do) about a Charlie Brooker documentary that FX put out last year ahead of a complete rerun of The Wire. I watched it, it was hugely enjoyable, full of people I admire a great deal (including Brooker) saying how amazing The Wire was.
Amongst this group of luminaries was a bit of a hero of mine, novelist Nick Hornby. He writes my kind of books, the kind of books I’d love to write myself if I had an iota of his talent. But he said something in the course of the documentary that got me rather irritated, even a little bit angry. Now, I’ll admit to paraphrasing here as I cannot track down the exact quote, but it went something along the lines of The Wire having:
the depth and complexity of a novel
I had to rewind and make sure I’d heard Hornby correctly, and indeed I had. It was at this point I shouted at the screen and stomped off to feed my copy of High Fidelity to next door’s dog.
Why did this seemingly innocent and sage comment get me so irked? It’s the inference that television is basically a lesser form of culture, a disposable, bubblegum peddler of lowbrow entertainment. When something comes along that is deep and complex and layered and crafted, intelligent people like Hornby have to relate it back to an art form they consider to be superior to television. It’s this desperate scrabble for highbrow pretensions to make somebody feel better about admiring and enjoying something as distasteful and tawdry as a television programme that drives me to absolute distraction.
Why couldn’t The Wire have the depth of a complexity of a television drama? Because that’s what it is, a television drama that is scripted, directed, lit and acted with complexity and depth. It isn’t a novel, a film, a theatre piece or an installation of bricks down at the Tate Modern. It’s a bloody television programme, made within that medium, for better or worse. But somehow that isn’t good enough, we must relate it elsewhere to make it acceptable and viable to those with supposedly more refined tastes.
I notice this in the Sunday papers - television is never bracketed under the heading of “Arts”, never mentioned in those pages that round-up the top five cinema, theatre, art or dance of the week ahead. Fair enough, there’s a whole section devoted to the week’s TV at the back of the papers, but why can’t we have a little nod on the arts page to the absolutely unmissable, inspiring and vital piece of television for the week ahead?
Because television isn’t one of the arts in the way that cinema or theatre is. It’s too immediate, it’s in the corner of just about every room in the house and requires no effort to switch it on and slump in front of it. Because of this, we simply don’t respect television. Even the people who work in television don’t want to be working in it, dreaming wistfully of graduating to film or theatre.
This turns my stomach and saddens me. It’s that lack of respect in all quarters that has led us to the current crisis in the television industry where audiences are in freefall and channels in turmoil. We need to regain our respect of this frustrating but frequently amazing and wonderful medium. Only then will its future be truly secure.
NEXT: Why Holby City has the depth and complexity of Proust…
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