"Really quite clever".
So goes the latest advertising slogan for British TV channel More4. It's a big claim for a station that seeks to both intelligent and entertaining. This week the channel broadcast the feature length comedy drama "The Trial Of Tony Blair", subsequently airing on Thursday on parent station Channel 4. Set in the near future after a belated hand over of power from Blair to Gordon Brown, it charts Blair's new life after power and the slow subsequent build-up to a prosecution for war crimes in Iraq.
It's a bleak piece, with a lightly black comic tone; Blair is a figure of fun, to be equally pitied and despised. Skillful as some of the performances are, though, this is not a clever piece of television. On the contray, it's a deeply unpleasant work. Smugly self-righteous, it's about as appealing as spending Christmas afternoon listening to a drunk uncle hold forth at great length on the blindingly obvious.
It's not the politics of the piece that's such a turn-off; it's just the smug tone of self-righteous wish-fulfillment that is so off-putting. In addition, the fact is that it is difficult to watch for 90 minutes when there's not a single character presented as route into the drama for the audience; there's no-one to sympathise with, no-one to act as the moral conscience, no-one to like.
The writers evidently consider themselves and the audience to be that conscience or that moral centre; but all that leaves is a bad taste in the mouth, that has the unmistakable sense of the moral judgementalism of 'reality' television.All the programme does is replace debate with caricature, hard work with lazy generalisations. Instead of adding to the debate, it trivialises issues by making one man a figure of fun and an object for moral superiority. Such an approach honours no-one and not unlike the war in Iraq, leaves us all worse off.
So goes the latest advertising slogan for British TV channel More4. It's a big claim for a station that seeks to both intelligent and entertaining. This week the channel broadcast the feature length comedy drama "The Trial Of Tony Blair", subsequently airing on Thursday on parent station Channel 4. Set in the near future after a belated hand over of power from Blair to Gordon Brown, it charts Blair's new life after power and the slow subsequent build-up to a prosecution for war crimes in Iraq.
It's a bleak piece, with a lightly black comic tone; Blair is a figure of fun, to be equally pitied and despised. Skillful as some of the performances are, though, this is not a clever piece of television. On the contray, it's a deeply unpleasant work. Smugly self-righteous, it's about as appealing as spending Christmas afternoon listening to a drunk uncle hold forth at great length on the blindingly obvious.
It's not the politics of the piece that's such a turn-off; it's just the smug tone of self-righteous wish-fulfillment that is so off-putting. In addition, the fact is that it is difficult to watch for 90 minutes when there's not a single character presented as route into the drama for the audience; there's no-one to sympathise with, no-one to act as the moral conscience, no-one to like.
The writers evidently consider themselves and the audience to be that conscience or that moral centre; but all that leaves is a bad taste in the mouth, that has the unmistakable sense of the moral judgementalism of 'reality' television.All the programme does is replace debate with caricature, hard work with lazy generalisations. Instead of adding to the debate, it trivialises issues by making one man a figure of fun and an object for moral superiority. Such an approach honours no-one and not unlike the war in Iraq, leaves us all worse off.
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