i trawl the megahertz

I'm back, but busy. So before a proper new post, here - apropos of nothing much - is the opening credit sequence to '80's TV show Shoestring. I loved this programme so much as a child that the episode featuring a '60's beat band and the covered up murder of a groupie still haunts me. What I particularly like about the credits though - apart from the fabulously shapeless and billowing dress worn by the lady at the end - is the attempt to make Bristol appear a little bit like gritty 1970's New York. Also, the use of the radio waveband motif sticks out as a piece of outmoded technology redolent of a time when trawling across the wavebands was a regular activity. As a metaphor for the relative difficulty of finding things to watch/listen to in those days it seems highly apposite. You had to search for culture then, by 'eck.

Smoke and Mirrors

I've been watching Mad Men. A little late but with the zeal of the newly converted. The show has just started its third season in the US, but the first two have already been shown on BBC4 over here so apologies for the untimely nature of this post. Also, in proper TV critic fashion I should say that the following gives the game away on certain storylines so if you haven't been watching it and intend to be warned. I'm just saying....

There is a chi-chi shop called Mid Century Modern near my house which sells 1950's and '60's furniture. The term mid-century modern has become synonymous with a sense of ineffable stylishness, an aura of unimpeachable good taste.

At first glance Mad Men could be mistaken for being yet another example of this '60's genuflection. Its characters seem too familiar and its sets a little too chic, as if the show is simply uncritically in love with the era it depicts. As it turns out though Mad Men is obsessed with surface qualities and appearances but in a very interesting way.

Being set in a time and milieu so overcoded by previous films and TV shows allows Mad Men to subtly deconstruct these stereotypes as we watch. Like the collapsing Manhattan office of the title sequence - itself a homage to Hitchcock's North by Northwest - the familiar certainties of character begin to dissolve in front of us as the series progresses.



Mad Men reflects an ambiguous relationship with modernity*. It is in love with the slick grids and shiny surfaces of early '60's design. It also reveals the particular brand of modernism that dominated post-war US corporate culture. Modernism then was associated with money and power rather then the social egalitarianism of its European roots. Mad Men's modernism is the architecture of Philip Johnson and the novels of Ayn Rand. In fact Rand is name checked continuously in the show as a kind of intellectual cheerleader for the ferociously ambitious admen.

Mad Men revolves around a fictional Madison Avenue ad agency called Sterling Cooper. The agencies boss has a Mark Rothko painting hanging in his office, a reference to the way in which modernism (in the form of abstract expressionism) was absorbed into high style by the moneyed American classes. The arrival of this painting forms a central storyline to one of the episodes where its monetary value and artistic worth are eagerly discussed. Its aura is reinforced by its inaccessibility and the young copy writers have to break into the boss's office to finally see it.

The camera may pan lovingly up the steel mullions of curtain walled office blocks or track across the agency's open plan offices, but the show is concerned with the minute hierarchies and power plays of the people that inhabit them. The shiny surfaces and implacable grids of modernist architecture are also aligned with the smoke and mirror effects of advertising itself. Advertising is not just the background setting for the show but an important thematic concern.

Mad Men's central character is Donald Draper, the urbane and sophisticated creative director of Sterling Cooper. Draper's identity is a fabrication though. He is a hick from the sticks, a character with a murky past who has reinvented himself as a dapper ad man. His persona is analogous to the brand identities he dreams up, a clever piece of self-promotion. Interestingly, Draper is in many ways the show's most honest character. He may be a phony but he's also - as Truman Capote said about Marilyn Monroe - a real phony.

Draper's real phoniness is central to Mad Men's interest in the construction of personal identity. Towards the end of season two his life begins to unravel. He takes a trip to LA where he ends up staying with a mysterious group of idle hedonists in Richard Neutra's Kaufman House. Standing by the pool with his trilby he looks like early Connery era James Bond about to indulge in some guilt free casual sex. And yet the louche sophistication of the setting becomes a backdrop for Draper's spiraling loss of identity. The Kaufman house's lack of solidity and ambiguous reflections are contrasted with the gloomy solidity of his own home in the suburbs of New York.



Modernity - the show suggests - comes at a cost. The price being the previous certainties of life. The shifting attitudes and nascent social revolution of the early '60's permeates Mad Men. Everyone is unsure of where they stand. Interestingly too, given the tendency to view the early '60's as a period of effortless cool, the show doesn't pretend that everyone was a Kennedy voting beatnik. Sterling Cooper's admen are automatically pro-Nixon and some of the most telling scenes show them bewildered by Kennedy's hip, populist appeal.

One of the most important characters in the show is Peggy, an intensely ambitious young secretary who is quickly promoted to junior copywriter. For the other female characters this is an inexplicable achievement. Peggy's success is particularly galling for Joan, an old fashioned office manager used to getting her way within a prescribed set of rules. Peggy consistently dismisses Joan's double edged advice to dress in a more feminine way in order to achieve success. In doing so she implicitly realises that Joan's canny playing of the game is actually a trap and the exploitation of her sexuality can only bring limited success.



In a later episode we see Joan's ambitions thwarted as she tries to achieve a different kind of recognition as a TV script reader within the agency. Later on, at home, she rubs the sores on her shoulders from the straps of her bra, a reminder of the efforts she puts in her to achieve her own identity.

The show is made with an obsessive attention to period detail. What could be an overly dry authenticity actually allows the social mores of the '60's to be explored. There is a fabulous sequence for instance where Don takes his family for a picnic. The scene is saturated in cliche; Betty, the perfect blond wife, sipping coke through a straw, the children playing on the picnic rug and Don himself lying back with a can of beer. As they leave Betty shakes the rug out, scattering food wrappers, drinks cans and rubbish across the grass. She makes no attempt to pick any of it up and they drive off.



In another perfectly judged scene a new photocopier arrives in the office. This vast piece of state of the art equipment has no natural home and the characters idly speculate on where it should go as a kind of background chatter to the main story. This is mainly played for laughs until someone uses it to photocopy Joan's ID revealing that she has lied about her age. The copier is quickly utilised as a new weapon in the same old power battles.

Similarly the incessant drinking and smoking becomes a knowingly absurd device, an endlessly recurring trope that ceases to be in any way aspirational or cool. Losing it, or dissolving into complete dipsomania, is an ever present possibility. At one point a character oversteps the line, pissing himself unwittingly during a meeting. Later, swilling whiskies from huge tumblers, the agency bosses shamelessly conspire to give him the boot.

Mad Men is set at the start of an era of massive social change. It is also an era that has passed into popular folklore as a signifier of effortless cool and stylishness. The programme pulls the rug from under this gloss, showing it instead as a period of anxiety and uncertainty, more similar to ours than we would like to admit. The corporate modernism of Sterling Cooper's office suggests an allusion of egalitarian transparency but actually harbours the same old dark spaces of the mind.

* There are good photos of the empty set here, ironically enough together with some tips on how to recreate the style.

The Fall and Rise of the Suburban Sit Com

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin was one of the darkest sit-coms ever to appear on British TV. Whilst its new remake has a depressing pointlessness to it, the original still has a strange and surreal brilliance. Watch an episode

of it today and it is clearly still very funny. It also serves as a fascinating document about the suburban landscape, which it captures in a way that is both visual and structural.

Like suburbia the shows structure was deliberately repetitive and predictable. Each episode would begin with a sequence where Reggie would leave his house and walk through the suburban streets to the train station. This walk was almost identical each time except for minor comic deviations that arrived - like the landmarks of the route that he would take - right on cue. A large part of the humour came from the slightly heart breaking predictability of this routine. Locked into the same pattern day in day out, Reggie's minor transgressions became ever more bizarre and desperate.

The estate that Reginald Perrin lived on with its streets named hopefully after famous English poets, and the vaguely deco red brick office of the fabulously dowdy Sunshine Deserts where he worked, are all depicted with deadpan pathos. Although seemingly the same each week they actually change to give a series of clues as to the character's mental deterioration. The interiors are equally repetitive and loaded with painful over-familiarity, from the minor victories against his fellow commuters in the morning train carriage to his attempts to avoid sitting in his bosses farting chairs.

Perrin's rejection of suburbia is complex and never entirely resolved one way or the other. After faking a suicide driven by his desperate boredom he starts a new life as an entrepreneur selling useless products. His Grot Shops are a huge success though and he ends up rejecting this new enterprise too. Its success has rendered it as hollow and emptily aspirational as his previous life. Following this he and his wife set up a therapy centre cum commune in their original house.

This invasion of the family home is quite significant and genuinely alters its relationship to the suburban context. The vaguely hippy, counter cultural ideas behind the commune completely transform the classic sit-com family house. In this sense the show's theme was very similar to that of The Goode Life, another 1970's sit com based around a rejection of suburban life. In this show Tom and Barbara Goode - two well to do suburbanites - decide to quit their jobs and attempt to live self-sufficiently. Their experiment transforms the immaculate lawn of the suburban home into a miniature working farm. Like Reggie Perrin though, they are not natural rebels and most of the humour comes from their obvious suppressed longing to return to the comforts of their former lifestyle.

In one of the most telling episodes a genuine hippie comes on a pilgrimage to visit Tom and Barbara's experiment in sustainability. But he has fundamentally misjudged their radicalism and they are bewildered by this hardcore acolyte. Clearly their rejection of suburban norms is partial at best and any wholesale embracing of a plausible alternative lifestyle is played for nervous laughs.

Similarly Reggie Perrin's daydreams about romantic trysts with his secretary usually involve the two of them making out on his office desk in the middle of a meadow. His escape fantasies are ultimately puerile and absurd and never really allow him to escape all that far at all.

Both Reginald Perrin and The Goode Life were made in the 1970's and early '80's and mined the incompatibility of suburbia's ultra conformity with the ideas thrown up by the late '60's. The interesting thing from an architectural point of view though is how the uniformity and spatial repetition of suburbia becomes part of the joke. To some extent most sit-coms rely on a small number of locations where the spatial arrangement becomes important in establishing strict routines for the characters. The importance of this spatial choreography is captured amusingly in Dan Meth's diagrams of sit com houses.

These set arrangements are vital in establishing the routine against which the action unfolds. The difference in Reggie Perrin - and one of the reasons why it is still such a brilliant piece of satire - is the way that this familiarity is subtly altered as the series progresses. The letters on the Sunshine Deserts factory slowly fall off. The grim routine of entering his bosses office becomes an elaborate game. After his suicide Reggie returns in disguise and proceeds to live an almost identical life to his previous one. Any attempt to move on or affect meaningful change seems doomed to failure. Unlike the characters in most sit-coms Perrin tries desperately to escape his situation. In some ways he rebels against the structure of the situation comedy itself.

The most telling example of this is in the titling of the episodes. These are fractionally different each week and take the form of Reggie's excuse for being late when he arrives in the office each day. The excuses become ever more absurd as the series goes on but ultimately remain utterly rooted in routine. Their flights of fantasy only serve to reinforce his total inability to escape. In their repetition lies an acute satire of suburbia itself. Always the same but obsessed by minute displays of individuality and difference.

Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, staff difficulties, Hampton Wick."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, signal failure at Vauxhall."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, staff shortages, Nine Elms."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, derailment of container truck, Raynes Park."
Ep.1 "Eleven minutes late, seasonal manpower shortages, Clapham Junction."
Ep.2 "Eleven minutes late, defective junction box, New Malden."
Ep.4 "Eleven minutes late, overheated axle at Berrylands."
Ep.4 "Eleven minutes late, defective axle at Wandsworth."
Ep.5 "Eleven minutes late, somebody had stolen the lines at Surbiton."
Ep.6 "Twenty-two minutes late, black ice at Norbiton."
Ep.7 "Twenty-two minutes late, obstacles on the line at Berrylands."
Ep.8 "Twenty-two minutes late, badger ate a junction box at New Malden."
Ep.9 "Twenty-two minutes late, fed up by train delays, came by bike. Slow puncture at Peckham."
Ep.10 "Twenty-two minutes late, escaped puma, Chessington North."

Power, Corruption and Lies

Many of the things I wanted to say about Red Riding have already been written elsewhere, namely at Sit Down Man (on the socio-political history behind the stories) and kpunk (on the thoroughly un-British use of dark allegory in place of traditional character development). I agree with a lot of the comments regarding inconsistencies of plot and the overripe cathartic ending too. Perhaps the only thing left to add might be something about the programme's superlative use of location and architecture.

Red Riding looked fantastic. This sounds at first a banal observation, but such visual complexity is extremely rare in British TV and film making. In fact a lot of the criticism of the series seemed to hinge around a suspicion of this richness, as if it were proof of deficiencies elsewhere. There is a bias towards words over pictures in our logocentric culture, a preference for the supposed clarity of language over the ambiguities of images.

Red Riding had a specifically visual intelligence. It's imagery was compelling from the recurring symbolism to passing period details. This was more than Life on Mars with better lighting. It wasn't simply that the police were benter, the sexism more pathological or the corruption more endemic. It was also to do with the way imagery was used to offer genuine insights about the way our culture may have changed over the period the series was set.

In an early scene in the opening episode (1974) two characters wandered through a Brutalist multi-storey car park. It looked terrifying but also beautiful, suggestive perhaps of some civic quality lacking in the corruption elsewhere. The cars within it though seemed from another era, creaky British Leyland vehicles emblematic of the industrial decline of 1970's Britain.

The locations were consistently intriguing throughout. In 1974 the camera returned again and again to the thoroughly ordinary row of terraces where Paula Garland lived. The slow, almost walking speed, panning shot along their facades had an English Noir quality, conjuring something deeply if disturbingly erotic out of the banal setting.



Similarly John Dawson's house was perfect, a vulgar piece of 1970's suburban modernism. Its bloated mediocrity was entirely appropriate to Dawson's character. This was shown to best effect in the scene where Dawson hosted a cocktail party where corrupt police cheifs in tuxedos and their wives wandered around its shag pile carpeted hallways and mirrored bedrooms in a queasy simulation of the high life. This could easily have ended up looking like something from Abigail's Party but the atmosphere was palpably unpleasant and threatening.

Best of all was the Indian restaurant where Dawson was shot. The faux-Indian arches and decorative screens disappearing in a haze of cigarette smoke were stickily familiar. These shots had the tense social observation of David Hockney, or Patrick Caulfield's paintings of 1970's interiors, but with a sense of dread instead replacing the archness.

Red Riding explored whole genres of neglected, under-described space; the vast expanse of the moors through which a succession of doomed characters drove, the edge of town wasteland full of allotments sheds and rusting vans to which the story returned again and again. As the plot inched forward the changes in cars and clothes became the only marker that time was passing at all. Otherwise nothing seemed to change. There was no forward momentum, just a seemingly endless return past the giant concrete cooling towers on the way back to the dank cul-de-sacs of Fitzwilliam.



So for me the best episode was 1974. It was the most visually ambitious and impressive if also the most narratively ludicrous. While 1980 was more coherent, 1974 ignored the conventions of good storytelling in favour of a bracingly strange David Lynchian exploration of English provincial life. Perhaps in some senses the story was too conventional, unhappily mixing the police procedural with something more polemical. The corruption demanded some kind of clear resolution and justice, where perhaps there should have been none. Despite its occult murkiness the plot never quite achieved the hypnotic depth of the imagery.