Tales Of The City: Seen it all before

John Walsh
Tuesday 26 November 2002 20:00 EST
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I've been watching the £10m TV adaptation of the classic novel; Daniel Zhivago. Marvellous isn't it? It has this fantastically pretty actress at its core, playing a girl both head-turningly gorgeous and headstrong in character, who disdains the advances of callow local chaps because she knows she is destined for better things; but then, to save her family from poverty and her mother from ruin, she submits to the embraces of a nasty (but rich and influential) middle-aged man-of-the-world, who wears a fantastically constricting collar and is trying to conceal his shocking past; and the girl, in doing so, loses her chance to find true love with a handsome, shining-eyed, dark-haired young idealist whose name is, coincidentally, the title of the book...

It has been said before that Andrew Davies's adaptations from the classics are starting to resemble each other, but this is getting ridiculous. Davies is probably the best book-to-screenplay alchemist working on the small screen, but he's now doing so many classic texts, one after the other, that some repeated effects have started to show in all his versions of complex books.

Chief among them is his single-minded pursuit, in the first half-hour, of the book's love interest, at the expense of every other plot strand. Second is his sweet, old-fashioned insistence on portraying a coup de foudre – the lightning flash of empathy and desire that fizzes between the young leads the minute they clap eyes on each other. Third is his freakish obsession with horses, as great snorting, stamping signifiers of imminent passion, whether they're pulling the seducer's carriage (as in Doctor Zhivago) or carrying the headstrong beauty (as in Daniel Deronda). Fourth is his determination that all mothers should be semi-hysterical at all times, whether they're facing bankruptcy, being confronted by a suicide victim (both in Deronda) or listening to their daughter being violated on the other side of the wall (Zhivago).

Curiously, the producers, casting directors and production designers of different adaptations seem also to be in the grip of some Andrew Davies clone-virus, so that not only do the plots meld into one, but so do the incidental effects. Along with Davies's hysterical mothers (two of them played by Celia Imrie, and all clones of Alison Steadman playing Mrs Bennett in Pride and Prejudice), it's now mandatory to have the wonderful David Bamber (Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice) lurking in the background. There must be a sneery part for Hugh Bonneville (Grandcourt in Deronda and Yury's dad in Zhivago) if you can't get Colin Firth. All dances, whether in Regency London, 1870s Offendene or Tsarist Russia, follow the same unchanging walk-towards-your-partner-then walk-away-while-still-talking routine. And the nasty villains must have a pet dog, towards which they will be creepily indulgent, along the lines of Ernst Blofeld and his white cat.

Andrew Davies is evidently working his work right through the whole Everyman Library. Soon, I expect, he'll start on Beowulf, Moby-Dick and The Upanishads. You can bet your last farthing that in each of them there'll be a headstrong young madam, a horse and a sneering, tight-collared swine all meeting at a formal dance, somewhere in the first half-hour.

Mayor Ken is driving me crazy

The right-wing press has been wringing its hands over a new survey whose findings suggest that more than half the population agrees with the leading questions, "Do you think nothing in Britain works?" and "Do you think Britain is grinding to a halt?".

It's a rather sly and weaselly survey (one question begins, "Many believe there are clouds on the horizon..."), which runs through a checklist of things guaranteed to upset the citizenry: the state of education, the NHS, local transport. What amazes me is that they should leave out the thing that most irritates most Londoners – that convinces you that some individual at the Greater London Authority is being paid a handsome salary to make your life miserable. It is, of course, the planners who've dug up half the West End of London, buggered up Trafalgar Square and its approach roads until next June, made a gory mess of Holborn and turned the four-lane highway around Vauxhall Bridge into an impassable nightmare, leaving anyone driving into film- or theatre- or club-land feeling they're being punished for an unknown crime.

Don't tell me it proves how much we need the Congestion Charge that's arriving next year with its £80-a-day fines. To screw up the key thoroughfares of the metropolis for months on end is a disgrace, no matter how few or how many cars inch their way through the narrowed traffic lanes.

It's a sign of ineptness, a moronic indifference to the way Londoners and visitors see the city, a gesture of contempt for the motorists who have to endure it.

There, of course, is the rub. One might almost believe it was a conspiracy by the Mayor of London to make people furious with their cars, with traffic lights, with traffic generally, and resolve to stick to public transport.

One day soon, I will kidnap Mayor Ken Livingstone and subject him to a whole hour of progressing very slowly through the roadworks on the Embankment, while listening to the fretful cries of the backseat offspring expiring from ennui.

Drink all you like, but no swaying and definitely no dancing

Westminster City Council has come down like a ton of bricks on the owners of the Pitcher & Piano pub chain. Two of its branches in central London – in Soho and the Strand – have been fined for allowing shocking and inappropriate behaviour on the premises. We're not talking here about intranasal injections of jazz talc, nor about sexual displays or outbreaks of violence. What the customers were doing was dancing. There it is, out in the open. Council officials watched as four, then five, drinkers shamelessly bopped along to the pub's piped music. The council reminded the owners that they had no proper dancing licence and fined them £2,500 for each offence. "We have spent ages trying to stop people dancing," said the company's chief miscreant, sadly. "We have signs up, we turn the music down, rearrange the furniture and so on." But nothing can, it seems, stifle the joie de vivre of the Pitcher & Piano punter with "Can't Get You Out of My Head" running on a loop through his brain.

Not content with this sledge-hammer/nut interface, the council has served written warnings on another Soho boozer where people have been found "swaying". Nothing new there, you might say, but this kind of swaying was taken to be a preliminary for dancing, hence the council's stern action.

I remember being told, on my first visit to the snazzy St Martin's Hotel, that although I couldn't sit down in one of the guests' bars, I was welcome to stand "or lean". Too kind. But being ticked off for swaying is ridiculous. Some of us sway naturally. Lots of girls I know cannot stand at a bar without moving their shoulders rhythmically and mouthing song lyrics in an attractively preoccupied fashion. The council jobsworths are behaving like the beadles who used to patrol Burlington Arcade in the 18th century, when it was forbidden to sing or whistle in the arcade, or shuck or – can you believe this? – to hum. No humming, by order, or the beadles will get you. The crackpot statute died out. So should Westminster City Council if it keeps coming on like the Puritan relatives on Blackadder.

Charming...

Cartoonists have been searching for the ideal metaphor to sum up the PM's dealings with the firefighters. Is he pouring oil on a troubled sea, to which somebody will shortly apply a match? Is he chopping off the rungs across which a fireman is clambering to rescue him? A better image can be found in the news from Malaysia, where a snake-charmer grew tired of waiting for his cobra to emerge from its box and, instead of negotiating, yanked its tail and plonked it on the ground, upon which the snake bit him fatally on the hand. The moral: if you can't be charming, and you can't compromise, be damned careful.

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