Sensing the City through Television

Peter Billingham

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781841508214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

An investigation of the fictional representations of the city in contemporary British and American television drama, assessing their political, sociological and cultural implications. The book draws on the following five key case studies for specific and detailed analysis:

* Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City
* Homicide & Life on the Street
* Queer as Folk
* The Cops
* Holding On

Each is discussed in terms of structure, content, characterisation and narrative, and each is placed within its specific ideological context. The case studies are intended to represent an interesting range of British and American cities and city sub-cultures. The author extends his analysis to investigate the intrinsic issues related to the implications of popular and high drama and culture.

This study includes exclusive interviews with the writers and directors of some of the series discussed. This new material provides new insights into the intended presentations of "city" identities for the television. As one of the first substantial investigations of the city in television drama, this book reflects and contributes to a growing general interest in the politics of representation. It is also designed for accommodation into the very popular academic courses on drama and in film and media studies: as a textbook and for supplementary reading.

1 Policing the Imagination

Tony Garnett’s ‘The Cops’

In this opening chapter I intend to analyse and discuss in some detail the two series of Tony Garnett’s ‘The Cops.’ The first of these police dramas was broadcast over eight fifty-minute episodes from Monday 19 October 1998 on BBC2. The second series began broadcasting, again on BBC2, on Monday 11 October 1999 and consisted of ten fifty- minute episodes. Both series were produced by World Productions with Garnett as Executive Producer and Eric Coulter as Producer.

In June 1999, Tony Garnett invited me to Bolton both to interview him about the making of the first series and to spend a day on location viewing the second series in production. During that day, I was also able to interview other members of the production team. All references to Tony Garnett in interview in this chapter are from that meeting. In my interview with Garnett he explained that:

We wanted to do a ‘cop show’ where the characters are not playing their uniforms – where we’re dealing with human beings that are more than the uniform. Now of course, putting that uniform on effects who you are when you have the uniform on, and it even effects you after a while when you’ve taken it off. It also effects the way in which the world perceives you and then reflects back to you, because how we perceive others is partly made up of how we perceive the world perceiving us.

It is one of my principle contentions in relation to ‘The Cops’ that at the heart of this two series drama is a profound moral ambiguity concerning the issues of law and order and their enforcement. As I mentioned in my introduction, ‘The Cops’ is urban based, rather than city based. The programme, filmed on location in Bolton, Lancashire in the north of England, constructs a fictional town named Stanton. Much of the dramatic action is located on or around the fictional, run-down housing estate known as Skeetsmoor. As Garnett noted in relation to this question of location when I asked him about its significance:

We wanted it to be urban but not metropolitan. What I particularly wanted was a fictional town that was large enough to throw up the kinds of problems we wanted to deal with, but small enough to allow regular and semi-regular characters to occur. I didn’t want the anonymity of a metropolitan centre because that is a different kind of drama.

Within this fictional setting therefore, the dramatic action is defined in terms of a location that is beyond the city and yet exhibits problems and issues that one might relate to a metropolitan centre. Such issues are the use and abuse of illegal drugs, homelessness, petty crime, prostitution and a pervading sense of wider material deprivation. In an important sense, the intrusion or transplanting of these major social and economic issues within an urban setting highlights wider concerns within contemporary British society about the increase and spread of these problems beyond London and the major regional cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle and Bristol. As Anne Power reported in an article for the The Guardian entitled ‘Streets of Shame’:

In the inner areas of Manchester and Newcastle, almost half the population of working age is outside the labour market or education – double the national average. Nearly half of all households are poor, compared with a fifth nationally…. Although unemployment dropped in the 1990s, it dropped far more rapidly for women than for men. There is a surplus of men with a manual work background.¹

Manchester is the named city in the series, the third largest city in England outside of London and Birmingham, and Stanton’s proximity to it ensures a symbiotic relationship between the two. The migration of these major socio-economic problems from the city into the conurbation carries with it also endemic implications for issues of law and order and the surveillance and punishment of criminal behaviour. In this chapter, through a closely detailed examination of both series, I intend to discuss the extent to which ‘The Cops’ interrogates and exhibits some principal concerns relating to the urban location as a site of ideological struggle. I shall examine firstly the eight episodes constituting the first series, seeking to identify some key and defining characters, conflicts and narratives. A self-reflexive, critical interrogation operates throughout the series and signifies a complex interaction of subject – the Police Force – constructed as myth but simultaneously, through a dialectical tension between the camera point-of- view and editorial values, subverting and questioning the status and function of that myth. In that important respect, ‘The Cops’ shares similar territory to ‘Homicide – Life on the Street,’ which I discuss in Chapter Five. In terms of my concept of the geoideological, both series map a geographical terrain of urban degeneration. What is significant is that some of the kinds of issues of urban neglect and impoverishment located within the city setting of Baltimore (‘Homicide’), are viewed within the regional urban setting of Bolton/Stanton in ‘The Cops.’ This confirms my assessment made slightly earlier in this chapter, that the demarcation of the geo-ideological terrain of the city, as opposed to the urban, is diminishing with a bewildering rapidity that has profound implications for social services and various schemes of both urban planning and inner city regeneration. So, in terms of the ideological marking of their terrain, both series implicitly address the wider meta-idelogical and socio-economic conditions in which crime and its palpable causes is enacted. In Barthes’ use of myth as a theoretical construct, he was, to quote Masterman (1984) ‘demonstrating the centrality of power relations – of patterns of dominance, oppression and subordination – to the process of signification.’ In television drama, the proximity between the signifier and our sense of everyday experience becomes equivalent to our valuing of the drama’s ‘reality’ or ‘realism.’ This process of the construction and reception of meaning is itself, of course, a function and outcome of our own culturally determined subjectivity. I shall argue that in terms of the performative aesthetic of both ‘The Cops’ and ‘Homicide – Life on the Street,’ both series seek to effect a deconstruction of those prevailing myths of the police and the concomitant constructs of law and order.

‘The Cops’ – Series One

In the opening sequence of Episode One, the visual narrative invites the viewer on a geographical journey from night-club to police station, which is correspondingly a journey for Mel Draper – the young WPC – from the anima of her private world into the persona of her formalised, public identity. Accordingly, the viewer is presented with a contradiction of expectations, powerfully communicating the tensions that Garnett identified in both the actual and ideological wearing of the police uniform. Therefore, within two minutes screening time of this opening episode, this sequence is signaling a world of ambiguity and disclosure. In so doing, it also exhibits complex, connotative layers of public duty and rhetoric with other, contradictory, subjective agendas. In ‘Notes’ that Garnett distributed to the production crew and actors he stated that “The moral ambiguity thus created is to be a defining attribute of the show and central to our relationship with the audience.”²

I believe that the location and function of this ‘moral ambiguity’ reflects a political and cultural climate, in which the fixed positions of activists and practitioners on the left have been subject to substantial review and reformulation. This ideological reconfiguration is a symptomatic response to the strategies of a dominant political culture, which seeks to deny ideology itself. Declaring that ‘the class war is over,’ the Blair ‘project’ accordingly seeks to define a debate in which no opposing view is articulated. It is important to recognise that it is within this context of the ascendancy of the centre right, with its accompanying penetration of the management and production of the political and popular mass media that Garnett observed:

More and more in television you have to do ‘Trojan Horse’ drama if you want to be political. Thirty years ago I could produce films and television that were overtly political. You can’t do that now, partly because the broadcasters won’t allow it, and partly because the audience is difficult to get and to keep. If I’d gone to a broadcaster and said that I wanted to do a series that is largely set on a really tough, difficult housing estate somewhere in the north of England… they’d have said there’s no audience for that. But if I say that I want to do a cop show, they say that’s very interesting because ‘cops and docs’ are the mainstays of the schedule.

This function and strategy of ‘The Cops’ as ‘Trojan Horse’ drama is hugely significant exemplifying the potential and actual constraints of expressing an oppositional critique within those fields. This is not to present a simplistic model of direct censorship or interference. As worryingly, it is the exertion of indirect control and influence through the ‘audience led’ management of the means of cultural production, which prevails. Nevertheless, in terms of the demographic constituents and range of many television audiences, television drama, as a medium of popular mass communication, offers one of the most effective means of engaging in discourse about – and with – those urban communities that are, in Garnett’s own words, “untouched by Blair’s Paradise.”

I am going to continue my immediate examination of these issues through a more detailed analysis of three characters in an inter-locking narrative from Episodes One and Two. These characters occupy significant positions within both the plot narrative and also the ideological discourse of these episodes. The characters are WPC Mel Draper, PC Roy Brammell and Nico a young, unemployed, working class man living on the Skeetsmoor estate. The fictive constructions of these characters and their dramatic interaction exemplify crucial ideological anxieties concerning the scale and extent of urban deprivation and crime and the rationale of its surveillance, policing and control.

The opening sequence of Episode One reveals that Mel’s personal life is located in a popular sub-culture of recreational drugs and the club scene. The clash between that lifestyle and the demands of her role as a young policewoman are vividly expressed by the panic intensity of her journey between those meta-locations. The consequences of Mel’s near-failure to self-reconstruct from the private into the public domain are traumatic not only for her, but also for the meridian expectations of the police and law enforcement. This dichotomy that is WPC Draper therefore constitutes an anxiety about both the efficacy of law enforcement in late capitalist urban society, and also about the increasingly indeterminate boundaries of the constructs of order and disorder. This dialectical tension, typified by Mel along with certain other characters, is a central narrative and ideological spine defining both series. Consequently, I shall be examining and discussing other examples of its presence and implications throughout this chapter.

It is significant that Draper is a newcomer in an established social order undergoing radical internal change. Her dominant motivational drives are an instinctive social concern expressed through humane values which, at crucial moments, collide with the pragmatic expediency of the old order, embodied most completely in the character of PC Roy Brammell. Brammell represents the type of policeman and policing which is perceived as dated and unacceptable by both the liberal left and the ascendant new management class within the police. Synonymous with the ideological strategies that led to both New Labour and the Birtist revolution within the BBC itself, these police inspectors are characterised through management- speak and a preoccupation with image. The character who embodies this generic class is Newland, whom I shall I discuss at greater length later in this section and chapter. Suffice to observe that Newland, in Episode Eight of the first series, against the background of a death in custody and insurrection upon Skeetsmoor, occupies himself with humiliating catering staff for the absence of exotic fruits at a police conference buffet. Placed almost subliminally in his office is a framed photograph of Tony Blair.

Roy Brammell acknowledges that both his own and the old order’s existence are fundamentally threatened by this culture change within the police. Grieving for a former friend and senior colleague, Sergeant Poole, who has collapsed and died while pursuing a criminal, the series opens with Roy seeking to exact his own revenge for Poole’s death. Believing – without any significant evidence – that the criminal being chased was a local house thief, Vince Graves, Brammell determines to fit Graves up for a criminal offence. A crucial stage in Roy’s plan is to stop and search Nico, whom he knows to be acting as a small-time drug courier across the estate for the drug-dealing Caffrey brothers. In taking the drugs that Nico is carrying in order to plant them on Graves and secure a wholly dishonest conviction, Brammell’s actions are seen to have serious and inevitable consequences for Nico, as the viewer sees in Episode Two. The predominant use of off-centre close ups, juxtaposed with the final cut to a mid-range framing of Nico’s abject exposure and vulnerability, reinforces the aesthetic and ethical confusion endemic within the problematic objectivity that this sequence presents to the viewer. There are voyeuristic implications in the viewing of Brammell forcing Nico to undress in public, the police officer threatening an uncompromising rectal examination if his suspect doesn’t co-operate. Equally, the sequence also provides another excellent example of the strategic tensions between camera-point-of- view that is that of the police, with the editorial viewing which translates into an ideological and ethical critique of the events witnessed. At the end of Episode One, Brammell drags a bloodied and evidently beaten-up Vince into the police station. Simultaneously, he slams onto the duty desk the plastic wrapped drugs that the viewer has previously witnessed him taking from Nico. There is a subtle layering process of possible meanings and resonance in this scenario. Self-evidently, the viewer is obliged to read into Brammell’s actions a complex web of personal vendetta and covert police brutality with a public display of law enforcement. The unlawful and humiliating searching of Nico and his subsequent framing of Vince are unquestionably corrupt and serve only to fulfil Brammell’s own, private need for his understanding of ‘justice’ to be executed and prevail. In Episode Two, Draper happens upon the badly beaten Nico in hospital and discovers that the Caffrey brothers have punished him for, as they construe, selling or using their drugs for his own purposes. Her righteous indignation and anger is, however, partially undermined by the viewer’s privileged knowledge of her own use of illegal drugs with all of its implications. This compromised position has been reinforced when, also in Episode One, Draper allowed a female drug addict to have one final, illicit fix prior to Draper taking her into custody. In this crucial sense, the editorial commentary is deliberately ambiguous, rejecting simplistic binary positions of the ethics of law enforcement – including those of the Guardian-reading, liberal left. What does become increasingly and unmistakably clear throughout the series, is that personal agenda and private histories are continually in conflict with the demands of both dominant public expectations of the police, and the impact of the uniform upon those who wear it. As Garnett again stated in our interview:

What I’m trying to do is to build up a tension – an ambivalence – between seeing from their [the police] point of view literally, but editorially not seeing it from their point of view and it’s in that tension that we hope to find the show itself. It does not mean coming at this subject from the left that we are never tempted into pat, knee-jerk, left-liberal attitudes towards the police, or if we are tempted into those, the discipline of the show pulls us up short.

Returning to the character of Nico, it is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the framing device of the camera that the perception of the poor, disenfranchised, working class characters is as marginalised subjects. Nevertheless, the construction of Nico is given an additional dimension and resonance through the revealing of a pre-existing friendship between him and Mel. It transpires that they share a common background of class, schooling and friends. In the mutual surprise, bewilderment and – for Mel – discomfort that the characters express at meeting in the circumstances of the hospital ward, a shared and equalising correspondence of that former friendship militates against Roy’s view of Nico. For Brammell and others like him, Nico is just another expendable ‘scrote’: the worthless, treacherous shirker of regular, Tory party conference rhetoric. More disturbingly, a similar form of reactionary rhetoric is, at the time of writing, being used by the New Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, in relation to asylum seekers.

Mel’s attempts to bring news of Roy’s corruption to light are irretrievably compromised and undermined when Roy makes it...