The Road to Coronation Street: Now 100% Florizel Free!

PLANET NORTH

"The Road to Coronation Street”
16/09/2010
BBC Four

Often it’s not the end product that’s interesting so much as the process that gives rise to it. Anyone who’s watched ‘making of’ documentaries or heard a decent DVD commentary may have noticed this. Once you’ve seen all the effort and hard work those goes into the end product, it seems much less exciting and interesting in comparison.

Such is the case with ‘The Road to Coronation Street’, a drama from ITV broadcast – confusingly – on BBC4 last night. (But more on that later.) This tells of how Street creator and writer Tony Warren fought, often tooth and nail, to get the UK’s longest running soap onto our screens. As drama goes, it is concise, focussed, well structured and flowing, with some great dialogue and characterisation. Which is to say, this story about how UK soaps came into being is much more fun than the soaps themselves these days.

The cast certainly helps. David Dawson plays Tony Warren as a sort of souped-up, gayed-out, speed riddled Ken Barlow on a mission. (The ‘real’ Ken Barlow, or William Roache, is meanwhile played with a sort of delusional ‘I’m too good for this’ pathos by his son, James.)

Elsewhere, Jessie Wallace (yes, ‘er from Eastenders) camps it up with brassy glee as Pat Phoenix, the audition scene between her and Dawson crackling with electricity. Meanwhile, surfacing as a sort of everyman amongst the carnival of elephantine egos is director Derek Bennet, played with both humanity and normality by Shaun Dooley.

And then, in the final act of the drama, comes along Lynda Baron, rumbling into view with a Godzilla-like presence as Violet Carson, invoking the spirit of Ena Sharples with harridan vigour and resigned fatalism in equal measure.

The story itself is a good balance of drama and fact, taking obvious liberties with the events and participants whilst not obscuring them with too much schmaltz. (Though some of the Pat Phoenix scenes do slap it on with a trowel.) The simmering professional, class and personal tensions are well depicted too, being reined in enough to not obscure the drama, but shocking enough when they do surface.

For it's telling that back in 1960, the thought of northern plebs played by northern thesps was seen as too radical and not commercial enough. This thinking remains, but has merely moved onto other pariahs who are seen as the kiss of death, unless they’re splayed out for all to see on sleazy reality TV.

And it’s telling too where this excellent drama was shown. Made by ITV Studios for the BBC, it was shown on BBC 4, light years away from the mass market ITV1 and BBC 1& 2 schedules. Almost in spite of itself, ‘The Road to Coronation Street’ leaves us wondering whether a modern Tony Warren would even get a twitch of an eyebrow from the fickle powers that be, convinced as they are that they, and they alone, know what the public wants.

BARLOWNESS: 8/10

Edgar Wright vs. The Law of Diminishing Returns (A Scott Pilgrim Movie Review).

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Universal, 2010
Dir. By Edgar Wright
Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead et al

Much ink has been spilt, and equal amounts of bandwidth wasted, on why comic book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World flopped at the Box Office. (Indeed, you could even say it Bob-ombed! Arf!)

Hypotheses range from the fact that it was badly marketed or that it came out at the wrong time or that it was aimed at geeks, who are unfortunately all two-faced, treacherous thieving c*nts with a bloated sense of entitlement.

Perhaps these are all correct, but let me propose another reason. Maybe the film wasn't that good in the first place?

True, at first this heavily stylised tale does sort of work. The first third of the film crackles with wit, sharp dialogue and the wonderful visual effects make a great impression. The problem, though, is that all the sight gags, SFX flourishes and one-liners get repetitive very quickly, and soon all the other flaws start to surface too.

Like the two leads. Michael Cera is awful, a flaccid lettuce with a ghastly Winnie-The-Pooh voice who brings neither passion nor life to yet another outing as a sort of everyhipster. Meanwhile, Scott's paramour cum McGuffin, Ramona Flowers, is played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead with a studied insouciance, but that's all she bothers to do for the entire film.

The rest of the cast does what it can with roles as 2D as cardboard, which is to say, not very well at all. Only Kieran Culkin, playing Scott's man-eating gay flatmate and moral compass Wallace, really delivers the goods as he tears through every scene he's in with a strong presence and a depth and soul the film otherwise lacks.

The film also suffers because its source material, a six volume comic epic set in Toronto, is basically unfilmable, at least all in one go. The Scott Pilgrim graphic novels are too epic and nuanced to translate well onto the screen in such a truncated manner (and people had the nerve to complain about Watchmen!), with the film trying desperately to include as much of the story as possible and so barely doing any of it any justice. 960+ pages just do not fit into 112 minutes, especially when most of the audience haven't even heard of the comic book in question.

What stands out is what's missed out. One major theme of the graphic novels that Scott is actually a bit of a swine, and how he overcomes his own turd behaviour. This doesn't even make it into the film, in part because the script hasn't got the room, and also because Cera's so insipid, he could rape a dog and shoot nuns, and you'd still barely even register it. Fans of the comics may well spend their viewing spotting all the bits either cut out or just ignored. Even the in-film art care of creator Bryan Lee O'Malley just serves to remind you what you're missing in the original comics. This is a film that simply isn't compatible with its source material,

It just proves that Indy comics and mass media simply don't mix. Daniel Clowes' script for the Ghost World movie was by necessity a departure from his original comic strip. Peter Bagge's forlorn quest to whore out and get a TV series will never come true. Robert Crumb won't even try, and Evan Dorkin will never be the cultural colossus he deserves to be. Why? Because by definition, any art form which rejects the mainstream will always have problems when it tries to rejoin it. And that goes for cult comics from Canada too.

Curiously, the film has strong parallels with Spiderman 2 (apart from the box office takings), in that it starts strong but overdoes it and runs out of steam, and so ends up trying desperately to recapture its original spark. The main difference was that Spiderman 2 had a bigger audience to play with and could afford to lose the plot a bit. SPVW couldn't but does so anyway.

Much too has been made of British director Edgar Wright being in charge. Tellingly, though, his most successful films - Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz - were disciplined, low budget, made for the screen in mind, had good characterisation and never alienated their audiences despite their geek heritage. SPVW is none of these things, and so is a far inferior product. At heart, the film is less a Scott Pilgrim spin-off, and more an overlong Spaced episode at its most tiresome and self-indulgent.

Put simply, it didn't work and didn't deserve to succeed. And it hasn't.

EPICNESS 4/10