TV Eye: Enough to send one to drink

'One of the most irritating pieces of drama I have seen in some time' - <i>Bouquet of Barbed Wire</i>. Photo / Supplied

There will always be an England. It might appear headed down Hell Lane in a runaway hansom cab, but dear old Blighty always seems to - as Winston Churchill would say in his wildness years - "keep buggering on" despite appearing for the last half-century to be sicker than a mangy bulldog.

Well not everything keeps keeping on. There was a time - admittedly it wasn't terribly recent - that British television drama was a byword for a damn good watch.

In my memory that begins with Brideshead Revisited, travels through the work of Dennis Potter (the quite mad The Singing Detective), to Alan Bleasdale (Boys from the Blackstuff, GBH) to Jimmy McGovern (Cracker and The Lakes) to Lynda La Plante's Prime Suspect and even to the various adaptations of classics such as Vanity Fair, and Middlemarch in the 1990s.

There's been the odd cracker since - State of Play in the mid-2000s comes to mind- but apart from the occasional return to form, British TV drama, in the last decade, has fallen down the garbage chute with execrable "historical" dramas (The Tudors and Rome were certainly no I, Claudius), style-over-substance thrillers (Spooks) and various plodding police procedurals. Even dear old Corrie St has long since gone off.

So the return of alleged quality British drama to TV One last Sunday night - called, in retro tribute to better times, Sunday Theatre - wasn't greeted with so much as an optimistic "whoop" at my place. This slot used to be called Masterpiece Theatre didn't it? At least we've been warned to downgrade our expectations.

My pessimism was richly rewarded by one of the most irritating pieces of drama I have seen in some time, called Bouquet of Barbed Wire.

I have read that this is a remake, a modern adaptation of a 1970s adaptation of a novel. The original programme apparently caused quite the stir as the story deals, in part, with a father in an unhealthy relationship with his teenage daughter.

While incest - or in this case, incest in the mind - is still very much, and rightfully so, a subject bound to disturb, I would hazard a guess that in the age of something like Spartacus, a drama exploring (rather mutedly) this subject is rather less likely to cause offence than it once might have. It will certainly be interesting to see whether this remake generates any complaints to the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

In any case, what offended me was how utterly preposterousness and utterly implausible this overblown melodrama was.

If you missed it (and lucky you, if you did) Bouquet was essentially the story of Peter, a middle-aged architect and father with an unhealthy love for his teenage daughter, who loses everything that means something to him - his job, said daughter and, finally, his life.

The manner in which this occurred was by turns plodding, frustrating and confusing as Peter's schoolgirl daughter Prue was wooed, impregnated and beaten by her English teacher Gavin, a person who turned out to be the vindictive adoptive brother of Peter's murdered, secret love-child daughter Paula, who Peter had rejected years before. Did I say confusing and improbable?

It was intended, certainly, as a morality play, and a very bleak one at that. But I find it very hard to believe that, implausibility aside, any viewer would have learned a single moral lesson from an absurd, questionable story played out by some of the most repellent characters I have encountered. They all deserved what they got, so why would anyone care that they got it?

Thanks heavens the Poms can still do laughs. Oz and James Drink To Britain (Prime, Saturdays, 7pm) is the third series in which Top Gear's James May and "wine ponce" Oz Clarke tool about the countryside (the first series it was France, the second California) looking for things to drink.

Much like a good food show will generate an appetite, Oz and James' adventures give one a thirst for, in this series, real British ale. But it is the bickering - they're like an old married couple - that is the real joy in spending time in their company.

Indeed, if I did actually see some "theatre" last weekend, it was their rather panto-ish show. It was a tiny bit of theatre certainly, with little melodramas that you won't remember five minutes after the show ends, but theirs is a mini-masterwork of entertainment, nonetheless.

-TimeOut