A rose by any other name...

The tragedy of a great man who could not reconcile his genius to the world around him... Soon to be in the West End after Andrew Lloyd Webber and Graham Norton use more public money to cast a private enterprise in Any Ear Will Do


Ok, this week stood on the edge of greatness but fell short.

The programme makers seem to harbour a near all-consuming cowardice in regards making drama. This probably stems from a patronising belief that a wider audience, children included, would not have the intellectual capacity to deal with something genuinely affecting.
Calling the episode Vincent and The Doctor was misleading as it was not really about either. Any time the script started to approach some form of character integrity it was undermined by the need to have a pointless monster stomping around. Essentially the episode had a story smothered by the production teams need to play upon shallow hokum and turn historical figures into a celebrity of the week.
The episode did not need a monster. It was pointless. The actual story, albeit struggling to emerge, was about Vincent, Amy and the Doctor. The idea of Amy trying to change the tragedy of Van Gough’s suicide, with the Doctor knowing the inevitability of history, would have made an episode above anything on TV that week. The best points of the episode were the ones separate to the usual monster mash we have come to accept. Amy presenting Vincent with the sunflowers; Van Gough’s bi-polar swing from melancholy to anger making him unpredictable to be around; the great mans disregard for his own work. These were some of the best written scenes the show has seen since RTD wrote for the Christopher Eccleston era. However, before you think I’ve gone soft in the head and started saying nice things for a change...

I have a problem with Curtis and much of his work. Firstly he is prone to sentiment. The final scenes of Vincent in the gallery were just wallowing and a cheap shot to provide an emotional denouement for the audience. The drama would have held the context on its own. The second problem is that Curtis deals with what we shall loosely term “issues” in the way that all middle class, champagne socialist, liberals like to. He lectures in the belief he is making a difference when, in actuality, he is just conscience soothing. By telling others of the importance of Africa or mental health issues he may believe he is making a difference. No, this is just a messianic conceit. Look at how Bono lectures others on poverty whist wearing designer clothes or how Slumdog Millionaire made people feel better about third world poverty because it portrayed hope in, what is really, an endlessly hopeless situation. It has nothing to do with resolving a situation but everything to do with exploiting it for a selfish moral reassurance and sustaining of self-worth. People who genuinely care about these issues do not make fortunes from shoddy rom-coms and then tell others about how guilty we should all feel. They dedicate their lives to their cause. Anything else is just the worst kind of self-deceit imaginable.
Incidentally, I’m pretty sure Van Gough is unlikely to have used the phrase sonny... ever, in his whole life. If you’re going to write stay true to the characters.

Anyway, next week it is a Gareth Roberts story. I’ll be giving it a miss, that man has already wasted an hour and a half of my life.