Sun Tv Serials

As the critics pan the Christmas TV schedules and damn soap plots as ever more ludicrous, one leading voice dissents CHRISTMAS is coming and television schedules are in print - to almost universal condemnat ion, dumbed-down trash the verdict. But how can the sane man or woman do without at least one part of it? Why was the nation urged to throw up its hands in Lawks 'a mercy mockery and horror when a deceitful journalist with the morals of a Judas revealed that the Queen is addicted to EastEnders? What hypocrites we are. Let me unashamedly confess to a dozen such addictions.

If by mid-evening the Queen feels as exhausted as I do, as emptied of energy and adrenaline - and her burdens of responsibility, good temper and diplomacy far outweigh mine to the art world and this newspaper - then watching anodyne junk television is far the most effective means of deliberately winding down.

I do it every evening - only the thrills of opera and stockcar racing break the habit. I absolutely refuse to read a serious book or even read at all after eight. I will not engage my brain in debate or argument unless I am content to have a sleepless night.

I watch The Bill, Casualty, Holby City, Bad Girls, POW, Foyle's War, Merseybeat, Frost - anything that is a bit of a yarn or derring- do - and let them wash over me, effortlessly removing the tensions of the day. I don't remember the plots, I can hardly recall the characters, and if they drift into the areas of incest, sodomy and lesbianism (as they do), it matters not at all.

One recent evening I was compelled to spend at the Tate Gallery attempting to debate with Germaine Greer, who has the attention span of a lurcher puppy and is diverted from the chase by another and another rabbit, never catching any of them. She cannot close a bracket on a parenthesis and in any argument her disputant will find himself struggling to remember where and why he is, while she has pursued the umpteenth parenthesis from Birmingham to Beachy Head and toppled off.

I was, I thought, wide awake, brain racing with the exhilaration of the chase, in for a sleepless night, but on returning home found that that evening's episode of The Bill had been recorded, and as I lay on my bed with a great dog beside me and a lesser dog in my arms, I could feel relaxation creeping up my spine like morphine and lethargy numbing my brain. The following day there was nothing of the fretfulness in me that follows a sleepless night.

The Bill is now preposterous, but none the worse for that. Long ago, in the dim and distant past, it may have seemed a lineal descendant of Dixon of Dock Green, but now no friendly constable boxes the ears of truant prepubescents or rescues a timorous kitten from a tree, nor does any constable ride a bone-shaking bicycle and wave cheerily to the worried mothers of young criminals who are really not so bad.

INSTEAD we have the domestic, sexual and amatory problems of the police men and women themselves, their drug-taking, their alcoholism and their delusions, and the more often the members of the cast need to leave for other jobs, the more high-pitched the rolling plot becomes.

We could, of course, look at The Bill as some sort of existentialist reinterpretation of Dante's Inferno, or at Sun Hill police station as Sartre's Huis-Clos - a closed circle of Hell in which the cast inevitably climbs into bed with a disastrous partner, man with boy, girl with woman, alcoholic with alcoholic and drug addict with pure soul.

All human life is concentrated here, all human sins are introduced, even perjury and murder, and the ingenuity of the scriptwriters knows no bounds as they replace the theatre of realism with sordid fantasy.

The element of fantasy is, for the inattentive, heightened by the cross-pollination of the cast with other serials. Faces familiar from, say, Casualty and Bad Girls are oddly disconcerting when they crop up in The Bill carrying the baggage of another role. Wasn't he driving an ambulance when I last saw him, dressed like a leprechaun in green?

How did he get here? Wasn't she busy injecting insulin into non- diabetic patients in a hospital last week? Wasn't she the girl having an affair with the female prison governor last year? But nothing of this matters as long as the storyline drives furiously on.

Yet even the storyline can confuse the watcher on the edge of sleep. Surely we dealt with incest in Casualty - or was it Holby City ... do I know the difference any more? - when the young doctor fell into bed with the nurse who was his long-lost sister? Surely we dealt with homosexuality in Holby City too? - who can forget the young Scottish faggot playing midwife with urgent cries of "Pish! Pish!" at every pregnant woman in his charge? And surely the whole of Bad Girls was veiled in mists of lesbianism? Or are we now to believe that these are themes as universal as those of the dramatists of Ancient Greece?

AND why not? The Ancient Greek culture that we so venerate is littered with tales of lust in all its forms and murder too, and the Old Testament on which some of us still base our moral views is not far behind in grand guignol.

A modern dramatist need not be an intellectual or poetic match for Aeschylus or Euripides to touch on these traditional themes in such a way as to have precisely the same emotionally purging effect; empathy and catharsis are not the prerogatives only of dramatists writing more than two millennia ago - the modern writer can as effectively touch us with trash and we cannot resist him.

Nor can we resist the bedtime story, for that is what The Bill and its ilk are - a little early perhaps, but a preparation for sleep, nevertheless.

The Bill empties the mind of the stresses of the day, replacing them with nothing - and it is the nothing that matters.

We do not care what happens to the characters; we have been told a merry tale and that is all, and to an empty, untroubled mind, rest and sleep come easily.

Television is the perfect narcotic - not the shrill nonsense of Graham Norton, not the patronising drivel of Parkinson, not the longueurs of Big Brother and certainly not the rousing political debate of Question Time or Newsnight (both of which I'd watch with relish early in the evening) but the bedtime stories of the serials. These are gentle opiates that anaesthetise the pains and travails of the day; they are palliative and anodyne, soporific even, and I am contentedly addicted to them.

(c)2003. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

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