The poignant death of uplifting TV

Life, as most of us know, is rarely straightforward. 

“Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” Or, if you prefer a little Dierks Bentley with your Churchill: “Half your life you struggle, half your life you fly. Half your life making trouble, half your life making it right.” Pick your philosophy of consolation – we all need one. 

And, what with the increased emphasis on mental health since Covid, most of us have developed little ways and means of dealing with the dark times, from Boethius to exercise. Alright, perhaps not Boethius. 

One of my favourite recourses is “the happy ending”. That deeply embedded cultural desire to see triumph in the face of adversity. The fairy tale from which we emerge safely from the deep, dark wood to live happily ever after in the shire. We have to have this hope in life or else face despair and, from there, it’s a short hop to “What’s the point?”

So what better way to haul oneself from the slough of despond than the escapism of the screen? Diversion, absorption, entertainment, for a short spell transported and, indeed, reassured either by fact or fiction that people have, do and will rescue victory from the jaws of defeat.

And yet. 

For all the plethora of streaming services we nowadays enjoy, if that’s the word, it strikes me that more and more time is spent searching to find something that is not afflicted by that great misnomer “gritty realism”, the confusion of dark with clever, or a series of thinly disguised moral lectures. 

Most striking of all is the extinction of the sitcom in the wild. Caught in the crosshairs of our po-faced times, the idea that we might share and recognise comic reactions to life’s challenges has been denied us. Few survive outside BBC iPlayer or the various sub-strands of Channel 4 where one might occasionally see a Frasier disappearing into the bush. 

The essence of many of the best was an essential sadness. Porridge was set in a prison. Only Fools and Horses in the Peckham tower block that hosted Del Boy’s thwarted dreams and pretensions and Rodney’s aching desire for something better. And Cheers was an assemblage of the lonely, the pretentious and the perpetually immature. The bar where even the barman had a problem with alcohol. 

To some greater or lesser extent we see ourselves in these characters and in their experience of the human condition. Hence when they win, we do. Norman Stanley Fletcher thrives on his “occasional little victories” against the system and the dreaded Prison Officer McKay, both confined if the latter but knew it. Del Boy’s endless optimism and endeavour finally rewards his motto that “He who dares, Rodney, he who dares…” And Sam finally realises that Diane isn’t for him and that Cheers is where he is happiest. And always was. 

And so it was that I recently found myself watching To The Manor Born, recommended by a cunning algorithm on iPlayer that has picked up on a penchant for seventies television. Peter Bowles and Penelope Keith dual. He for the class to match his wealth, she for the wealth to match her class. Keith behaves appallingly but does so with the ironclad Boudica-cum-nanny confidence that so oddly appeals to Brits. 

Eventually, their fortunes reverse and, the field levelled, they marry in a final episode watched at the time by 24 million people. There was, of course, a reason for a viewing figure today’s programmers could only dream of.

In the end, for all their trials and tribulations, De Vere and fforbes-Hamilton triumphed. She over the circumstances that had reduced her, he over his loneliness and struggle for acceptance and both over their mutual affection. We wished them well. We found it uplifting. For all that she was a hectoring snob and he an oleaginous parvenu, we liked them because, deep down, they knew their own ridiculousness and laughed along.  

And that’s the word, uplifting. It seems so absent in a screen world of dark lighting, mumbled dialogue or a brand of humour that is so remorselessly earnest. Who now could live as, the recently departed Ian Lavender did, off a role in which he was eternally condemned as “stupid boy” as a punch line?

Humour must have a victim and victimhood is not allowed. 

Much the same in film where a happy ending would not allow the endless continuation of a franchise or where the American psychotherapy obsession demands that everyone is badly damaged. Or a superhero. Or both. Mind you, even Bond succumbed. To leave one of these films feeling the world is perhaps better than when you went in is to emerge like Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in gales of laughter only to discover they’ve been watching Platoon. 

An exception stumbled across in desperation recently is Green Book, an Oscar winner, based on the true story of a 1960s musical tour of the Deep South by Don Shirley, a black American pianist, and his Italian American minder “Tony Lip” Vallelonga.

An American story of the road and a buddy movie at once, it looks beyond the caricatures and finds two flawed, different but essentially decent men who strike up an unlikely and enduring friendship in flawed and difficult times. 

Struggle, if you will, not to feel better after seeing it. It’s what we all are and what we all live in. It’s hopeful. And we need more of it. 

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