Diagnosing Silk

Those in their fifties today were in their teens in 1975 when Rumpole of the Bailey first aired on television. Its creator was Sir John Mortimer, a genuine British barrister, played by Leo McKern. The series eventually featured 44 episodes the last of which appeared in 1992. The show has, at minimum, produced a phrase destined never to die. “She who must be obeyed” was Horace Rumpole’s muttered reference to his wife, Hilda, played by Peggy Thorpe-Bates.  Both actors have since passed away. For Brigitte and for me, the series also presented what we viewed as a realistic insight into the workings of the British legal system as viewed from the perspective of a senior barrister and a lawfirm, called chambers, of which he is a member.

In the United States series based on lawfirms have been quite numerous. The American Bar Association cites 25  such shows, labeling them Best; of these 24 were made here—and that list does not even include The Good Wife. In Britain the second such series, in structure entirely echoing Rumpole, is Silk. It just aired its third and last episode of Season 1 on Public TV last night. It has all the necessaries: Barristers, solicitors, criminals, victims, police, odd judges, wigs, chambers, drinking in dark crowded bars by night, conniving chamber clerks, etc., except that, in Silk—is that a sign of leveling?—there is no evident Head of Chambers, that role filled, and perhaps by default, by the Chief Clerk.

This is a rather long, but alas necessary, introduction to my actual subject. It is that Silk appears to have been born with a disease—but one which afflicts all too many new television series, be they fiction or documentary. Don’t get me wrong. Silk is in many ways quite excellent and benefits much from its lead character, Martha Costello, played by Maxine Peake, a relative newcomer. Martha Costello has values. I thought I would try to diagnose this disease.

The show suffers from what I call flicker, by which I mean a chopped-up character where video images, certainly in action sequences, last much less than one second each. In scenes with many people, thus out- and inside courts, continuous motion, also continuously interrupted, adds to one’s sense of trembling or tremor. Based on this feature—the object of which, presumably, is to induce excitement in the viewer—makes me weight Parkinson’s disease as perhaps the appropriate diagnosis. But there is also a lot of noise. The noise is present over, above, and beneath the dialogue; and all through this noise, except in the most tense exchanges, there is a constant musical sound as well. This audio-based distraction reminds me, deeply schooled as I am in diseases, of Synesthesia, in which sounds and smells and even symbols, like writing, turn into colors and, possibly, colors turn into sounds. One interesting feature of Synesthesia, however, is that many people who are said to suffer from the syndrome deny suffering at all—and treat it as an added source of stimulation and of meaning.

Now, of course, it’s well to remember that TV shows are not people. They are social constructs. To apply human diseases to them too directly may be inappropriate, except by analogy. And one analogy might be to fuse, as it were, Parkinson’s with Synesthesia into a single syndrome—and then search for a broader cause of it in the social world. Then a proper diagnosis finally comes into focus, sort of, flickering and music-making all the while. Call it Advertisingitis.

One Creator—or Forgettable

To rise above a certain mediocre level, creative works must be fashioned by a single individual—or, to put it more gently, the core creation must be by one person even when the work is later translated into, say, a movie or a television series. In that translation, in turn, it is important that the direction/production of the piece—quite a different kind of creativeness—also be in the hands of a single person with requisite talents. Regarding this last point, I’m thinking of Masterpiece Theater pieces or the Mystery series that have come to us principally from the BBC. Those that genuinely succeed were made from novels or stories. Some of these have succeeded so well that, later, other authors have produced new segments “based on the characters created by [fill in the blank].” The “characters” very often do carry the series forward well beyond the original author’s living work, but a kind of “fade” becomes obvious eventually. Series based on a “concept” reducible to a page—to help sell the idea—and then executed by a “stable” of writers is invariably and by design something second rate.

Through a Glass Brightly

In a real sense the medium is the message, not in any erudite, sociological, McLuhanesque sense but merely in the kind of content that it brings—and how it brings it. In 1911, we had neither radio nor television. News from far away reached us more rapidly then than in 1811; the telegraph had speeded up communications immensely. But it reached us each personally as print on paper and thus had a predominantly conceptual, abstract, symbolic form. In a meaningful sense then the Chinese saying still held: The sky is high and the emperor is far away. Radio began to spread in the 1920s and had reached world-wide extent by World War II. Radio rides on sound and for that reason, possibly, still retains a certain mysterious quality (for me anyway). Sound whispers to us from the dark, and we’re quite skilled at parsing multiple sounds simultaneously, spontaneously. The image of women, their cheeks pressed into their palms, anxiously staring at a monstrous trumpet that topped my grandmother’s radio during the war in Europe has become for me an icon, preserved like an old sepia print, of the Greater World under deep clouds of advancing doom. Television dawned in the 1950s and rapidly became the eye by means of which we watch Big Brother, a very flexible fellow who is now Ed Sullivan in grey and all the kings, the kings’ men, the kings’ clowns, in bright flickering colors to this day.

The deceptive aspect of TV is that it seems to be the best source of news because it is the most visual of media. It’s vivid, now, and the camera moves, like our own eye, its focus seemingly drawn by what’s important. But what the bright eye shows is less, much less than is actually there. We see what we, in fact, can’t see. From Detroit I cannot really see what happens in Afghanistan, in Washington, or in Los Angeles. If I think I do, I am deceived. If I were there, I wouldn’t see that. But I’d see a whole lot else—and that would make me think quite differently about the images I’m fed. We’re accustomed to hearing what we cannot see, therefore radio is, oddly, more natural somehow. But to see what we cannot—not without days or weeks of arduous travel—give us a peculiar experience for which, in effect, millions of years of evolution have failed to prepare us. The images are sharp, vivid, dynamic, accompanied by matching sound. But they’re not happening to us. Not really. They are far away. And we can’t move that eye. We seem to—but others really move the view. A small, tiny square looks here, looks there. But when I move my gaze—why then all I see is the window of my living room and a gauze curtain still carrying its Christmas lights.

As through a glass, brightly—but certainly not face to face. The vast sociological mirage evolves from this radically diminished perspective. It deceives by its vivid sensory message, makes effort to acquire knowledge using symbols too costly and inefficient; we know less, feel as if we’re overwhelmed by information; but that information is shrunken and deformed into something primitive but made on purpose by many teams to shape somehow—even if competing with each other—a deceptive something we call the public will.