Banished

Lunchtable TV Talk: A Touch of Cloth – The John Hannah School of English

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Firewall and I have created the imaginary John Hannah School of English to acknowledge Hannah’s brand of exaggerated, overenunciated English as spoken by a Scot – that’s John Hannah! I love it. We love when his voice suddenly comes on in a voiceover. In this show, the voice is matched only by the determined (but intentionally overacted) intensity on Hannah’s face.

In much the same way that Hannah’s way of speaking is a kind of parody of actual English, A Touch of Cloth spoofs procedural police dramas. Virtually every action, every word they say is an inside joke, a reference (“You’re nicked.”) to something else (often within the same genre) or over-the-top parody of the Law & Orders (and other shows like it) that have long saturated the airwaves.

Also, the boss, Tom Boss (of course), looked familiar – finally I realized he is one of the prisoners in the Australian show, Banished.

But what else is there to say except to concede perhaps that the cop investigation and justice system procedural has gone too far, if something like this show is possible? (Indeed, in interviews, Hannah has said as much. He asked his agent to stop sending him cop procedural scripts but changed his mind when he got the Touch of Cloth script. Why wouldn’t he, considering that it blows up the whole genre and laughs at it?)

What is fresh and refreshing about the show is that you could watch it a few times over and catch new things each time. In the first episode, for example, Hannah’s character, DI Jack Cloth, gets irrationally angry and violent (a la Elliot Stabler in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) in the interrogation room with a potential suspect – to the point that even he admits in a worked-up frenzy that he doesn’t know what he is doing. Afterwards, he realizes that the suspect is probably innocent, but his boss forces him to arrest the guy anyway. Cloth goes to the local pub, where his partner (Anne Oldman, pronounced repeatedly as “an old man”) meets him; he complains, “Yeah I always come here when we lock up and innocent man, helps me forget everything.” His partner: “You in here a lot then?” Cloth: “Have no idea.” And the bartender hands Cloth Cloth’s mail. Haha. Then the female partner gets a phone call, and her ring tone is kd lang’s “Constant Craving” – as if to beat us over the head with the “lesbian cop” trope. Here I don’t really mind because that’s the point, right? Every single minute of this show is something equally as ridiculous. If it weren’t quite this ridiculous, it might be offensive. But when it doesn’t hit, it seems stupid but innocuous, and when it does, it’s quite funny – in the same vein of, for example, Airplane!.

Lunchtable TV Talk – Banished

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Banished has a fantastic premise that feels wasted with this show. It has the chance to explore something we have never seen before. But instead, it makes vague allusions and oblique references to things like interactions with “the natives” and only one character succumbing to snake bite. But if you were the first “colonists” – prisoners and the military men from England  – sent to Australia, this should somehow feel wider – told as a much bigger story and through a broader lens, yet with a lot more detail. But it feels like everything about the story and the scenery is too contained, too limited. It never fully conveys how far away they are from everything. They talk a lot about these long prison sentences and the opportunity to go home someday – and even if they all know they will never really get there, or that they will starve before their sentences are up, you never quite sense that urgency or the true sense of eternal banishment that the round-the-world incarceration of geography has imposed.

On a lighter note, the British dude from one of my least favorite shows (another one with a good premise and the opportunity to tell a much-needed story), Looking, gets to beg in the same way in both shows. In Looking he was constantly telling his illicit lover, Patrick, that he will leave his boyfriend someday. But just not yet. Be patient. Eventually he leaves the boyfriend and gets together officially with Patrick, but in the last episode, sets Patrick off by pleading with him to consider an open relationship.

In Banished, he begs for his food back when a bully steals his food every day. Then begs the authorities to take action when he tattles on said bully for stealing his food. When nothing happens because the bully is the only smith among the prisoners, he eventually kills the bully. And then begs for his life and whines and cries in an understandable but not particularly appealing way.

We also get to see Ewen Bremner – best known as Trainspotting‘s Spud – as the colony’s minister/pastor. Funny how nearly the whole gang from Trainspotting are television staples today.

Hopefully, if this series has a second season ahead of it, these kinds of problems can be addressed. I don’t really think a premise with this kind of rich historical import deserves to be a second-rate soap opera.