TV Temptress

Aunty's Hidden Surprise

I have recently enjoyed a three week jaunt in New Zealand, Australia’s beautiful and underrated next door neighbour. Enjoyable as the trip was, I was surprised that on the flight home I wasn’t thinking about the spectacular scenery and surprising cool cities I’d enjoyed, but how much you can tell about a country from its television.

You see, this holiday was taken with my mother, a woman who favours 9pm bedtimes and early starts. As such I spent a great deal of my New Zealand evenings in hotel rooms sorting through what was on the box. Largely the results were pretty good, although far from must-watch television.

The programming was largely made up of British reality shows (of the informative type as opposed to hellish I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here reruns). Early evening saw delayed repeats of Australian Masterchef or The Block and there was a decent chunk of NZ news and current affairs (a rather odd mixture of hard hitting reporting and utterly disinteresting reports of high school cupcake competitions or retrospectives of 1980s country music shows). The American content was there but mostly in cartoons.

Overall the free to air programming said as much about the country as travelling around it did. This is a small nation influenced far more by Europe than America and trying damn hard to avoid the shadow of their larger and more famous neighbour. Limited budgets were clear, but the fact that this is a proud and determined country was obvious on each of my evenings in.

One BBC programme recently broadcast in Australia reflected only too well the way in which a show can represent a country. Luther was a detective drama, seemingly much like the hundreds of British crime shows which have come before it. Yet it bought more to the table; it was sleek, intelligent and surprising. It made you think about right and wrong, the morality and fairness of the justice system and the role of certain personal relationships. It portrayed the good and the bad side of London, and the volatility of human nature. This isn’t to say that it was wholly original for there were storylines and scenes we’ve seen many times before, but an impressive script by Neil Cross and an impeccable performance from Idris Edba (Stringer Bell from The Wire) took these points above the stereotypical and ultimately put Luther into the State of Play pile of brilliant, thrilling television.

Luther snuck up on you. Just as you got used to the pattern of the volatile and potentially dangerous DCI John Luther (Edba) solving the crime through his freakish skills of perception and sharp intelligence the subplots start to intertwine until unexpectedly you found yourself in the midst of a thriller rarely enjoyed on television today. The depth of character of each of the supporting roles, whether Luther’s estranged wife, her new partner, his blindsided colleagues and the brilliant murderer too clever even for the Luther, allowed for their flaws in the first episodes to suddenly become gripping ascents which belied the difference between life and death.

Truly Luther is not to be missed and for anyone with an interest in quality television it is as much worth a late night on the couch as any episode of Mad Men. Yet sadly, for those in Australia, it is unlikely there are many out there who were able to enjoy it.

You see, the manner in which Luther screened in Australia says as much about our television as anything my NZ holiday showed me. Luther was only a six part mini-series (recently recommissioned by the Beeb' for a second 'series' of two two-hour specials). Yet the ABC screened it at 8:30pm on a Friday night, a slot well recognised for mediocre, series long British crime shows of the Silent Witness or Midsommer Murders ilk (indeed, the exact pile of shows Luther set itself apart from). In other words unless you have Friday nights in regularly, enjoy average BBC police  dramas or are an iView obsessive (as I am) it is unlikely many readers would have seen it.

Clearly these things matter; timeslots, advertising and hype make an obvious difference as to who watches and what they watch. The timeslots programming history alone would have limited Luther's audience as well as giving any prospective audience the impression that this was yet another long, formulaic show that you could take or leave for the next few months.

Ultimately, Luther was of a standard which demanded more than Aunty gave. It deserved an improved timeslot so that more could wallow in the wonders of Idris Edba’s performance, the sleekness of the script and generally enjoy a British cop show which challenges and excites viewers again; something so many of us worn out by the US franchises and British Grannie dramas would have really relished. Visitors to Australia would quickly suss out the intrinsic role that ABC cop shows play to so many of us and our upbringing; the least Aunty could do in return is make sure we get to see the cream of the crop.