Blackout

During July and August 2012 there has been some great dramatic series fiction on Television with Blackout a three part BBC production together with three more episodes of Wallander with Kenneth Branagh. I have particularly enjoyed The Newsroom the new Arron Sorkin creation which covers contemporary events with all the impression of authenticity that covered West Wing and with echoes of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister which continues to be rerun on channels. The second series of the Bogies returns with more attention to the machinations of the Pope attempting to sustain his position and further the interests of his family than the explicit sexuality which in my judgement failed to add to the excellent performance of Jeremy Irons, while I am still trying to catch up with the latter episodes of the final season of the Sopranos, discovering in the process a rerun of Inspector Montalbano and being able to experience the first of 12 episodes which I missed. The first episode of a new series of George Gently set in Northumbria commenced on Sunday while to day there is a new series of New Tricks. I also accidentally came across a brilliant live short play performance of the meeting of spy Guy Burgess when the worked for the BBC as Parliamentary editor and Winston Churchill when he remained an isolated figure during the period when Chamberlain attempted to appease Hitler and his embryonic Nazi Empire.

In this first piece I try and remember Blackout which starred the former Dr Who Christopher Eccleston and one of my favourite female actresses, the always adorable, she will hate me for her describing her in this way, Dervia Kirwan.

The subject is a corrupt London politician who commits manslaughter on his way to become a popular Mayor of London supported by a large international corporation bidding to control the city though taking over the public sector services.

Eccleston plays Daniel Demoys the chairman of a contract allocating committee of what I presume is an individual local authority rather than the Greater London Council. It is never made clear which came first, his alcoholism or his corruption, paid by the man he goes on to kill for providing contract information and ensuring the man gains lucrative contracts for pubic sector services. Married to Dervia and with three children he consoles himself with the separated wife of a Metropolitan police Detective using a seedy Soho drinking club cum brothel.

Following a night of debauchery he encounters and kills the corrupt service provider and this triggers a great sense of guilt which leads him to intervening in an attempted assassination in which he is shot and become an overnight popular hero. Because of blackouts we the audience and Demoys himself is not sure his responsibility which he attempts to establish by retracting his movements on the fatal night.

Through a close political adviser Jerry Durrans played by Ewan Bremner had become an expert in managing elections and pushes Daniel into using his popularity to sweep into the office of Mayor, unaware that this former idealist has become one of several placed individuals by a sinister fascist corporation set on controlling greater London by winning contracts for all the essential and major public services. He initially successfully blackmails Demoys into cooperating and abandons his plans to create a utopian political situation in which the people own the services in such a way that they cannot be privatised. The position of the Mayor is undermined by the daughter of the man he killed seeking to know what her father was doing and why he was killed and by the Police Detective husband of his mistress who has suspicions about their infidelity and the involvement of Demoys in the death, helped on by a corrupt senior police officer also in the pay of the corporation.

Eventually Eccleston cleans himself up especially when the lives of his wife and children are threatened and realises that he will only be free of his guilt by confessing to his responsibility for the death and corrupt involvements leading to a long period of imprisonment. Through this atonement he rescues his marriage and relationship with his children as well as taking steps to stop the privatisation and set a new regime of good government for the capital. There is also the prospect of a new relationship between the Police detective and his former wife.

Conspiracies, politics, the police, the media and sex and corruptions has always interested me for reasons which should be implicit in my writings over the past five years and the level of acting in this work and broad subject matter outweighed the many questionable moments. However the series became very topical with the failure of the private corporation to provide the level of contracted security at the Olympic Games leading to the deployment of soldiers and arousing pubic concern and insecurity before the games commenced. This led one Tory Minister to admit he had reviewed his previous prejudices about the ability of the private sector to always perform better than the public. The success of the Olympic Games and the role played by London Mayor Boris Johnson has also highlighted the importance the London Mayor in British politics and in this in instance the future of the Tory Party in the UK and that of David Cameron in particular albeit with Scum Murdoch pulling the strings.