IN THE Comic Strip's 1988 parody Strike!, Alexei Sayle plays a screenwriter whose gritty script about the miners' strike is turned into a ridiculous Hollywood blockbuster starring "Al Pacino" as Arthur Scargill. Twenty-one years later, More4 brings u
s another Strike. I'm not saying the satire has become true… well, not exactly.
This Strike may have been a documentary account of the 1984 struggle, not a glossy fiction, but it certainly took a History For Dummies approach. A pun-heavy script strained to tie events to pop songs of the time, while talking heads both relevant and random (including Alexei Sayle, but not Arthur Scargill) gave their thoughts.
The narration took a mocking tone, gossiping about the supposed affairs between posh students and miners, or the Metropolitan Police stationed in Grantham who flashed their cash at the local women (it became "one great big knocking shop", apparently). And there was a peculiar emphasis on Torvill and Dean, whose Bolero performance that same year was apparently a metaphor, or something. "Who were they, skaters?" asked Tony Benn with polite bemusement, obviously not realising that he was supposed to play along with the nostalgia (Neil Kinnock, on the other hand, happily hummed the tune).
It was a strange choice of style and the result was more like "The Rock'n'Coal Years" than a serious documentary. The programme did attempt to convey the events and personalities of 1984 and perhaps the barrage of pop cultural background helped give younger viewers a sense of what it was like to live through that time which, even then, felt like a true historical moment. But there was little depth to this programme and no real reflection on what the strike meant or the effect it had – and continues to have – not just on politics or communities, but on our daily working lives even now.
You wouldn't look for depth in Hotel Babylon, which returned for a fourth implausible series on Friday. It's the closest thing British TV has to Desperate Housewives or Ugly Betty, set in a luxury London hotel run by a staff of six who, despite their obviously insane workload, always have time to help guests solve romantic crises. In fact, maybe the American series it most resembles is actually The Love Boat.
The characters are broad, the situations unlikely, but the whole thing moves along quickly enough and everyone involved plays along with gusto, so that it's not actually too annoying (apart from the over-used voiceover of Dexter Fletcher's concierge musing philosophically).
New characters are introduced with a camera zoom to show them twinkling in close-up, like a sitcom regular entering to applause. Adding his twinkle was Nigel Harmon, playing the manager's millionaire ex-husband who was so impressed by the six staff's hotel-running abilities that he bought the place, then – in a stunningly poorly explained twist – suddenly went bankrupt. I seem to remember that Harmon, formerly Dirty Den jnr, left EastEnders to have a serious theatre career; well, everyone's got to pay the rent.
The last ten minutes, though, when various people cried, had emotional breakthroughs, etc, were a bit of a bore. And a storyline inspired by the terrorist bombings of London was a bad idea. But everything magically worked out and the staff all dressed up to perform a Bollywood dance routine. Well, of course.
