These are the notes I made in advance of the BSFA/SFF panel. The discussion went off in other and equally interesting directions, but I thought these notes might be of interest anyway.
- How might we be using the term ‘literary’? One might be synonymous with ‘quality’: what makes ‘good’ television according to some general standard of ‘good’ culture?
- This could quite quickly get bogged down into a discussion of high vs. low culture which even now forms a background pulse to television studies, as an unspoken justification for studying these particular cultural products. [On the day we discussed the desire of SF readers and writers for 'respectability'.] As a result we could easily end up doing a kind of boundary work, in which we claim the cultural high ground for particular forms of television as high, as literary, as quality: for example, the one-off single-authored play (rooted in Play for Today, or The Wednesday Play) or the short high-profile serial (things like State of Play, Edge of Darkness). (Some people might point to Torchwood: Children of Earth here as a recent example; I personally wouldn’t.)
- I don’t much want to do that kind of boundary work, partly because I consume television pretty indiscriminately and don’t want to justify the habit.
- But also, because that kind of claim for ‘high cultural’ status misses a couple of important features about television for me: firstly, its mass and popular appeal; and also, because, when I think about the literary nature of television, in the sense of thinking about the nature of television writing, it seems to me that many of television’s chief treasures are tucked away in smaller and more ordinary moments, in smaller and more ordinary programmes. Television’s closest literary forms, for me, are the short story and the play, not the film or the novel. [On the day, IIRC, we discussed long-running, novel-like series such as Battlestar Galactica, Lost, The X-Files; discussing whether it was the sense of an unfolding storyline moving steadily towards resolution or the permanently unresolved narrative that gave them their appeal.]
- A successful example of television writing. The Doctor Who episode ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’: an emotional drama that – for me – contains credible individuals, whether they are the King of France, his mistress, her lover the time-travelling alien, and the time-travelling alien’s girlfriend. If I tried to say in a single word what I think makes this episode successful, that word would be intimacy. (I’m swiping that notion very inaccurately from Jason Jacobs’ book on 50s television drama, The Intimate Screen.) ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ is about unrequited love, chances missed, paths not taken – a story that, obviously, you could tell in an realist fashion, but the fantastical elements of the story (space ship, time travel, magic door) aren’t accoutrements, I think, they’re essential to heightening the emotional stakes. Also, they’re kind of cool.
- And this idea of intimacy, for me, encapsulates a particular quality of television: the smallness of the screen – even in these widescreen days – which circumscribes the emotional space and intensifies the emotional stakes, and which works in combination with the character-focused nature of its writing. Even now that we can convincingly ‘do’ aliens, and planets that don’t look like Betchworth Quarry, for me they don’t matter if the characters are lacking truth. (An example of what I mean by ‘lack of truth’ might be the behaviour of the soldiers rounding up children in Torchwood: Children of Earth, or the treaty negotiations in the recent Doctor Who episode ‘Cold Blood’.)
- But I’ve now got myself to the point where I’m starting to wonder whether television is actually a good delivery mechanism for SF! I think television can do terrific action adventure/soap, which is basically what, say, Firefly and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are; so are Chuck and Burn Notice, my current must-see shows. But I’ve now convinced myself that television doesn’t really do the numinous.
- I think if we’re looking to television to provide an outward-looking sense of wonder, then we’re probably always going to be disappointed, even as special effects improve. Because television’s space is intimate. It’s domestic. It’s about a small number of people gathered in a small space – whether that’s Central Perk, the Westminster Village, Albert Square, the Big Brother house, or the Liberator – and it’s about the plausible unfolding of the stories of these people.