British Film Forever

British Film Forever is the BBC's flagship series on British cinema as part of its "Summer of British Film" season. While the season is a good excuse to show some lesser known films, this accompanying series is a bit of a disappointment.

For a series of seven episodes averaging around 90 minutes each, there's not all that much information being imparted. The selection of interviewees (mostly actors, including Michael Caine, Helen Mirren and Bob Hoskins) puts this above the average clip show, but they all cover well trodden ground and audiences are unlikely to learn much unless they are completely new to the subject. By later episodes, not very recognisable actors and comedians start to creep in as well. Interviewees tend to say things like "it was totally new" "it was a breath of fresh air" etc, but isn't all that illuminating for the audience without understanding the context of what/how/why something was new or how it compared to its contemporaries.

The series also has an irritating habit of starting with more recent films and working its way back. This may be an attempt to make it more appealing to viewers, but it hampers any attempt to place the films in context, or to show how a genre developed. The episode on thrillers, for example, starts with The Long Good Friday in 1980 - more than 70 years after the first British film thriller, while the period drama episode also starts in the 1980s, at least 50 years after British cinema became strongly associated with the genre. It does eventually get around to the earlier films, and sometimes, in the case of Bond or Get Carter, places them into a sociological context. But the films are often not placed into a cinematic context, and are rarely compared to American or European cinema This is difficult anyway when the programme tends to just flit from one film to another in no particular order.

There's also something wrong with the voice-over by Jessica Stevenson - she has a pleasant enough voice but its not authoritative and she tends to sound like a big sister telling you about her favourite films. She isn't helped much by Matthew Sweet's script, which takes a semi-jokey approach, occasionally bordering on the obtuse. Sometimes its amusing, sometimes its just irritating.

This series is also a bit of a spoiler-fest, especially the thrillers episode. The narrator explains the plot of the films in detail, almost always giving away the ending in the process, explaining who gets killed, by whom and why. The irony is that anyone who has seen these films probably won't learn much from the interviewees, while the narrator is happy to spoil them for anyone who hasn't.

Perhaps I shouldn't be too harsh. This show is a fairly harmless time-passer, but its hard to know exactly who its aimed at. I would assume that any viewers devoting more than ten hours to watching this would have a reasonably serious interest in the subject. And with seven feature length episodes and a raft of distinguished interviewees, this could have been an authoritative look at British cinema history, something enlightening for fans and scholars. But the treatment the subject gets here is largely superficial, and its hard not to see this series as something of a missed opportunity.

This series is a huge disappointment, and it seems to suffer from a lack of identity: the show seems unable to decide whether it is targeted at an audience that is seriously interested in British film, or whether it is targeted at the audience for the BBC's other 'talking heads'/clip show programmes, who may have only a marginal interest in British cinema.

The series has many problems: the episodes are poorly-structured, and would really benefit from the application of a more chronological structure. Although there are some good interviews with the likes of Michael Caine and Richard Attenborough, each show seems padded out with irrelevant comments from television 'personalities' and comedians such as Richard Bacon and Al Murray. Mostly, these seem to have been presented in a similar way to the aforementioned clip shows, in which it seems the producers sit these 'celebrities' in front of a few clips and then ask them to comment on what they have seen on screen. Mostly, this results in comments which are, at best, trite; and generally, the comments simply describe what is already apparent to the viewers who have just watched the same clip/s. This level of discussion is also brought out in the poorly-scripted 'jokey' narration by Jessica Hynes.

The show could really benefit from dispensing with the interviews with these 'celebrities', and it would also benefit strongly from an on screen narrator who has some authority within the subject--somebody like Chris Frayling, for example. Whilst there are some academic commentators, their comments are few and far between.

I can imagine that the show has pleased neither those who have a serious interest in British cinema, nor those whose interest in the topic is only passing: it's too jokey and not critical enough for those who have a serious interest in the topic, and I would imagine that the show loses most of its casual viewers whenever it tries to get a little more serious, dealing with, say, the films of Powell and Pressburger.

All in all, this series was a great opportunity to celebrate the diversity and development of British film culture, but thanks to the decisions made by the production team the series seems like a 'dumbed down' guide to British film (a 'Dummy's Guide to British Cinema'). It's a huge disappointment.