As Big as I Can Get Them

On television on Sunday night, in a very addictive cop drama set in Northern Ireland, the hero just shot someone in cold blood. I feel rather cheated about this. See below for my reasons.

Have you seen the film My Favourite Year? If not, you should. It is very funny and very touching. The plot centres around a fictional event in the history of television, when Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole as a thinly disguised Errol Flynn) appears as a guest on King Kaiser’s (Joseph Bologna as a thinly disguised Sid Caesar) weekly comedy TV show in the 1950’s. A young comedy writer, Benjy Stone, who hero-worships Swann for his swashbuckling film roles, is detailed to look after the hell-raising movie star, ensuring that his drinking and womanising doesn’t lead to too much trouble, and getting him to rehearsals on time and sober.

Towards the climax of the film, Swann refuses to go on camera, having a severe bout of stage fright at the thought of appearing on live television, having previously only acted in movies, where there can be take after take to get a scene right. In anguish, he says to Stone, ‘Look at me. I’m flesh and blood, life-size. I’m not that silly, God-damn hero.’

Stone replies, ‘I don’t need you life-size. I need Alan Swanns as big as I can get them.’

And that’s why I feel cheated when the supposed crusading copper shoots a witness in cold blood. I felt the same when at one point in the series based on a police corruption investigation unit, Line of Duty, there was a suspicion that the hero, Ted Hastings, was in fact corrupt, and in one or two episodes of the magnificent period policier Endeavour, when it looked like Morse’s father figure, DI Fred Thursday, was going off the rails. I need Ted Hastingses and Fred Thursdays as big as I can get them. How would you feel if towards the end of Dracula, you found out that Doctor Van Helsing was a closet vampire and on Dracula’s side?

And the need for dependable, unambiguous heroes isn’t simply a feature of our troubled times. I’ve always felt like that. And I think we all feel a certain need for justice in narrative. I recall an old pal of mine when we were students, objecting to the fact that in the cult novel The Magus, by John Fowles, the manipulative Conchis never gets his come-uppance, and saying, ‘Once you’ve established who’s wearing the black hats and who’s wearing the white, you have certain obligations.’

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Back to My Favourite Year. There are some very funny lines in it, including when Benjy Stone says to his sweetheart, ‘Jews understand two things: suffering and where to get great Chinese food.’ Or when he takes Alan Swann to his mother’s home in Brooklyn for dinner, and his mother addresses Swann as Al: ‘He’s Alan. I bring home Capone or Jolson, it’s Al.’

There are some hilarious misadventures involving Swann’s philandering and boozing, and Stone’s futile attempts to keep him out of trouble. Which reminds me a bit of my dad. He was an alcoholic (believe it or not, the Duffys are fond of the occasional snifter), and we spent a lot of time and energy trying to stop him from drinking. We might as well not have bothered. The addict always wins.

Dad sometimes got Friday afternoon off in lieu of working Thursday evening. On those occasions, my mum would go to great efforts to prevent him from going to the pub on Friday lunchtime, as that would mean The Lost Weekend. On one such Friday, my mum and my older sister Kathleen surreptitiously locked the mortice locks of front and back doors and pocketed the keys, imprisoning him in the house, then returned to their afternoon’s work, my mum at a school down the road and my sister at the school right across the road from our house. Kathleen’s classroom windows had an uninterrupted view to our front door and front room window. As she tried to teach a geography class, she could see from the corner of her eye the old man with his car coat and soft hat on, rattling vainly at the front door (the door had an almost full length window) and feeling in his pockets for the missing keys. Then he disappeared, presumably trying the back door. A few minutes later he was back fiddling with the front door.

Kath continued to strive manfully to teach her class, while being unable to resist the temptation to cast an occasional glance at the one-man drama going on across the road. This took on a more distracting turn as the old fellow now deducing the dastardly plot against his legitimate diversion, stood at our front room window, still with the car coat and trilby hat on, fixing Kath with a baleful and accusatory glare as she struggled on with the topography of the Lawrentian Shield.

Eventually, he broke the lock on the front door and sauntered victoriously down the road to the pub.

Although the old guy caused us a lot of worry and frustration, his antics also afforded us considerable innocent amusement. He might return from the pub on Saturday afternoon, plastered, and after toying with his oven-preserved lunch, scrape it into the fire, where it would smoulder malevolently and send a malignant green smoke up the chimney for some time to come. He might then decide that a roof tile needed pushing back into place. This was simply an excuse for him to climb out of a dormer window and sit smoking a cigarette on the roof above the little world of our street, entirely at peace and half obscured by the tobacco smoke. If I were coming up the street with one of my little pals, explaining the sight of my dad up on the roof was a challenge for the imagination.

And this brings me back to one of the final lines of Benjy Stone as narrator in the movie: ‘Some people you forgive a lot.’