Red Riding
Heston’s Victorian Feast
Channel 4
HISTORY is a slippery beast – endlessly rewritten by people who can’t remember it. Just now, we seem to be obsessed with the 1970s. At first, decade was re-invented as a jolly whirl of glitter dust and feather boas: David Bowie, glam-rock, space hoppers and Bagpuss the cat. Movies such as Velvet Underground and Boogie Nights created envy in their audiences for a decadent hedonism that even those of us alive at the time struggle to recall.
Then, all of a sudden, we changed our collective mind. The 1970s were no longer a fun-packed party full of fondue sets and Demis Roussos albums. Television researchers did a bit of research, poring over British newspaper cuttings detailing industrial unrest, high inflation and the three-day week.
Overnight, the picture was transformed. In TV dramas such as Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes, the 70s were re-reinvented as the most grim and gritty years imaginable. Urban landscapes appeared in bleached monochrome, with everything faded to brown and beige. Men’s hair was bouffant and ridiculous, their trousers too tight and their sideburns too long. Women – women’s lib forgotten – were a flock of twittering ninnies. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect Tory Central Office was behind it all. No wonder we needed Margaret Thatcher to “rescue” us.
Above all, the 1970s police force was corrupt and brutal from top to bottom. It’s this version of the past which Channel 4’s new three-part drama, Red Riding, inhabits. Adapted from David Peace’s visceral novels, it is set in the West Riding of Yorkshire. But this is a Yorkshire which the tourist board would disown – a bleak land stalked by monomaniac property developers, child murderers and gleefully sadistic coppers.
Andrew Garfield played Eddie Dunford, a local news reporter who’d failed to make it in London and returned home to Leeds and a job on the local rag. Desperate to repair his reputation, he got stuck into the case of a murdered schoolgirl – her body found with real swan’s wings attached. What did this have to do with the plans of swaggering tycoon John Dawson (Sean Bean) and the violent death of Eddie’s whistle-blowing newspaper colleague? Why was Eddie’s editor so keen for him to drop his investigation?
At first, I worried that Red Riding was simply another modish misrepresentation of the recent past. But, as the plot unrolled, I realised it was more than that. What sets David Peace and adaptor Tony Grisoni’s take on the 1970s apart from previous dramas are its uncompromising extremes. This is less a sociological recreation than a full-on gothic nightmare and, as such, the rules of historical balance hardly apply. It doesn’t matter that life was never really like this for most people, that reality is more complex and multi-dimensional. Peace’s vision supplies it own internal integrity – this is a state of mind drama, not state of the nation.
As Eddie Dunford’s life became ever more hellish, the conventions of TV thrillers melted away. The hero is not supposed to murder the villain and then destroy himself in a blaze of burning petrol, is he? And a crime show is not supposed to invade your dreams, as this did mine. I look forward to the rest of the trilogy with curiosity and apprehension.
Also liable to bewilder and revolt was the latest wizard wheeze from celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal: Heston’s Victorian Feast. Not content with hijacking the menu of the Little Chef motorway café chain, his teeming brain has decided to “use myths, science and history to recreate feasts you won’t find in any cookbooks”.
What this seems to mean, in practice, is that Blumenthal and his cackling team of mad scientists are producing the oddest food they can concoct, using a few wisps of history as an excuse. Were these people never told not to play with their food as children?
If so, it did no good and Blumenthal’s obligatory celebrity guests were treated to fried grasshoppers, wobbling jelly phalluses filled with buzzing sex aids and absinthe, edible garden soil and dissolving gold fob watches. Blumenthal reckoned this symbolised the real Victorian era – all sex, drugs and dabbling in the occult. It seems taking liberties with history is the new black. It’s just as well there are no Victorians left to take offence.
Helen Chappell
