'Requiem', and nostalgia television

As pretty much everyone has noticed by now, modern television likes nostalgia. Nostalgia brings in money, viewers, and is easy to execute, if harder to execute well. All perfectly harmless. However, I would argue that when well-written and performed ORIGINAL television drama is undermined by this fad, that something in the system is wrong- that, maybe, tv is being suffocated under its own history.

A good example is BBC1’s Requiem (Fridays, 9pm, full series on iPlayer). Essentially an original ghost story, it’s really a combination of tropes. Not only those classically modern cliches- missing children and towns obsessed with unsolved mysteries (cough cough, Broadchurch)- but also the kind of thing that the BBC rarely make anymore, and when they do, do badly- see ‘The Living and the Dead’. This second category is chock-a-block with influences including ‘The Turn of the Screw’’s blend of psychological drama and unnerving children, as well as MR James-ian echoes such as an unexpected inheritance and the pervasive evil of the local countryside. And then, to add to the fun, definitively 70s tropes such as sudden excessive blood (Stigma), evil stones (The Stone Tape, Children of the Stones), and mystery-hunting trios (innumerable children's programmes), creating great fun for the retro tv fan. However, as these tropes are largely played straight you have to wonder at their inclusion. Is this story a pastiche? An homage? A rip-off? Recognising these elements and having them so familiarly at your fingertips pulls you out of the story, turning it into a game by highlighting its unoriginality. Resultingly, the drama is prevented from being experienced rather than analysed.

The time-clashes of these tropes reflect another problem of this serial- the mix of two different televisual styles. At first, the story is presented as a modern urban horror, involving ambiguous relationships, sex and young women undergoing deep psychological trauma, filmed with little dialogue and masses of subtext. So far, so 21^st century tv drama, which has come to shirk the style of plays for films in recent years, and more original than what follows. This is then brought into sharp contrast, by the second half’s dialogue, performances, and tropes to the extent that it feels like two different programmes. This script, though well-written and engaging, is closer to the stage-y dialogue of classic television than today’s realistic style. The same cannot be said for the performances, which are, as the Guardian reviewer puts it, ‘subtler than the piece [they are] playing’. Herein lies the key conflict- the actors are absolutely desperate to fit the dialogue to regular patterns of speech, even when to say it in a theatrical way would have made more sense dramatically, changing the meaning behind their lines to a more ‘acceptable’ way of performing. Perish the thought that theatrical lines might be delivered in a theatrical way- no, for the modern world one kind of acting is allowed, and everything else must be fitted to that or be rejected and considered ‘archaic’.  Simultaneously, Mrska’s script fails to adapt itself to the modern way of acting, thus shooting itself in the foot- it is using 70s tropes, moulding itself to a way of doing television that is arcane and that modern actors are not used to responding to. Thus, modern and previous styles clash, as in the scene where a female police officer suddenly leaves for the convenience of the plot, despite speaking in a wholly natural tone, resulting in a distinctly jarring scene. This satisfies no-one, disrupts the action and fails to engage the viewer, whose desire for subtlety above everything constricts this programme and leaves it out of time.

Does this make ‘Requiem’ a bad programme? No, but it does leave it a lesser one that it could have been, had it been left to be something closer to ‘Stranger Things’- an exercise in nostalgia, explicitly demonstrated- or been allowed to embrace its old fashioned nature rather than been forced onto a style of acting it doesn’t fit. It’s still worth watching, but the odd combination of new and old, undermining both aspects, provides a compelling argument to why nostalgia, and the use of nostalgic clichés, shouldn’t dominate the industry.