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If television is the idiot's lantern then the subjective opinions of someone unqualified to write about television must surely be the idiot's lectern. |
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The Golden Hour ITV, 2005 You probably won’t remember this – I certainly didn’t – but it ran for four weeks on ITV in 2005. It centres on a helicopter medical team who fly in whenever anything spectacular happens and offer on the spot doctoring to those in the direst need. The title refers to the sixty minutes immediately following an accident when the chances of saving everyone are highest. It starred Richard Armitage (Sir Guy in BBC1’s marvellous Robin Hood) and Zoë Telford (who is obviously the reason why I rented it). That’s enough facts.
For whatever reason, I’m going to review this in fifteen minute chunks. I had hoped the medical "golden hour" would likewise be broken down but internet research (or Wiki as it is sometimes called) didn’t confirm that hunch. Oh well, the reality is that I’m doing a pizza and fifteen minute segments is more convenient. It isn’t glamorous but it is true. Four cheeses in case you were wondering.
The first fifteen minutes see a good old fashioned stunt-fest as a bus collides with a small child, hits a parked car and sends that flying on top of an old woman. The whole thing only happened because a small girl ran into the road without looking (as they do) and her brother bravely leapt out to save her (as they do) and the driver ploughed into him after a mild expletive (as they do). The problem with the first fifteen minutes is that we have at least a dozen flashbacks and I don’t think we’re done with them. Seriously, this was the most insulting use of flashbacks I have ever seen. The accident happens in the first two minutes. Literally two minutes later we see the accident again in flashback. Did the makers really believe we would’ve forgotten what happened? Did they imagine hoards of ITV viewers (a contradiction in terms these days) scratching each others heads and saying "Why are those people lying down with blood on their faces?"
The flashbacks continue in similarly revolting ways as we see snippets of back story for each of the guest characters. Only they all seem to have the same back story – they’re all dreadfully working class and live their lives through domestic rows. That’s about it. Slight sepia tint to the film, generic lower class London accents, everyone hates everyone else, there is misery and there is anger. The only redeeming flashback was to a party in which Zoë Telford looked lovely. With that little bit of value for money we end the crucial first quarter of the golden hour. One of the three victims has already died and the Welsh doctor is preparing to do surgery in the middle of the road. Helped by Zoë Telford. Hence the reason I’m still watching this patronising, unintelligent and fairly unpleasant nonsense.
Half an hour in and things have progressed. We now have a baying mob of ghastly local proles shouting abuse at the bus driver as he lies dying in his ambulance. It would be nice to dismiss them as an ignorant rabble who are jumping to fatuous conclusions based on nothing more than him being an adult and the victim being a child. But, of course, via the medium of flashback we know that he’s an obnoxious, drunken old sod who is probably over the limit. So they are in fact an ignorant rabble whose fatuous conclusion happens to be right even if they don’t know it is right. They just assume because they are working class and therefore (a) unemployed and (b) enjoy shouting abuse at someone in the afternoon.
Back at the hospital, two men with clipboards are following Richard Armitage around. He is very subdued in this series. I didn’t expect him to be an over the top panto villain but he might at least move out of first gear occasionally. Anyway, the suits are questioning his methods despite him being quite obviously as by-the-book a doctor as you’ll ever see. He’s also quite disturbingly touchy-feely with his staff – he doesn’t bark orders in the operating room, he asks nicely if people are comfortable with pumping air or fixing a drip or squeezing a heart (or whatever).
Back at the flashback party, Zoë Telford is being moody, Richard Armitage is late and lovable Kurt from "Teachers" is trying it on with everyone in a short skirt. An earlier flashback (probably from after the party) showed us that he’s stressed, angry and takes his frustrations out on his wife/partner/girlfriend and there is mention of children. Then, in a new low, while in a flashback he tells us a story which involves a flashback within a flashback. A girl got hit by a car. That’s it – he’s moody because he can’t cope with people being hit by things. Not a great career choice then.
Meanwhile, Zoë and Richard reveal to each other that they’ve been having a covert affair these past three months. There is no sexual chemistry between them at all. I can see he is in the scene but you wouldn’t know it from his performance. We end the second quarter hour of the Golden Hour with the bar out-acting the lead.
The third quarter hour shows us (in a flashback of all things) the little girl’s expression when told she’s going to see her father. She turns away. Ok, so he’s sexually abusing her. They probably thought they were being so clever and subtle about it but they couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d personally hit every single viewer in the face with a sledge hammer. It would have been a likely bet even without the look as the mother was a slut which meant the father has to be abusive. That’s what divorced couples do in clichéd drama. Occasionally they’ll do something different like making the mother a slut and the father an abusive slut but that might confuse the audience. We get more flashbacks to the accident. They don’t add anything but they serve to remind us of what we’ve seen every two minutes for the last forty. I mean, really, do we need to see a small boy crushed by a bus twenty times? Is someone enjoying this?
The mob of angry plebs has multiplied and they are now surrounding the ambulance. When they start to actually rock it, Kurt from Teachers suffers an extremely mild head wound. Nevertheless he gets cross and shouts at them until they get out of the way. The general public are indeed savages. In the apparently fascinating world of the doctors’ personal lives we have the Welsh one (now Irish) spying (in a flashback) on Zoë and Richard. He sees them kiss. He concludes from this that they are an item. He mentions it causally. She gives him a look. He snoops around the hospital, finds out that Kurt from Teachers has left his wife. They do a bit of banter on the roof. It goes nowhere.
In surgery, we have more or less exactly the same sequence of dramatic medical events as happened during the surgery performed half an hour ago in the middle of the road. The same clamping, the same heart massage, the same heart spasm, the same electric shock, the same result. It was basically the same. But with more people present. And we still didn’t know why he was doing it. House bombards us with technical jargon that we can’t possibly understand but when things happen we usually have a vague idea why they are happening. Here we just get surgery for no explained reason and then more surgery for what looks like the same no explained reason.
And so to the all important final quarter of the golden hour – who will live, who will die and will anything even slightly make up for the previous 45 minutes? Well, to an extent it did. Their technique throughout the first three acts was to make everyone who wasn’t dressed in orange as unpleasant and unlikable as possible. In the final segment some of them got redeemed and others confirmed our worst suspicions. We also got yet more of Kurt from Teachers and his random tempter tantrums. Three minutes into almost any conversation and he’d get angry for no obvious reason. It’s either a character point or poor writing. I literally can’t tell which. He gets a close-up deducting moment in which he figures out a couple of pieces of the puzzle and solves one little bit of what we didn’t actually realise was meant to be a mystery. The bus driver – drunken oaf – hit the boy because he was looking for his ringing mobile phone. He’d had word from the school that his son was ill and needed to contact his wife to make arrangements. So he wasn’t speeding and he wasn’t drunk – just extremely careless. It’s a partial redemption for those who care. Zoë gets a close-up deduction moment too – she realises that the girl’s mother bites her nails which means the scratches on the girl’s body can’t have been caused by her mum. Which means her dad – into whose custody she’s been put for the time being – must be the guilty one. On the plus side, it’s only physical abuse and not sexual. SWERVE~! The Golden Hour is truly appalling. It has a silly title but once you know what it means you can see the dramatic value. Then they ignore it as a basic conceit. This isn’t a real time medical emergency drama – it is one which start out pretending it is but then we get back to the hospital and it is just another medical drama. The only thing marking it out as different is that the leads all wear orange jumpsuits. The four leads are an extremely bland man who is too nice to be in a drama series, an extremely unstable man who flits between still being Kurt from Teachers and a man on the brink of a nervous breakdown, a Celtic man who is recognisable only for not being one of the other three and a woman who is the best of a bad bunch and who I fancy so I won’t say anything bad about. It is hard to imagine who could possibly have enjoyed this programme. It sounds good on paper but between the endless flashbacks (which aren’t nearly as clever as they think they are – I really believe they thought they were making "Memento" with the unfolding sequence of events but without the plot, ingenuity or skill) and the total lack of any substance what so ever make this a bland, clichéd, hopelessly padded, pointless waste of time. And not even Zoë Telford can make me sit through another one.
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