Modern as tomorrow: Gangsters

admin — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 10:00:35 +0000

Car-cam travelling shot. A soot-darkened Victorian church obscured by a six-lane motorway. The sun is setting in a sullen sky. Birmingham, 1975…
It would be impossible to make a TV drama series like Gangsters today. Unbelievably, writer Philip Martin was given three months’ salary to research Birmingham, with a view to scripting a Play for Today, a slot for tele-plays that presented fresh work by young dramatists and nurtured such talents as Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. These productions were formally inventive and thematically up-to-the-minute, none more so than this forgotten feature, created on a shoestring budget by a mob of film buffs in a dirty, hidden city.
Birmingham was a brilliant choice. It was the only British city that looked American – alienatingly, excitingly skyscrapered, throttled by car-chase-friendly expressways, riddled by underpasses whispering death-threats. It was a cosmopolis controlled by a corrupt council and a terrifying constabulary – the subsequently-disbanded serious crime squad was legendarily bent and ferociously violent. The final ingredient in this perfect brew of provincial sewage was the Fewtrells family, club-owning spivs who ruled the city’s underworld like a pack of adenoidal Krays.
Naturally, gangsters are at the heart of the drama, but mercifully, it’s practically cop-free; everybody knew they were beyond redemption, hence they were excluded. The thrust of the programme was to characterise crime as a business. The hoods are the Consortium, with an ‘MD’ supervising ‘board-meetings’. The language is administrative: ‘We’ll foreclose on his option to breathe.’ There are endless discussions about despatching rivals, which, like routine matters of detail in any profession, acquire a baroque, bureaucratic dullness by constant repetition.
These crims and molls are unlicensed capitalists, apparatchik-entrepreneurs of extortion; also little caesars of illegal polities. On the realistic level, this is underlined by the connections between gangsters, politicians and ‘genuine’ businessmen (entertainment, restaurants, construction). According to this critical-realist analysis, there is an overlap of personnel and no distinction between legitimate and illicit income.
On the symbolic level, capitalism itself is seen as a criminal activity, the shake-down of the weak by the strong, the most successful racket of all. It dramatises the person/function contradiction, here ‘family-man’ high-fliers perpetrate mayhem in office hours. They’re ‘only doing their job’. On Monday you outsource production to Romania, laying off workers. On Saturday you found a charity for Romanian orphans. Capo di tutti Brummie capi Eddie Fewtrell was, like Bill Gates, notoriously charitable.
The gangster genre foregrounds this systemic doublethink. The protagonist is forced by circumstance into initiating a chain of escalating moral infractions. He rises by jettisoning his ethical self. Consequently he nullifies himself as a person. The reward is power, but the successful hood, like the white-collar big shot, eventually discovers that it is the economic imperative of the organisation that rules, not himself. Thus the alpha male of the classic gangster narrative, and of business-school propaganda, is, in reality, morally and professionally a cipher.
At first Gangsters, originally a stand-alone production in the Play for Today slot, follows this classic trajectory. In the subsequent two series (1976, 1977) the emphasis shifts to the re‑education of the anti-hero Kline by, significantly, a woman. This is unusual for the genre. The only three female types permitted in the Warner Brothers 1930s template were glamorous molls, dominating mothers, and occasionally a sister embodying the pleasures of compliant femininity.
Gangsters breaks with this canonical prescription. By series two, three of the main characters are women: the magnificently malign Lily Lee, RP-speaking Anglo-Chinese triad boss (she has her father assassinated in a feminism-inspired reworking of the genre’s familiar Oedipal arc): Sarah Gant, who has plummeted from an Afro-American fashion magazine into the grime of Brum; and the moral centre of Gangsters, Anne Darracott, hippie prostitute, ex-junkie, barge-dweller, inheritor of the mantle of Gloria Grahame, American cinema’s supreme avenging angel.
Gangsters incinerated the conventions governing women and crime. It had a multi-ethnic cast; it exploded fourth-wall tele-naturalism with an arsenal of stylistic fireworks; it showed that gender, class and race – like organised crime and business – are about power underwritten by violence. Modern as tomorrow, it gestured towards TV’s future – for which we are still waiting.

Lively London

admin — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:00:44 +0000

There are two notable strains in literary representations of London. The first, characterised by comic brio and the high style, takes its rhythms from the bustle of the streets and markets, its hyperbolic register from the plausible blather of the stereotypical Londoner. This tradition derives from Dickens, runs through Wells and on into Gerald Kersh, latterly finding expression in Ballard, the Amises, B S Johnson, Iain Sinclair and Will Self.
The second mode is quieter, the scrupulous meanness exemplified by Defoe, Gissing, Patrick Hamilton and Orwell. The dreary compulsion of everyday London life saturates the prose; only the scepticism is exuberant.
London’s Overthrow belongs in the first category. This excellent book is an illustrated survey of London in 2012, consisting of interviews with local people, meditations on place and politics, forays into policy debate, excursions into the capital’s history. The obvious influence is Ian Sinclair, who makes a brief appearance. Miéville has the same hunger for the disregarded minutiae languishing in the shadows of the Grand Projects, the same sympathy for the excluded and off-message.
His style is similarly lively, dense with unexpected metaphors and odes to the quotidian. The text is generously freighted with lyrical bravura passages, affectionate renderings of non-tourist London, including a brilliant evocation of the strange charms of the Horniman Museum. Also included are indignant paragraphs on deaths in police custody, the life expectancy of the poor, the scandal of London’s housing, and the circuses-but-no-bread Olympics. And, of course, the spectre that haunts the book is the misery of economic disaster. In a characteristic phrase: ‘the economy toilets’.
There are sections that don’t convince. The discussion of clothing for female Muslims is one; Miéville’s position that the wearing of the veil is a personal matter is classically liberal and undialectical. And the assertion that ‘we had no food’ before recent migrant cuisine is unhistorical sciolism, untypical and unworthy of the author.
These are minor blemishes. London’s Overthrow is a fitting coda to the double centenary of London’s greatest biographer.

Red Pepper » Frank Carney

Modern as tomorrow: Gangsters

Lively London