Challengers & Red Eye. TV & film for children, by children.

Often times, after I’ve watched something that I think is worthy of a review for being very good/bad, I look first to see if Mark Kermode, or the Financial Times, have covered it before I commit to writing anything myself. Invariably they have, and usually in such a way that says everything I’d have said, and more.

Take the FT’s review of the atrocious Red Eye, for example. As somebody else said, somewhere else, it was almost worth sitting through the it for the funny reviews that have followed. I thought that Dan Einav was particularly shrewd not to use words like atrocious, or preposterous, thus ensuring that it remained within the range of the scriptwriter’s lexicon, and thus increasing the chances of it being read by the production team. If Peter Dowling, the unfortunate writer, were still to find the review beyond his range of vocabulary, perhaps he could be persuaded to watch the superbly written, Responder, that airs at the same time as his lamentable effort on Sunday evenings (he won’t be the only person switching over). Better still, would be for the senior execs at ITV, to test their commissioning editors with an essay – compare and contrast ITV’s Red Eye, with the BBC’s Responder. It need not be a task that eats into their busy schedules: whereas the writer of Red Eye has had his arse handed to him on a plate; Tony Schumaker, the writer of Responder, should be nominated for a BAFTA, would suffice. It might not do much to improve ITV’s drama output in the short-term, but it would serve as a shot across the bows to the hopeless, juvenile, commissioning editor gatekeepers who constantly green-light this low-grade, unworthy, garbage. Though something as simple as a spelling test might serve to filter out which have them have yet to read a book all the way through. Until then, we the public, must make our own rules to avoid these execrable efforts at entertainment. I’d suggest the following starting point, red flags to look out for: anything starring Lesley Sharpe, Suranne Jones, Richard Armitage; or written by Matt Baker, or Peter Dowling. Until dramas start to credit the halfwits who commissioned them, it’s the best we have to go on.

It was funny then, to be encouraged by two positive reviews from my go-to sources, to go-to see Challengers this week, and find it so disappointing – a tennis love-triangle thing, made and starring someone called Zendaya whose passion project, it is said to have been. It is no criticism of her to say that I have never heard of her before, but she does seem to have packed a lot into her twelve years.  When you embark on a project to create an original screenplay, be it passion, or vanity, the first advice that the old pros will give you, is that audiences soon forget the plot, but never forget the characters. Zendaya and her team failed to heed the old maxim; the film, having a sort of superficially attractive plausible-ish, symmetry, that you can imagine novice filmmakers convincing themselves is one of the cutest stories never told; and no characters. The three principal actors played their “characters” from teenagers to today’s thirty-somethings. Zendaya did it like one of those precocious types you see in children’s dramas who act like they suppose grown-ups might act – much in the same way that Lesley Sharpe portrays senior people with important jobs. She convinced well enough as the teenager but stopped there, because that’s as far as her emotional maturity stretched. Unfortunately, occupying another apex in the love triangle was the bloke who, about four or five years ago, played Laurence Durrell in The Durrells. His was the most convincing character, but seeing this big hairy, thirty-odd-year-old, err, mixing it, with teenagers in their student rooms was, how to say, pedologically challenging. The other apex was occupied by a boy who did not cut it as a man, and was not interesting when he was boy.

Perhaps the adults took over to impose the constant, shameless, product placement, that made you think you were watching a two hour+ big brands advert, but you really knew that you were in the company of children when it came to the action. There were two arenas chosen for that: the bedroom and the tennis court; and in both, whenever it began, the film switched to slow motion, and the soundtrack switched to very loud, slow, big-beat, techno. And there was loads of it; lots of long, slow, making-out; lots of long, long tennis rallies. Boy, were we in the company of self-obsessed children. It all became too much for me, and I was praying for the game, set and match call, but no such luck. The final, oh so dripping-with-meaning scene, was an endless, slo-mo, point by point, by laboured fucking point that went to a tie-break. A set all, six games all, and then a tie-break… – despite the fact that both of the apices (only one is an actual ape) had tried to throw the match in the final game without managing to pull it off.  When all they’d wanted to do, all along, was to pull each other off. That last scene, of this two hours and twenty minutes movie felt like went on for about twenty minutes – a significant proportion of the time Zendaya has spent on earth to date.

Face eggs forward. Cubby Begge, 18 oh 5.