The BBC's budget was frozen and then the government made them pay for the Welsh language S4C as well as the World Service taking hundreds of millions off their budget. They also mandated a move of some of the production to Salford, which cost more. Then the latest move of sticking a cost of £700m on them to pay for pensioners licence fees. BBC cut the budget to all channels and departments.
To be pedantically accurate, the move to Salford was down to the pre-2010 Labour government, and not unconnected to cabinet minister Hazel Blears being MP for Salford. World Service etc was down to the conservative-led coalition post 2010.
True, but there was also an extra 1000 people move to Salford and job losses, property and infrastructure builds & sales with the same of Broadcasting House and others, still ongoing in their bid to save money.
So the first episode limped out on BBC1 last night with zero publicity to 60% of the average rating for its time slot. Having masochistically made my way through all eight episodes (eventually) I think it will be about as missed as K9 and Company is. And are we sure the Patrick Ness who wrote these is the same guy with a shelf full of literary awards who is currently getting acclaim for 'A Monster Calls'?
Completely forgot it was on last night (partly cos I thought yesterday was the 8th, and partly cos I never saw an ad or trailer with the date, even though I'd posted about it before Xmas), stumbled across it halfway through the second episode, and decided not to bother, having missed the first (with Capaldi, which was the only one I really wanted to see), and already missed half the second. I'm not going to bother jumping on with the third, cos what's the fucking point? "Iplayer, yadda yadda" yeah well that shit gives me so much hassle that unless I really need to see something for work purposes, I'm not putting myself to all the trouble it causes me. Fuck it.
I have to admit, based on Class, I really don't get why Patrick Ness is considered a master of YA literature. The strange thing about BBC America holding off on the show for so long is that both Canada and Australia aired the show within days of each episode airing or whatever you call it in a streaming service in Britain.
Skill in one medium doesn't necessarily translate to skill in another. Prose and TV are very different media with different strengths and different needs, and being good in one doesn't guarantee being any good in the other. One criticism I've read of Class is that it's too slow-paced and talky, which is fine for a book but not so much for television.
I don't find it particularly strange at all. BBC America has a financial interest in Class as coproducers of the series. It makes sense for them to broadcast it when it will maximize their ratings and justify their investment. For BBCA, that means holding it until the new series of Doctor Who when they know they're going to have eyeballs on it.
Actually, what I was referring to is that none of the teen drama in Class is particularly good. In fact, one episode in which the characters in a stressful situation start going off and expressing anger-driven opinions of each other actually made me laugh, though I doubt that was the intention. At no point did this feel like a show written by an acclaimed master of YA fiction. Maybe Ness did have trouble adapting to television with his background in prose, but the show's problems definitely go deeper than that. Hmm, that's an interesting perspective. I'm just basing it on the fact that most British shows these days are broadcast same day, or at least same week in other countries to cut down on people watching pirated versions of the episodes. But then, I suppose Class has nowhere near the following or popularity that Doctor Who or Sherlock have.
That still comes down to the same thing I'm talking about -- not being able to adapt one's talent from one medium to another. Think of how Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player alive but a mediocre baseball player. It wasn't that he lost his athleticism, just that he couldn't adapt it to such a different type of activity with different demands. I haven't seen the scene you're describing yet, but it sounds as if it could be a result of being a prose author struggling to adapt to script form. In prose, you can get inside the characters' heads and express their thoughts in narration. In drama, everything has to be expressed through dialogue. And so a prose author unaccustomed to writing dialogue may try to put too much description of their inner thoughts and opinions in their actual speech, because he lacks the experience to convey it through subtext or to trust the actors to put it across in their performance.
My impression was a few things. It all seemed a bit drama school, I don't know how much experience the actors have, other than Miss Quill, but it felt like they were trying scenes for drama class. Second whether it was the acting, directing or writing the scenes didn't flow well, let's stop a huge fight with an army of bad guys around us to discuss why I won't say i love you. Whether that was Ness being used to do a whole lot with internal monologue without disrupting a scene or the director being unable to handle the action and talk I'm not sure. Third, and this may be me, I've seen a lot of the shows this is riffing on and liked them better, maybe I was disliking it for what it isn't.
This was their first pancake. These kids are going to grow as people and hopefully as actors, very quickly. Season one happened so quickly, they didn't even figure out how they sucked until everything was over and then there was no more resources present to express improvement. How smart is the little girl who got put up a couple years? They never really clarified if she was as smart as an adult, or as smart as Reed Richards. If she starts reverse engineering alien tech, that could be a way more interesting element than what they had her doing this year, which might have been close to "nothing".
I think you’re right, but I also agree with Christopher’s assessment about part of the problem is that Ness is a prose author. Some of those pauses in battle whilst everyone talked were terrible. I’m amazed he didn’t have anyone helping him, or at least approving the scripts. His depiction of the kids is, well just seems lame. None of the stuff they went through felt particularly ‘now’ or particularly ‘teen’ orientated. For someone whose such an expert at writing for teens, none of the characters he created seemed very different from what I might have come up with if asked to create a teen show, or what Wedon was doing years ago. I’m also disappointed that a show heralded as cutting edge and not for kids, didn’t explore more of the issues teenagers have to deal with these days. No mention of drugs or sexting or body image or anything like that. Ness seemed fixated only on loss (Ram lost a leg, a girlfriend, a promising football career and a dad, Charlie and Quill lost a world, Tanya lost a dad, April sort of lost a dad, and her mum lost the use of her legs). The relationship stuff seemed very hackneyed and it probably didn’t help that the cast appeared to be just nice kids fresh out of drama school. She may have been clichéd and annoying, but Courtney Woods seemed more realistic. I think if asked to sum Class up in one word it’d be ‘Safe’ or possibly ‘bland’. That said if Ness gets commissioned to write Quill-The Series I’d watch the hell out of it.
Granted I've not been at school for *counts... runs out of fingers* a while but it didn't seem particularly like a British school, more like American high school dramas.
I fear British schools are more like American highschools then when we were there. They have proms and everything these days!