Television - Andrew Billen is wooed by the start of a finely cast drama set in the world of e-commerce
Tony Garnett rarely gives interviews, so we do not know how much he likes or is influenced by Steve Bochco, the writer-producer behind everything laudable in American TV drama, from Hill Street Blues to NYPD Blue. One point of comparison, however - besides the excellence of their records and the documentary feel of their work - is that both obey the old Hollywood dictum of beginning a drama with an earthquake.
Before NYPD Blue had even made it on air in 1993, the Bible Belt was crusading against the drama's sex scenes. When I later spoke to Bochco, he was entirely unrepentant about their excess: in a crowded market, the first thing you have to get is noticed. Similarly, when Garnett's The Cops began on BBC2 two years ago, the initial headlines were about the opening scene, which followed a WPC arriving for a day's shift straight from a rave where she had taken Ecstasy.
True to form, then, Garnett's Attachments (Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC2), about an internet launch, began with a full-frontal shot of a naked young man (a naked young man on a skateboard, in fact) making a phone call to his bosses, who happened to be engaged in a nude love scene. An editor of the Times once famously asked for more sex and computer stories; I trust he would have approved of the efforts made by all concerned. For a while, however, I wondered if the pudding was not being overegged. In 50 minutes, we had the subplot of an anonymous stalker, the diversion of a webcam in the loo and a sudden death caught by this camera.
Gimmick among gimmicks, viewers were also invited to log on to a real version of the fictional internet site, seethru.co.uk, that the cast were constructing.
Having seen the next episode, however, I am reassured that all this was a cross between attention-seeking and throat-clearing. The rush to replace the finance that went down with the deceased investor in the WC was as tense and gripping as anything on television. A theme had emerged about whether honesty was possible in business and, more narrowly, whether the web was creating a new, fairer kind of consumer-responsive capitalism. Most importantly, the characters, who at first looked too sexy to be true, were proving as addictive as the cast of Garnett's greatest hit, This Life.
As in that series, the writers (in this case, Richard Zajdlic and Amelia Bullmore) choose not to subvert stereotypes, but to explore them. For This Life, after all, Amy Jenkins fundamentally dreamt up only that the lawyers who shared the house would include an upfront woman, a man with a phobia of commitment, a couple (she uptight, he unfocused) and a gay man. In Attachments, the characters are hardly more subtly differentiated: Mike, the idealist creator of the new company (Justin Pierre); his more practical wife, Luce (Claudia Harrison); techno-nerd Brandon (Iddo Goldberg); street-smart lech Reece (William Beck); lippy lesbian Sophie (Amanda Ryan). Yet the acting and writing are so naturalistic that they hardly seem types at all.
The bright colours of the Seethru office, the summery locations in trendy Hoxton, the youth of the cast and the not-yet-extinguished flames of optimism they carry mean there is a distinct lightening of Garnett's palette here from The Cops, in which no one ever smiles, and from This Life, where the lawyers saw work as a kind of doom to which they had to submit. It is fascinating in these dramas to see Garnett's take on each succeeding generation. It is like having a barometer in the corner of society, eternally forecasting its future. In the e-commerce generation, he has clearly detected a return to the Eighties work ethic and the cautious birth of post-socialist idealism.
There is, nevertheless, some wonderfully cynical writing. In the second episode, Sophie says of Mike: "You know what you'd find if you ripped off his T-shirt? A suit." The acting is cruelly observant. Forced to apologise to Brandon, Amanda Ryan as Sophie pushes her tongue between her bottom lip and chin, an expression of fake gormlessness that I must have seen a hundred times, but never before on television. Still, my favourite moment was unscripted: a street scene in which a woman stops Mike to ask if he knows where Drysdale Street is. Congratulations for keeping that in.
A couple of things still worry me slightly. The first episode was too plotty, and some of the action was unlikely. Would anyone really want a job so much that she would have the nerve to arrange to meet the rival candidate, pretend to be the boss hiring her, and turn her down? If they are going to make Yvonne (Sally Rodgers) the duplicitous villain of the piece - the Rachel, as it were - she will have to be toned down. There is a danger, too, that, with the bubble bursting on e-commerce, Attachments will look dated. Things move fast: wouldn't the naked Brandon be riding a silver scooter, not a skateboard?
But Attachments is so much better than most series that you wonder why, 40 years after he started out as an actor at the BBC, only Garnett and his production company, World Productions, know how to make credible, relevant contemporary dramas. If Attachments does not save Jane Root's job as controller of BBC2, nothing will.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
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