FlashForward appears a fairly decent but unremarkable programme in terms of its plot and characters, but it attempts to deliver a very potent message. It’s not anything subliminal or intricately woven, indeed, it staggers up to your face and belches its words across your cheek with a healthy splattering of spittle. All the tact of a drunken fool, you might say.

The Demon Drink - the cause of lots and lots of bad things in FlashForward

The central character is Mark Benford, a recovering alcoholic. From the word go, FlashForward makes it clear that Mark is on borrowed time. His wife will leave him if he relapses, and his AA group provide constant reminders of the cliff edge he teeters along. Mark himself lives a life of denial and fear after seeing a flash of a future in which he is drinking again – or, to use the programme’s wonderfully prohibitionist parlance, “taking a drink”.

Now, I realise America has long used television to project the image of drinking as something done largely by hopeless Irishmen in dingy late-night bars, but FlashForward ups the ante with the bluntness of its demonisation. And it is part of an ongoing campaign to cast drinking in a negative light, one which appears in the face of failure to be taking a scattergun approach across television.

House is more of a drug user but his occasional fits of drinking nearly ubiquitously end in him laid in a pool of vomit on his floor. Throughout the series, the pattern is reinforced that he drinks and makes everyone’s lives worse, while Cameron sits at home with a glass of wine after work and everything is fine. It’s a more subtle approach than FlashForward but after a couple of series it’s still pretty clear what the message is.

A more interesting case is Mad Men, another American programme which I’ve watched from the beginning and after three series still cannot conjure up one decent reason why it exists. When all comes to pass and we go up to the pearly gates for reckoning, the Mad Men Series 1-13 box set will be bouncing along in front of me and when St. Peter asks him (and it will be a him, for Mad Men is a show for men) what he’s done with his life, he’ll just shrug and go, “well, I…” and fade off into a very soulless, insubstantial yet somehow eerie 42 minute monologue about advertising and sex.

Mad Men - better known as smug cocks with brandy

The programme portrays a 1960s American view of drinking, naturally contrasting to much of what’s shown today. It’s a world of men drinking spirits in the office, cocktails over dinner and coming home to pull a beer out of the fridge. Drinking is a very routine part of life, very rarely shown to any form of excess. The over-arching impression I get is that they show drinking as something the characters do to ease their own inadequacies; whenever a tragedy or troubling moment occurs, the man reaches for the bottle while his wife falls by the wayside and tries to comfort him. It’s quite a sad picture, quite bleak, and quite off-putting – the message is, “you don’t want to be like these men”.

The antithesis to this recent phenomenon of anti-beer fascism might be Cheers. At times it’s saying exactly the same thing – too much drinking is bad for you – but it’s altogether a much gentler message. The lead character is a reformed alcoholic (well, by American standards) and it’s occasionally mentioned that he no longer drinks, but it’s only ever in passing. The bar fly at the end opens most episodes with a one-two: “Hey Norm, what do you say to a beer?”, “Hello *drinks* goodbye.” This lightheartedness is occasionally contrasted with moments when Norm takes things too far, moments which show genuine weakness in a man who likes to portray himself as easy-going; in comparison with the cudgel used by FlashForward, this way of showing how drinking can have negative effects is leagues ahead.

As ever, a history lesson would likely offer a few answers to the “drinking question”. Prohibition and demonisation do not work long term. People will still have an appetite to drink and will find ways to either circumvent legislation or filter out messages they disagree with. As sad as I find it to see pubs closing at the moment, I can’t worry about the long term because history shows that as one thing dies, something new emerges to take its place; I don’t know what that will be yet, and I’m sure when I’m an old man I’ll sit whistfully telling tales of the great public house of my youth, but it’ll be sat in whatever kind of place takes over as the social drinking place of the age.

I respect attempts to curb dangerous drinking as that is a social problem that it is justified to interfere with; as always, the moral I follow being that anyone can do whatever they like with themselves so long as it doesn’t fuck with me. But ham-fisted attempts to demonise all kinds of drinking do no-one any favours. They are unrealistic and simplistic attempts to challenge a “problem” that exists as much in perception as reality; it is a passed-on and accepted wisdom that society has a drink problem to be challenged, and successive generations attempt to apply the same old “fixes”.

I feel that all I can do is add my voice to the list of people who hope that cheap drink in supermarkets and corner shops is consigned to history, beer prices are lowered in pubs and we see something of a return to the pubs of the not-too-distant past – social drinking places where the demons are drowned out by laughter.

Beers · FlashForward · House · legislation · Mad Men · prohibition · TV

Picture the scene:

It’s the early 1990s and you are either William Broyles, Jr. or Al Reinert, both respected screenwriters.  You’ve just been asked to adapt the book ‘Lost Moon’ by Commander Jim Lovell.  You’re going to tell the incredible true story of Apollo 13- possibly the greatest rescue of the 20th Century.  Tom Hanks is going to star in it.  Ron Howard’s going to direct it.  Imagine and Universal are going to fling money at it.  Ed Harris has signed up.  As has Gary Sinise.  And Kevin Bacon.  And Bill Paxton.

To be frank, this thing’s going to get so many awards it’ll end up shitting golden statues.

Then the marketing guy turns up.  And he’s got a problem.  The trailer.

You see in the real events of April 1970 this is what mostly happened:

Nothing.

There was a relatively small explosion which left the men stranded over 200,000 miles from home but all they could do was slingshot round the moon and hurtle back to Earth through a dark empty void with nothing much to do but hope.  In reality, the world held it’s breath and the talent involved in the film would easily make a great human drama out of it but all you’re essentially writing is the story of 3 men in a box.  And all the marketing man wants to know is what the hell are we going to put in the trailer?

Especially since everyone knows the ending anyway.

So you, Broyles or Reinert, have to manufacture some action where previously there was none.  So you write an entirely fictional scene into this true story in which there’s a much bigger explosion and Tom Hanks is pumped into the vaccuum of space and killed.  It’s thrilling, noisy, exciting and entirely made up so it’ll probably mess up the narrative to have it in there.

So you get Tom Hanks to dream it instead.

I hate dream sequences. Mostly, they’ve been excuses to shoehorn in some manufactured excitement or intrigue without ruining the story- as in Apollo 13 above or, most infamously, the whole of Series 8 of Dallas.  This opened up a whole world of madness to a variety of shows over the years- the Saved By The Bell gang memorably morphed into worldwide rock sesnsations ‘The Zak Attack’, while an episode of Darkwing Duck saw the lead character enter his own dreams to fight a witch that he had become erotically infatuated with.  Remember, Darkwing Duck was a childrens’ cartoon- but filtered through the evil machinations of a writer allowed to let it all hang out with a dream sequence it suddenly became a terrifying mixture of A Nightmare on Elm Street and invasive brain surgery.

That was then though and times have changed.  The dream sequence has morphed these days to focus on the waking dream in which hallucinations regularly pop up to guide a protagonist through the plot that week because everyone’s clearly far too tired of contriving circumstances to explain actions and think it’s all better if someone’s imaginary friend does it instead.  Most TV shows these days aren’t complete without at least one maverick genius who is constantly plagued by someone in their head who magically appears at useful intervals to highlight important information and provide a distraction which, oddly, no-one in the real world ever seems to notice them suffering from.  Dr. Baltar from Battlestar Galactica spends half of his time imagining himself being dry-humped by a tall, blonde Cylon but no one ever seems to call him on the fact that he keeps phasing out of conversations with a far away look on his face and his flies undone.

After Girls Aloud, Sarah Harding's moved into ventriloquism proved less successful

I know this is all a nice allegorical way to demonstrate the internal monologue of brilliant minds but it’s simply left me terrified of clever people.  Dr House is another fine example- a man who seems utterly incapable of solving a medical mystery until a hallucination appears to tell him what dosage to increase and that it’s probably just a combination of wind and nostril cancer.

And now James Cameron has spent $400 million or something producing Avatar which is essentially a 180 minute dream sequence in 3D- clearly technology is at such a point that film-makers can do anything and so what they ought to be doing is, if they instist on having dreams and hallucinations in films and on TV, doing them properly.

My big problem with the dream sequences in the likes of Apollo 13 and the imaginary friends in House and BSG is that they’re too realistic, too normal, too much like the waking world of their subject and too obviously relevant to their current circumstances which dreams never, ever are.  Cameron at least appears to have tried to go a step further into the twilight world of the mind’s eye (and Darkwing Duck really had a pop at it) but why can’t dreams sequences now be more like actual dreams?  To get potential producers starting here, fresh from my subconscious, are a few ideas for dream sequences to be merrily slotted into anything that they see fit.

-  British heptahletes Denise Lewis, Kelly Sotherton and Jessica Ennis compete to find out who is the superior athlete with a race around the world in 1768.  They can travel by boat or catterpillar and are accompanied by the colour purple.  The eventual winner is Linford Christie stood on his head in a time of 4 seconds.

-  I get chased around a maze by a shoal of camels.  The maze is made of Tuesdays.

-  All cars are replaced by big, giant eggs that can fly, travel through time and move diagonally like bishops.  They are invented by comedian Tim Vine who becomes the richest man in the Universe and spends his money researching honey.

-  Everything becomes smaller and more pointy

-  The people making a film of your life eject you into space so there’s something for the trailer.

Anyway, goodnight. Sweet dreams…

Apollo 13 · Battlestar Galactica · Darkwing Duck · Dreams · House