The Comic Strip, Part 19 - Hey, lay your burden down

"The Strike" - February 20, 1988

The history of Hollywood is strewn with tales of writers who are forced to watch as their stories are dismantled by the movie-making machine. As a response to this, there are also a fair number of memoirs and novels by former screenwriters about writers who are forced to watch as their stories are dismantled by the movie-making machine. Some of these have been turned into films, most of which have had their stories dismantled by the movie-making machine.

The miners' strike of 1984-5 was a major event in the UK that Americans have only a slight awareness of. Like the execution of Derek Bentley, the Mod/Rocker riots, and the Profumo affair, it's one of those things that we don't know the specifics about, but can see the reverberations of. Here is the Wikipedia article on the miners' strike. I've read up on the details enough to know that I will never get a sense of what it was like to be in the UK possessing an opinion-generating brain as it was going on. To make the point that this episode is making, they could have used any historical incident. They picked one that at the time of the filming was just two years out. There must have been open wounds, just as there are at the end of the episode.

The beauty of this episode lies in how far they are willing to push the theme to make their point. Not only do we get the concept of a Hollywood version of the life of Arthur Scargill, but we get Al Pacino. And where most versions would just refer to Al Pacino in the background, here we actually get Peter Richardson as Pacino on screen. (We also get a surprisingly excellent Jennifer Saunders as Meryl Streep. I was going to search out a copy of The French lieutenant's Woman, as it (as I recall) has the same juxtaposition of story being filmed and story on screen, and it might have had some bearing on what Saunders/Streep was doing with her character - I have no idea what the business with all the oranges is referring to, for example.) In any event, this is the real Arthur Scargill:


Here is Peter Richardson as Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill:


I've lived a number of places in my life, and it is always difficult looking at some film or television show that is supposed to take place somewhere that you can tell nobody in the whole process of making the thing has come within a hundred miles of. I can't imagine how exasperating it must be to live someplace where people actually travel to film the misconceptions, rather than staying put and getting them wrong in a soundstage or on a backlot. At the beginning of the film within a film we see heroic young Arthur Scargill in a "pub" surrounded by cackling Dickensian homonculi. All I could think of was Rik Mayall's cameo at the beginning of An American Werewolf in London.

Much of the episode was filmed on location in Wales. Early on, there is a scene where the idealistic scriptwriter is showing the art directors exactly where the events of his script happened.


The filmmakers are aghast - the location looks nothing the way they have visualized it. Everything has to be changed. The location in Wales that The Comic Strip used to film these scenes aren't (so far as I've been able to tell) where these events happened. Thus the art directors for The Comic Strip had to find a location that looked like the sort of place that these events would have taken place (while still looking interesting - note how the road curves out of the shot. It's a nice image.) the dissonance caused by filming a scene about filming a scene makes my head hurt - I keep writing these enormous paragraphs only to delete them because they no longer make sense.

So far as I know, this is the only episode to be honored with an award. In 1988 it took the Rose d'Or, which seems to honor entertainment in television. If you click on the link, you will find a list of the other winners, including Rich Little's Christmas Carol (1979) and Pop Idol (2002). I recall seeing Rich Little's Christmas Carol as a lad, mostly because I remember him doing Marley as Richard Nixon all wrapped up in audiotape rather than chains, and thought it was a good idea for a costume should I ever need one in a pinch (I was 12 and had been given my first tape splicing kit for my birthday). Anyway. This award looks completely nuts, and I intend to pay attention to it from now on.