It's ironic that within a couple of days of London's volcanic letting-go of emotion, BBC's main drama series for autumn 1997 should be titled Holding On. An eight-parter, written by Tony (Goodbye Cruel World) Marchant and directed by Adrian Shergold, Holding On is set in a tense, bleak, contemporary London, where society has atomised. To reflect this fragmentation, the drama has 25 main roles (some, admittedly, more main than others) in which the characters crash and scatter like snooker balls.
The crashing and scattering isn't random, of course: Marchant and Shergold wield the cues. But, at least in this week's opening two episodes, they have managed to create a peculiarly convincing sense of casual inevitability. These characters - who include Gary (Phil Daniels), a bulimic restaurant critic; Alan (Sean Gallagher), a paranoid schizophrenic; Sally (Fleur Mould), a young Lancashire lass working as an office temp; Shaun (David Morrissey), a fanatical tax inspector; a taxi-driver; a black commis-chef who dabbles in pirate radio; Claire, Sally's sister, and too many more to list - are all on the edge in the dark, decaying city. Hence, emotionally fraught, they are holding on.
Well, some of them are. Others can't quite keep their grip. Sally receives a picture of a colleague's penis in the internal mail. Later, she gets a filthy phone call and a rude note. The harasser turns out to be her smarmy boss. Alan's mother cannot get doctors to admit him to hospital. He is released under a Care in the Community scheme.
When, at the end of the opening episode, Sally and Alan have their random city collision, it is for Alan to stab Sally repeatedly in the stomach as she calls Claire from a phone kiosk. Sally dies as the cab driver looks on and locks all his doors. He didn't see what he saw. Shaun reads about it in the paper. This London is that kind of place.
Of course, countless cop series have included similar action. Almost always, however, the victims in standard cop opera (not Cracker, for instance) are two-dimensional and the perpetrators nasty in a nice, undemanding, simple way. In Holding On, however, Sally is the best developed character and the one for who we feel most sympathy, by the time Alan flips. "Stop speaking to the devil," he screams as, in a frenzy, he practically disembowels her. If the London of This Life was coarse, it was Enid Blyton beside the London of Holding On.
Unlike This Life, there is no soap opera communality here. But there are very weird camera angles. When Gary (a kind of overarching link for the series) decides not to hold on, but to vomit up some hideously expensive meal - in order to make room for a bag of crisps - we see him lean over the toilet bowl. There is, however, a camera underwater. Gary's face looms larger and larger. Sploshhhh . . . Gary's grub splatters the water as it makes the screen swim. If it's not quite in your face, it's more than close enough, thank you. Later, we share Jack-theLad Gary's perspective as his lover straddles him for sex. I'm still not sure where they strapped the camera for that one.
Anyway, you get the picture. There is a brutishness throughout this drama and, in that, it does reflect a coarsening - throughout the classes - of contemporary British (it's largely true of Irish too) society. There are clubbing scenes, stalking scenes, confrontational and counselling scenes - its scenes are certainly very 1990s.
But it's not just brutish. Much of the action takes place to a kind of fretful music of regret. It is not sentimental, but it is poignant. It is, in fact, a music which prompts plaintive feelings and, inevitably, wonder at how society could have got to this. Perhaps this excess of fear and loneliness is all Margaret Thatcher's fault - "no such thing as society" and all that nonsense. But that seems too simple. Certainly, the culture of greed accelerated fragmentation. But maybe other, less obvious cue-masters were controlling stronger, less understandable forces. Clearly, there is a paradox that as globalisation continues apace, people grow farther and farther away from their neighbours.
There are six episodes of Holding On to run. With so many characters giving so many possible collision combinations and permutations it's not, as yet, the easiest drama to follow. It does seem, however, that it's going to be worth persistence. Unlike drama with a regulation three or four main characters, its problem will not be in avoiding snookers. Rather, it will be to convey coherence - not a contrived neatness, mind - but a meaningful, albeit complex pattern. If, however, it merely glorifies some sort of postmodern chaos, it will be as selfindulgent as the most uncouth of the unconnected egos which form its cast. Still, it's looking good - we'll see.
If Holding On seems set to be the serious drama hit of the season, Full Circle With Michael Palin is a banker in the documentary category. Why not? Palin's appeal - established in his earlier Around The World In Eighty Days and Pole To Pole - is that he manages to make the wit seem effortless. It's gentle too. Even when he encounters nerds, dorks and prats - indeed, all the sub-species of Red Tapery - he seems able to smile. If ever he's not, the director just whips him off camera to record the voiceover when hindsight allows time for polishing up the, eh, effortless wit.
But even if Palinism is, paradoxically, one of TV's most carefully prepared concoctions, it regularly takes place in genuinely astonishing locations. Armchair travel, it might be thought, would lose its appeal, as real travel became increasingly affordable. But Palin began on Little Diomede, a rock in the Bering Straits housing 180 people. Even those business- and tourism-itinerants (you know, the bores who order the super-duper, thick-as-a-telephone-directory passports) are unlikely to have been to Little Diomede.
This time, Palin's journey is around the Pacific Rim - 50,000 miles in all. He's going down the Asian side first. Visiting Magadan, a city in Russia's Kolyma region, built by slave labour under Stalin, Palin's running joke was about trying, unsuccessfully, to buy a bath stopper. It was a rare instance of poor taste and the forced levity - anything but effortless - jarred with the general tenor of Palinism.
But for the most part the established mix of awe, reflection, humour and spectacle will see Full Circle hold big audiences. Confident of its own appeal, the programme has now dispensed with the pretence of lone travel. It's not that anybody sane could have thought there was no camera crew. But now, on camera, Palin books tickets for eight people. If this stresses the fact that these super-popular travelogues are really travelling TV circuses, that's OK. Palin is the star and, at this stage, he can carry millions with him.
Like Michael Palin, Ian Hislop has managed the trick of having his name as part of a programme title. Although Ian Hislop's School Rules will not draw the numbers of Full Circle, this three-part history of British education this century is equally witty and entertaining. Sunday's opening episode, The Fourth R, dealt with the teaching of religion in schools. It is hard to imagine that, in Britain, the intensity of this project was equal - or almost equal - to the story here. But Hislop painted a different picture.
Indeed, even in the matter of sex education, the Church of England had decreed in the early part of the century that "if reproduction had to be taught, it must be by reference to the vegetable kingdom". Carrots, onions, cabbages . . . it's difficult to see how appropriate analogies could be constructed. Anyway, among Hislop's central theses was that the aim of Edwardian education was to create subservient lower orders and public schoolboys who would believe it was their duty to lead.
The project worked spectacularly well. We know this from the first World War, in which men and officers kicked footballs ahead of them (sport was for character only, not for fun) as they advanced into German machine guns. The sheer callousness and evil of the imperialism which moulded people that way eventually gave way to a kinder, gentler - sometimes to the point of irresponsibility - view of education.
The most compelling scenes in Hislop's first episode were the opening ones. At - you'll love this - Burgess Hill Beatnik School (Pathe News, 1961) we saw eight and nine-year-olds smoking, teachers jiving and everybody generally having a good time. There was no conventional nonsense such as discipline or even order and the voiceover was, as Pathe voiceovers always were, daftly dramatic, condescending and corny. It was brilliant. By the way, the Beatnik School went bust in 1962.
But considering what the world was going through only two decades earlier, the Beatnik School wasn't all that daft. The Nazis - A Warning From History reminded us that ordinary citizens, not some over-hyped evil genius, as the "great man" school of history would have it, really call the shots. Hitler, this first of six episodes suggested, came to power not because of his appeal, but by default. A crumbling economy pushed people to the margins, starkening choice to the point of essentially leaving it, for too many, between fascism and communism.
That seems true, although there were some still defending Hitler's "charisma". Maybe so, but it's hard to see it. All that ranting - apparently even in small rooms he went on with that idiotic shouting - and that moustache and comb-over hairdo. C'mon - even in the late 1920s/early 1930s, that sort of combo can hardly have spelt charisma. Anyway, you all know the story and the end result. But, as it fades further into history, its sheer murderousness ought not be forgotten.
This one is produced by Lawrence Rees, the editor of Timewatch, and it does have compelling, new (at least to TV) colour footage. It was a pity the opening 18 minutes, which included some of the most intriguing footage, was silent on my TV. (Anybody else have this problem?) But it seems promising and with participants from the period in ever shorter supply it will, at the very least, make a valuable oral history. Perhaps the most striking aspect of all however is how unapologetic - to this day - some contributors were about the anti-Semitism of the time.
Finally, back on RTE, Glenroe - Going On 15 looked back at the agri-soap which has its roots in The Riordans and Bracken. In its own way this was poignant because in their time these dramas, along with the early Glenroe, did have much to say to and about Irish society. Now, Fair City is - narrowly - the premier Irish soap and it's difficult to see how Glenroe can regain lost ground. There were some worthwhile contributions in this look back in sentiment. But, really, new drama would be better than talking-head documentary about old. Holding on, indeed.