Mar 30, 2023
ScreenPlay: Christine (BBC, 1987)
"Jess?"
"What?"
"Your dad don't know, does he?"
#screenplay#christine#alan clarke#drugs tw#needle tw#bbc#1987#single play#classic tv#arthur ellis#vicky murdock#kelly george#joanne mapp#mark harvey#anthony smith#brenda reid#seemingly styled at various points in its existence as ScreenPlay‚ Screenplay and Screen: Play‚ ScreenPlay (??) was a late attempt by the#bbc to revive the drama anthology format in a more modern manner‚ shot on film and using young and outspoken writers to#produce realistic films about gritty subjects. Christine was Clarke's first production for the strand (tho not his last) and it's a very#typically Clarkean treatment of an unsettling subject; in his trademark steadicam trailing of characters we follow a group of pleasant‚#smartly dressed teens in a nice suburban setting as they go about typical summer holiday business‚ planning parties‚ chatting‚ trading#gossip. except that as they do all this‚ they repeatedly inject heroin. it's a jarring disconnect‚ and a powerful one‚ with their drug use#and habits not once directly referred to‚ but simply carried out in simple straightforward moments as they watch children's tv or chatter#about records or whose sister is married etc etc. deeply unsettling‚ and anchored by Murdock's Christine‚ whose almost matronly#approach (constantly cleaning up after the others‚ diligently washing needles and disposing of refuse) is at odds with her identity as a#drug dealer to her friends. Clarke and Ellis don't lay on any preaching or sermonizing‚ nor even any judgement really‚ content to present a#documentary style record of drug abuse among relatively comfortable but nonetheless isolated young people. if there's a lesson or a message#in their work then they're satisfied for the viewer to do the work themselves and perhaps that's a truer form of thought provoking#certainly it's a recurring idea in Clarke's later work‚ stripped as it often is of any excess dialogue‚ music‚ exposition#by the late 80s his work was becoming somehow both simpler and more streamlined and yet more challenging for that