Some Mrs Winslow’s for the Cameraman Please

You have to admire the ambition, but the photoshop skills aren’t quite there yet.

Well, quite apart from the ITV Player sending me all the way to STV Player and then making me watch five adverts before being able to enter fullscreen, and despite the STV logo being set far too far from the left-hand side making it look like a UFO in the night scenes, Henry and I persevered in watching Broadchurch, which premiered last night.

Set in Dorset, Broadchurch is a detective series starting Olivia Colman and David Tennant.  The newly arrived Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (Tennant), aided by the local Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller (Colman), investigates the mysterious death of an 11-year old boy on a beach at the foot of a cliff.  The content is not at all gory or gruesome so far, so will no doubt please the Jan Moirs of the world.

The eventual solving of the murder (if it is indeed a murder) will have to be pretty original if the series is to overcome an almost stereotypical scenario in which everyone will be expecting the culprit to be a paedophile.

An ‘active camera’ so active that it seems constantly on the verge of zipping past its current subject and on to something more interesting, a la Richard Linklater’s ‘90s cult comedy feature Slacker or an upbeat downmarket wine advert.  It is perhaps too soon to tell if this marriage of camera and editing techniques so clearly associated with chaotic fun and ‘uplift’, on the one hand, to sordid, depressing programme content will end in divorce.

Just as jarring as the disjunction between theme and camera style is the mismatch of camera style and acting style, the latter being more suited to a stage play: especially the lingering New-Labour emphasis on weeping, wailing, hugging and general falling apart.  Are the programme makers aware of how strange these exclusively grown-up behaviours must appear to the victim’s contemporaries?  It seems they might: the dead boy’s sister takes the events completely in stride (not to mention having an illicit sexual relationship with a boy over 16); and the deceased’s best friend is too busy deleting an electronic trail of some kind to spend much time grieving.  Is this part of some sort of wry commentary on adult hypocrisy, or the badness of children, or just sloppy storytelling?  Only time will tell, but we’re going to give it the chance by tuning in next week.