I know it's not important, and I don't want to be one of those people who write into Points of View/Radio Times complaining about a non-salient point of a TV drama.
Watching Waking the Dead the other night. They were interviewing a former Cabinet Minister, who mentioned that he had been working on a White Paper that had a Second Reading.
Wait on, I thought, White Paper: Second Reading. I don't think so. I know about Parliamentary procedure. But then I got to doubting my own knowledge. I ended up googling and wikipeding, and, of course, I was right. But there again, I ought to be right about the basic noddy stuff of Politics. But, surely, other people know this. Should I be surprised/shocked/appalled that seemingly, not one person involved in the making of Waking the Dead doesn't know something so basic? Surely I can't be the only viewer who has a basic understanding of Parliamentary Democracy.
Sometimes, I allow for poetic licence. Watching the Bill and seeing someone run down my road, and turn the corner onto a Thameside Path; this is a fictional portrayal of fictional Sun Hill. It's amusing but no more incongruous than the fact that time passes a lot more quickly on telly than in Real Life. Genuine continuity errors are funny - the famous episode of Yes Minister when Bernard's tie changed radically mid-conversation without human intervention.
I get annoyed at dated portrayals. Like in Judge John Deed, when various Senior Officials are all portrayed as dour men in grey suits, in cellular offices. Or when TV tries to portray an office setting, and has everybody talking fervently evangelically slightly rapidly and a bit breathlessly. Have they ever been in an office? I have never yet seen a portrayal of a local councillor and/or local politics that bears the slightest resemblance to reality. Don't they do their research? Dialogue in Eastenders is hysterically funny, all these half-wits sounding like they've been 20 rounds in psychotherapy and are so in touch with their feelings and able to articulate them in long words.
But paradoxically, I can take the unrealistic dialogue in most drama. The fact that everybody is capable of stringing words together coherently and logically. I don't know anybody who does that unfailingly. Even when I'm being articulate and in full flow, with someone a friend or a colleague who's likewise, we don't have a chess game of perfectly formed sentences and phrases. Sometimes we talk over each other; sometimes there's a verbal shorthand; half-expressed thoughts clarified by facial expressions or hand waving; misunderstandings quickly rectified; stroking words put in; someone momentarily dropping the concentration to take a sip of tea or wine. It's how it happens in real life, but I think it would make really bad TV.
I know ultimately these things don't matter, compared to how the drama plays and resolves or how the characters are portrayed.
But it still bugs me that they get basic facts wrong. Facts that everybody ought to know, and if they don't, they have no business writing about them in a Prime Time drama series.
