- A television series which is simultaneously
- an essay on architecture in a specific place (Leeds and related places, the group of islands Leeds is in),
- a political tract concerning public space, everyday life and policing,
- a poem about the relation of texts (including music and maps) to everyday life,
as well as being an engaging drama which takes the detective story format in a different direction to other works that revise or reuse this format.
- Instead here the motion is towards something gentler, more ordinary and more integrated into everyday life off-screen (for instance in terms of the locations and characters). An idea of the detective story narrative as a journey/path/route, even an excuse, that allows the text to visit, examine and potentially transform everyday spaces and places, is already inherent in the stories of Raymond Chandler for instance, and is here amplified to subversive effect, shorn of the violence and macho tone in amusing ways (which oddly produces a result a little like the films of Jacques Rivette, approached from a completely different angle). You end up with a set of instantly applicable ideas for living.
- Brief plot summary: two high school teachers in Leeds become involved with two men running a (legal) alternative economy, and subsequently all four are tracked by an over-eager young policeman. Eventually all of these characters realise they have unearthed corruption at the top of the local government and police force.
- The aforementioned modes (essay, tract, poem, (story)) are all related to one another, an archipelago of ideas, and are woven skilfully together in the construction of the series, through each formal element. In this way problems are dealt with in a complexity of pattern beyond simple oppositions (characters switch sides). A method of production which thinks by moving through space, and uses the tools of filmmaking to think (through space)(best exemplified by Varda's LES GLANEURS ET LA GLANEUSE (2000)). This space is the familiar spaces and places of the contemporary city (somehow little has been lost in relevance since the original broadcast / same economic era? / the beginning of the dodgy development, construction, rather than the industrial ruin, as the dominant marker in the landscape).
- Location: these are the actual spaces of Leeds 1985, filmed on location. 80s housing, post-war housing, pre-war housing, high schools, town halls, city centres, police stations, planning offices, mansions, building sites, demolition sites, allotments, modernist and anti-modernist buildings. Brecht's making an instant stand out without hiding what it stands out from. In being visually represented, already a fiction, these spaces are immediately also being subverted, producing alternative approaches to them. Working at a local level produces a practice, ironing out the generalising aspects of wider theories, for instance that of the state apparatus which is referenced by the young policeman. Is this a useful way of demonstrating there is something in these kind of theories?
- Image: use of framing as an immediate simple subversion: an astonishing shot that tracks up the outside of the regulated box structure of a high school building, but within the windows you can see the chaos of children chasing and fighting. Use of wide shots that track outwards to be comprehensive about each space (for instance the new housing estate where the woodwork teacher lives, or a roundabout).
- Writing: each episode begins with a title which will eventually be spoken by one of the characters, a puncturing gesture that immediately takes the viewer into a level above the text as well as the text itself: here is where the essay, tract and poem can take place (above the level of being (vaguely) engrossed? still a problem with this kind of thinking, a snobbery? to veer away from this familiar edge).
- Characters: the protagonists actions and uses of city space form a possible, simple, modest, gentle, everyday anarchism. They defy the categorisation and authority-structuring of space: a shed is an office, a parish church (and later a flat) is a warehouse. "Planners make a church a church". Within the home, falling asleep on the sofa (life's great pleasure - the scene in THE LONG GOODBYE (1973) where Marlowe wakes up in the middle of the night and goes to the supermarket - breaking down the day/night behaviour distinctions). A house as another building in the city; treating each building in the city as of equal use; using the city, actually going to a town hall and asking questions; running for a local election.
- Simultaneously the characters defy established social relations. The priest is not actually a priest, and the two brothers are not actually brothers. Association and solidarity; a family who are not family develops. The villains (businessman, police chief and local councillor) are those who use the structure to gain power and capital, and illicitly subvert the structure for their own ends without transforming it in general (corruption). Chilly handshakes in the town hall. The two brothers-not-brothers are actively resisting the free market by running their own "white economy".
- Finding it more and more difficult to remember what is possible on a really simple level, squeezed by technology and the market. The characters in this series listen to jazz, wear good clothes (especially Barbara Flynn's character), build furniture, go to the cinema, work in the garden, walk around, fall in love. There's so little time to be together.
- Maps: thinking of maps as a formal element of any moving image. This series features different kinds of map, some authoritarian (plans, police notes, computer archives) some anarchic and unconventional (jazz records, the chance images and encounters of wandering around).
- Sound: jazz, popularly available, massively subversive, a way to make everyday life more fun, more colourful, to make a game of each day going to work and coming home again. Or simply a way to introduce new sounds into the listened-to-landscape. The narrative, familiar but warm and strange in a reproducible way, develops like a jazz piece, a collective journey that goes somewhere without stopping each individual from going on diversions of their own; it is actively produced across the duration of the series by these diversions. Like baseball or the grid of American cities, jazz, a structure as a simple frame for any number of other things and moments to be suspended in rather than dictated to.
- How to write a series of notes with this structure? An archipelago of ideas, not authoritative, possible to join into larger networks of co-operation, possible to wander off (where has G gone? we stood in the supermarket. "he's gone to the moon").
