Heroes in Contemporary British Culture: Television Drama and Reflections of a Nation in Change 9780367653668, 9780367653675, 9781003129141

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Heroes in Contemporary British Culture

“This timely, vigorous, and wide-ranging book is a welcome addition to the scholarship. Korte and Falkenhayner demonstrate an illuminating depth and breadth of understanding of the texts and their contexts that contributes new insights on both.” – Michael Goodrum, Canterbury Christ Church University, UK “It has been a true pleasure reading this book. It offers a rich and engaging discussion of the ambiguous hero and the contested heroic in contemporary British TV culture. Moreover, it presents a range of deeply fascinating and thought-provoking analyses of contemporary series – military, espionage, detective and fantasy – and scrutinizes the protagonist – mostly male – as a figure whose actions raise the broad and important questions what counts as heroic and who can be represented as heroic. Thereby it includes a clever and critical discussion on TV series and (the lack of) diversity. It is highly recommendable to anyone interested in contemporary British TV culture and how TV fiction can contribute to our understanding of contemporary societies.” – Anne Jerslev, University of Copenhagen, Denmark This book explores how British culture is negotiating heroes and heroisms in the twenty-first century. It posits a nexus between the heroic and the state of the nation and explores this idea through British television drama. Drawing on case studies including programmes such as The Last Kingdom, Spooks, Luther and Merlin, the book explores the aesthetic strategies of heroisation in television drama and contextualises the programmes within British public discourses at the time of their production, original broadcasting and first reception. British television drama is a cultural forum in which contemporary Britain’s problems, wishes and cultural values are revealed and debated. By revealing the tensions in contemporary notions of heroes and heroisms, television drama employs the heroic as a lens through which to scrutinise contemporary British society and its responses to crisis

and change. Looking back on the development of heroic representations in British television drama over the last twenty years, this book’s analyses show how heroisation in television drama reacts to, and reveals shifts in, British structures of feeling in a time marked by insecurity. The book is ideal for readers interested in British cultural studies, studies of the heroic and popular culture. Barbara Korte is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. She has co-edited the volumes Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Popular Culture (2019) and Heroes and Heroisms in British Fiction since 1800: Case Studies (2017). Nicole Falkenhayner is Senior Lecturer of British Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg and author of Media, Surveillance and Affect: Narrating Feeling-States (2019) and Making the British Muslim: Representations of the Rushdie Affair and Figures of the War-on-Terror Decade (2014).

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Heroes in Contemporary British Culture

Television Drama and Reflections of a Nation in Change Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner The right of Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-65366-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-65367-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12914-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Heroes, television drama and a nation in change. Concepts and contexts

viii ix

1

1 The hero’s journey and the state of the nation

21

2 British soldier heroism in the War on Terror era

44

3 The heroic TV detective in the twenty-first century: Transforming archetypes

64

4 Secret service TV drama: Dubious ethics, dubious heroism

90

5 Merlin versus Misfits: Heroic British youth telefantasy

110

Summary and Outlook

135

Index

147

Figures

1.1 Hero-shot of the hero (screenshot from Robin Hood III/1) 2.1 The humanitarian hero (screenshot from Occupation I/1) 3.1 Luther staring down at Henry Madsen (screenshot from Luther I/1) 4.1 A hero’s death (screenshot from Spooks VII/1) 5.1 Tilted hero-shot in Misfits (screenshot from Misfits I/6)

28 53 72 97 128

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the Collaborative Research Center on Heroes, Heroizations and Heroisms (SFB 948) at the University of Freiburg for generous support during the production of this book. SFB 948 is funded by the German Research Council (DFG). We would like to thank Jessica Hargreaves, Cindy Hügel, Alexandra Kuhn and Özlem Sarica for their assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.

Introduction Heroes, television drama and a nation in change. Concepts and contexts Barbara Korte

Aims and premises This book investigates how British culture represented and negotiated heroes and heroisms (patterns of heroic action and behaviour) during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. As described by the historian Max Jones (2007, 440), heroes are a site in which cultural attitudes and social practices can be examined. From this perspective, this book considers the heroic not only as an object of investigation per se, but as a tool for cultural and social exploration.1 It posits that an inspection of the heroic reveals contemporary Britain as a society challenged by change, crisis and contested identity. This nexus between the heroic and the state of the nation is examined through a set of case studies focused on television drama. Television has been described as a “repository for meanings and a site where cultural values are articulated” (Gray and Lotz 2012, 22); its programmes “comment on how we live and how we feel” (Wickham 2007, 1). Such functions are most apparent in the characters and narratives of television drama. Television drama partakes in popular culture’s shaping of the national imagination (Sandbrook 2015), and it has been noted for its power to mould personal and social identities, especially when it is realised in extensive, multi-part forms (Caughie 2012, 50). This power is enhanced by the fact that people not only watch television drama but also “talk about it” (Bednarek 2010, 8), and this communication has been accelerated by social media. The programmes discussed in this book constitute a cultural forum in the sense that they create, individually and accumulatively, “a discursive space in which a society’s problems, wishes, and cultural values are laid open and negotiated” (Steiner 2018).2 Such negotiation does not necessarily use templates of the heroic. However, because television drama depends on its engaging narratives and characters, it has responded almost naturally to a revival of the heroic that arose around the turn of the twenty-first century. Television drama fosters and at the same time scrutinises this revival. It critically questions the meanings of heroic character and heroic action in the present day, and also utilises the heroic to probe contemporary society.

2  Barbara Korte It is a frequent diagnosis that, after the Second World War, Western culture entered a “postheroic” age (e.g. Münkler 2005): heroes went out of fashion and lost their power of enchantment; former heroes were debunked. There is certainly evidence for this trend, despite the fact that appreciation for civil heroism never seems to have waned (Wendt 2016). However, heroes began to garner increased interest as the twentieth century drew to a close. The 2000s are marked by a renewed attention to heroes in daily life and popular culture, and by a revived discourse, both appreciative and critical, of the heroic. In the summer of 2020, the public applause for medical workers and other carers during the Coronavirus pandemic proved that people are disposed to heroise those who show extraordinary effort and selflessness, just as people enjoy performances of the heroic in their entertainment media. Heroes and their deeds are attractive; watching them “is compelling— literally commanding our attention” (Franco, Blau and Zimbardo 2011, 99),3 and there are several reasons for this. As Benjamin van Tourhout writes, heroes are “both new and old,” and they “combine nostalgia with utopian ideas” (2018, 53). Heroes can serve as an anchor for collective memory but also as a projection screen for people’s needs, desires and expectations for the future. Heroes often “concretise abstract moral paradigms” and demonstrate that “morality is that special ingredient which divides stunts from heroism” (99). As Geoffrey Cubitt notes, heroes are “endowed by others […] with a special allocation of imputed meaning and symbolic significance,” and are objects “of some kind of collective emotional investment” (2000, 3). Heroic figurations, and the discourse that accumulates around them, focus social meaning. Heroes can become the node of a collective’s shared values and act as leaders in moments of crisis (Franco 2017). Heroizations typically occur when a collective’s sense of identity and cohesion are at stake, and while it is not difficult to find positive examples of heroic leadership (such as Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela), the emergence of populists and “strongmen” in contemporary politics is an alarming manifestation of this phenomenon. This book proposes that the moments when the heroic is visible, when it is given increased attention in the public and in popular forms of representation, are also the moments when social coherence is frail and social meanings are contested. For the purpose of cultural analysis, the heroic serves as an indicator of the state of the nation and its corresponding “structures of feeling,” to use Raymond Williams’s familiar concept for the arrangements of affects and moods that shape generational experiences in a given context.4 This book reflects recent work in cultural, social and historical studies,5 but it does not approach the heroic within the framework of psychology,6 or through a universalising mythography as in Joseph Campbell’s famous Hero with a Thousand Faces, first published in 1949. Rather, it assumes that the heroic is culturally constructed and situated in specific contexts. Figurations of the heroic are derived from processes of heroisation in acts

Introduction 3 of communication; heroes and heroisms are constituted by the ascriptions, descriptions and evaluations of various kinds of publics (Falkenhayner, Meurer and Schlechtriemen 2019, 6). There is therefore no “fixed” definition of the hero or of heroisms as patterns of heroic action and behaviour (von den Hoff et al. 2019, 10); instead, the meaning of the heroic at a specific time and place can be described as a fluid constellation of certain features. However, some of these features are more stable and prominent than others, also across time and space, and seem to form the core of our understanding of the heroic. Heroes are widely understood as extraordinary in their character and deeds; they are charismatic; their determination and agency surpass those of ordinary people. Heroes often stand in agonistic relationships to grand opponents and show an unusual willingness to take risks; they act beyond what is required by duty and without the expectation of reward. From a sociological perspective, their actions guard or challenge the borders that structure the social imaginary; they stabilise or transgress the values and norms of a collective; they mark what is and what is no longer acceptable to its ideals and aspirations. This “bordering and boundary work” (Schlechtriemen 2019, 23) connects the heroic fundamentally to collective identity and morals. Heroes can be models of excellence and human potential, they can inspire and mobilise others. However, their transgressiveness can also make them controversial; questionable heroic action demands legitimation. This makes the contested hero a particularly strong indicator of rifts that run through a collective, and of fault lines in its moral system. Heroic figures tend to be juxtaposed with counter-figures, such as the outright villain, as well as the more ambiguous figure of the anti-hero who lacks features of established heroism or whose heroism is corrupted.7 The borderlines between heroes, perpetrators and victims can be disturbingly permeable (Giesen 2004, 6). The preceding remarks have suggested that heroes have high social effectivity and a highly affective charge. They are admired, perhaps even venerated, but they can also be disturbing and arouse fear. It is not surprising, therefore, that a new academic interest in the heroic coincides and partly overlaps with new research in affect studies and its interest in how “affectivity seems to have become an ever more important part of social life today,” and in how “politics, economy, and culture are becoming increasingly affectdriven” (Sharma and Tygstrup 2015, 3). As Raymond Williams emphasised, the forms and conventions of literature and art “are often among the very first indications” of new structures of feeling (Williams 2015, 24), and we can include television drama here.8 The case studies in this book focus on multi-part television drama because its sheer scope—especially in the form of series and serials9 —has a special potential to engage its viewers intellectually, imaginatively and affectively, and “to explore society in its different layers” (Lusin and Haekel 2019, 14). Multi-part television drama also has a special affordance to explore the heroic in its complexity and its dynamics of change. To prepare the case

4  Barbara Korte studies of the later chapters, the subsequent sections sketch the horizon of heroisation in contemporary Britain, the continued importance of television as a national medium, and the affordances of (multi-part) television drama for projecting the heroic. The final section introduces the selection of material for the case studies.

Horizons of heroisation in twenty-first-century Britain As noted above, the appreciation of heroes has its limits, and it undergoes change. Heroisation is subject to “dueling impulses to elevate and negate heroic actors” (Franco, Blau and Zimbardo 2011, 99). Heroisation and deheroisation are complementary, and as the case studies will elaborate, increased attention to the heroic often co-occurs with an increased fascination with anti-heroes and an alertness to the paradoxes and ambiguities of the heroic. Such impulses are embedded in historical epistemes, or “horizons,” of heroisation. These horizons enable specific narratives about, and constructions of, heroes in a specific period, and they have a significant influence on that period’s hero appreciation (Boudreau and de Alba 2011, 76). A society’s horizon of heroisation at a given time is not homogenous, and it can incorporate contradictory trends. In twenty-first-century Britain, Winston Churchill can still be heroised within the British collective memory of the Second World War (as in the award-winning 2017 biopic Darkest Hour), but Churchill is still considered a highly controversial figure from a postcolonial point of view, and his statue in Parliament Square was defaced during a Black Lives Matter protest in June 2020. The highly visible heroisation of carers during the Coronavirus crisis, with its focus on the heroism of “ordinary” people acting for others, might signal a shift in contemporary hero appreciation. This is certainly what the British artist Banksy suggested with a painting he donated to the National Health Service in May 2020. It shows a young boy at play with hero dolls, but the superheroes, Batman and Spiderman, are in the wastepaper basket. What the boy holds in his hand instead is an NHS nurse coming to someone’s rescue in the iconic Superman flying pose, right arm stretched out. Other typical superhero attributes are reinterpreted: the doll’s cape alludes to a traditional nurse’s garment, and the mask is no disguise but a medical face covering. Banksy’s artwork literally brushes aside the superheroes that shape the representation and discussion of the heroic in contemporary globalised mass media. It is too early at the time of writing to predict whether the carer heroism in the context of the Coronavirus crisis will have a lasting impact on the contemporary culture of the heroic, and whether it will stimulate cultural production to the same extent that superheroes did. However, it provides a caesura from which we can look back to the first two decades of the twenty-first century and reflect on how the cultural meanings of the heroic have been negotiated in relation to significant events and changes in British society.

Introduction 5 A significant shift in the horizon of heroisation did occur at the turn of the twenty-first century, and it was a departure from the herosceptical mood that dominated the era after the Second World War. The historian Max Jones (2014; 2015) demonstrates how easily Britain in the second half of the twentieth century substituted their appreciation of heroes for a depreciation and deliberate debunking, because the heroes no longer fit the dominant structure of feeling and political mood, as was the case for Scott of the Antarctic and General Gordon. After the Second World War, the horizon of heroisation became narrow; there was a growing wariness of established military and imperial heroes. This disenchantment with “great men” went hand in hand with a rising interest in anti-heroes. Rather than the straightforward heroes of old, the second half of the twentieth century tended to be concerned with victims and preferred flawed and even failed heroes. Jeremy Black noted “the more critical and sardonic, if not sarcastic, attitude toward heroism” displayed in 1980s television and film: “the popular British television comedy series Blackadder, for example, closed in 1989 with programs presenting World War I as futile, cruel and unheroic” (2000, 149). This anti-heroic stance was encouraged by the post-Vietnam disillusionment with soldier heroism, the anti-authoritarian counterculture that emerged in the 1960s, and even more widely by postmodernist thinking and its distrust of grand narratives. It is understandable, therefore, that in 2005 an article in a British media industry magazine expressed surprise at the BBC’s re-launch of Doctor Who and the production of a new Robin Hood series: “In an era better known for dramatic anti-heroes […] it comes as something of a shock to discover the good old-fashioned hero is back in vogue” (Wood 2005, 15). The article explains the revival of such programmes’ “heightened heroism” with nostalgia (generations of Britons grew up with the old Doctor Who series and earlier TV incarnations of Robin Hood) and with the anxieties of the post9/11 world: “In an age of global terrorism tales of heroes who can save us from danger are clearly in demand” (15). As the later chapters will show, not all British television dramas of the 2000s demonstrate a heightened heroism or are unreservedly affirmative of the heroic. The dramas are distinguished, however, from the debunking tendencies of the 1980s, when the myth of Scott of the Antarctic was deconstructed in Central Television’s seven-part serial The Last Place on Earth (1985), and of the 1990s, when even a highly popular adventure series like ITV’s Sharpe (1993–1997) countered its protagonist’s displays of swashbuckling heroism with repeated affirmations that he did not consider himself or his deeds heroic.10 When Tony Blair’s New Labour government was elected in 1997, it was widely perceived as a new era for Britain—a country then trademarked as Cool Britannia. At first, however, this did not have an impact on the horizon of heroisation. The values promoted by Blair—such as affirmative multiculturalism and an open society—did not have much affinity to most traditional ideas of the heroic. If there was a collective idea of heroism in

6  Barbara Korte the late 1990s, this was arguably embodied by Princess Diana, the Queen of Hearts who crossed class borders, campaigned for humanitarian projects and defied a royal family that was unpopular with the public. Her heroic traits were adulterated by her more superficial status as fashion icon and celebrity,11 but the cult that emerged around Diana, especially after her death in 1997, indicates that a new affectivity and sense of community was establishing itself (Seidler 2013). This affectivity paved the way for the largescale re-attention to the heroic in the 2000s, and it manifested itself not only in new positive feelings attached to “Britishness” but also, in the realm of aesthetics, a re-appreciation of spectacle (Kellner 2003) and the sublime (Johnson 2012). Both trends intensified in the wake of the terror events of the early twenty-first century. It is contested to what extent 9/11 was responsible for major cultural reconfigurations of the twenty-first century.12 However, as an event that established Islamist terrorism as the new antagonist of the West and drew countries, including the United Kingdom, into new wars, 9/11 was certainly a catalyst for changes in the horizon of heroisation. As Chapter 2 of this book will show, one of these changes was a newly appreciative attitude towards soldier heroism, even in a war that was considered controversial by Members of Parliament and by the British public. More generally, the heroic resonated with the insecurity created by terror and the measures taken against it, including expanding surveillance of all citizens. The attacks of 9/11, followed by the 7/7 attacks in 2005 on London transport and further subsequent terrorist acts, created a mood defined by anxiety and trauma; they helped to create what sociologists have described as the contemporary “society of fear” (Bude 2018) or “culture of fear” (Furedi 2018), which a “politics of fear” (Furedi 2005) can exploit and within which a positive disposition towards heroes can thrive—in real life as well as in fiction. Older, quintessentially British hero fictions were revived on television (Doctor Who, Robin Hood and, from 2010, Sherlock). Debunked heroes of British history also found new appreciation; Stephanie Barczewski shows this for Scott of the Antarctic and explains it with the growing conservatism in the climate of anxiety (2007, 311). The post-9/11 era reinstalled the heroic in non-ironic ways, as an imagination of reliable agency in times when ordinary people saw themselves exposed to an insidious threat and disturbing measures to counter that threat. Concrete acts of terrorism are not, however, the only reason to characterise twenty-first-century Britain as a nation facing crisis. Terror had far-reaching effects on the structure of British society, but there were also other large-scale transformations that overwhelmed, and continue to overwhelm, ordinary people’s capacity to cope. This can only be sketched in bold strokes here but will be expanded upon in the subsequent case studies. Terror on home ground made the “other” uncanny again (Fortier 2008, 38–65) and led to the perception of British-born Muslims as “enemies within” (Falkenhayner 2014, 2). It became increasingly obvious that New Labour’s 1990s utopia

Introduction 7 of a culturally and ethnically diverse society had not decreased racism in British society; like other European countries, the United Kingdom witnessed a significant backlash to multiculturalism in the years following 9/11 (Wessendorf and Vertovec 2010). On another front, New Labour attacked urgent social problems, but the financial crisis of 2008–2009 led to economic decline with rising unemployment and precarious jobs; many people lost their homes, while those whose greed was responsible for the crisis came out of it largely unscathed. Austerity politics to counter the recession have been implemented since 2010, including cuts in services and social care that had a “biting” impact on people’s lives (O’Hara 2014). Socio-economic gaps widened significantly, making the United Kingdom “one of the most unequal societies in the developed world” (Thane 2018, 448). In 2011, the year of the “riots” in London and other English cities (Briggs 2012), a YouGov poll found that “[a]lmost three quarters of British people believe that Britain as a whole is a ‘broken society’ whose ‘social problems are far more serious than they were ten or twenty years ago’” (Moran 2011). However, expressions of discontent during the riots were not only nourished by national developments; they were also connected to an awareness of global challenges— ecological problems and the impact of new media and technologies on people’s lives—that would have significant consequences for the future. Feelings of social exclusion, lack of agency and being “left behind” by rapid economic change in a significant part of the British population became a driving factor in the Brexit campaign and vote (Goodwin and Heath 2016, Guderjahn and Fischer 2019). The growing sense of crisis was accompanied by an “erosion of faith” in formal politics (Evans and Menon 2017, 70). As Guderjahn and Fischer summarise: Feelings of political disenfranchisement, apathy, marginalisation and powerlessness have been in the making for decades. As socio-economic conditions have worsened for large parts of the British population, the latter do not believe that their representatives work for them— they rather see them as pursuing their own and corporate businesses’ interest. Accordingly, trust in politicians and established parties has declined. (2019, 22) Like other European countries and the United States, Britain has witnessed a backlash against social and economic liberalism and a significant rise of populism that crosses traditional divides between the Left and the Right (Goodhart 2017). Both the New Labour and subsequent Conservative governments emphasised Britishness as a “deliberate attempt to strengthen and sustain a sense of national identity in the face of what were seen as challenging tendencies” (Black 2018, 14–15). These perceived tendencies included large-scale immigration and Islamism, but also the risks of devolution for national unity (despite the fact that Scotland voted against independence in

8  Barbara Korte 2014). The discourse surrounding the Brexit referendum, especially as pronounced by the extreme Right, bespoke a resurgence of nationalism, a pronounced border mentality, and an island mentality that went hand in hand with nostalgia for former imperial greatness. Anti-immigration discourse, also fuelled by the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, created a toxic atmosphere even for long-established black and Asian communities.13 Pat Thane (2018) concludes from her survey of contemporary history that Britain’s road towards Brexit created a nation that is at its most deeply divided since 1900 in terms of political beliefs, national and regional identities, class and race.14 There is a range of factors, then, that help to explain why the hero has gained new attention in British culture as a figure of special consequence in moments of insecurity and crisis. Apart from concrete events and statistics, the idea of heroes seems attractive to compensate the perception that people today live in a technological, bureaucratic, consumerist and mediatised environment that restricts the autonomy and personal agency of most ordinary people. The television programmes analysed in this book are embedded in, and engage with, the horizon of heroisation sketched above. They show that contemporary heroisations mirror the diversity of British society in terms of gender and sexuality, class and race. British television drama also reveals that the contemporary horizon of heroisation, while creating a more open disposition for heroisation, is still alert to the ambiguities of heroic character and heroic action. It reflects an ongoing fascination with anti-heroes and morally ambiguous heroism, not least because television has a general tendency to negotiate questions of morality (Briggs 2010, 148) and thus shape the “moral imaginary” of its viewers (Dant 2012, 203).15 To Dant, television transports an essentially “postmodern” morality, one that is conscious of uncertainties and offers its viewers “the autonomy to bring their own moral judgements to bear on a wide variety of situations presented in very different ways” (71). Media psychologists have shown that moral judgement plays an essential role in the enjoyment of television heroes (Raney 2011, 166–167), and what twenty-first-century viewers seem to enjoy most are anti-heroes. “Antihero narratives,” writes Jason Mittell, “regularly invoke relative morality, in which an ethically questionable character is juxtaposed with more explicitly villainous and unsympathetic characters to highlight the antihero’s more redeeming qualities” (2015, 143; see also García 2016). The protagonists of these narratives display “hero-like characteristics for which they are admired, but simultaneously act in ways that can also be regarded as morally questionable and bad” (Janicke and Raney 2018, 2).16 Studies of US-American television series (Lotz 2014, Vaage 2016, Scheg and Girardi 2017) have established the popularity of such dark and flawed characters and of moments when their behaviour violates the boundaries of common morality; the case studies in this book reveal the same trend for British television drama. The contemporary horizon of heroisation is wide enough to comprise undisputed heroes, as well as heroes that challenge entrenched ideas of the

Introduction 9 heroic. In either case, the heroic is articulated with social ideas and ideals, structures of feeling and political moods. Television drama has a special affordance to reveal such articulations because television has a general affinity to collective feeling and thinking. It must be questioned, however, to what extent television as a medium still has a national significance.

British television and television drama in the twenty-first century The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw unprecedented transformations in television culture. Television was redefined by “[g]lobal economic shifts, regulatory liberalization, and myriad technological changes” (Shimpach 2010, 1). Its programmes “must now be designed to travel, both spatially and temporally, as never before” (4). Indeed, to Shimpach, the re-emergence of action programmes with a “single narrative centered on a white, English-speaking, male hero” is an attempt to “unite a fracturing television audience” (8). But to what extent have these changes de-nationalised British television? Certainly, television in the age of cable and streaming services no longer entertains the nation as it did in the twentieth century (Williams 2004). Television audiences have fractured, and programmes are also increasingly watched in different places, on different devices and at different times. It has become rare for the whole family to assemble in front of one single television set.17 And yet, television still offers content—news, sport programmes and local dramas, for example—that helps to “construct a sense of unity and belonging for citizens of the nation” (Turner 2009, 62), and it still functions as a medium for “working through” the chaos and conflict of the world in which the viewers live (Ellis 1999 and 2000). While some television scholars talk of the death of linear, broadcast television, others speak of a television landscape “that encompasses both linear televisual flow and non-linear flexibility” (Woods 2016, 4). Television has survived as “an entity that most people still understand and identify as ‘TV’” (Lotz 2014, 7). Even when watched on mobile devices, it is still a medium that “fits into the routine flow of everyday life” and “attempts to reach out to the viewer by presenting a reflection or mirror of their own lives” (Casey 2008, 113). Through social media, television also retains what John Ellis noted as its “community of address” (1992, 139)—not so much in terms of a family audience any more, but a more liminal community of communication amongst fans: “The development of social media and online chat fora has given viewers many more avenues through which to comment on, and engage with, programmes” (Bignell and Lacey 2014, 2). On the production side, British broadcasters are challenged by the economic power of American cable stations and big streaming services. Increasingly, British broadcasters are commissioning drama series from independent producers with international aspirations, or co-producing with global streaming services.18 And yet, while the production of very expensive

10  Barbara Korte television drama has thus been transnationalised, British broadcasters, especially the publicly funded BBC, maintain their commitment to public service. Media scholars Ruth McElroy and Caitriona Noonan contend “that there are overarching public values at stake within local production ecologies that go to the specific cultural and social significance of television drama,” and they emphasise that “the significance of local production lies not only in its economic value, but in its potential to create local dramas that imaginatively reflect our communities at home and to others” (2019, 4). Despite significant change over the past decades, television still reaches viewers in domestic contexts. It continues to play an important role in representing the national past and shaping the cultural memory (Dillon 2010), and acts effectively as both a seismograph and a source of collective thinking and feeling. A 2017 study by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) shows that television was still the medium that drew the largest adult audiences in the United Kingdom, and the medium that held its audiences for the most hours per day.19 This status was confirmed during the Coronavirus lockdown in 2020, when overall television usage increased significantly for both news and entertainment programmes (Mayhew 2020, Kerrigan 2020). This included a demand for re-runs of favourite television drama. The BBC, with its commitment to public service, made several popular series available for re-viewing on its online catch-up service, BBC iPlayer, including some of the programmes discussed in this book (Spooks, Our Girl, Merlin). Other broadcasters did the same, also including programmes such as Strike Back (Sky) or Misfits (C4) that are the subject of later chapters. While this illustrates that some television programmes, especially series, have entered British cultural memory, this book looks at programmes in the context in which they were originally produced and viewed, when they resonated immediately with their target audiences’ experiences, concerns, fears, desires and fantasies. This is precisely where television drama and the heroic interact. If heroes are a projection screen for cultural values and needs, the television screen is a congenial site for projecting heroes and their meanings. One might ask whether there is a basic tension between the heroic as a manifestation of the extraordinary and television as a medium of everyday life (even if not all television presents everyday life). It can be argued, though, that it is precisely the everydayness of television that makes it a suitable tool with which to explore why ordinary people feel attracted to the extraordinary, and what meanings and imaginations they associate with heroic characters and heroic action. This book focuses on multi-part television drama because it has the capacity to develop its viewers’ relationship with a hero character in more depth than one-off dramas could. Multi-part television dramas portray heroic figures and actions over an extended period of time, with continuities as well as variations, and sometimes with marked paradoxes and ambiguities. The complications of the contemporary heroic, which make it a sensitive tool for cultural analysis, are especially emphasised in what Jason Mittell

Introduction 11 calls “complex TV” (2015, 3). This refers to a form of serial television drama that uses segmented, multiple and intercut storylines and constructs complicated characters and narratives. Complex TV encourages perplexing, unexpected turns and accumulates potentially contradictory meanings. It is often self-reflexive, aware of the narrative and televisual codes it employs, and demands the viewer’s intellectual engagement, also in relation to meanings and functions of the heroic. Not all programmes investigated in this book are complex TV as defined by Mittell, but they all display the production value of contemporary “high-end” television drama with a sophisticated multimodal rhetoric, intriguing storytelling and intelligent dialogue (Nelson 2007, Cooke 2013). A new “cinematic” quality made possible by new technologies enables television to depict heroic characters and action with highly affective, overwhelming images and sound. Television now has the potential to portray a heightened heroism that was formerly the prerogative of cinema. And in contrast to cinema, it affords the extensive narration of multi-part forms that are viewed in close temporal sequence, thus enabling the presentation of heroes with complications and contradictions that provoke reflection.

Material, approach and outline of chapters The proliferation of multi-part television drama in the twenty-first century demands that this book restricts its selection of material. The case studies concern dramas produced in the United Kingdom between 2002 and 2019.20 All programmes were originally broadcast on British television channels (mainly the BBC and ITV, but also C4, E4 and Sky) in an early or late evening slot, which is when high-end television dramas are normally placed and where complex engagements with the heroic can be expected. All programmes are culturally rooted in Britain and British history; they reference culturally specific content that has a special resonance with its domestic audience (while “Britishness” is also, of course, an important global selling point for UK television). Most examples consist of series and serials that ran for at least one full season, but in some instances, miniseries are also examined. This book does not consider programmes that started before 2002 (which excludes long-running series such as the medical drama Casualty), and in order to establish a clear link with the heroic discourse of the twenty-first century, only programmes that refer to the heroic explicitly, often even meta-heroically, in their own text or their peritexts of marketing and reception are taken into account. The combination of these selection criteria creates a bias in the material. It excludes many programmes that depict everyday, civil heroism, for example, daytime children’s programmes or documentaries, such as Inside London Fire Brigade (3 parts, ITV 2017).21 Overall, for the period and programme slots under investigation, drama programmes portraying an undisputed everyday heroism, such as Call the Midwife (BBC 2012–present), seem to be rarer than portrayals of the

12  Barbara Korte extraordinary heroism that commands attention but is also contested and calls for critique. This book’s special interest in television drama that portrays and reflects critically upon the heroic—per se and as an indicator of the state of the nation—also creates a bias in terms of genre. While television genres are often hybridised, genres “work within nearly every facet of television” (Mittell 2004, xi) and “function as cultural shorthand that link together a range of cultural assumptions to a shifting corpus of texts” (19). Television genres enable specific cultural, social and political meanings over others, and they play a seminal role in configuring the heroic for specific audiences. While selecting the material for this book’s case studies, it soon became clear that certain genres are more prone to reflect upon (rather than merely portray) the heroic and to explore its nexus with British society than others are. The examples studied in this book are therefore taken from television dramas that can be characterised as epic, military, espionage, detective or fantasy. This, in turn, implies a certain gender bias because these genres have a (white) male-centred tradition, but the programmes discussed all show an awareness of this tradition and counter it, sometimes explicitly, as part of a meta-heroic discourse. All chapters integrate critical and aesthetic analysis, thus revealing the wide range of televisual modes, codes, forms and styles with which the heroic and its nexus with contemporary British society can be configured. Chapter 1, “The Hero’s Journey and the State of the Nation,” focuses on three television series that revive English myths and make them relevant to contemporary interpretative, emotional and identity needs. All three series make explicit reference to Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey, which has inspired countless scripts for cinema and television. The heroes of myths regain interest in times of precarious national unity and eroding faith in democratic governance. They embody shared values, are connected to national traditions and memories, and exemplify efficient leadership. The programmes discussed in this chapter generally reflect on the construction of heroes and their power to enchant. Above all, they emphasise the nexus between the heroic and the nation at a time when Britain’s national identity and cohesion were challenged by terror, the War on Terror and controversial measures of securitisation, as well as by class and ethnic tensions. The adventure series Robin Hood (BBC 2006–2009) aimed to update the Robin Hood legend and engages playfully and anachronistically with its folk hero. While this series is still marked by ironic references to the heroic, the two series discussed for the second decade of the century, Beowulf: Return from the Shieldlands (ITV 2016) and The Last Kingdom (BBC 2015–2017), develop the interest in national identity and cohesion with reliance on an epic framework and the aesthetics of the sublime. Both programmes responded to a structure of feeling that surrounded the Brexit decision—the mood of a country that perceived itself as disintegrating and under both internal and external threats.

Introduction 13 Chapter 2, “British Soldier Heroism in the War on Terror Era,” discusses four television dramas about British soldiers on missions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Strike Back (Sky One 2010), Occupation (BBC 2009), Our Girl (BBC 2014–2017) and Bluestone 42 (BBC 2013–2015). Soldier heroism points to questions that are central to the contemporary understanding of the heroic, including the claim that the present is a postheroic era. More specifically, the examples in this chapter use the heroic to scrutinise the moral issues of soldiers who are sent by their government and in the name of their country into a controversial war. Strike Back perpetuates the war-adventure genre, albeit with some sensitivity to postcolonial and gender issues. Occupation and Our Girl are realist dramas emphasising that the kind of war hero most appreciated today is a humanitarian hero; at the same time, like the satirical Bluestone 42, they expose the fabricated nature of contemporary military heroic reputations and the way these reputations can be exploited. Chapter 3, “The Heroic TV Detective in the Twenty-First Century: Transforming Archetypes,” investigates the portrayal of (anti-)heroic protagonists in two outstanding BBC detective series with a focus on their negotiations of transgressive, ethically ambivalent heroism in relation to the social order. The police detectives in Luther (BBC 2010–present) and The Fall (BBC 2013–2016) reshaped the representation of the police force on British television by letting their central protagonists take on aspects of the template of the eccentric, boundary-crossing private detective, and diversified this heroic template in terms of gender, race and aesthetics. Using the highly successful series Sherlock (BBC 2010–present) as a foil, the chapter analyses how the series emphasise the thin boundary line between moral heroism and immoral villainy, and also discusses the series’ meta-heroic aesthetic strategies. The chapter retraces a shift in the genre of the police crime drama that allows police officers to take on aspects of both eccentric “super-sleuths” and dubious heroes: while traditionally represented in conventional, social-realist modes, the series discussed are as unrealistic as they are spectacular. The discussion of Bodyguard (BBC 2018) closes this chapter, showing that the trend towards morally dubious heroes in more psychological crime drama might already be over, while the spectacularity of heroic representations in this genre certainly is not. Chapter 4, “Secret Service TV Drama: Dubious Ethics, Dubious Heroism,” discusses a genre in which the anti-heroic bias of twenty-firstcentury television drama is particularly strong. Secret agents serve one of their country’s state institutions, but in contrast to the soldiers and police detectives discussed in the preceding chapters, they operate covertly and often in ways that compromise laws, violate citizens’ civil rights and erode trust. Spy drama has undergone a renaissance in British television in the context of pre-emptive security that followed 9/11. More fundamentally, spy heroism leads to basic traits of the contemporary understanding of the heroic, but it is also a lens through which to focus contemporary anxieties relating to the efficacy and morality of the state. Television is a medium

14  Barbara Korte in which the spying of secret agencies is spied on by the television viewer, and this creates a situation of double observation that intensifies this critical inspection. The long-running BBC series Spooks (2002–2011) probes the double-edged morality of secret agents. It portrays the inland intelligence service MI5 as a heroic community defending Britain against terrorism, political cabal and financial collapse. BBC spy programmes from the second decade of the twenty-first century—The Game (2014), David Hare’s Worricker trilogy (Page Eight, 2011; Turks and Caicos, 2014; Salting the Battlefield, 2014) and The Night Manager (2016)—reveal a more disillusioned view of the secret services and their capacity to keep Britain safe. The services they portray are corrupt, and what redeems them is only the fact that individual heroic officers are still willing to act on moral principles. Chapter 5, “Merlin versus Misfits: Heroic British Youth Telefantasy,” focuses on a genre that has, as of yet, received little attention with respect to its British incarnations and even less with specific regard to the role of its heroisations. The chapter argues that television drama with a fantasy or science fiction theme, aimed at an audience of teenagers and young adults and often with young protagonists, is a site in which heroic representations amass. This is largely due to the genre conventions of sci-fi and fantasy, as well as to the fact that the experiences of youth and the heroic are structurally similar in a number of respects. The ways in which British youth telefantasy represents, adapts and promotes the heroic therefore reveals what values producers believe ought to be passed on to a younger audience. The chapter regards two very different examples of the genre: the BBC’s Merlin (2008–2012) and Misfits (E4 2009–2013). Merlin, in a similar vein to Robin Hood, adapts a globally popular British legend, which is also an influential model for formula fantasy and its trinity of sword, magic and dragons. While at first sight the programme appears devoid of any obvious links with contemporary Britain, it includes many statements on gender, race and class, and openly promotes its own twenty-first-century definition of the heroic. The high-concept drama Misfits ironises both the twenty-first century’s popular obsession with superheroes and the specifically British discourse on “feral youth,” turning its ASBO protagonists’ sudden superpowers, and how to come to terms with them, into a reflection of their character development. The series redeems a disenfranchised urban youth that is often vilified in British public discourse. The final chapter synthesises the book’s main results: how television drama, or at least television drama in certain genres, hovers between affirmation and scepticism towards the heroic. It is precisely by revealing the tensions in contemporary notions of heroes and heroisms that television drama employs the heroic as a lens to scrutinise contemporary British society and its response to crisis and change. That British television drama is a cultural forum in which contemporary Britain’s problems, wishes and cultural values are revealed and debated, is to no small extent a matter of its extensive engagement with the heroic.

Introduction 15

Notes







1. This is the approach of the Collaborative Research Center on “Heroes– Heroizations–Heroisms,” at the University of Freiburg, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (https://www.sfb948.uni-freiburg.de/en). This book was significantly inspired by the Center’s interdisciplinary approach. A selection of the Center’s contributions to the theory of the heroic is available in an issue of its online journal (Falkenhayner, Meurer and Schlechtriemen 2019). 2. Steiner draws on Amanda Lotz’s (2004) use of the term cultural forum for television discourse that manifests across individual programmes. 3. The heroic can therefore be considered a part of a society’s “attention economy” (Franck 2018). It is significant in this respect that “heroes” have become attention capital in contemporary mass media and advertising. 4. Williams’s concept enjoys new currency in cultural analysis; see, for example, the volume edited by Sharma and Tygstrup (2015), which includes an excerpt in which Williams explains his understanding of “structures of feeling” (Williams 2015). It is also adapted in Boudreau and de Alba’s notion of “political mood,” which they define as “a set of affective arrangements that have an effect on political subjects and their actions” (2011, 77–78). 5. Apart from the studies conducted at the Freiburg Center, see also work by historians like Geoffrey Cubitt and Max Jones, and the sociologist Bernhard Giesen. 6. See the heroism studies developed by Scott T. Allison and George R. Goethals (Allison, Goethals and Kramer 2017), and the work of humanist psychologists around Philip Zimbardo and Zeno E. Franco. 7. See, for example, Bergonzi ([1965] 1980), Hasan (1995), Brombert (1999). 8. For representations of the heroic in the history of the British novel see Korte and Lethbridge (2017). 9. It is common to distinguish between episodic series and continuing serials, but the two types of serialisation now often mix and overlap. 10. See Korte (2020) for a closer analysis of Sharpe’s negotiation of the heroic. 11. See Jerslev (2014) on how contemporary heroisations interweave, and sometimes blur, with the present-day fascination with celebrity, i.e. fame based on reputation rather than actual deeds. 12. For views of 9/11 as a rupture in Western culture see, for example, Dixon (2004), Bragard, Dony and Rosenberg (2011), Hassler-Forest (2012), Lacey and Paget (2015) and Moïsi (2017). 13. As expressed poignantly in Shukla (2016), Warsi (2018) and Eddo-Lodge (2018); see also Korte and Mair (2019). 14. For the discursive topoi of a “divided Kingdom” and a “divided nation” see also Rostek and Zwierlein (2019). 15. Dant’s notion of the moral imaginary is inspired by Castoriadis’s notion of the social imaginary (The Imaginary Constitution of Society 1975) as a sphere “in which a society provides the answers to fundamental questions” (Dant 2012, 192). 16. For the disposition to like such dubious heroes see also Shafer and Raney (2012), Krakowiak and Oliver (2012), Janicke and Raney (2015). 17. For more in-depth discussions of these transformations see also Bignell and Lacey (2014), Cooke (2015) and Evans (2011). 18. Of the programmes discussed in this book, The Last Kingdom (BBC) was first co-produced with BBC America, then with Netflix, and the third season is entirely a Netflix production. On the BBC’s problems to compete in the drama sector see also Tait (2017) and Steemers (2016).

16  Barbara Korte 19. See Practitioners in Advertising (2017). Helen Piper has also argued that television drama is still part of the flow and production logics of broadcast television, and that national overnight ratings are still a major decision-making tool in programme planning (2016, 5). 20. All programmes are marked with UK as country of origin in the IMDb database. 21. In British television drama, the long-running ITV firefighter series London’s Burning ended in 2002, and its successor, Steel River Blues, was stopped after only one season (2004).

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18  Barbara Korte 2016. https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-andlack-opportunities. Gray, Jonathan, and Amanda Lotz. 2012. Television Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Guderjahn, Marius, and Jessica Fischer. 2019. “Understanding Brexit: Agency in Divided Britain.” In Brexit and the Divided United Kingdom, edited by Joanna Rostek and Anne-Julia Zwierlein. Thematic Issue, Journal for the Study of British Cultures 26 (1): 17–30. Hasan, Ihab. 1995. “The Anti-Hero in Modern British and American Fiction.” In Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades, edited by Ihab Hassan, 55–67. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Hassler-Forest, Dan. 2012. Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age. Winchester: Zero Books. Janicke, Sophie H., and Arthur A. Raney. 2015. “Exploring the Role of Identification and Moral Disengagement in the Enjoyment of an Antihero Television Series.” Communications 40 (4): 485–495. DOI: 10.1515/commun-2015-0022. . 2018. “Modeling the Antihero Narrative Enjoyment Process.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 7 (4): 533–546. DOI: 10.1037/ppm0000152. Jerslev, Anne. 2014. “Talking About Angelina: Celebrity Gossip on the Internet.” Nordic Journal of Media Studies 12 (1): 105–122. DOI: 10.1386/nl.12.1.105_1. Johnson, David. B. 2012. “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and Its Limits.” In The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Timothy M. Costelloe, 118–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Max. 2007. “What Should Historians Do with Heroes? Reflections on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain.” History Compass 5 (2): 439–454. DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00390.x. . 2014. “‘The Truth About Captain Scott’: The Last Place on Earth, Debunking, Sexuality and Decline in the 1980s.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42 (5): 857–881. DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2014.959717. . 2015. “‘National Hero and Very Queer Fish’: Empire, Sexuality and the British Remembrance of General Gordon, 1918-1972.” Twentieth Century British History 26 (2): 175–202. DOI: 10.1093/tcbh/hwu050. Kellner, Douglas. 2003. Media Spectacle. London: Routledge. Kerrigan, Lisa. 2020. “Inside Broadcast: How TV Has Risen to the Challenge of Lockdown.” British Film Institute, May 29, 2020. https://www.bfi.org.uk/ news-opinion/news-bfi/features/inside-broadcast-tv-lockdown. Korte, Barbara. 2020. “Heroic Affect and Structures of National Feeling on British Television: 1990s Sharpe Versus 2010s The Last Kingdom.” Journal of European Popular Culture 11 (2): 105–117. DOI: 10.1386/jepc_0020_1. Korte, Barbara, and Christian Mair. 2019. “New-Old Rifts: Brexit and Resurfacing Racism.” In Brexit and the Divided United Kingdom, edited by Joanna Rostek and Anne-Julia Zwierlein. Thematic Issue, Journal for the Study of British Cultures 26 (1): 73–86. Korte, Barbara, and Stefanie Lethbridge, eds. 2017. Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction since 1800: Case Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Krakowiak, K. Maja, and Mary Beth Oliver. 2012. “When Good Characters Do Bad Things: Examining the Effect of Moral Ambiguity on Enjoyment.” Journal of Communication 62 (1): 117–135. DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01618.x.

Introduction 19 Lacey, Stephen, and Derek Paget. 2015. “Introduction.” In The ‘War on Terror’: Post 9/11 Television Drama, Docudrama and Documentary, edited by Stephen Lacey and Derek Paget, 1–10. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Lotz, Amanda D. 2004. “Using ‘Network’ Theory in the Post-Network Era: Fictional 9/11 US Television Discourse as a ‘Cultural Forum’.” Screen 45 (4): 423–439. DOI: 10.1093/screen/45.4.423. . 2014. Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the Twenty-First Century. New York: New York University Press. Lusin, Caroline, and Ralf Haekel, eds. 2019. Community, Seriality and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century. Tübingen: Narr. Mayhew, Freddy. 2020. “UK Broadcasters Reaching Record Audiences During Coronavirus Crisis.” PressGazette, April 8, 2020. https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/ uk-broadcasters-reaching-record-audiences-during-coronavirus-crisis/. McElroy, Ruth, and Caitriona Noonan. 2019. Producing British Television Drama: Local Production in a Global Era. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mittell, Jason. 2004. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge. . 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Moïsi, Dominique. (2016) 2017. La géopolitique des séries ou le triomphe de la peur. Paris: Champsactuel. Moran, Alice. 2011. “Broken Britain?” YouGov.uk, August 18, 2011. https://yougov. co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2011/08/17/broken-britain. Münkler, Herfried. 2005. The New Wars, trans. Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nelson, Robin. 2007. State of Play: Contemporary ‘High-End’ TV Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. O’Hara, Mary. 2014. Austerity Bites: A Journey to the Sharp End of Cuts in the UK. Bristol: Policy Press. Piper, Helen. 2016. “Broadcast Drama and the Problem of Television Aesthetics: Home, Nation, Universe.” Screen 57 (2): 168–83. DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjw021. Practitioners in Advertising. 2017. “Adults Spend Almost 8 Hours Each Day Consuming Media.” September 15, 2017. https://ipa.co.uk/news/adults-spendalmost-8-hours-each-day-consuming-media. Raney, Arthur A. 2011. “Media Enjoyment as a Function of Affective Dispositions Towards and Moral Judgement of Characters.” In The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media, edited by Katrin Döveling et al., 166–178. London: Routledge. Rostek, Joanna, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, eds. 2019. Brexit and the Divided United Kingdom. Thematic Issue, Journal for the Study of British Cultures 26 (1). Sandbrook, Dominic. 2015. The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination. London: Allen Lane. Scheg, Abigail G., and Tamara Girardi, eds. 2017. Hero or Villain? Essays on Dark Protagonists on Television. Jefferson: McFarland. Schlechtriemen, Tobias. 2019. “The Hero as an Effect.” helden.heroes.heroés Special Issue 5: 17–18. DOI: 10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2019/APH. Seidler, Victor Jeneliewski. 2013. Remembering Diana: Cultural Memory and the Reinvention of Authority. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

20  Barbara Korte Shafer, Daniel M., and Arthur A. Raney. 2012. “Exploring How We Enjoy Antihero Narratives.” Journal of Communication 62: 1028–1046. DOI: 10.1111/j. 1460-2466.2012.01682.x. Sharma, Devika, and Frederik Tygstrup, eds. 2015. Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter. Shimpach, Shawn. 2010. Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Action Hero. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Shukla, Nikesh, ed. 2016. The Good Immigrant. London: Unbound. Steemers, Jeanette. 2016. “International Sales of U.K. Television Content: Change and Continuity in the Space in between Production and Consumption.” Television & New Media 17 (8): 734–753. DOI: 10.1177/1527476416653481. Steiner, Tobias. 2018. “What Would Jack Bauer Do? Negotiating Trauma, Vengeance and Justice in the Cultural Forum of Post-9/11 TV Drama, from 24 to Battlestar Galactica and Person of Interest.” European Journal of American Studies 13 (4). DOI: 10.4000/ejas.14045. Tait, Theo. 2017. “‘The Night Manager’: Shaken, Not Stirred.” Sight and Sound, April 6, 2017. https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/ features/night-manager. Thane, Pat. 2018. Divided: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Graeme. 2009. “Television and the Nation: Does This Matter Any More?” In Television After TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, edited by Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, 54–64. London: Routledge. Vaage, Margarethe Bruun. 2016. The Antihero in American Television. New York: Routledge. Van Tourhout, Benjamin. 2018. Hybrid Heroes and Ambiguous Empathy. PhD diss. University of Leuven. von den Hoff, Ralf, et al. 2019. “Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms: Transformations and Conjunctures from Antiquity to Modernity.” helden.heroes.heroés. Special Issue 5: 9–16. DOI: 10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2019/APH. Warsi, Sayeeda. 2018 (2017). The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain. London: Penguin. Wessendorf, Susanne, and Steven Vertovec, eds. 2010. The Multiculturalism Backlash: European Discourses, Policies and Practices. London: Routledge. Wendt, Simon, ed. 2016. Extraordinary Ordinariness: Everyday Heroism in the United States, Germany and Britain, 1800–2015. Frankfurt and New York: Campus. Wickham, Phil. 2007. Understanding Television Texts. London: BFI Publishing. Williams, Jack. 2004. Entertaining the Nation: A Social History of British Television. Sutton: Phoenix Mill. Williams, Raymond. 2015. “Structures of Feeling” [excerpt from Marxism and Literature]. In Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture, edited by Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup, 20–25. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wood, David. 2005. “Return of the Heroes.” Broadcast (November 25): 15. Woods, Fay. 2016. British Youth Television: Transnational Teens, Industry, Genre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

1

The hero’s journey and the state of the nation Barbara Korte

The hero’s journey revisited The changes British society faced in the early twenty-first century, and the ways these changes challenged national identity and cohesion, went hand in hand with new attention to heroic figures and narratives. This includes the heroes of myth who function as founders, anchors and saviours of the collectives that created them. As part of national traditions and cultural memories, these heroes are of special interest in times of precarious unity and fragile consent about ideals and values. It may not be a coincidence that the BBC revived one of Europe’s oldest myths as an epic television series (Troy: Fall of a City, 2018) at a time when the idea of European unity was under severe pressure. This chapter focuses on television series reviving myths with a more immediate relevance to Britain and the nexus between the heroic and the state of the nation. They follow the structure of the hero’s journey, the “monomyth” famously described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. “The composite hero of the monomyth,” Campbell writes, “is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently he is honoured by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained” (1968, 37). Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey was drawn from anthropology, comparative religious studies and Jungian psychoanalysis. The book was first published in 1949, and it arose from Campbell’s perception that his contemporary world was in need of myths and the meanings they offer—especially through their heroes, whom Campbell deemed “indispensable to the continuous circulation of spiritual energy into the world” (36). The Campbellian hero, therefore, is “eloquent, not of the present, disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn” (20). Campbell’s rhetoric is lofty, but his message has often been stated since: even (post)modern and seemingly postheroic societies desire “personages of exceptional gifts” as a source of meaning and inspiration, and as a force of integration and social cohesion. While the monomyth has a strong universalist element, Campbell was aware that mythology is “as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age” (382). Such translatability

22  Barbara Korte explains why the hero’s journey has been a source of inspiration for countless film and television writers and continues to be recommended in screenwriting manuals (e.g. Vogler 2007). Its influence on twenty-first-century British television is demonstrated in the three series to be analysed in the following pages: Robin Hood (BBC 2006–2009), Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands (ITV 2016) and The Last Kingdom (BBC 2015–2017). They are set in the middle ages, a period popularly perceived as an age when the deeds of great warriors and noble knights were praised in poetry and song, and all three programmes retain a close link to the mythologies from which Campbell derived his ideas. A practical attraction of the hero’s journey for screenwriters is that it provides the recipe for a compelling plot (adventure), a strong character constellation (hero, helpers, antagonists) and an engaging character arc (the hero’s development). In Campbell’s own words, the “standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return” (30), and this path comes with substages: the call to adventure, a phase of trials and, finally, the hero’s reintegration into society. All these elements are found in the case studies below, but these series also employ the hero’s journey in a more essential Campbellian sense because they present their heroes as a source through which a society can be (re-)born and healed. For viewers in Britain, all three series resounded with emotional and identity needs at a time when the United Kingdom seemed more unsafe and divided than ever. The appeal of mythical worlds in twenty-first-century television is, of course, not limited to Britain. Game of Thrones (HBO 2011–2019) and Vikings (History 2013–2019) were highly successful around the globe, and Robin Hood, Beowulf and The Last Kingdom were also produced with the international market in mind. Myths and their heroes speak to worldwide audiences facing uncertainty and crisis. At the same time, myths have national inflections: their heroes emerge from specific communities and cultures, and they retain this local significance when they are updated for the present. As constituents of national identity, myth and history are just as important as ethnicity, territory or economic and legal-political frameworks (Smith 2009, 14–15). All these dimensions also play a role when the nation is negotiated in television drama (Castelló 2009, 303). Robin Hood, Beowulf and The Last Kingdom treat English myths as parables for the national present and demonstrate that television programmes set in versions of the past always also “articulate the dominant anxieties, hopes and truisms of the national present” (Donald 2009, 126). Robin Hood retells the folk legends of England’s famous outlaw, or social bandit, to use Eric Hobsbawm’s (1959) term. Beowulf borrows from England’s most ancient warrior epic. The Last Kingdom adapts Bernard Cornwell’s popular novel series (begun in 2004) about the fictional Saxon warrior Uhtred and his service under King Alfred the Great. The actor Harry McEntire called it “an epic story about the creation, literally about

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 23 the creation of a nation” (“Making of” 2015), and such national significance is signalled in all three series. Robin Hood’s title sequence has the caption “Deep in the heart of England lies a legend.” The DVD cover of The Last Kingdom (2015) announces “England is Born,” and the Shieldlands in Beowulf were shot in recognisably Northern English locations, despite the fact the original Beowulf poem deals with south Scandinavian tribes, the Danes and the Geats. All three series present England as a country whose peace and security are under internal and external threat; as a result, issues of national integrity and identity are acute. The threats to which the nation is exposed call for a hero who will make England safe and whole again, and the hero characters of the series fulfil this expectation. They know how to fight and they act as inspiring leaders—in obvious contrast to the way British politicians were widely perceived to have handled the crises of the twenty-first century. None of the series propagates a naive faith in heroic leadership, strongman politics or populist nationalism. However, the series use their hero characters to probe the state of the nation and ask, often quite critically, what kind of agency is needed to preserve or restore the nation’s integrity and solve its problems. Of course, in order for old myths to be meaningful to twenty-firstcentury audiences, the myths must be translated. The three series configure gender and sexuality, ethnicity, class and age in ways that correspond to twenty-first-century ideas of diverse and flexible identities which are also reflected in the production codes of contemporary British television.1 The European tradition, with its white, male and often highborn heroes, poses an obvious challenge in this respect, and all three series respond to this challenge by distributing heroic agency more equally among men and women, different classes and different ethnicities.2 Notwithstanding such updating, the structure of the hero’s journey and its constituent elements remain recognisable—and are clearly meant to be recognisable. With their conspicuous use of heroic myth, the programmes discussed in the following sections invite their viewers to reflect on contemporary meanings of the heroic and its attractiveness and validity for twenty-first-century Britain.

Robin Hood: The people’s hero in times of trouble The characters and storylines in Robin Hood are familiar in Britain and around the world, due to the countless remediations in film and television (Knight 2015).3 Robin Hood is the nobleman who gives up his title and land to fight the villainy and injustice personified by the Sheriff of Nottingham. The Sheriff also supports Prince John in a conspiracy against King Richard the Lionheart, who fights in the third crusade and has been absent from England for many years. Guy of Gisborne is the Sheriff’s henchman and Robin’s rival for the love of Lady Marian; he commits heinous deeds but, over the course of the series, is developed into an anti-hero with relative morality rather than a villain figure.4

24  Barbara Korte Like all adaptors of the Robin Hood legend, the creators of the series aimed to make it come to life for their own time. One of its writers, Dominic Minghella, characterises Robin Hood as “an action-adventure series with contemporary resonance” (Kelly 2006, 28). The myth was updated with “postmodern strategies of pastiche and intertextuality” (Chapman 2015, 248), also in matters of gender and ethnicity (Gossedge 2015). Most of the leading male characters behave with “sensitive masculinity” (Donald 2009, 131), and there is a significant presence of female characters who fight as competently as the men. Lady Marian even develops her own social-bandit persona, the Night Watchman, and declares in an early episode that her father had her taught how to fight because he wanted her “to have choices in the world” (I/3). Djaq, a regular character in the first two seasons, is a highly educated Saracen girl who becomes a member of Robin Hood’s gang when he frees her from an English slave trader. Apart from representing another emancipated woman, Djaq makes the gang multiethnic and is a statement against the anti-Muslim discourse and feeling that emerged in the wake of Islamist terror attacks. In the third season, the character is replaced by a black Friar Tuck who becomes Robin’s mentor and thus performs an important agent function in the hero’s journey. The series presented a “medieval” version of the diverse society the BBC is committed to promote, and, despite the restricted setting of Nottingham and Sherwood Forest, this also includes regional variety; the members of Robin Hood’s gang speak with a range of British accents and in times of devolution this includes a Scottishaccented Little John. Robin Hood was originally broadcast in BBC One’s early-evening Saturday slot for family viewing. Part of its entertainment value derives from action heroics. There are swordfights and ample opportunities for Robin Hood to display his archery skills, but many swashbuckling scenes are presented in a tongue-in-cheek manner or exposed as stunts, for example, through the use of slow motion. Such parody of action heroics was part of the programme’s intention to mix drama with comedy (Kelly 2006, 29). This strategy was not inappropriate for Robin Hood’s trickster heroism, but it was not well received by all critics and was reduced after the first season.5 The main providers of comedy on the character level are the grotesquely evil Sheriff, played by Keith Allen, and Robin’s servant Much, an everyman whose earthly desires provide a homely foil for the grander displays of heroism. Robin Hood thus parodies the monomyth, while leaving basic elements of the Robin Hood legend intact, especially when it is related to social issues of contemporary Britain. A hero who steals from the rich to give to the poor was an obvious choice through which to address Britain’s status as “one of the most unequal societies in the developed world” (Thane 2018, 449). Measures taken by the New Labour government to address the inequality and poverty it had inherited from the John Major government were effective only to a limited extent. When Robin Hood’s final season was aired in 2009, the financial crisis made the programme and its concern with greed and

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 25 injustice particularly topical. Much of Robin Hood’s heroic energy is spent in providing for the poor and thwarting the Sherriff’s plans for increasing taxes. In the second season, the defender of the poor has become a living folk legend who is emulated in children’s play (II/3) and whose deeds are often cheered by an admiring crowd. The programme’s discourse of the heroic is more complex when it entangles Robin Hood’s outlaw heroism with other kinds of heroism and, eventually, with the fate of the nation. At its very start, the series engaged prominently with war heroism. When Robin Hood and his servant return to Nottingham from fighting in the Holy Land, they are tired of war. As Much puts it simply: “No more heroics, we’re going home” (I/1). Later episodes show that both men—and occasional other crusader characters6 —have been traumatised by the war and no longer believe in its noble purpose. Robin Hood, who fought in the King’s guard, returns with the reputation of a war hero but declares that “the battlefield is the last place you will find [glory]” (I/13). In a later episode he is given much scope to describe how he is haunted by “the terrors we saw” (II/12). At best, his war experience has taught him that violence is only a last resort: “And I know now, whether it was right or wrong what we did in the Holy Land, it makes no difference. So I have to try not to kill.” When Robin Hood was first aired, such dialogue linked up with widespread perception that British soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan were harmed in body and soul, and with the common view that this happened in a “hugely unpopular” war (Lacey and Paget 2015, 5). The legitimacy of the War on Terror was highly contested—especially after it had been revealed that British involvement in the invasion of Iraq as America’s closest ally was based on the false assumption that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that the British government had supported this assumption to justify intervention in Iraq. That Prime Minister Tony Blair lost the trust of large parts of the British public was “largely due to his arguments for war in Iraq” (Thane 2018, 436).7 The series’ references to the “ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan” were noted by critics (Gossedge 2015, 259) and confirmed by its executive producer, Foz Allen: We have Robin returning from the Holy Land, […] and he doesn’t really understand why we’re fighting 2000 miles away. […] I’d call it resonance really in the sense that we have boys dying in Basra, and nobody quite understands why, when there are things going wrong in England. (Wood 2005, 27–28) Not only does Robin Hood speak about the horrors of war, he explicitly refers to the crusades as an illegitimate war that is fought in the name of a foreign power (“Is it our Holy War, or is it Pope Gregory’s?” I/1). The series’ villains borrow American War on Terror jargon to legitimise their own unlawfulness: “Outlaws are classed as enemies of war, thus we can hold them without trial. And we can execute them without trial” (I/2).

26  Barbara Korte Robin Hood’s uncontested heroism as a defender of the poor is thus configured against a war heroism that is problematic because it is performed in a problematic war. Almost programmatically, the beginning of the first episode shows Robin Hood shedding his reputation as a war hero and embarking on a new journey as the rebel hero of Nottingham who fights evil not 2,000 miles away, but at home, where “the real cancer” is (I/2)—until the third season puts him on a new journey as saviour of England. The series thus presents Robin Hood undergoing several cycles of the hero’s journey, and it compares different kinds of heroism. While affirming that heroes and heroic action can be meaningful if conducted for the greater good, the series also uses the legend to debate more questionable heroic demeanour, including that of the Robin Hood character himself. It is important in this respect that the series puts considerable weight on Robin Hood’s gang, the men and women on whose courage and loyalty Hood’s heroism depends. The gang’s slogan, “We are Robin Hood,” is a leitmotif throughout the series. The heroic as portrayed in Robin Hood is democratic; it is performed for the people and by a heroic collective that includes males and females, the highborn and the common, whites and people of colour, Christians and Muslims. Hood’s gang is, in this respect, an echo of New Labour’s pre-9/11 ideal of an open and diverse society. In the storyworld of the series, the gang is not only important because they are co-heroes, but also because they act as a choir that comments on Robin Hood’s behaviour and thus performs a meta-heroic function. The legend’s shining reputation in the eyes of the people is countered with the more realistic perception of those who share Robin Hood’s exile in the forest. For instance, his comrades reprimand Robin for his moments of vanity and for stealing all the glory for himself (II/12, II/5). Robin Hood disappoints his comrades most deeply when he forgets his own moral principles. In one episode he even intends to torture and kill the captured Gisborne, not only because Gisborne was part of a conspiracy to assassinate the King in the Holy Land, but also because he plans to wed Lady Marian (I/8). For the original audience, the scene would have resounded with the torture of prisoners in the War on Terror in camps such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Since Robin Hood’s motives are impure, and because acts of violence against a helpless enemy contradict his self-proclaimed ethos, his friends remind him of the principles on which his heroic reputation is based: “Killing we do not do” (Little John); “We do not take part in bloodshed unless absolutely necessary” (Much); “What are you doing? You’re a killer now?” (Marian). The series presents Robin Hood as a hero who does not always deserve admiration, and this culminates at the beginning of the third season, where he loses control and undergoes a phase of deep despair. He has just returned from the Holy Land, where an attempt on the King’s life by the Sherriff could be prevented, but Lady Marian was killed by Gisborne. At the beginning of the third season, Robin Hood therefore has to undergo a journey of rebirth, and he is reborn as a hero of national rather than local

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 27 significance—a hero who is needed to prevent England from falling apart when a faction of nobles around Prince John, including the Sheriff, try to seize power. With this reorientation of Robin Hood’s heroism, the series is relaunched in a more epic, rather than folkloristic, mode and applies the aesthetics of the sublime quite conspicuously. In a basic definition, epic refers to narratives “on a grand scale, about the deeds of warriors and heroes,” and these narratives “are often of national significance in the sense that they embody the history and aspirations of a nation in a lofty or grandiose manner” (Cuddon 1992, 284). The aesthetic of the sublime, with its capacity to overwhelm and exalt, has a close affinity to the epic.8 With their grand heroes, extraordinary deeds and high style epics affect their audience and use this affectivity to bond them to the national collective. It would be too simple to explain the turn to epic within the storyworld of Robin Hood as a direct result of growing national feeling in British society. However, the New Labour government emphasised Britishness to strengthen communal identity and coherence in face of pressing challenges that not only included terrorism but also a possible separation of England and Scotland. As Jeremy Black writes, “the language of Britishness under the Tony Blair (1997–2007) and Gordon Brown (2007–2010) governments became an assertion of long-term values very much in relation to the political needs and cultural fashions of the day” (2018, 15). The shift in Robin Hood’s aesthetic treatment of the heroic and the way it links the heroic and the nation in its final season seem symptomatic of this trend. The third season could not have been more programmatic in the way it reimagined its hero as a saviour of England. The first episode of the third season, “Total Eclipse,” stages the reconstruction of Robin’s heroism with the full force of symbolism and the sublime, and with explicit reference to Campbell’s monomyth. It even gives Robin Hood a mentor figure, Friar Tuck, whose concern about the state of the nation is expressed from his very first appearance. Arriving at England’s shores, Tuck grabs a handful of pebbles and pronounces “England”—the first word of the third season. Tuck is a warrior monk with heroic potential himself, and thus a very suitable companion for rebuilding Robin’s heroic constitution, both mentally and physically. Tuck considers Robin to be England’s only remaining hope: “Everywhere I go I see fear and suspicion haunting [the people’s] faces. And yet everywhere I hear one name. […] One name that keeps the flame of England burning. Robin Hood” (III/1). However, Marian’s death has destroyed Robin Hood’s belief in his own heroic capacity and destiny (“Robin Hood is finished. He died in the Holy Land”), and a confrontation with Gisborne ends with Gisborne throwing Robin Hood into a ravine. After this cataclysmic event, the hero is believed dead, but Tuck saves and restores his will to assume the role of the hero again. A significant step in this restoration occurs when Tuck takes Robin to an altar the people have built in his memory, so that Robin can see how the people worship him: “You see the power you have? This is why God spared you.” The hero as saviour of England is sacralised in

28  Barbara Korte this scene; it is suggested that he has become an instrument of a higher will, and his learned mentor finds a way to reawaken the hero with grand effect during an eclipse of the sun. This sequence has a pronounced meta-heroic significance because the viewers see how a hero is literally made anew: Tuck has arranged a situation where Robin must save his comrades from being executed during the eclipse, an event which, to the audience assembled for the execution, will be a wonder. In this scenario, Robin Hood’s resurrection as hero is staged with symbolic power and emotional intensity for both the spectators in the story and the viewers in front of the screen. The sequence first shows the moon moving in front of the sun while Robin is climbing the wall of Nottingham castle, still visibly suffering from his injuries. Tuck addresses the crowd with words that are heard on and off screen: “Have faith, for soon a new day will dawn and you will be saved. […] For out of this darkness a legend will rise. […] You see? The sun emerges again, like England’s protector.” As these final words are spoken, the screen is completely filled with the image of the darkened sun and its corona. As it begins to brighten, the soundtrack provides us with the familiar, triumphant Robin Hood theme. Robin, in this visualisation, has now arisen as England’s saviour, standing gloriously on the wall, shot from below and with the sun at his back (Figure 1.1). He draws his bow while Tuck’s voice pronounces: “His journey is complete. He appears into the light and he will save you. He has returned! The legend is alive.” Robin too can now believe in his heroism again and declares his—now national and patriotic—mission to the admiring crowd below: “I am Robin Hood, your humble servant. It is for you that I live to fight the evil that chokes this country. No longer shall we live in fear and darkness.”

Figure 1.1  Hero-shot of the hero (screenshot from Robin Hood III/1)

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 29 Finally, to make the message quite clear, Tuck sums up what has happened and points to its lasting significance: “What happened today will reverberate around England. The story told around every fire and every child’s bed, how the sun itself intervened in the fight against evil. The Sheriff eclipsed. A legend reborn.” The process of hero- and legend-making, within the plot and in the programme itself, could not be more explicit, and nor could the emphasis of the last season on Robin as a heroic protector of the nation. At the end of the final season, Robin has fulfilled the hope Tuck invested in him. Facing the Sheriff’s vast army with only a few men at his side, he delivers a patriotic speech that echoes Henry V’s famous address to his officers on St Crispin’s eve in Shakespeare’s play (Henry V 4.3. 40–67). It aims to inspire his followers to action and promises them a place in memory: “And yes, some of us may fall, but our fight will live on in the minds of those that despise injustice, in the hearts of those that cherish freedom. […] Together, for England” (III/13). This parallels the speech which the resurrected Robin Hood gave in the season’s first episode. Once more it shows the hero speaking to an admiring crowd, and the camera either looks up to Robin Hood (in what is sometimes called a hero-shot) or down from his elevated position to the crowd. The inspiring power of Robin Hood’s hero­ ism is attested by the fact that even his rival Gisborne has joined the fight against England’s enemies, which completes a trajectory that has developed this character increasingly from a villain to a conscience-ridden anti-hero.9 Robin Hood dies at the end of the episode; in the great final confrontation between good and evil he is cut with a poisoned sword. The fact that the character is not killed in battle was perhaps an attempt to preserve an element of the war-weariness with which he was introduced in the series’ first episode, even though he is now the leader of a legitimate, patriotic war. His is not a hero’s death in action but a gentle passing in the forest while he imagines his reunion with Lady Marian. The legend of Robin Hood will live on, however, through his companions and it will also inspire others to carry on the hero’s work. In Campbell’s words, the hero has fulfilled his role as an “unquenched source through which society is reborn” (1968, 20). As this analysis has shown, Robin Hood updated a familiar myth in an affective climate that was receptive for stories of heroes and heroism. The programme’s affirmative and critical engagement with forms and functions of heroism reached young and adult viewers and resonated with issues that troubled people in Britain during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In its final season in particular, the series tied in with spreading national sentiment in the face of these issues. Overall, Robin Hood portrays an English folk hero with sympathy, and it acknowledges that heroes can fulfil important functions for their society. At the same time, though, the series points to the dangers of irresponsible heroism and the problematic affinity of war heroism to violence. Robin Hood was distinguished by a meta-heroic awareness, laying bare, even to a young audience, that heroes are constructed—in traditional stories as well as in contemporary television drama. What began

30  Barbara Korte as an entertaining actualisation of the Robin Hood legend in the first season, and as a play on concepts and representational conventions of the heroic, ended on an epic note, reconstructing Robin Hood as a hero with the power to unite his country and make it a better place. With this epic note, the third season of Robin Hood (whose final episode was aired in June 2009) antici­ pates the tone of the two series considered next. With their political and social references, and a pronounced interest in issues of (proto-)national community, Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands and The Last Kingdom are products of and for the 2010s, and both make overt use of the conventions of epic. Set in the early middle ages, the era of Old English epic poetry, both engage with the warrior as a type of hero who, as Campbell writes, comes into being “when villages and cities have expanded over the land” but “monsters remaining from primeval times still lurk in the outlying regions” and have to be dealt with, just like the “tyrants of human breed” who usurp “to themselves the goods of their neighbors” (1968, 337–338).

Reviving the epic: Beowulf and The Last Kingdom The aesthetics of epic is marked by a special affectivity. It strives for the sublime effect, displays the grand emotions of its characters and aims to induce awe in its audience. Cinema developed powerful visual formulas for epic narrative, such as the panoramic landscape that is used to great effect in classic Westerns or Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptions. After 9/11, the “cinematic sublime” gained a new actuality in the visual expression of terror (Comer and Vayo 2013, 5–6). “Cinematic” television now also has the ability to create the overwhelming images we associate with the sublime. Unlike Robin Hood, whose pictures, except in the episodes discussed above, have the domestic scale traditionally associated with television, Beowulf and The Last Kingdom consistently employ a visuality that draws on almost all of Edmund Burke’s sources of awe-inducing effect (Burke 1757). Both series indulge in grandiose images of fierce battles and sublime landscapes that provide a stage for grand feats of heroism. It is a stage upon which the hero’s journey can be literally performed; both series feature long sequences of their heroes moving across the land between the locations of their various adventures. While they offer engaging narratives, both series also connect with the socio-political situation and the structures of feeling that characterised Britain in the second decade of the twenty-first century. British viewers originally watched Beowulf and The Last Kingdom within an affective climate where the angst and insecurity of the preceding decade were aggravated by the discourse around Brexit and the eventual vote to leave the European Union. The rhetoric surrounding Brexit heightened concerns about national identity and cohesion; it fuelled nationalism and far-right populism. It raised questions as to future relations with other countries and stimulated fears of immigration and of “others within.” Around the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, immigration was even demonised as invasion. The

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 31 Brexit discourse expanded class frictions and racism; members of long-established black and Asian communities found themselves exposed to new hostility and abuse (Korte and Mair 2019, 75). Not least, the way towards Brexit and its implementation provided troubling examples of doubtful political ethics and bad governance that enhanced people’s disenchantment with formal politics and even the democratic system itself. Beowulf and The Last Kingdom had international audiences, but their epic character had a special resonance for viewers in Britain as a country that aimed to wall itself off against perceived threats from outside whilst also being troubled by the divided society within its walls. Such resonances were noted when the two programmes were launched. In 2016, when Beowulf was about to be aired, an article in the Radio Times stated the timeliness of Anglo-Saxon material for “the era of Isis,” citing the TV historian Michael Wood: When we look back to the Anglo-Saxon period, where Beowulf comes from, we see an age where things come down to life and death decisions. But there was also an honour, a bravery and courage then, which appeals to us. We want a hero with a moral code, and a hero who sticks to that code as Beowulf does. That’s comforting now when it seems there is a moral quicksand everywhere. (Radio Times 2016) Faye Sayer makes a similar claim in her critical discussion of The Last Kingdom, pointing out that its portrayal of Viking aggression against “peaceful ‘Christian’ Anglo-Saxons” can be seen as representing current trends: “This is popular television; it seeks to be entertaining to the public while appealing to popular myths and nationalist cultural stereotypes” (2018, 39). The subsequent discussion of Beowulf and The Last Kingdom argues that neither series promotes nationalism. They demonstrate clearly, however, why “Anglo-Saxon” television drama is relatable to a society haunted by present-day “monsters” and plagued by deficits of political authority. Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands is epic fantasy drama. Its visual style and the computer-generated imagery for its imaginary creatures are obviously inspired by successful fantasy epics in cinema and television, notably Game of Thrones. The Old English Beowulf poem is referenced only loosely. This poem narrates three events in the life of its hero: as a young warrior of the Geats, Beowulf injures (and eventually kills) Grendel, a monster that invades Heorot, the hall of Hrothgar, King of the Shieldings (or Danes). Later, Beowulf also kills Grendel’s mother, who has come to avenge her son. Fifty years later, the old Beowulf, who has long been king of the Geats, fights a dragon that attacks his people and is killed. Apart from its titular character, the television series, set in Herot, a part of the Shieldlands, uses few other elements from the poem’s storyworld. Grendel and his mother appear only towards the end of the first (and only) season, when it is revealed that

32  Barbara Korte Elvina, the woman Beowulf loves, is the mother of a “monster” and that she has named her son Grendel. The nonhuman races in the storyworld are distinguished by their black blood and called Mudborns by the humans; they originate from an older world once ruled by giants and were marginalised and repressed when the humans, the Redbloods, took over the reign. Some of the creatures are still enslaved and work for the Smelters, iron workers who are important for Herot’s arms-dealing wealth but live in humble conditions outside its walls. Apart from the threat from nonhuman species, the world of the series is endangered by the power struggle between the thanes that rule the different tribes of the Shieldlands. The theme of the hero’s journey is taken up immediately at the beginning of the first episode. After a long absence, Beowulf returns to Herot to pay his respects to the deceased thane Hrothgar, who was also leader of the alliance of all Shieldlands tribes and a guarantor of political stability. This stability is endangered because Hrothgar’s death creates competition for leadership, despite the fact he appointed his wife Rheda as his successor. Hrothgar had adopted the young Beowulf after his father was killed (a backstory shown in the series’ opening scenes), but it is later revealed that Hrothgar was also Beowulf’s natural father. As in Robin Hood, the hero’s return from abroad means that a new journey can begin for him, in the course of which he will gain his true heroic reputation. At first, however, Beowulf is not welcome in Herot, from which he was banished years ago. Later episodes reveal that during his exile he lived in the Farlands and had a family that was killed in an uprising of slaves while Beowulf was absent. The event leaves him guilt-ridden and causes him to become a mercenary, a warrior for monetary reward rather than an honourable cause. That his sidekick Breca is a gambler, thief and womaniser, albeit a likeable one, is a reminder of Beowulf’s own disreputable past, and Breca remains a selfish, materialistic foil for the hero’s altruism. Returning to Herot gives Beowulf an opportunity to regain his honour and use his warrior skills for the good of his native land; he helps Rheda to rule Herot and lead the Shieldlands as Hrothgar had decreed. After initial complications during which he has to prove his loyalty, Beowulf is readopted into the community and becomes its reeve, promising that he “will serve Herot” (I/4). With this office the hero is tied to the laws of the community, and the transgressive qualities that are part of the heroic makeup are firmly contained.10 As a hero officially instituted and committed to serve the social order, this Beowulf comes closer in character to the soldiers and policemen of twenty-first-century television than the hero of ancient epic, which helps to make Beowulf relatable to the needs of present-day society and contemporary ideas of good governance. Rheda as ruler and Beowulf as her hero are challenged not only by Hrothgar’s son Slean, Beowulf’s stepbrother, whom his father deemed unready for thaneship, but all other thanes, including Rheda’s brother Alecan, who reject a woman’s leadership and conspire against her. Flashbacks into their childhood reveal

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 33 that Beowulf has always been a better swordsman than Slean and that Hrothgar would have liked to see Beowulf as his successor. This preferment has left a mark on Slean, who, for most of the series, is a traitor. Similar to Robin Hood’s Gisborne, however, Slean is an anti-hero rather than a fullfledged villain, a man “whose ambition is at war with his conscience” (I/6). While his uncle Alecan emerges more and more as the series’ main villain, Slean is allowed to reform and develop his heroic potential, and in the final episodes, he helps to defend Herot against Alecan’s forces. In order to engage a twenty-first-century adult audience, a television series requires a hero with a more complex psychology than that of the hero of an Old English poem. Some of this complexity is found in Beowulf’s backstory of banishment and loss, as well as the rivalry between him and his stepbrother. Despite a more modern psychology, however, Beowulf still functions as the hero of traditional epic, and his first appearance in the series leaves no doubt about his heroic destiny. The camera first hovers over a stretch of sea, then approaches a grandiose landscape with a beach in the foreground and mountains in the background, and so literally transports the viewers into the drama’s world. Over the pictures, an external narrator’s voice announces the heroic theme of the story that will unfold: “Some say heroes are born. Others, they’re made […] I only ever knew one […] Beowulf.” As a meta-heroic statement, these sentences suggest that heroes are (also) a product of storytelling. But the narrator then affirms that Beowulf was a hero, and a singular one to boot—the “one” hero, the epitome of heroism. This opening combines several elements to signal epicness: a grand style, especially in its visuals; a strong narratorial presence; the evocation of pastness in the voiceover narration as well as through a soundtrack that uses drums and guttural chanting to suggest an archaic world. After the establishing shots, the camera draws closer to a horse and armed rider galloping along the beach, pursued by monsters. When the narrator first speaks Beowulf’s name, the camera reveals a boy, young Beowulf, clinging to the rider. Within the next few minutes, Beowulf will become an orphan—a quality he shares with many mythical and (pop)fictional hero figures (including the BBC’s Robin Hood and The Last Kingdom’s Uhtred).11 His father is killed by the monsters, and Beowulf proves his heroic disposition by killing one of the creatures himself. Hrothgar, who has witnessed this deed from afar, recognises the boy’s potential and predicts that he will once be “welcome in the Halls of the Dead”—a privilege for warriors who died bravely in battle—and that people will remember his name. In other words, Beowulf will gain a heroic reputation and become part of the nation’s collective memory. That the adult Beowulf fulfils Hrothgar’s prophecy is confirmed in later episodes, notably by one thane who is himself an exceptional warrior: “Beowulf, few men live up to their reputation. You are one of them” (I/3). Beowulf’s reputation is consolidated when he becomes Herot’s heroprotector, assisting its rightful ruler and taking measures to make Herot a

34  Barbara Korte safer place. In the seventh episode, for example, he orders the fortifications of Herot to be strengthened and serve as a safety wall. Indeed, the safety of Herot and the Shieldlands is increasingly compromised, not only because the Mudborn rise in resistance against the humans, but also through the power play of the thanes. Desire for power gives rise to harmful alliances among the thanes, and some even seek allies among the nonhuman enemies. Beowulf warns repeatedly that “war is coming” (I/4, I/6, an obvious echo of Game of Thrones’ “winter is coming”), and a discourse of threatened safety and loss of security permeates the conversations of the thanes: “These lands aren’t as safe as they once were” (I/3). They also use safety as an argument against Rheda’s leadership because safety, to them, can only be secured by war and Rheda, as a woman, cannot be a warrior. She can rely on a warrior hero, however, and with Beowulf mobilises a force strong enough to resist Herot’s enemies. A great battle dominates the last four episodes, and much emphasis is put on the fact that it is won by a communal effort, which belies the narrator’s claim at the beginning of the series that Beowulf is a singular hero. This Beowulf does not face the dragon alone, and he would not be able to save the Shieldlands on his own. Rather, his role is that of a leader capable of inspiring a concerted effort that unites the people of different tribes, different social classes (including even the humble Smelters) and both genders. Herot’s female ruler may not be a warrior, but other female characters know how to fight. The final battle even provides an opportunity for the series’ anti-hero characters, Slean and Breca, to redeem themselves by joining the communal effort. Slean’s heroisation reaches epic proportions when, in the twelfth episode, he and his men make a brave stand on a bridge against the enemy to gain time for Herot’s allies to arrive. This is an allusion to the Spartan’s last stand at Thermopylae, and possibly to a canonical Victorian poem, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Horatius,” whose eponymous Roman hero also keeps a bridge. Slean’s address to his soldiers—like Robin Hood’s discussed in the previous section—echoes the Saint Crispin’s eve speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V: “People will talk of the Huskarla who held the Draca bridge for 500 summers. We will not be forgotten. None of you will ever be forgotten! We hold our lines. For Herot.” Slean’s willingness to sacrifice his own life is appreciated by Beowulf (“He’ll die a hero instead of a traitor”), and because he does not die on the bridge after all, the stepbrothers are eventually reconciled. Beowulf, knowing his place as an illegitimate son, accepts Slean as Rheda’s future successor. Heroism is a more complicated affair where Breca is concerned. Breca is not a nobleman, and he has committed crimes, but he is noble enough in spirit to give his life in the fight against the enemy. However, Breca resists being heroised. When Beowulf promises him a “place among the heroes” in the Halls of the Dead, Breca quips: “Droning on about honour and bloodlines. I should say I’m sorry for all the bad things I’ve done. But I’ve enjoyed doing them too much” (I/12). This undermines the heightened heroism that

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 35 otherwise dominates the final episodes with their grand verbal and visual rhetoric. Panoramic shots, spectacular crane shots and dynamic editing turn the battle into spectacle. It does not lead to a final victory, however. Beowulf’s last words in the final episode caution that “We’re not safe yet,” and the last scene shows the Prophet of the Mudborn asking his Gods for their support to chase the humans from the Shieldlands. This would have been the departure for a second season, but overall response to the programme was too negative (Power 2016, Farmer 2016), and audience figures were far below expectation, so that the series was not continued.12 Arguably, Beowulf’s presentation of warrior heroism as a response to threat was too simple, and the portrayal of the main hero too straightforward to appeal to contemporary audiences. For an analysis of the heroic, the series is interesting, however, in how it translates the traditional masculinity and whiteness of the hero of (European) epic for its target audience.13 Beowulf was cast with a white actor (Kieran Bew) but the world in which the hero acts has been feminised and is culturally diverse. That the series shows female characters performing traditionally male roles (smith, warrior, ruler) is almost a token gesture nowadays to female viewers who expect more from television drama than the performance of male heroics. But the programme has some subtlety where it addresses female leadership in what is still a warrior society. Rheda’s authority is contested because her gender allegedly forbids her to be a warrior. But this is also not something she aspires to because Rheda believes in a social order based on peace and the law rather than violence. When, in the second episode, the thane of the Varni claims that “the alliance must be led by a warrior. Its purpose is war,” Rheda counters: “Its purpose is peace. Something its leader must understand.” It is through peace and good governance that Rheda attempts to rule, and the warrior hero, Beowulf, only serves at her side. The series presents Rheda as a civilising, modern force in an ancient, male-dominated world and as a reminder that there are other ways to govern than by the sword. In this respect, she serves as the harbinger of a future where the oldtype warrior hero will belong to the past. The harmfulness of violence and strongman politics also emerges where the series portrays ethnic relations in the Shieldlands and engages with fears of the other. Beowulf was originally aired at a time of backlash to multiculturalism that Britain experienced as a reaction to large-scale immigration and under the impression of continued terror attacks in British cities, significantly by British-born Islamists. Allusions to the contemporary Islamist threat are very evident in Beowulf.14 On the surface, the series subscribes to the cultural and ethnic diversity that production codes demand from public UK television. The human communities of the Shieldlands are multi-ethnic and multi-cultural; the casting of its various tribes appears to have been colourblind. The Varni, for instance, wear oriental-style costume but are played by actors of different skin colours. At the same time, the interethnic tensions and racism in contemporary Britain are projected onto the

36  Barbara Korte series’ non-human species. The Mudborn are perceived as a threat, but they are also shown to be marginalised and subjected. The most feared of the others are the Skinshifters, creatures of mixed origin that have red and black blood, who can shift between human and Mudborn appearance and thus live unrecognised as part of the human communities and as potential “enemies within.” An early episode shows how one of them is captured and killed without trial, although he has lived in Herot loyally and peacefully for many years (I/3). With such characters and their treatment, Beowulf makes a rather obvious comment on the poisoning of race relations in Britain during the 2010s. Even Beowulf is exposed to ethnic conflict when he learns (in I/9) that Elvina, the woman he loves and who serves as the healer of the community, is a shapeshifter and has given birth to a Mudborn, Grendel, who neither looks nor behaves like an evil monster. Grendel’s existence, and that of his mother, confront the hero with a disturbingly blurred boundary between self and other, friend and foe. It would have been interesting to see further seasons of Beowulf develop the hero’s relationship with Elvina and the theme of otherness as a “risk” to society. Even the one season produced, however, proves that the series used the conventions of ancient epic to negotiate structures of feeling of contemporary Britain, especially fears of the other and a desire for a safe homeland. This can also be claimed for The Last Kingdom, even though this series embeds the epic hero in the genre of historical fiction and thus creates a more complex framework for engaging with the social functions of heroism and its significance for the nation. This series was made by creators who were also behind the successful Downton Abbey, but it was meant to look different to the sleek period drama for which the BBC is renowned.15 The Last Kingdom shows a gritty premodern world often shot with a handheld camera to achieve a reality effect. At the same time, the series was clearly meant to be an “an epic show” and the actor playing Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) was cast for his ability to embody a warrior hero with credibility,16 while his character also participates in the trend of contemporary period drama to portray masculinities that are psychologically and physically vulnerable.17 At first sight, Beowulf and The Last Kingdom have obvious similarities. They are set in roughly the same pre-Norman period (though with a greater demand for historical accuracy made on The Last Kingdom), they show the same epic pictures of sublime nature, and they use a similarly “archaic” music in their soundtrack. The England shown in The Last Kingdom is just as threatened as the Shieldlands, but here the outward threat comes from a historical invader. When the main action begins, shortly before Alfred becomes King of Wessex in 871, the Danes have occupied and settled almost the whole of England, and Wessex is the last remaining kingdom under Saxon rule. The series is thus set in a period “when nationhood was up for debate,” as one critic noted (Runcie 2015), also pointing to its topical relevance at a time when the unity of the United Kingdom and its relationship

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 37 to the rest of Europe were up for debate, and when conservative rhetoric stirred anxieties about “invading” immigrants. The threat posed by the Danes in The Last Kingdom is visualised in the title sequence, where a map shows England being literally burnt up until only Alfred’s Wessex is left. The fact that The Last Kingdom is explicitly concerned with England as a nation in itself (rather than a pars pro toto for Britain) seems to resonate with the new attention English identity has gained in recent years in relation to strengthened nationalism in the devolved parts of the United Kingdom, and in relation to the global identity that has developed in the British capital (see Black 2018, 3). The Last Kingdom shows a historical phase in which an English identity was first developed, and Uhtred is a hero figure who personalises this English identity in the making. The development of his own Englishness is intertwined with his development into a true epic hero—a hero of significance for a community. The Last Kingdom was more positively received by critics and viewers than Beowulf and received a second season from the BBC (after which it was taken over by Netflix). The more favourable reception of the series can be explained through the greater complexity both of its storyworld and of its hero. The programme was not made as sword-and-fantasy drama but as historical drama for an adult audience; it presents a hero with psychological complications in a world that is culturally divided in terms of values and belief. It is also a world undergoing significant change as King Alfred intends to spread not only Christianity but also law, civilisation, effective governance and—through his famous chronicle—historical record rather than myth. Like Rheda in Beowulf, Alfred is a moderniser with a civilising mission, the builder of a society, a “Hero as King” in the Carlylean sense “to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so” (Carlyle 1966, 196). This implies that the world of the epic warrior hero is on the wane. However, because politics are still largely a matter of power play, violence and war, King Alfred still has use for a warrior hero, and this is why Uhtred enters his service—albeit with much reluctance. He has yet to learn that true heroism is fulfilled in service for a greater good rather than selfish aims. Uhtred’s first-person voice-over narration with which each episode begins suggests that his heroism is predestined. As in the novel it adapts, “Destiny is all” is Uhtred’s mantra.18 However, what the series really shows is that Uhtred’s heroic ethos is not predetermined but learned and formed. Uhtred is a hero made rather than born, and this making takes place under the King’s control. Alfred needs Uhtred to realise his dream of England, and it is in the King’s interest to make Uhtred learn that his heroic potential should not be spent in his personal interest but for the good of England. When the viewers are first acquainted with Uhtred as a young man, his ethos and loyalties are still fluid. It requires several mentors and the authority of the King to shape him into the hero England needs. Uhtred’s journey towards this desired kind of heroism is stony because he has suffered

38  Barbara Korte childhood trauma, because his cultural identity is divided, and because he is disposed to act selfishly and rashly. Young Uhtred is orphaned when his father, Ealdorman of Northumbria and Lord of Bebbanburg, is killed by the Danes. The brutal killing is witnessed by the boy who has followed the men into battle with his toy sword. The Danes take Uhtred and the girl Brida as slaves, but the Danish lord Ragnar adopts them and they grow up alongside his own children. As a result, Uhtred and Brida forget their Saxonness (Englishness) and become culturally Scandinavian. Uhtred was baptised as a child but has never lived as a Christian and, when he returns to the Saxons, rejects Christianity. This return takes place when Uhtred loses most members of his Danish family in a fire set to Ragnar’s home by a rival; only the younger generation survives. Uhtred decides that he and Brida, who has developed into a warrior woman, should return “to the beginning.” This means that his heroism is directed at two major objectives: reclaiming his Northumbrian inheritance, and avenging the deaths of his natural and adoptive fathers. The first episode ends with a statement that affirms Uhtred’s self-centredness: “I am Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and I shall take what is mine.” When his attempt to retake Bebbanburg fails and he is charged with the murder of Ragnar, Uhtred heads south to Wessex. On the way, he has his hero’s tool made: a sword whose handle holds a piece of amber he once received from his father and which symbolises his ambition to reclaim his paternal title and land. In Wessex, Uhtred meets his first mentor Beocca, the priest who baptised him shortly before he was orphaned, and who now serves Alfred. Beocca makes Uhtred enter Alfred’s service as a warrior, and in theory Uhtred is exactly the kind of hero Alfred needs—not only to fight his wars, but because he can become a symbol for his vision of an England that lives in peace with the Danes. This symbolic function of the hero is pronounced very clearly by Alfred in the second season of the series: “You are a great warrior, Uhtred. You are a Saxon who is also a Dane. The very embodiment of the England that must emerge” (II/3). At the beginning of the first season, however, Uhtred is not yet ripe enough to fulfil this function. He only agrees to enter the King’s service for a year because he expects to be rewarded with a return of his land, wealth and a title. To Alfred, such self-servingness is a misconception of the heroic function: “Only by joining together and saving Wessex can we have England. Only by saving Wessex can we have a Northumbria. A Bebbanburg. […] I see Uhtred of Nowhere who cares for no one but himself” (I/2). In order to become the hero of England, the bicultural Uhtred must come to terms with his Saxon side and must let himself be forced into loyal service to the King. Uhtred’s second mentor figure, the great warrior Leofric, teaches him what loyal service means. When Uhtred complains to him that he has sold himself to Alfred for a Saxon “mailcoat and a helmet,” Leofric explains the true intention behind Alfred’s gift, namely, that Alfred wanted to make a statement about Uhtred’s identity: “Of course, when the year is up you could go back to the Danes. … But what would you be? Who

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 39 would you be?” (I/3). By the end of this episode it is clear that Uhtred’s hero’s journey will be about finding his true heroic identity along with an English identity, but on the way he has to suffer trials and tribulations, and there are severe disagreements between him and the King. They are reconciled in the wilderness of the Somerset marshes, where Alfred has withdrawn from the advancing Danes. Uhtred now understands that he should use his heroic potential for more than his own reward, and he is able to convince the pious King that he needs to risk a defining, merciless battle to stop the invaders. The battle of Edington will be a decisive step towards Alfred’s dream, and it is the first heroic effort Uhtred makes deliberately for England. The battle is filmed as a sublime spectacle, its scale revealed by overhead shots, while close-ups of the fighters expose its violence and prevent any impression that war might be glorified here. When the Danes have withdrawn, Uhtred is thanked and praised by his mentor Beocca: “You have given everything. You are the man I always hoped you would become” (I/8). However, Uhtred’s journey towards heroism for a higher purpose has come with great cost because on the way he experienced the loss of his infant son, the woman he loved and his mentor Leofric. At the end of the first season, Alfred is able to accept Uhtred, even admit his indebtedness to him, just as Uhtred can accept the King and the fact that he has to submit to his authority. Significantly, Uhtred’s voice-over at the end of the first season starts with citing Alfred’s chronicle, suggesting that the historic victory over the Danes was more important than Uhtred’s role in it: “In the year 878, at Ethandun, King Alfred defeated Guthrum of the Danes and drove them from Wessex” (I/8). While a high degree of closure is thus effected for the first season, Uhtred’s journey can also continue because he still needs to reclaim Bebbanburg, avenge his fathers and release his adoptive Danish sister from slavery. But he stays in the King’s service and helps to resolve a crisis that endangers Alfred’s political vision. Uhtred’s voiceover at the end of the second season reveals to what extent he has become a part of Alfred’s vision: “I, Uhtred, son of Uhtred, shall be the warrior to bind kingdom to kingdom. Honour-bound to forge Alfred’s dream of an England” (II/8). The way in which the epic hero of The Last Kingdom develops an English identity speaks to a television audience for whom the issue of national identity, and specifically English identity, was acute when the series was originally aired. But the series did not strive to play into the hands of populists and Brexiteers. It points out, rather, that Alfred wanted to unite a country that was already multiethnic and multi-cultural because the Danes were not only invaders but also settlers. Certain viewers in Britain who watched the series in the run-up to Brexit might have interpreted it as showing the spectre of a country invaded from the Continent. But it really projects the vision of a country where different people can live in peace together, and where a warrior hero is useful because he is bicultural.

40  Barbara Korte

Conclusions All three series discussed in this chapter are concerned with the kind of exceptional heroism that enters cultural memory and is remembered in legend and epic. The series illustrate how Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey can be effectively updated for television audiences in the twentyfirst century. The three programmes’ use of a mythological framework foregrounds and, at the same time, questions common assumptions about heroic character and narrative. The series encourage this questioning by applying a meta-level that reflects on the meaning(s) and representational conventions of the heroic. All three programmes suggest that our ideas about heroes are always configured in specific ways, and that they are also often prefigured by historical or mythical templates. Even though all three series have an action-adventure element, they manage to suggest that the heroic is a complex phenomenon, and that it does not offer simple solutions to social and political problems. The pastness of premodern storyworlds is appealing for viewers who find themselves in a world of constant acceleration and technological innovation. But the examples discussed above are also tied up with social, political and cultural issues that concerned British viewers in particular during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and they illustrate the nexus between the heroic and the state of the nation. During the first decade, Robin Hood demonstrated a preoccupation with social injustice as well as the War on Terror. In the second decade, Beowulf and The Last Kingdom showed a pronounced interest in national identity and cohesion. This interest was anticipated in the final season of Robin Hood, but Beowulf and The Last Kingdom developed it with a greater reliance on an epic framework. Both series resonated with the structure of feeling that characterised Brexit Britain—the mood of a country that perceived itself as disintegrating and threatened from without and within. Both series respond to this mood by depicting heroes who can be relied upon to make their communities safe. Such heroes may well speak to parts of the audience who have lost faith in democratic governance because the politicians they know are perceived as self-serving and show poor leadership. But neither series promotes the strongman politics that is resurfacing in the twenty-first-century world, or plays into the hands of the new extremisms that endanger democracy. Rather, Beowulf and The Last Kingdom promote heroes who subordinate their prowess and agency to the authority of a rightful ruler, and in both instances these rulers envision better, more lawful and modern ways of governance. In this respect, the two series eventually imply that their great warriors, Beowulf and Uhtred, represent a type of hero who is needed in moments of crisis but will become obsolete once their community is stable and safe. Significantly, all three series present heroes who are capable of singlehanded acts of bravery, but who achieve their greatest triumphs as part of a collective effort. They demonstrate that the Campbellian hero’s journey is revivable for contemporary Britain, but that its cultural validity must also be carefully gauged.

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 41

Notes







1. See BBC’s “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2016–2020” (BBC 2016) and ITV’s “Social Purpose” (ITV 2019). 2. Robin Hood and Beowulf used colourblind casting (which some fans criticised as unhistorical, for instance in the Beowulf forum on Digital Spy 2016). The Last Kingdom aimed for historical authenticity in its casting strategies and used white British and Irish actors for its Saxon characters, and Scandinavian actors for its Danes. 3. Earlier British television series include The Adventures of Robin Hood (ITV 1955–1959) and Robin of Sherwood (ITV 1984–1986). 4. See the introductory chapter of this book, p. 8. 5. An article in TV Zone mentions “ill-timed quips” and “lame comedy” as reasons for the mixed reception of the first season (2007, 88). 6. I/10 and III/8 feature knights whom the crusades have turned into traumatised killing machines. 7. On heroism in the War on Terror see also Chapters 2, 4 and 5 of the present book. 8. For theories of the sublime, see Doran (2015). 9. Gisborne dies with Robin at his side, aware of his former villainy but feeling redeemed: “I’ve lived in shame. But because of you, I die proud. I am free” (III/13). Gisborne’s conversion to the good side required a whole episode (III/10) that explains the strain between Robin and Gisborne, and Gisborne’s psychology, with childhood trauma and which gives Robin some responsibility for Gisborne’s development. 10. See the introductory chapter of this book, p. 3. 11. For a survey of the orphan theme in fiction and especially popular fiction, see Gymnich, Puschmann-Nalenz, Sedlmayr and Vanderbeke (2018). Orphans are solitary, self-sufficient, resilient and free to invent themselves; such features help to explain why the heroes of myth and contemporary popular culture often grow up in the absence of parents. 12. Critical and viewer comments on Beowulf suggest that the series might have been more successful if it had been broadcast not in the Sunday family early-evening slot but after the 9 pm watershed. 13. This whiteness was challenged in Troy: Fall of a City, by casting Achilles and Zeus with black actors. 14. See also Gulley (2014) on how the 2007 cinema Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis) used its monsters to comment on post-9/11 anxieties about Islam in the United States. 15. See the comment by producer Nigel Marchant (“Making of The Last Kingdom” 2015). 16. Comment by producer Chrissy Skinns (“Making of The Last Kingdom” 2015). 17. For many examples of this trend, see the contributions in Byrne, Taddeo and Leggott (2018). 18. “Destiny is all. And now, looking back, I see the pattern of my life’s journey” (Cornwell 2016, 223).

Works cited BBC. 2016. “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2016–2020: Diversity Includes Everyone.” 1–22. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/diversity/pdf/diversity-and-inclusionstrategy-2016.pdf.

42  Barbara Korte Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands. 2016. Written by James Dormer, Guy Burt, et al. Produced by Will Nicholson, Stephen Smallwood, et al. London: ITV Studios Home Entertainment. DVD. Black, Jeremy. 2018. English Nationalism: A Short History. London: Hurst. Burke, Edmund. 1757. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: R. and J. Dodsley. Byrne, Katherine, Julie Anne Taddeo, and James Leggott, eds. 2018. Conflicting Masculinities: Men in Television Period Drama. London: I.B. Tauris. Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Carlyle, Thomas. 1966. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, edited by Carl Niemeyer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Castelló, Enric. 2009. “The Nation as a Political Stage: A Theoretical Approach to Television Fiction and National Identities.” International Communication Gazette 71 (4): 303–320. DOI: 10.1177/1748048509102183. Chapman, James. 2015. Swashbucklers: The Costume Adventure Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Comer, Todd A., and Lloyd Isaac Vayo. 2013. “Introduction: Terror and the (Post) Cinematic Sublime.” In Terror and the Cinematic Sublime: Essays on Violence and the Unpresentable in Post-9/11 Films, edited by Todd A. Comer and Lloyd Isaac Vayo, 5–13. Jefferson: McFarland. Cornwell, Bernard. 2016. The Last Kingdom. London: Harper. Cuddon, J. A. 1992. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3rd ed. London: Penguin. Digital Spy. 2016. “Beowulf ITV.” January 3, 2016. Accessed October 28, 2019. https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2125218/beowulf-itv. Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk. 2009. “Anachronism, Apologetics and Robin Hood: Televisual Nationhood after TV.” In Television Studies after TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, edited by Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, 125–136. London: Routledge. Doran, Robert. 2015. The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farmer, Clara. 2016. “‘What a Disappointment’: Fans Swarm Twitter to Blast ITV’s New Epic Drama Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands.” Mail Online, January 4, 2016. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3383258/Whatdisappointment-Fans-swarm-Twitter-blast-ITV-s-new-epic-drama-BeowulfReturn-Shieldlands.html. Gossedge, Rob. 2015. “‘We Are Robin Hood’: The Outlaw Tradition in Contemporary Popular Culture.” In Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, edited by Gail Ashton, 251–262. London: Bloomsbury. Gulley, Alison. 2014. “‘What We Need Is a Hero’: ‘Beowulf’ in a Post-9/11 World.” The Journal of Popular Culture 47 (4): 800–816. DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12161. Gymnich, Marion, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Gerold Sedlmayr, and Dirk Vanderbeke. 2018. The Orphan in Fiction and Comics Since the 19th Century. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1959. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: Norton. ITV. 2019. “Social Purpose.” Accessed November 18, 2019. https://www.itvplc.com/ socialpurpose/overview.

Hero’s journey and state of the nation 43 Kelly, Nicola. 2006. “Interview with Dominic Minghella. ‘The New Robin Hood.’” Scriptwriter 30 (September): 28–29. Knight, Stephen. 2015. Reading Robin Hood: Content, Form and Reception in the Outlaw Myth. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Korte, Barbara, and Christian Mair. 2019. “New-Old Rifts: Brexit and Resurfacing Racism.” In Brexit and the Divided United Kingdom, edited by Joanna Rostek and Anne-Julia Zwierlein. Thematic Issue, Journal for the Study of British Cultures 26 (1): 73–86. Lacey, Stephen, and Derek Paget. 2015. “Introduction.” In The ‘War on Terror’: Post 9/11 Television Drama, Docudrama and Documentary, edited by Stephen Lacey and Derek Paget, 1–10. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. The Last Kingdom. 2015. Season 1. Written by Stephen Butchard, Bernard Cornwell, et al. Produced by Stephen Butchard, Gareth Neame, et al. London: Playback Studios. DVD. “Making of The Last Kingdom.” 2015. The Last Kingdom. Season 1. Written by Stephen Butchard, Bernard Cornwell, et al. Produced by Stephen Butchard, Gareth Neame, et al. London: Playback Studios. DVD. Power, Ed. 2016. “Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands, Review: ‘A Letdown’.” The Telegraph, January 3, 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/ tv-and-radio-reviews/12075875/Beowulf-Return-to-the-Shieldlands-review-aletdown.html. Radio Times. 2016. “How Ancient Classic Beowulf Suits the Era of Isis.” January 3, 2016. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-01-03/how-ancient-classic-beowulfsuits-the-era-of-isis/. Robin Hood. 2013. Written by Foz Allan, Dominic Minghella, et al. Produced by Foz Allan, Greg Brenman, et al. Munich: Polyband. DVD. Runcie, Charlotte. 2015. “The Last Kingdom, BBC TWO, Review: ‘The Thinking Person’s Game of Thrones’.” The Telegraph, October 23, 2016. https://www. telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/11948970/The-LastKingdom-BBC-One-review.html. Sayers, Faye. 2018. “The Moving Image as a Secondary Source: Truth, Authenticity and Narrative.” In Histories on Screen: The Past and Present in Anglo-American Cinema and Television, edited by Sam Edwards, Michael Dolski, and Faye Sayer, 29–43. London: Bloomsbury. Smith, Anthony D.. 2009. Ethnosymbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach. London: Routledge. Thane, Pat. 2018. Divided: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. TV Zone. 2007. “New Season Preview: Robin Hood.” 78: 88–89. Vogler, Christopher. 2007. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. 3rd ed. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Wood, David. 2005. “Return of the Heroes.” Broadcast (November 25, 2005): 15.

2

British soldier heroism in the War on Terror era Barbara Korte

Soldiers in the War on Terror and the discourse of post/heroism Martial heroism has been identified as a basic pattern of hero perception (Franco, Blau and Zimbardo 2011, 100), and this appears to be valid across cultures and periods. The heroism of soldiers in modern war has vestiges of the warrior heroes of tradition and myth. It is a physical-risk form of heroism, and it involves a code of conduct with distinct rituals and a special sense of honour. Soldiers are perceived, appreciated and commemorated as heroic when their actions exceed duty and set them apart from their “already brave peers” (100). The heroism of soldiers is thus defined by the surpassing of norms, but it also typically transgresses the norms of common morality because soldiers practise violence. Being a soldier entails not only the willingness to sacrifice one’s own life, but also to victimise others by inflicting bodily harm and taking lives. However, such violence, and violation of moral laws, is authorised and regulated by the state in whose name military operations are conducted. In their discussion of military ­identity, Woodward and Jenkings refer to Max Weber’s definition of the military as “the state-sanctioned body with the authority to use lethal force,” and claim that “the exercise of lethal force defines military personnel as such” (2011, 258).1 This also implies that modern soldier heroism, like the epic hero­ ism discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, has a special association with the nation. As Graham Dawson writes in Soldier Heroes, the soldier is a figure “[i]ntimately bound up with the foundation and preservation of a national territory,” and narratives about military heroes may become “a cultural focus around which the national community [can] cohere” (1994, 1). Soldiers do not only fight for their country, they are also honoured, commemorated and mourned in its name. The television dramas analysed in this chapter address such issues. They demonstrate, first, that soldier heroism emphasises core features of the semantics of the heroic and points to questions that are central to the contemporary discussion of the hero. Some of the programmes have a distinct meta-heroic awareness and reveal, for example, the role of the media in constructing soldier heroes. Second, these television dramas engage with the

British soldier heroism 45 heroism of British soldiers in the defining wars of the twenty-first century. The United Kingdom joined the United States in military operations that were part of their so-called War on Terror strategies in 2003. The occupation of Iraq was formally ended in 2009; British operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan were begun in 2006 and formally ended in 2014. Despite the growing threat and fear of terrorism, the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan was unpopular and contested (Lacey and Paget 2015, 5), as was the “special relationship” with the United States that drew Britain into these conflicts. Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, legitimated by Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, met with strong opposition in Parliament (including 139 Labour MPs) and in the British public (Thane 2018, 435). The controversial nature of the Iraq war and the occupation of Afghanistan made the question of the aims and values for which British soldiers fought particularly acute. If soldiers acted heroically in wars of doubtful legitimation, was their heroism tainted? How could it be appreciated by their country and, vice versa, could the heroisation of soldiers help to make controversial military engagements more acceptable? The four drama programmes discussed in the following pages—Strike Back (Sky One 2010), Occupation (BBC 2009), Our Girl (BBC 2014–2017) and Bluestone 42 (BBC 2013–2015)—belong to different genres and present war as adventure, as realist drama and as satirical comedy. However, they all probe the heroic status of British soldiers and, through the lens of the heroic, cast a light on the relationship between soldiers and civilian society. At the core of all four dramas is the question of whether, and if so, how, civilian society, including the viewers in front of the television screen, can appreciate the heroism of soldiers. It is important, therefore, that the programmes reflect the composition of the United Kingdom’s armed forces in terms of diverse regions, ethnicities, classes and genders, and that they were originally watched in a medium from which the public derives much of its general information about their country’s armed forces and their historical and present significance for the nation. As Parry and Thumim remind us, mediations of military experiences not only “reflect the dynamics of civil-military relations,” they also coproduce them (2016, 32). The four examples in this chapter should also be seen in this light. Some of them critique how the media heroised soldiers during the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, but the dramas’ own representations also shape the image of soldier heroism in the twenty-first century and inscribe it in the tradition of war representation on British television and the diverse images of soldiers projected there. British television in the twenty-first century continues to represent earlier wars in documentary and fictional forms. British war-cinema classics, especially films about the Second World War, are often repeated on British television and keep ideas of patriotic war alive, as well as patterns that associate British soldier heroism with “a sense of unflappability, gentlemanly

46  Barbara Korte conduct, emotional self-control, cheerful but self-effacing humor, stoicism and devotion to duty” (Havardi 2014, 6). Television has dealt with the two world wars in its own drama productions, for instance in the context of important anniversaries of these wars in the 2000s. While aware of the role and semantics of the world wars in British cultural memory, these productions reflect present-day values and offer re-interpretations of the historical wars. A series about a field hospital during the First World War, The Crimson Field (BBC 2014), emphasises suffering rather than soldierly agency.2 World on Fire (BBC, first season 2019) portrays British experiences of the Second World War on the front and the homefront, but within a wider European context that can be interpreted as a response to the Brexit decision. The most obviously heroic fighters in a traditional understanding are the Polish resistance fighters, while one of the central British characters in this series is a shellshocked veteran from the preceding war who promotes pacifism. Such contemporary productions indicate an emphasis on victims and suffering that is also found in the dramas considered below, even though the national and patriotic significance of the historical wars is far less controversial than the British involvement in the twenty-first-century conflicts in the Middle East. In terms of controversial wars, 1990s television dramas about British soldiers in Bosnia and the first Gulf War can be considered as an immediate predecessor to the programmes about the War on Terror era. They are also a foil for these programmes because the 1990s productions echo the hero-sceptical mood that was still prevailing in this decade.3 The ironically titled Warriors (2 parts, BBC 1999) shows the frustration and psychological trauma of soldiers in the British peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. Bravo Two Zero (2 parts, BBC 1999) is based on soldier Andy McNab’s bestselling memoir of an ill-fated Special Forces mission in the first Gulf War (McNab, like Chris Ryan, another member of the operation, subsequently became a successful author of military fiction). The drama expresses the ethos of the professional elite soldier and shows some spectacular action in its first part, but the second part concentrates on McNab’s ordeal in Iraqi captivity, emphasising his capacity to endure victimisation rather than heroic agency. The tendency towards a non- or low-heroic portrayal of soldiers in these 1990s dramas corresponds to a widespread non-heroic perception of soldiers in British society at the time. Soldiers did not occupy a prominent place in the national imagination, and neither Warriors nor Bravo Two Zero express concern over the perception of soldiers at home. This can be explained by the fact that the 1990s military engagements had little repercussion on the homeland, but also by the fact that military service in the United Kingdom had been thoroughly professionalised. Most British men born since the Second World War have never been called up for military service. Like other Western societies after 1945, the United Kingdom developed into the postheroic society described by the political scientist Herfried Münkler—a society where the performance of heroism is limited to “heroic

British soldier heroism 47 communities” that guarantee order and safety (2006, 328–329). To Münkler (2005), the military field is therefore the principal indicator for a postheroic era in Western societies; its factors are absence of compulsory military service, the professionalisation of soldiering, highly technologised armed services and the asymmetric nature of the new wars. More fundamentally, the idea of a postheroic age assumes, as Sibylle Scheipers formulates, an erosion of the “social contract between the modern nation-state and its citizens”—citizens who are no longer willing to tolerate sacrifices such as the death of their sons, or to invest such sacrifice with meaning (2014, 1). Instead, emphasis is shifted from the heroisation of the soldier’s sacrifice to the soldier as victim. Scheipers argues, however, that the idea of a general postheroic condition is too general. Rather, she sees the social construction of heroes as “an ongoing process in which many actors participate, and in which the meaning of heroism is contested and constantly reinterpreted,” so that it would be “next to meaningless to speak of the current era as a post-heroic one” (2014, 15). The War on Terror era and the way soldier heroism is represented and debated in television drama about this time is a good testing ground for this position, not least because the perception of British soldiers underwent a significant shift during these years. At first the low esteem for war and soldiering in the wider public persisted,4 but after 2007 a new “covenant” between the military and civilian spheres became effective and started a process, as Sarah Ingham writes, “by which the public came to separate the men and women from the missions and rallied to ‘our boys’ (and our girls), giving them unprecedented levels of moral and material support” (2014, 4). This support, which was to a great extent media-fabricated, was in exchange for the soldiers’ willingness to sacrifice their own health and life in the interest of protecting British people from a terrorism these people were experiencing in their homeland. A postheroic society could learn to appreciate soldiers and perceive them as national heroes once again. The examples in the following case studies are thus quite obviously located at a moment of shift in the culture of the heroic. They reveal a spectrum in which soldier heroism is negotiated between acknowledgement on the one hand, and scepticism on the other hand. This scepticism is not directed at soldiers per se, but at the purposes for which soldiers were heroised during the War on Terror era.

Strike Back: War as pleasure culture The new appreciative mood vis-a-vis soldiers went hand in hand with increased visibility of soldier heroes in British popular culture, including television entertainment shows (Kelly 2012). The Victoria Cross-awarded Lance Sergeant Johnson Beharry, for example, appeared in the 2011 Dancing on Ice season. What Graham Dawson calls the “pleasure-culture of war” (1994, 4) emerged in Britain in the days of high imperialism. It comprises objects and representations in which “the heroic but violent deeds of the

48  Barbara Korte warrior became a widespread and popular theme in mass entertainment” (Paris 2000, 8). Late-Victorian novels and periodicals (such as Boys’ Own Magazine), especially those addressed at young male readers, presented war as “an entertaining spectacle” and “an exciting adventure narrative” (8). Not even the anti-war and anti-heroic bias of the late twentieth century prevented the survival of this tradition on the book market, in cinema, comics and digital games culture. As military-action drama, (Chris Ryan’s) Strike Back is at first glance a straightforward contribution to this pleasure culture of war.5 It places its main character John Porter (Richard Armitage) in the centre of exciting adventures in contemporary war zones, offering the spectacle of combat, man-to-man fight and the well-trained male body. Critical response to the programme in the quality press tended to be condescending, pointing to its proximity to video combat games (Sutcliffe 2010) and its lack of subtlety (Anthony 2010). Critics also claimed that Strike Back served a new cultural need for muscularity vis-a-vis the “shiny-faced public school boys” that led the British government: “If Luther (BBC1) and Chris Ryan’s Strike Back are in any sense a reflection of a cultural mood shift, now is the hour of the muscular, tasty geezer” (Anthony 2010). One reviewer admitted with some embarrassment that he had enjoyed the programme’s male fantasy (Wollaston 2010). A closer look reveals, however, that the programme was not merely “pure boys’ own comic book stuff” like the earlier military series Ultimate Force (ITV1 2002–2008) (Wollaston 2006), but offered a hero with some complexity and also used this hero as an anchor for its critique of the war in Iraq and the imperialist history behind this and other present-day conflicts. It also inflected the association between soldier heroism and ideal heteronormative masculinity. Graham Dawson points out that the soldier hero embodying “[m]ilitary virtues such as aggression, strength, courage and endurance” is “one of the most durable and powerful forms of idealized masculinity within Western cultural traditions since the time of the Ancient Greeks” (1994, 1). However, the nexus between war, heroism and masculinity is complex, and the soldier-hero trope exists “in complicated and conflictual relations with the other components of any lived masculinity” (234). Soldiers’ stories can therefore be vehicles for alternative and complex imaginations of masculinity,6 also in adventure television like Strike Back. Strike Back is based on novels by Chris Ryan, and the three-part (six double-episodes) programme was produced for Sky One, a British general entertainment channel. The word “hero” is used sparsely in Strike Back; indeed, in the third part the designation “war hero” occurs with a negative connotation when it is used by the man who, as the audience then know, has dishonourably ruined Porter’s military career: “Your word against mine. Major Hugh Collinson, decorated war hero. John Porter, pensioned out of the regiment, found wanting under pressure.” However, narrative and characterisation leave no doubt that John Porter is meant to be received as a hero, and he is given a story arc where his damaged heroism and honour can be rebuilt.

British soldier heroism 49 In contrast to the heroised soldier characters in the other case studies, Porter is an action hero who acts solitarily, and this is enabled by the fact that he is not a member of the regular army, where “heroics” are not encouraged (see the discussion of Occupation below), but of the Special Forces; at the end of the first part, he joins the fictional Section 20, a counter-terrorism/military intelligence unit that works in close association with the British secret service MI6 and is located in their iconic building on the Thames. Such affiliations predestine Porter for exciting action and physical heroism. However, while Porter’s fighting skills are part of a conventional masculine pleasure culture, his transgressive violence is always defused: his enemies are more brutal, and Porter acts brutally only when it is necessary. Porter also demonstrates excellence of character. The working-class man is not an officer, but he behaves like a gentleman. He has a strong sense of honour but also a caring side that makes him appreciable for the viewers, including female viewers.7 In this respect, the character was exactly the right product for a time when the new military-civilian covenant was becoming effective. Porter’s arc of restoring his soldier’s honour extends over all three parts. The beginning of the first part shows why Porter loses his reputation in the first place. At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, he makes a single bad decision when he leads an operation to rescue the business senior of a British armaments firm, who is being held hostage in Basra. Hugh Collinson (Andrew Lincoln) accompanies the soldiers as an officer of Section 20. They manage to free the hostage, but on the retreat a “human bomb” is put in their way, and Porter decides to save the young man (later revealed to be named As’ad). Instead of shooting him in the head, as he had been trained to do, Porter cuts the cable of the bomb trigger, and As’ad says in Arabic that he owes Porter his life and stands in a debt of honour to him. Porter knocks him unconscious so that he will not pose further danger, but As’ad reappears later with a machinegun in his hand. In the shooting that ensues, three of Porter’s comrades are killed, and his “best mate” Steve is brain damaged. The dark and shaky images of this scene are fractured, and Collinson’s claim that As’ad shot all the men cannot be verified. The third part will reveal that Collinson shot his comrades while suffering an anxiety-induced panic attack, and that he did not have the courage to admit this and ruin his own career. During their final confrontation, after Collinson has admitted his deed and Porter’s honour is cleared, Porter forgives him, and the fatally injured Collinson helps Porter escape, performing a last act of comradeship. Until Porter’s soldierly honour is restored, however, his journey leads him into a phase of depression and despair. Because of his professional failure to kill As’ad (which would be interpreted as a humanitarian act in other circumstances), Porter is demoted from his role as sergeant of an elite force. As a result, he loses the militariness that defines his identity and becomes a man who has lost the respect of his comrades, his family and himself. Rather than accepting a relegation to a humble job in the regular army, Porter resigns from the Special Forces. One of his last acts in uniform is to

50  Barbara Korte salute the war memorial that lists his dead comrades’ names. Porter’s difficulty in finding a new job outside the military epitomises the lack of public appreciation that the armed forces experienced during the early phase of the Iraq war, and the series exposes this as unfair treatment. The businessman whose life Porter saved offers him only “some driving work, office security” because Porter lacks academic qualifications. In 2010, Porter works as a dishevelled security guard in the MI6 building, and viewers can assume that he acquired this menial job through Collinson. To the audience, the former elite soldier looks visibly deheroised, but Porter has not abandoned hope that he may redeem himself. He gets a chance when a militant Islamist group kidnaps a British war correspondent, the daughter of a former minister, to exchange her for a “brother” imprisoned in Britain. The reporter was able to take a photo of her kidnapper and text it to Britain, and when it is shown in the television news, Porter recognises As’ad and sees a connection to the group that kidnapped the businessman seven years earlier. Porter becomes the last means for Section 20 to save the correspondent after one of her hands has been cut off by her abductors—an act of brutality that, indirectly, justifies Porter’s later violence against them. Porter is reinstated as a special soldier and sent to Iraq. A female Section 20 operative, Lt. Layla Thompson, is opposed to Porter’s role, declaring him a failure and emasculating him in the process. When her rescue operation fails, Porter sets out on his own, as a solitary hero. He lets the Islamists capture him in order to get close to the correspondent; after scenes of torture and fight action he is able to rescue her with the help of As’ad, which ultimately justifies Porter’s humanitarian act towards him. The correspondent, who speaks Arabic, has learned from As’ad that another British soldier shot Porter’s comrades, but Porter still lacks evidence. He is, however, restored to his prior military position—and his soldierly masculinity—and is seen once more in front of the war memorial, to which more names have been added over the past seven years. It is at this symbolic site that Layla apologises to Porter for her earlier dismissive behaviour and appreciates his exceptional bravery: “You did an extraordinary thing out there.” Porter as hero restored is invited to join Section 20, and two further adventures in parts two and three take him to Zimbabwe and Afghanistan. These are settings with an explicit connection to the British Empire that suggest British imperialism as a cause of present-day global conflicts.8 At the beginning of part two, the voice-over of a speech by Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe clearly expresses this: “We don’t have to invite the British. And who are they after all? Our invaders and colonisers of yesterday.” The prison in Harare, which Porter has to infiltrate during his mission, is a fortress once built by the British, and Porter is about to be tortured there with the same instruments used by the British during the colonial period. However, Porter’s personal postcolonial sensitivity takes some time to develop. His mission in Zimbabwe is to free a former British soldier, Felix Masuku, from prison and then kill him so that he cannot be used in a show trial against the United Kingdom. Masuku is a black soldier whose parents were killed by Mugabe

British soldier heroism 51 in the Matabeleland massacres in 1982. Masuku, who served in the British armed forces, was sent by British Intelligence to assassinate Mugabe, but he was betrayed by a double agent. When Porter learns that Masuku was framed, he decides to save his life and let him stay in Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, Masuku and Porter team up and save a group of AIDS orphans from bandits—an opportunity to demonstrate that Porter is not a killing machine, as a young African nun deems him to be, but a “good man.” In the third part, Porter finds himself once more at the forefront of the War on Terror. This time, he is in the Helmand province in Afghanistan, a hothouse of insurgent activities. He is tasked to find and extract a deranged Scottish computer specialist who has been assisting the Taliban in manipulating British missile guidance software. The man is traumatised by the fact that one of his operations as a contractor for the British in 2003 led to the accidental bombing of a village, killing many women and children. Porter sympathises with the man and tries to save him. This means that he must operate against the Americans, who are hunting the computer specialist because he has come across one of their secret dirty operations. The last sequence of the series shows Porter escaping in a jeep, a lone hero in the lonesome desert, while a voice-over of a radio communication does not only reveal that the Americans are still hunting him but also summarises the qualities that make him a hero: he is said to be “resourceful, tenacious, possibly obsessive-compulsive.” Porter has a short final appearance at the beginning of the successful Cinemax series with which the Sky programme was continued (2011–2014). After Section 20 fails to rescue him, Pakistani activists execute him during a live video transmission. Porter dies tearlessly and defiantly, even managing to convey coded information while being forced to read his killers’ message. Despite its intention to provide action entertainment, and the fact that it does not refrain from heroic cliché, Strike Back expresses criticism of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and Britain’s special alliance with the United States. In part one, while Porter is recovering in hospital from a wound he received during the rescue of the businessman in 2003, he watches a news report by the correspondent he will later save. Porter hears that the operation that cost his comrades their lives was dubiously legitimated: “Well, despite repeated assurances by the Prime Minister that WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] will be found in Iraq, firm evidence of Saddam Hussein’s supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons has yet to be found.” After the correspondent is saved in 2010, she gives a press conference expressing that both Iraqi and British families have suffered through the war: My father supported the invasion and the war that followed, an extension of which is still going on in Afghanistan. My family have had a taste of what British Forces and Iraqi families have gone through these past few years, and we are humbled by it. My heart goes out to those families on both sides, whose loved ones will never come home.

52  Barbara Korte While Strike Back thus pays tribute to the unpopularity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Britain, it also reflects how the soldiers who fought these wars gained public recognition. Strike Back personalises this process and shows how civilians, including a Christian nun, learn to appreciate Porter and his behaviour. For all of them, and for the people he saves or tries to save, Porter becomes the man who puts things right. Porter’s heroic character has a physical correlative because as he is tall and athletic, the embodiment of a British adventure hero. However, his muscular masculinity is also marked by the gender complexities of the twentyfirst century: he has a sensitive, vulnerable and empathetic side. In part two, he seems to have the ability to sense the moment his wife dies during an operation, and he is tearful when he talks to his daughter about this loss. He breaks down in part three when he learns that his friend Steve has died and fears that he will now never be able to prove his innocence. Furthermore, Porter is compassionate: he shows compassion to the boy turned into a human bomb, the injured war correspondent, a boy he saves from being raped in the Harare prison, and the AIDS orphans. Portraying Porter as an adventure hero with a sensitive, caring side and a sense of injustice connects him with the soldier heroes in two realist television dramas.

The humanitarian soldier hero in Occupation and Our Girl Occupation was the first television drama about the Iraq war broadcast on British television. As Stephen Harper writes, “the widespread public disapproval of the occupation of Iraq, and a somewhat heightened public suspicion of media propaganda” explains the delay in fictional representations of this conflict (2013, 209). Occupation, winner of the BAFTA award for Best Drama Serial, was written by Peter Bowker, directed by Nick Murphy and first shown across three parts on three consecutive nights in June 2009 (the DVD version presents the drama in two parts). Occupation follows the story of three soldiers in the British army over five years, beginning in April 2003, when they are part of “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” the invasion that led to the occupation of Iraq by the Western allies. The soldiers remain involved in Iraq, albeit in different functions, and the narrative ends in 2007, with a funeral in Manchester. The title of the drama thus refers not only to the occupation of a country. It also suggests how Iraq continues to occupy the soldiers—and their country—long after the original operation, because the aim to liberate Iraq only led to its further deterioration and a significant loss of freedom for large parts of the population. The three main characters—Sgt Mike Swift (James Nesbitt), Corporal Danny Petersen (Stephen Graham) and Lance Corporal Lee Hibbs (Warren Brown)—undergo significant changes in their own lives. These changes are initiated by an incident they experience during the invasion phase, as part of a “normal” army operation. The first images of the drama show the men huddled with other soldiers in an armoured personnel carrier on the way to

British soldier heroism 53 a mission in Basra, where their task is to eliminate a sniper. The soldiers are presented as professionals, and Sgt Swift announces “no heroics. We don’t lose anyone.” In accordance with this maxim, the sequence where the soldiers approach the sniper does not convey the dynamics of an action scene. Rather, because it is shot with a handheld camera and swiftly edited, it suggests the soldiers’ disorientation and the general confusion of the operation. When they finally reach the place where the sniper is hidden, a girl appears unexpectedly in the door of the opposite flat. The soldiers give her sweets to keep her quiet, but the sniper becomes aware of their presence and slips a grenade into the corridor, which explodes and leaves one soldier and the girl badly injured. The cries of the wounded soldier, who loses a foot, sound over the title sequence and signal that this television drama will focus on victims and the cost of war, rather than war heroics. Nevertheless, the subsequent scene depicts an act that, thanks to media coverage, becomes a heroic deed in the eyes of the British public, exposing that it is always also the media that make a hero. Sgt Swift is deeply affected by the injured girl and carries her to a hospital, taking her through streets that are under fire and littered with other Iraqi war victims (Figure 2.1). The sequence has a soundtrack of sublime chanting that is discrepant with the images and marks Swift’s humanitarian act as an extraordinary deed amid the dirty business of war. Swift is even more affected when a female Iraqi doctor, Allyah Nabil, tells him that the girl cannot receive adequate treatment in war-torn Basra, due to a lack of medical equipment. The story is continued two months later in Manchester, where Swift, Petersen and Hibbs have returned from their tour of Iraq. None of them is able to re-adapt easily to life at home. When Swift enters his house in

Figure 2.1  The humanitarian hero (screenshot from Occupation I/1)

54  Barbara Korte uniform, he looks alien in the domestic environment, especially in the kitchen, where his wife has pinned an article from a newspaper on the notice board. A war photographer captured Swift’s rescue of the girl, and the newspaper presented it on its front page as an exemplary act of heroism: “True Brit: Sergeant Mike Swift saves Iraqi girl after insurgent attack on Basra flats.” The caption highlights the humanitarian side of the soldier’s act and at the same time suggests that this humane heroism legitimises the British presence in Iraq. As John Kelly (2012) points out, emphasis on the humanitarian side of the United Kingdom’s military engagement in Iraq was a strategy to create a positive image for the contested war, and in Occupation, the press coverage of Swift’s deed aims to do just that. Swift is a rewarding subject for this kind of heroisation because his humanitarianism exceeds his one rescue deed in Basra. He becomes part of a longterm aid project, a cooperation between a children’s hospital in Manchester and the hospital in Basra. His media-fabricated heroic reputation is used in the promotion of the project, whose fundraiser explicitly calls Swift a hero and bedecks the room for a press conference with blown-up newspapers that have put Swift’s “mercy dash” on their front pages. These newspapers characterise Swift as a “local hero,” thus allowing Manchester to participate in “their” soldier’s humanity. During the press conference, Swift sits in uniform next to the girl he helped to save, representing the humanitarian side of the British army for the media. A hero theme is thus established very prominently at the beginning of the drama, but it is focused on a humanitarian act rather than martial prowess. Swift is the soldier as lifesaver, blurring the line between military and civilian heroism. As a humanitarian hero, Swift is highly appreciable, also for the viewers of Occupation. At the same time, however, the drama criticises how Swift is also a media-fabricated hero, and how his heroic reputation is exploited to make an unpopular war palatable to the public. In Strike Back, heroism is part of Porter’s identity. Occupation presents a more complex constellation where a heroic deed is made into a heroic image that can be used for purposes that are dissociated from the original deed. The viewers are thus confronted with a situation where they must judge not only a heroic deed, but also the way in which a heroic reputation is instrumentalised. Apart from this explicit engagement with the process of heroisation, the first part of Occupation puts emphasis on the theme of victimisation. Not only do Iraqi civilians become “collateral” victims of the war, there are also significant psychological costs for the British soldiers. Iraq continues to hold the three main soldier characters in its grip, albeit for various reasons. Sgt Swift has fallen in love with Allyah, who shares his feelings but returns to Iraq when she learns that Saddam’s henchmen did not kill her husband, as she had believed. In order to find her, Swift volunteers for a second tour in Iraq, now as part of the Royal Medical Corps. Unable to forgive him for his affair, his wife back in Manchester will later divorce him. Swift’s love for Allyah is hopeless, however, because the occupation of Iraq has incited the

British soldier heroism 55 rise of religious fundamentalism and, with it, a severe curtailing of women’s rights—a bitterly ironic consequence of Operation Iraqi Freedom. When Swift finds Allyah again, her ability to work as a doctor has already been significantly restricted; fundamentalists, who already suspect her relationship with Swift, will eventually kill her when she treats people wounded during an emergency. In this plot line, Swift’s media-hailed heroism leads only to personal loss, and his individual humanitarianism effects almost nothing because, on the grander scale, Western occupation has given rise to widespread corruption and the war profiteering of private entrepreneurs. As Herfried Münkler observes, the spread of military entrepreneurship is characteristic of the new wars, and “fits in most closely with the ‘free market’ mentality of post-heroic societies” (2005, 134). In Occupation, soldiers who become private entrepreneurs and exploit the political situation for their own material profit are negative foils for Swift’s humanitarian heroism. While Swift stays in the army, his comrades Danny Peterson and Lee Hibbs have become disillusioned with the army during their tour of Iraq and, albeit for different reasons, they decide to join private firms. To Danny, who has no family ties, this allows him to make far more money than he could in the army. His character arc is a deheroising one as soon as he becomes the company partner of Erik, a US ex-Marine and performs “risk management operations” for private investors in Iraq. Danny recruits several of his former comrades, including Higgs, claiming hypocritically that they can thus “put things right in that country […] for the Iraqis” and “for those comrades who were killed or injured.” While this rhetoric sounds honourable, the only purpose of the company is to generate profit from the large amounts of money that flow into the country from the United Nations and other sources to help rebuild Iraq. Danny and his American companion (a “special relationship” on a personal level) gain a contract to escort American businessmen around the hospitals they are allegedly planning to rebuild. Swift calls Danny and Erik mercenaries; in his opinion, they have betrayed a value- and honour-based soldierly ethos for material gain.9 Indeed, when Danny and Erik later become contractors themselves, Danny becomes so greedy that he forges contracts and signatures, and causes severe trouble for his former comrades. He does not even hesitate to exploit the esteem his friend Swift enjoys among Basra’s medical profession. Hibbs seeks employment in Danny’s company not for the money but because he really wants to help the Iraqis, something he believes the British armed forces do not. He develops a close friendship with an Iraqi, Younis, who is killed for cooperating with Danny’s company just when he has fulfilled his personal dream and opened a pizzeria. One year later, a disillusioned Hibbs gives Younis’s family all the money he earned in Danny’s company. He is then kidnapped by the militant group that killed Younis. They have planned to execute Hibbs—behead him with a knife—in front of a video camera. Although Hibbs does not lose his dignity in this situation,

56  Barbara Korte he is not presented as a man who faces this horrible fate like a “hero,” as Porter does in Strike Back. Crying and hunched in a corner, Hibbs points out that he was always “a quiet lad” and that his life “wasn’t supposed to end like this.” Dressed in a prisoner’s overalls, he then reads out his kidnappers’ message, which ironically describes an opinion he has formed himself: “I think the United States army and the British army should leave Iraq. And let the Iraqi people decide for themselves their own future. My name is Lee Hibbs, and I should not be here.” Hibbs is saved at the last minute when Danny finds him and offers the kidnappers ransom. This is a brave act through which Danny aims to reassert his former comradeship with Hibbs, but it is also motivated by Danny’s growing misgivings about his contracting work. The action rises to catastrophe in June 2007, when Hibbs and his driver, returning from a mission for Danny, encounter a demonstrating mob and have to escape on foot. They need help, and Danny calls the British army. Sgt Swift’s son Richard, who is now also serving in Basra, having joined the army against his mother’s will, is part of the rescue unit, tragically right after he has confessed to his father that he cannot cope with the situation in Iraq. He gets into trouble during the rescue mission, and his text message calling for his father’s help reaches Swift too late. Shortly after Allyah has been killed, the sergeant finds his son’s dead body. The television drama suggests through this father-son tragedy that the War on Terror has longterm traumatic consequences not only for the people of Iraq, but also for people in the United Kingdom. After the tragic climax, the final act of the drama takes place in Manchester, at Richard’s funeral with military honours. Hibbs and Danny attend the funeral, even though the latter is not welcome. It is here that the heroic theme is taken up explicitly again, but in a manner that is devoid of any propagandistic intent. Hibbs has abandoned mercenary work and found a new task as counsellor to returning servicemen. During the funeral service, Hibbs reads from a book Swift gave him, because Allyah once quoted from it as a testimony of her cultural heritage. It is a Babylonian epic, involving Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu, who excel in fights and other heroic deeds. The scene in Occupation, however, conveys quite a different impression of the epic, emphasising its human message. Allyah cited this message to Swift, and now Hibbs cites it once more at the funeral: “What you seek you will never find. […] Let your every day be full of joy. Love the child that holds your hand. Let your wife delight in your embrace. For these alone are the concerns of humanity.” After the funeral, Swift, having lost his child, his wife and his lover, confronts Danny, who tries to defend his mercenary work with the statement that “at least now I know what I’m risking my life for.” When Swift asks incredulously, “What happened to you,” Danny returns the question. This question, along with the final bleak images of the three former friends lined up on a bench, looking helpless and lost, creates an open ending that provokes reflection.

British soldier heroism 57 According to a female reviewer in the Observer, “Occupation engaged its audience […] because it married wham-bam Boy’s Own war games with considerable emotional depth and breadth, thus avoiding unreconstructed machismo. This was a drama about men that was entirely in touch with its feminine side” (Flett 2009). Occupation presents the possibility of humanitarian heroism as an alternative to martial heroism, or rather: it inscribes an ethics of care (and its prevailing connotation with femininity) into the role and image of the heroic soldier. The soldiers in Occupation are professional when they wage war, but they are depicted as heroic only where they act humanely and against the violence with which martial heroism is traditionally associated. This redefinition of soldier heroism accords with the civil values of contemporary British society and suits the new covenant between the military and civilian spheres. On the negative side, Occupation reveals how this redefined heroism lends itself to producing positive images of soldiering in a disputed war. Our Girl has a similar strategy of portraying the soldier hero, and here an emphasis on an ethics of care is even more prominent because the serial revolves around a female soldier.10 It is situated in a context where, reflecting ideas of gender equality, women have gained access to the armed forces, increasingly also in combat positions, and begun to break up its traditional homosociality. Female fighter figures have become a staple of cinema, including contemporary war films, where women “are gaining agency in violent conflict situations, replacing and supplementing male combatants and questioning the processes of masculinization of heroes” (Ritzenhoff and Kazecki 2014, 2–3).11 The British armed forces did not permit women to serve in combat situations until 2016, excepting women in the medical corps. For Our Girl, whose first episode was aired in 2014, this exception was the only option for a realistic portrayal of a female soldier of ordinary rank in the regular army at the front in Afghanistan.12 Our Girl continued a single drama of the same title (2013) which presented its young London working-class character Molly Dawes (Lacey Turner) coming to the decision that joining the army might help her sort out her life. In the serial, Molly joins an infantry team in October 2013 as their new medic and embarks on a mission in Afghanistan, where the British soldiers support the Afghan National Army in the fight against the Taliban. Molly will eventually shoot one of the terrorists dead, but what makes her an official war hero is a life-saving deed. She is awarded the Military Cross because she has demonstrated “bravery and valour” when saving her injured comrade Smurf in a dangerous situation. As proclaimed during the ceremony: “To save a life whilst being willing to sacrifice your own is above and beyond the call of duty. Her Majesty the Queen has found it fitting to award Private Dawes the Military Cross” (I/5). Molly is an officially recognised war hero, in contrast to some of her male comrades who exploit the heroic image of soldiers as an excuse to get and do what they want. When Molly rejects Smurf, who has fallen in love with her, he points out that he is

58  Barbara Korte “a fucking war hero” (I/3), and when his friends visit Smurf in hospital, they claim access to his room saying “[w]e’re war heroes, no rules” (I/5). Molly is more hesitant to consider herself as a hero as is made explicit when, as part of the military’s encouragement of its heroes to appear at public events, she is invited to her local London football club. As she says to Smurf when they visit the stadium: Molly:  I’m a war hero, apparently. […] Smurf:  People love soldiers nowadays. Go for it. […] Molly: I dunno. I just don’t feel like a hero. I find it all a bit embarrassing. Smurf: You saved me and your local club wants to honour you. Don’t let them down. It’s a big life ahead, and you might not get another opportunity. (I/5) The scene expresses scepticism at the current cult of soldiers, but it also confirms that Molly has fulfilled the request of her commanding officer at the beginning of the first episode and “done herself proud.” The rest of episode five shows that Molly uses her hero status to good effect; she becomes an example to others and trains new combat nurses. Under a gender-critical perspective Molly’s professional task as a medic roots her agency and achievement in the conventionally “feminine” domain of caring and healing. But like in Occupation with its male heroic figure, Molly’s “feminine,” caring and life-saving heroism is also used to foreground the human disaster of the war in Afghanistan. Molly’s attitude towards the Afghan civilian population is more open than that of her male comrades, and she is more understanding of their plight under the Taliban, especially that of the suppressed women. The heroism of “our girl” is, similarly to Sgt Swift in Occupation, primarily motivated by humanitarianism, and neither of the characters is a martial hero although both are professional soldiers. Their heroism comes very close to civil heroism—a kind of heroism that is acceptable to the civilians watching the military dramas in their domestic environments. It makes the soldiers morally acceptable even though the war in which they serve is not. On a meta-heroic level, Occupation and Our Girl point out that heroism needs to be critically examined, especially at a time when soldier heroism is not only a matter of deeds actually performed but also a fabrication of the media and the military propaganda machine. With a satirical inflection, this is also exposed in Bluestone 42.

Soldier heroism exposed: Bluestone 42 Bluestone 42 is a sitcom originally aired on BBC Three, a channel targeted at viewers between 16 and 34 and with a remit for innovative programming. Its half-hour episodes revolve around a British bomb disposal detachment in Afghanistan’s most dangerous province, Helmand. It depicts situations

British soldier heroism 59 familiar to cinemagoers from the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker (2008), but this time with a strong dose of satire and black humour, much of which is directed against the heroisation of and within the British army. As described by a Times reviewer: “Thanks to television, most of us are familiar with what hellholes such as Helmand look like […]. Bluestone 42 is true to what we have observed but turns reality into a dark, sharply written comedy” (Billen 2013). There is a tradition of comedy dramas and sitcoms about war and military culture both in Britain (Blackadder Goes Forth, Dad’s Army) and the United States (M*A*S*H), but as most reviewers note, Bluestone 42 is unique in that it is set in a war zone where British soldiers were still in active service at the time when it was originally broadcast. This explains why the creators of Bluestone 42 were careful that their comedic approach would not show a lack of respect for the British soldiers in Afghanistan. A review of the first episode cites one of the writers, Richard Hurst, claiming that “we did an enormous amount of research and talked to a lot of soldiers. […] We wanted to make something that soldiers would look at and say, ‘Yeah, that’s basically what it’s like’” (Rampton 2013). Accordingly, response among the Armed Forces and even Afghanistan veterans was largely appreciative of the way in which the humour of the programme and its presentation of military banter reflected soldiers’ lived experience (Parry and Thumim 2016, 39). This is significant because the aim to be authentic and the comedic approach generate a non-heroic and, at times, a distinctly deheroising tone. The series plays with clichéd ideas of soldier heroism, beginning with its promotion photograph. This picture, which is also reproduced on the DVD cover (2013), shows the Bluestone 42 team shot from below, standing in heroic poses. Such poses—and all other conventions of heroic representation and self-fashioning—are systematically deconstructed. In the first episode, a sniper shoots a boastful CIA liaison and veteran from the first Gulf War when he carelessly lifts his helmet, prompting feelings of schadenfreude among the British team. However, this gibe at the “special relationship” is only a side issue, because the satire of the series is mainly directed at heroisations within the Bluestone 42 team itself. Its chief object is the unit’s handsome upper-class captain, Nick Medhurst (Oliver Chris). He is the “bomb man” who performs the risky defusing work. The series leaves no doubt that this job is dangerous and requires courage; the Captain eventually loses a leg when a bomb explodes. The third episode reveals, however, that the Captain owes his heroic reputation less to his soldierly work than to his sexual prowess and the attention of the media. Like Occupation, this programme also shows how the media create heroes, and how this may result in a blurring of heroism and celebrity. The Captain’s fame is based on the fact that a female journalist he has “shagged” becomes so obsessed with him that she publishes a heroising article about him. She is subsequently fed new stories about him by the army headquarters, as they find the heroic captain useful for building a positive public image. The double-page article from the Express with the caption “10 Bombs in a Day: Brave

60  Barbara Korte British Soldier Defuses 10 Bombs in One Day” is on display in the unit’s tent, and it has even received international attention. When an attractive female Danish hostage is freed from the Taliban, she declares to be familiar with the article and is very keen to sleep with Captain Medhurst herself: “It’s you. From the newspaper. Ten bombs in a day. […] So brave! And even taller than I thought” (I/3). The lance corporal who has actually saved the Danish aid worker meanwhile tries to get a publisher’s contract for his memoir, sensationally entitled A Foot in Death’s Door. He obviously tries to emulate soldiers-turned-writers like Chris Ryan and Andy McNab, but his book is too poorly written to compete on a market already saturated with soldiers’ memoirs. The corporal’s publicity photo is ridiculous, showing him in full Guard’s Uniform, including the famous bear-fur helmet, despite the Afghan heat. The episode encapsulates the tongue-in-cheek manner with which Bluestone 42 exposes the hero cult that developed around British soldiers after 2007, while it does not deny that the soldiers were performing dangerous work and risked their life and health. It is the programme’s stand against the contemporary zeitgeist of heroising the British soldier which a reviewer of The Times found most impressive, calling Bluestone 42 “the bravest thing I have seen on television for a while” (Billen 2013).

Conclusion The television dramas analysed in this chapter reflect a situation where appreciation for the role of soldiers and for soldier heroism in the British public was revived. This happened in the context of wars that were unpopular, and where the heroic image of soldiers was actively fabricated to influence people’s attitude towards these wars. The programmes approach the new heroisation of the soldier within the framework of different genres and from different perspectives. While Strike Back perpetuates the war-adventure genre and presents an action hero (albeit with some sensitivity to postcolonial and gender issues), Occupation and Our Girl are realist dramas that critique the way heroic reputations are instrumentalised to recreate the soldier as a figure around which the nation can convene, a strategy intending to make the War on Terror more palatable. Bluestone 42 makes the same critique with the means of satirical comedy. However, none of the four programmes is dismissive of the bravery of soldiers or questions that soldiers do act heroically. They all reproduce elements that are central to the definition of heroes and heroism: bravery, honour, and the willingness to sacrifice one’s own life and well-being. Their critique is directed towards processes of heroisation that are primarily aimed at producing, disseminating and exploiting a heroic image. It is significant that the image promoted in the media and by military propaganda is that of the soldier as a humane and humanitarian hero. This is an uncontroversial form of heroism and one that crosses the boundary between military and civil ideas of heroism. Humane heroism de-emphasises the problematic association of soldiering with violence; it is

British soldier heroism 61 immediately relatable for civilians and therefore has a special capacity to bond soldier and nation. It is telling in this respect that none of the examples considered in this chapter present soldiers who find it easy to kill. Even the Special Forces soldier in Strike Back is not naturally bellicose; his use of force always appears justified and is balanced by his care for others. A sense of morality pervades all four programmes, and not only in relation to the use of violence. The criticism of the mercenary soldier in Occupation is meant to emphasise that a heroic soldier not only acts beyond what is required by duty, but also acts without the expectation of material reward. While all programmes present characters who are unheroic, it is interesting that they do not feature anti-heroes of the kind that is popular in twenty-first-century television drama: characters with a “relative morality” (Mittell 2015, 143) that hover between right and wrong, between heroism and villainy. The soldiers who are presented as heroic in the four examples are uncontroversially heroic; they are portrayed as men and women who deserve to be called and appreciated as heroes. This supports the claim that the view of the twenty-first century as a postheroic era needs to be treated with caution and that one should rather see the social construction of heroes as an ongoing process in which, in Scheipers’s words, “the meaning of heroism is contested and constantly reinterpreted” (2014, 15). The television dramas considered above show their viewers that soldiers in the War on Terror can be appreciated as heroes due to their actual behaviour. At the same time, they point out that the way heroes are constructed can be problematic. Eventually, this includes the way in which the programmes themselves applaud and reproduce a humanitarian heroism whose propagandistic use they expose.

Notes



1. For a discussion of the affinities between the heroic and violence, and the way in which such affinities are captured in medialisation, see Falkenhayner et al. (2019). 2. See Korte (2016) for a discussion of this series. 3. See the introductory chapter to the present book, p. 2. 4. The British vigilante film Outlaw (2007, dir. Nick Love) significantly includes a scene in which a soldier returning from Iraq is derided by a group of young men. The film depicts this disrespect as a motivation for the soldier to form a group that will fight crime and injustice in the United Kingdom. 5. The original Sky series is now often referred to as Chris Ryan’s Strike Back (also on the cited DVD), to distinguish it from the Cinemax series Strike Back. 6. See Amanda Lotz’s discussion of series on US cable television “that probe the trials and complexities of contemporary manhood” (2014, 5). 7. As the programme’s executive producer Andy Harries said in a comment on the DVD edition: “We don’t want to turn off the female audience” (“On Strike” 2010). 8. As Münkler states more generally, “[n]early all wars that have claimed our attention for a shorter or longer time over the past ten to twenty years have developed in the margins and breaches of the former empires that ruled and divided the world until the early part of the last century” (2005, 5).

62  Barbara Korte

9. This is a parallel to The Last Kingdom, where Uhtred is criticised by King Alfred for desiring only material reward. See the discussion in Chapter 1 of this book. 10. This chapter considers only the first season of Our Girl because seasons two and three have a new female protagonist and are focused on humanitarian missions of the British army in different regions of Africa and Asia. 11. The female soldier in combat situations pioneered in 1990s Hollywood films such as Courage Under Fire (US 1996) and G.I. Jane (1997). See also Yvonne Tasker’s view that in the analysis of war films “gender can be best understood as a set of discourses that are contested, accepted, and resisted within networks, rather than binaries” (2005, 180). 12. Efforts of British television to depict women’s contribution to war have therefore tended to focus on their roles as nurses (see The Crimson Field for the First World War), or in different roles on the home front. The exceptional status of women serving in war in other roles is reflected in a television series about the female British code breakers of the Second World War: The Bletchley Circle (ITV 2012–14) depicts how the women find the fact that their important contribution to the war effort had to remain secret, and their return to ordinary life and “normal” female roles in the postwar period unsatisfactory and secretly start investigating crimes.

Works cited Anthony, Andrew. 2010. “Luther, Chris Ryan’s Strike Back and Jamie Does… Venice.” The Guardian. May 09, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-andradio/2010/may/09/idris-elba-jamie-oliver-tv-review. Billen, Andrew. 2013. “Last Night’s TV: Bluestone 42.” The Times, March 6, 2013. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/last-nights-tv-bluestone-42-7v3gg9gxc0s. Bluestone 42. 2013. Season 1. Written by James Cary and Richard Hurst. Produced by Michelle Farr, Stephen McCrum, et al. London: 2 Entertain Video. DVD. Chris Ryan’s Strike Back. 2010. Written by Jed Mercurio, Alan Whiting and Robert Murphy. Produced by Andrew Benson et al. London: 2 Entertain Video. DVD. Dawson, Graham. 1994. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities. London and New York: Routledge. Falkenhayner, Nicole et al. 2019. “Heroism – Violence – Mediality. Working Paper of the Collaborative Working Group on Mediality.” helden. heroes. héros., Special Issue 5: 69–78. DOI: 10.6094/helden.heroes.heros./2019/APH/08, 69–78. Flett, Kathryn. 2009. “Three Hours of Shock and Awe.” The Guardian, June 21, 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/jun/21/the-take-occupation-psychoville. Franco, Zeno E., Kathy Blau, and Philip G. Zimbardo. 2011. “Heroism: A Conceptual Analysis and Differentiation Between Heroic Action and Altruism.” Review of General Psychology 15 (2): 99–113. DOI: 10.1037/a0022672. Harper, Stephen. 2013. “‘Terrible Things Happen.’ Peter Bowker’s ‘Occupation’ and the Representation of the Iraq War in British Television Drama.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 10 (1): 206–223. DOI: 10.3366/jbctv.2013.0130. Havardi, Jeremy. 2014. Projecting Britain at War: The National Character in British World War II Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Ingham, Sarah. 2014. The Military Covenant: Its Impact on Civil-Military Relations in Britain. Farnham: Ashgate. Kelly, John. 2012. “Popular Culture, Sport and the ‘Hero’-fication of British Militarism.” Sociology 47 (4): 722–738. DOI: 10.1177/0038038512453795.

British soldier heroism 63 Korte, Barbara. 2016. “‘The Crimson Field’ (2014): Re-Visioning World War I in British Period Drama.” In History as TV-Series, edited by Edgar Lersch and Reinhold Viehoff. Thematic Issue SPIEL 31 (2): 53–66. DOI: 10.3726/ spiel.2016.02.04. Lacey, Stephen, and Derek Paget. 2015. “Introduction.” In The ‘War on Terror’: Post 9/11 Television Drama, Docudrama and Documentary, edited by Stephen Lacey and Derek Paget, 1–10. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Münkler, Herfried. 2005. The New Wars. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity Press. Occupation. 2015. Written by Peter Bowker. Produced by Karim Abouobayd, Laurie Borg, et al. Cologne: Rough Trade Distribution GmbH. DVD. “On Strike: Making Chris Ryan’s Strike Back.” 2010. Chris Ryan’s Strike Back. Written by Jed Mercurio, Alan Whiting and Robert Murphy. Produced by Andrew Benson et al. London: 2 Entertain Video. DVD. Our Girl. 2014. Season 1. Written by Tony Grounds et al. Produced by Caroline Skinner, Ken Horn, et al. London: Acron Media. DVD. Paris, Michael. 2000. Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000. London: Reaktion Books. Parry, Katy, and Nancy Thumim. 2016. “‘When He’s in Afghanistan It’s Like Our World/His World’: Mediating Military Experience.” Media, Culture & Society 39 (1): 29–44. DOI: 10.1177/0163443716672298. Rampton, James. 2013. “Bluestone 42: The Hurt Locker Meets Miranda in Military Comedy Set in Afghanistan.” The Independent, March 5, 2013. https://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/bluestone-42-the-hurt-lockermeets-miranda-in-military-comedy-set-in-afghanistan-8519895.html. Ritzenhoff, Karen A., and Jakub Kazecki, eds. 2014. Heroism and Gender in War Films. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scheipers, Sibylle, ed. 2014. Heroism and the Changing Character of War: Toward Post-Heroic Warfare? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sutcliffe, Tom. 2010. “Last Night’s TV, Chris Ryan’s Strike Back […].” The Independent, May 6, 2010. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ tv/reviews/last-nights-tv-chris-ryans-strike-back-sky-1timothy-spall-somewhereat-sea-bbc4the-boats-that-built-1964268.html. Tasker, Yvonne. 2005. “Soldiers’ Stories: Women and Military Masculinities in ‘Courage Under Fire’.” In The War Film, edited by Robert Eberwein, 172–189. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Thane, Pat. 2018. Divided: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wollaston, Sam. 2006. “Last Night’s TV.” The Guardian, May 1, 2006. https://www. theguardian.com/media/2006/may/01/tvandradio.g2. . 2010. “Chris Ryan’s Strike Back and Timothy Spall: Somewhere at Sea.” The Guardian, May 6, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2010/ may/06/chris-ryans-strike-back-review. Woodward, Rachel, and K. Neil Jenkings. 2011. “Military Identities in the Situated Accounts of British Military Personnel.” Sociology 45 (2): 252–268. DOI: 10.1177/0038038510394016.

3

The heroic TV detective in the twenty-first century Transforming archetypes Nicole Falkenhayner

Detectives on British television The history of the crime drama has led to its alignment with realistic representations and societal questions—more so than many other fictional genres on television.1 The crime drama is also connected to basic questions of morality, as McElroy has argued: [Crime drama] is one of the most important places where ideas of justice, transgression, retribution and civic life are represented and contested. Crime drama offers audiences stories of right and wrong, moral authority asserted and resisted, professionals and criminals, and does so in ways that are often highly entertaining, innovative and thought-provoking. (2016, 1) This is especially the case for the police procedural, a genre traditionally built on the fictional premise that the viewer is witnessing an actual crime investigation. For much of its television history, representing the police realistically was essential for the production of crime drama. Marianne Colbran, in an academic monograph investigating the production background of crime drama, recalls how, when she became a scriptwriter for The Bill (ITV 1984–2010) in 1990, “it was standard practice for new writers to spend time at London police stations shadowing police officers” (2014, 1). The proximity of the crime drama to the social discourses it represents makes it a valuable site for investigating the dynamics between fictional mediations of crime and the role of an ideology of safety and security in the wider social fabric— with the police force as one of the ideology’s main executive institutions. As McElroy observes, crime drama “is simultaneously transgressive—crossing the thresholds of professional insider knowledge—and conservative, as it reinforces the privileged insights and authority of the police force” (2016, 2). Unlike the military or the secret services, and certainly in contrast to the heroic figures of historical and fantasy genres discussed in other chapters of this book, police officers are keepers of order in the most parochial

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 65 and nonheroic situations. Especially in the British context, the traditional figure of “the bobby on the beat” is a sight that, for many, still has a calming, rather than exciting, effect.2 This figure also represents what Reiner has called “the legitimating myth of the British police”: “they are carers rather than controllers” (1985, 13). The fact that the police procedural might still induce this reassuring effect on British television audiences might be a reason why The Bill was among the series that were rerun on the ITV player during the pandemic lockdown in 2020 (Kelly 2020). In the history of popular crime literature, it was conventionally amateur sleuths and hardboiled detectives who represented figures of extraordinariness as either “reasoning machines” or “shop-soiled Galahads” (Scaggs 2005, 39, 58). While in the early decades of television, such figures could also be found on the British small screen, from the second half of the twentieth century, programmes with such protagonists gave way to police procedurals that laud collective agency and, conventionally, put their “emphasis on regulatory authority and social control” (87), like The Bill. It is this ambiguity between people’s perception of the police as a protecting and caring force and the police’s disciplining function and duty that underlies their representations in popular literature and crime drama. The twenty-firstcentury reconfigurations of the heroic reflect this underlying ambiguity. Even though the realistic quality of police procedurals is often and rightfully questioned,3 police procedurals maintain a connection to actual social circumstances and, to a certain extent, operate as figures of the social. In other words, crime dramas appear as synecdochic representations of a society as a whole, with all its problems and discontents (Falkenhayner 2014, 6–10). These observations beg the question of whether this proximity to the social will hinder or amplify the affordance of the genre for heroic stories and heroic characters. The genre’s immediate address of broad and fundamental moral questions and the status of the police as a pillar of the social order appear as a fruitful prerequisite for heroic representations. The social contract between the public and the police institution gives the police the authority to prevent the transgression of the boundary between right and wrong. However, fictional representations of police work are able to display exactly these transgressions to the audience, thereby inviting a voyeuristic and sensationalising gaze on the forbidden. The representation of transgressions in fictional media reveal which actions and desires are implicitly seen as forbidden in a culture, while simultaneously offering them to the public as entertainment. Following John Scaggs’s analysis, the police procedural genre utilises fiction as “an ideological state apparatus” that “diffuse[s] the potential for violent transgression” (85). Therefore, the cultural work of police representation in TV drama can, similar to its counterparts in popular literature, be seen as “one of the most effective means of policing a society governed not by morality, but by fear of scandal, fear of punishment, and by fear of its own capacity for criminal and amoral action” (86). In the police procedural, it is not individual figures who are granted

66  Nicole Falkenhayner collective agency, but the structure of the police force and the police officers as a specific unit or team. An obvious counterexample, both on American and British television, was the rise of the action police series of the 1970s, including the iconic The Sweeney (BBC 1974–1978) and its hard-boiled hero, Jack Regan. It has been argued that the 1970s shattered the post-war promise of rebuilding a Britain that would fully recover to its pre-war glory, and revealed a dramatic rift in the social structure—connected to a growing critical awareness of the power structures and frictions within society’s disciplinary institutions. Television scholar Alan Clarke has argued that tough, unrealistic detectives on TV, such as John Regan, reflect the cultural shift away from trusting the police force and viewing them as carers in the crisis-riven 1970s, a time of social unrest, strikes and economic downturn. Stuart Hall et al. analysed this decade as reflecting a Britain in an “exceptional state” in Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978). As gendered figures, these action heroes were not immune to changing social ideas of masculinity, so that they found themselves replaced by the “new men” of crime drama. As noted by Jack Williams in his monograph on the development of the British crime drama, this “new man,” as seen in the 1990s Inspector Morse, contrasts the 1970s Regan: The character of Regan resorted to violence more often, and had a more aggressively macho persona, than Morse, which could indicate that male viewers in the 1990s found it had become easier to identify with less aggressively assertive, less brash expressions of masculinity. (2004, 132) Fitting Williams’s observation, the twenty-first-century bewilderment with the sexist, racist and boozy violence of 1970s police heroes was the key idea behind the series Life on Mars (BBC 2006–2007): a contemporary officer is transported back to 1973 and must work under the tutelage of a character emulating Regan. A more recent police critical series, Line of Duty (BBC 2012–present), depicts a decreasing trust in civil institutions in contemporary Britain. These institutions’ service to the common good becomes problematic in neoliberal times, where the fulfilling of target agreements becomes more important than the moral charge of police work. 4 In Line of Duty, the police force has become a corrupt institution that forces its individual officers into power and success struggles. The detectives of television crime drama, in coherence with the genre conventions in popular literature, traditionally come in one of two shapes: the police officer or the private detective. The figure of the private detective enjoys a larger individualistic profile; they are not employed by a public institution and they therefore have a greater license to perform transgressive and heroising acts (Porter 2003). The heroic potential of the private investigator can be seen as an effect of a lack of the extraordinary in the police force: he or she is not bound to an institution and also, often, less to

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 67 social reality. Figures such as the iconic Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple oppose the state force of the police officers and, even though they always cooperate with them, police officers are regularly vexed by their unusual behaviour. In the British crime fiction tradition and in stories about private detectives, the police officers are represented as comparatively mediocre figures, throwing into sharp relief the extraordinariness of intellect or wit for which the types of Holmes and Marple stand, respectively. The normality of the British police force is also emphasised in series set in (seemingly) idyllic rural England, such as the long-running Midsomer Murders (ITV 1997–present). Its original protagonist DI Barnaby is a case in point: he is calm, matter-of-fact and rational, and supports his stay-at-home wife—a storybook decent English Everyman, but not a hero. Since 2010, the BBC’s programme planners have followed a strategy of transforming the role of the television detective into a more transgressive and active figure. As Helen Piper notes, “the BBC’s express desire to restrict its output of crime drama resulted in a select roster of detective shows” (2015, 123): from an everyday genre, the conventions of which were implicitly familiar to British television audiences, the BBC attempted to transform crime drama into a more prestigious “quality” genre (McCabe 2007). The strategic production of complex crime drama, among other factors, resulted in an emergence of markedly heroic and/or anti-heroic detectives on British television. More so than in previous decades, there was a presence of ambiguous figures fighting against their own moral corruptions, extreme and often unrealistic adversities and larger-than-life villains. Innovatively, there was a larger attention paid to aesthetic quality as an important aspect of the heightened suspense and action levels. In the twenty-first century, heroic ambiguity became a main attraction to audiences of television drama, and it can even be argued that representations of heroic ambiguity found some of their most pronounced expressions in the transgressive and stylised TV detectives that the BBC produced between 2010 and 2018. While this chapter will be concerned with series that have police officers as their protagonist, the seminal influence of the BBC’s Sherlock (2010–present) on the transformation of the genre of the crime drama needs to be addressed. Gatiss and Moffat’s adaptation of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle quickly developed into an international cultural, popular and critical phenomenon.5 This particular Sherlock Holmes adaptation was so successful because Moffat and Gatiss reconfigured the cultural capital of the figure by displaying Sherlock as a British superhero in a superhero-frantic popular culture (Riddell 2014). This also points to a general trend within the genres of television, pertaining to the question of what kind of heroes can be envisioned in which genres of television dramas. While exceptional heroic figures have been long-standing characters in the genres of science fiction and fantasy (Hodge 1988), and have seen a renaissance in the epic series discussed in Chapter 1, we can observe an appearance of near-mythical hero figures in the previously realistic crime drama, especially in the genre

68  Nicole Falkenhayner redefining crime dramas produced in Britain since 2010. Sherlock points to new trends in crime drama that are also encountered in programmes about police detectives. The realistic aesthetic typical for police procedurals receded to allow crime dramas to become improbable and, because of the central heroic figure, almost fantastical. For example, although it contradicts the plot that presents Sherlock and Moriarty as media-technological “nerds,” much of their ploys are never explained, totally improbable, and overwhelming for the audience—both the fictional audience within the series and the audience sitting in front of the TV (Bochman 2014). Sherlock distributed different aspects of the heroic among its main protagonists. At the beginning of the series, Watson, on the one hand, is attributed with the classical heroic features: he combines two heroic professions in one (soldier and medical doctor), he empathises with the victim, and he is a very timid Everyman who unexpectedly saves the day with his “nerves of steel” (I/1). Sherlock, on the other hand, is an ambiguous figure, situated on an unstable balancing board that hovers between the heroic and the anti-heroic—a situating that invites the audience to read the character as a trickster figure (Charles 2013). It is only during his standoff with Moriarty in the final episode of the second season, The Reichenbach Fall (2012), that Sherlock fulfils his heroic potential. The Reichenbach Fall brings the mirroring relationship of Moriarty and Sherlock full circle—it is only in the last moment that Sherlock opts for “the good side” and differentiates himself from his other, his shadow, Moriarty. Based on the narration and dialogue of the series, Sherlock’s heroics are questionable; however, other levels of representation— especially the musical score and visual aesthetics—present Sherlock as a hero figure. The series makes heavy use of the signature theme, which often crescendos at the beginning of scenes in which Watson and Sherlock are seen running. These “running scenes” are significant feature of the heroising audio-visual code that the series utilises. The action shots are often low, front-on and backlit, highlighting Sherlock’s coat billowing out behind him as he runs. These are iconic instances of comic book hero representations that, together with the signature theme, install Sherlock and Watson as a proverbial superhero pair, reminiscent of DC’s Batman and Robin in the 1960s film (1966). Sherlock, at least in the first two seasons, retains elements of order-keeping that link it back to older crime drama genre conventions— both on the plot level and in the dynamics between its protagonists. For all its formal, stylistic and storytelling inventions, Sherlock is not a morally transgressive series; rather, it leaves the basic generic status quo intact. This status quo is upheld by the narrative reassurance that in the end there will be “clean” heroes—such as Watson and the Scotland Yard officer Lestrade— who tame the genius of Sherlock and can harness his extravagance for the common good. However, with the stress on the dynamics between Moriarty and Sherlock, the series introduced a pronounced hero/anti-hero ambiguity to the genre, as well as an obvious concern with heroic themes and audio-visual codes. At the same time as Sherlock was broadcast, the BBC

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 69 commissioned a new, transgressive crime drama series with a transgressing heroic policeman protagonist: Luther (BBC 2010–2019). The ambiguity between the hero and the anti-hero played out in the characters of Sherlock and Moriarty is echoed and expanded in the frictional, obsessive entanglements of DCI John Luther and his nemesis, the killer scientist Alice Morgan in Luther, and in the relationship between the ice-cold police detective Stella Gibson and the serial killer Paul Spector in The Fall (BBC 2013–2016). This chapter will examine these cases of police officer heroes as refractions of the “super-sleuth.” The two programmes contributed to the innovation of the already successful genre of the British crime drama by depicting highly transgressive detective figures and by focusing on a pronounced hero/anti-hero dynamic. The Sherlock-esque heroes John Luther and Stella Gibson expanded the representational space of the “super-sleuth” in terms of race and gender. The fact that John Luther is the carrier of a police badge amplifies the figure’s moral transgressions and deconstructs the cultural type of institutionalised figures of authority— in this case, police detectives. Recent British television dramas have presented police investigators and detectives as postmodern variants of the Byronic hero: psychologically deviant, morally ambiguous and largerthan-life. This has had significant effects on how the medium and the genre have changed and, extrapolating from the representations of the figure of the crime-fighter, also on how television dramas have made use of the police as representative of social order: namely, as dysfunctional, and in need of transgressions beyond its rules in heroic attempts to bring forth justice. After analysing the representations of the heroic detective in these signature series, the chapter will end by looking at the development of the representation of the heroised detective and police officer in the more recent BBC production Bodyguard (2018). I will argue that Bodyguard once again reframes the idea of heroic police officers into a new direction that aims to return to a more realistic frame, while simultaneously strengthening the heroising elements of its aesthetics and figures. When the heroic becomes accepted as realistic again, and thus no longer needs to be represented in a fantastical mode, it will be clear that, as this book observes, a shift is taking place in British cultural production that resonates with the leaving behind of a postheroic, ironic structure of feeling and a new appraisal of heroic modes.

Beyond cutting procedural corners: Transgressive heroics in Luther Having written episodes for the long-running spy series Spooks, crime fiction and screenwriter Neil Cross was an already established figure in British television business when he was commissioned for a new BBC police detective series. In a promotional article on the event of the series’ launch, Cross described the essential characteristics of the titular hero he created:

70  Nicole Falkenhayner “Essentially, the BBC asked me to create an iconic detective. […] He’s a combination of both a genuinely brilliant intellectual mind but his intellect is not the master of his emotions which are chaotic and messy and uncontrollable” (Televisual 2010). Luther (which, like Sherlock, first aired in 2010), invented a decidedly non-realistic, transgressive hero-figure. The character was built for the lead actor Idris Elba, a black British actor who already had achieved international fame due to his role as the evil, business-schooleducated drug magnate Stringer in The Wire (HBO 2002–2008). Stringer, in the US series, is a telling name: he is the one who pulls the strings in the series’ Baltimore-based drug cartel. Using the same actor to play a British police officer already points towards the transgressive aims of the series’ creators and producers, among which Elba is listed as co-producer. Elba was chosen, in the words of producer Katie Swinden, to create an “epic” and “classical” character (Televisual 2010). In terms of visual style, the series wanted to create a mood that was much closer to the genre of the graphic novel than to the traditional convention of the police procedural. Luther created a visual iconicity through its use of red and black, both in its title card and often also throughout the series, evoking both darkness and aggression and, unlike Sherlock, used the space of London in a defamiliarising way, at least to the international viewer. In Sherlock, London is mostly represented via its touristy city centre and iconic landmarks. This simulacrum-London appears as the fitting spatial backdrop for the exploits of a hero detective who is at once imaginary and familiar. In contrast to the touristy London-space of Sherlock and Watson, John Luther moves through a space marked by the high-rises of London’s housing estates built in the 1970s, using the sharp cuts and angles of the city’s brutalist architectural legacy in a stylised, graphic and geometrical manner. Where London’s figuration as a heroic space in Sherlock is based on the global recognisability of its landmarks, the city over which Luther presides as a deeply troubled superhero watcher in Batman-manner is distinctly contemporary, gritty and adverse. Where Sherlock seemed only to nod at Batman’s visual conventions to establish its hero as a similar figure of a lonely and deeply troubled watcher-over-the-city, Luther fully embraced this code and reframed it to fit its equally ingenious, but much darker, titular character. In fact, John Luther embodies many aspects of contemporary televisual anti-heroes: “We are faced with characters that seem to have an endless struggle with the society that would have them crushed, defeated or incarcerated, even those that on one level belong to this society as teachers, fathers, and even law-enforcement agents” (Peters and Stewart 2016, 7–8). While the similarities between the BBC’s two superhero detectives launched in 2010 are striking, so are their differences: as noted above, playfulness marks Sherlock’s moral and heroic ambiguity. Sherlock, at least in the first season, is in it for “the game” and his brilliance is often made light of by displaying his late-adolescent arrogance. Also, while he asserts that he is “confident with his sexuality” (II/1) in the episodes with Irene

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 71 Adler, Sherlock is a “boy’s show,” a fact that is also played with by the series’ many tongue-in-cheek references to male homosexuality, such as Watson’s repeated insistence that he and Sherlock are not a couple. Until the introduction of the dominatrix Adler (II/1) and Watson’s wife and ex-spy Mary (III/1), the regular women in the show are hardly to be perceived as a “match” for Sherlock: they are shy and conflicted (pathologist Molly), old and motherly (Mrs. Hudson), or spoil-sports (Sergeant Donovan, who soon disappears from the series entirely). In contrast, DCI John Luther is represented as a pronouncedly masculine and “grown-up” heterosexual, who is constantly positioned in contact with and in opposition to equally strong female figures—not least of them, of course, his nemesis, the psychopath parent-killer Alice Morgan. However, especially in the first series, Luther has the potential to be portrayed as a violent jealous husband, who refuses to accept that his wife has left him for another man, smashes office furniture to pieces and physically attacks his wife’s new partner. As a result, Luther displays the danger of overstepping heterosexual maleness. The first season of Luther, which revolves around this loss of the beloved wife, gives the lead character an almost Shakespearean dimension. The jealous black husband, betrayed by his friend and colleague, DCI Ian Reed, presents Luther as a latter-day Othello: a brilliant officer, a good man, destroyed by his passions and others’ evil agenda. Sherlock has Watson as a normalising sidekick who keeps him in check; in Luther, DS Justin Ripley is fiercely loyal to Luther and lies for him in an internal investigation when Luther has cut procedural corners, but he dies at the end of season three (III/3). The series strategically discards every character who may normalise the hero detective as he brings down increasingly mad psycho-killers by increasingly bombastic means—and becomes increasingly involved with his former opponent, psychopathic villain-turned-anti-hero Alice Morgan. Luther’s intellectual prowess is not used for its own sake; he fights his villains out of a “gut morality” and inner urge that lets him destroy everyone around him as he labours to save the day. When he starts to pursue the perfect murderer Alice Morgan, he does so out of instinct: he emotionally “knows” (I/1) she killed her parents, and he uses his brains to prove his gut instinct right. However, Luther’s “gut morality” is questionable; it is based on a primordial sense of right, wrong and vengeance, rather than on law and procedure. From the first opening scene, this is a dominant feature of the series: in the establishing shots, we see him following someone who is running away in panic. It is an extreme close-up, showing only Luther’s eyes and angrily contorted parts of his face in front of dark colours (I/1). It is only in the second minute that the dialogue over a mobile phone establishes Luther as a detective of the police force. Visually, something else entirely is represented: at first glance, Luther appears as the “criminal” in the setup of crime drama conventions. This, of course, is a clever commentary on common mass-media racial stereotypes: if an angry black man pursues a panicked white man—who do you think is the villain?

72  Nicole Falkenhayner

Figure 3.1  Luther staring down at Henry Madsen (screenshot from Luther I/1)

In the action-filled first scenes, in which Luther’s pursuit of the man is crosscut with his detective colleagues who are searching for the man’s victim, we learn that the detective is pursuing a child-killer. In contact with his colleagues over radio, Luther has to find out where the man has hidden the girl he has abducted—and if she can still be saved. Pursuing the villain through an abandoned industrial site, the two men attack each other on an overhanging iron railing bridge. The villain drops down, hanging over the abyss with only the tips of his ­fingers holding on to the iron railing—a conventional action movie trope. Luther uses his leverage over the villain to extract the information of the ­location of the abducted child—by letting the villain hang above the abyss and stepping on his hand. In a crosscut scene, we see his colleagues finding the girl, locked away in a box behind a wall, and she can be saved. But the titular hero is not satisfied. “How many more were there, Henry?” he asks the ­villain, who is still hanging over the abyss. Luther lists a number of girls’ names, ending with “Emma. I dug up Emma with my own hands” (I/1). The camera shows the men’s faces alternatingly, with Luther glowering over Henry, who, after crying for help, drops down the abyss (Figure  3.1). On Luther’s face, rather than the expected shock, we see a satisfied half-smile—before he realises what he has done and appears to suffer a nervous breakdown. This introductory sequence illustrates the “gut-morality” mentioned above: the audience is enlisted to sympathise with Luther by using the affecting trope of the child murderer, the kind of criminal universally despised. Also, by the dialogue we understand that Luther has been pursuing Henry for a long time, and that Henry has killed many children. Therefore, while rationally understanding that this is wrong, the audience is motivated to

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 73 share Luther’s satisfaction as he lets the killer drop to what seems to be his death. This is a satisfaction of justice that is affect-driven, rather than rational, and seems “right” in the moment, even if it is rationally understood as “wrong.” In hindsight, the simultaneous portrayal and reflection of actions driven by gut instinct, rather than rational thought, can be read as a subtext of the series that appears to foreshadow the rise of populist sentiments and an affect-driven public sphere in Britain in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The series altered the overall aesthetics of its visual style and changed the tone of its plots with nearly every season. In the first and fifth season (2010 and 2019, respectively), the series leans towards the realistic; in the second and third season (2011 and 2013), the graphic-novel stylistics, bordering on camp, are stressed. Luther’s highly ambiguous heroics act as a leitmotif in the series. DCI John Luther oversteps the law and disregards procedures to a much larger degree than any other police hero in British television history—including the hard-boiled policeman prototype in British television history, The Sweeney’s Jack Regan. Alan Clarke wrote of Regan’s representation that his “inflection of the moral domain [is not] a complete transformation of the character, but rather a character with a difference, a harder edge than any previously found in the series” (1993, 240). However, the figure of Luther seems to constantly test the boundaries of how far a fictional character can morally transgress with the audience still willing to sympathise with his actions. To a large degree, this constant testing and overstepping of “normal” moral boundaries can be seen as significant for the series’ success. As communication scholars Krakowiak and Oliver have argued, morally ambiguous characters often appear to be the ones that audiences enjoy the most: “protagonists often perform in immoral ways yet some audience members seem to excuse or even embrace these actions when performed by a beloved character” (2012, 117). Audiences may embrace and identify with the morally ambiguous and transgressive fictional characters, because they must defend their actions to themselves to justify why the morally “wrong” action is, in fact, heroic and admirable in the context of the plot. While he is decidedly trespassing the law, Luther is still a policeman. The audience’s decoding of Luther as heroic rather than anti-heroic is, apart from the visual superhero conventions of hero-shots and signature coats, afforded by what is repeatedly shown to be his main motivation: protection. In season one, he wants to bring down Alice because he wants to protect his estranged but beloved wife from Alice’s antics. His protective nature is especially strong in his fatherly relationship to the character of Jenny Jones, a young prostitute he tries to save, which leads him into complex clannish entanglements through which he nearly destroys his career (season II). This basic motivation represents John Luther as a figure who still upholds, even if by quite a stretch, the ideal of the carer myth of British police. If we want to position the main motivation of DCI Luther, rogue police detective, we must state

74  Nicole Falkenhayner that he is completely out of control—but he still cares. However, he can only be caring in a way that is based on his individual heroic agency and that disregards the police institution of which he himself is a part. This poses questions of the status of a common imaginary of the police as a pillar of social order as represented in the series, and the ideological disciplining function of the genre of the police procedural, as described by Scaggs (2005, 85–87). Even if we accept that Luther is a psychological crime drama and a character piece to a stronger degree than it is a generic police procedural, the series is still significant for the shift of the popular representation of British police as an institution in the twenty-first century. With DCI Luther, crisis has moved into the character of the heroic policeman: in a late-capitalist, globalised London riven by terrorism and a crumbling social state, a caring policeman has to be in a constant, high-strung “state of exception.” The pervasive atmosphere of threat of the series as a whole, as well as the many scenes showcasing Luther’s despair echo the observations made by sociologist Heinz Bude about the powerful emotions which overtake rational assessment of the overall situation in a contemporary “society of fear” (Bude 2018). However, in the series, the agency is fiercely located with the title character, and he reacts to injustice and cruelty with vigorous rage, rather than depression, as Helen Piper has remarked: “Amidst a cycle of TV detectives in which the protagonist is increasingly and chronically fallible, Luther preserves a more obviously mythological dimension of heroism for the role” (2015, 127). The suppressed anger and resentment which for Bude characterise the structures of feeling in the society of fear find an outlet in the fits of rage and desperation we see John Luther go through on the small screen. Luther both reflects the undercurrent of helplessness and discontent and provides a cathartic sense of release from these constant pressures of a pervasive public atmosphere of fear by performing their effects for the viewer. The ability of the character to maintain his agency in the face of constant crisis is thus a particularly contemporary aspect of his heroism. The break of the social contract between police and public already prevalent in Britain since the 1970s is so complete in Luther that villainy and loneliness reach epic dimensions, crystallising in nearly epic scare figures that emulate folkloristic opponents of the police, such as the killer in the Punchmask in season 2, episode 1 (2011). Such epic villains can only be fought by equally epic heroes, like DCI Luther. To quote Piper again, the series manages to bring “the cinematic and utopian possibility of near superhuman prowess to the resolution of largescale disaster whilst remaining (just) within the conventions of the domestic TV police series” (2015, 129). Accordingly, there is little space in Luther for the everyday or the “normal” represented in the Sherlock series by Watson. The series itself comments on this when Luther cooks Jenny breakfast in his council estate flat, wearing tracksuit bottoms. Gazing up at him, she comments “you look odd when you look normal” (II/3). The overdrawn style of the series tends

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 75 to deliberately sidestep and conceal comments on and engagements with actual contemporary British public discourses. The only obvious political commentary is made, in the same episode, concerning the contemporary austerity politics, when Jenny, newly rescued from her drug and porn-film life, is sent by a fatherly Luther to go looking for a job. She is shown making herself up in “normal” clothes, just as uncharacteristic for her as it is for Luther, and going to an employment office, where she ends up filing through leaflets without any result—stressing the futility of the task in a country that has systematically blood-let its social services. Other than this instance of open social commentary, the series’ politics lie in what it does not show. By refusing to show or capitalise on contemporary British politics, Luther is among very few contemporary British crime dramas that never creates its sense of metropolitan menace by representing terrorist attacks, and there are no “Islamists” or other religious fanatics of any kind shown. While Luther’s London is a thoroughly dangerous space, it carries none of the familiar markers that are part of the twenty-first-century British discourse of the “politics of fear” (Furedi 2005). The series’ villains are mostly white, English men—with two significant exceptions. First, the mercurial Alice Morgan is one of the very few female supervillains in popular television culture not constructed in the mould of the femme fatale, or temptress, even though she retains aspects of this type. Alice is an unusually shape-shifting character, alternatingly threatening, helping and always being in thrall with the titular hero and trying to seduce him, and appears as “stalker, admirer, tempter and nemesis” (Newman 2011, 297). She “plays contrasting roles throughout the series, keeping her from being categorised as one specific role, thereby preventing audiences form assigning her corresponding (and restrictive) characteristics” (Gilchrist 2016, 114). The anti-hero/villain figure of Alice Morgan is special also in the sense of the distribution of audience sympathy, as Peters and Stewart have remarked: she “manages to gain the support of viewers as an antihero(ine), despite the fact that she upsets the heteronormative expectations of this genre” (2016, 11). She garners this sympathy despite being a psychopathic serial killer. Second, we find an even more unusual figure: the grandmotherly Baba, a manipulative head of the gang structure Luther encounters in season two. Baba bribes Luther into performing criminal acts, including an insider job in the Metropolitan police. Due to Baba, Luther corrupts his connection to the institution in order to keep Jenny safe. Apart from Alice, Baba is the only character in the show positioned as a serious threat to the hero, and as a force that further tries to break his integrity. It can be argued that the crime drama has taken part in enlarging the representational space for women and their roles in British television and, due to its international success, in popular culture at large, as supervillain figures. What the drama does not comment on, and this can be interpreted in multiple ways, is the blackness of its hero. Luther’s ethnicity is not part of

76  Nicole Falkenhayner the discourse of the programme, apart from the screen’s visual domination by Idris Elba, and we know hardly anything about his background: “in fact, in narrative terms he is defined only by his job, love for his […] wife Zoe, his temperament and his admiration for David Bowie” (Piper 2015, 125). Piper speculates that the decision to not include any story aspects connected to race was made to keep the figure out of any associative proximity to “the stereotypical black cops of an earlier generation” (2015, 124), who were mostly morally clean-cut saviours who had to keep troubled black neighbourhoods together, a convention Williams also notes: “In the 1980s and particularly the 1990s it was more common for ethnic minority actors to be cast in drama series such as Casualty, Holby City or London’s Burning, which dealt with ordinary situations of everyday life” (2004, 156). In this interpretation, not stressing the character’s background frees him from any circumscribed discursive space—very much like the character’s own shapeshifting “hero” David Bowie. This might be seen as fitting for a figure that is as confident striding along against disaster in front of iconic buildings in the London City like the “Gherkin” as he is doing the same in front of a council tower block, and marking the series’ twenty-first-century London as a space in which there is, on the one hand, maybe an ever less pronounced concept of neighbourhood, and, on the other hand, as one where there isn’t any imaginary space that could be thought of as “untroubled.” In Luther, chaos and bloodshed strike in crumbling council house flats as much as in the pretty townhouse in which his wife Zoe is killed, in underground passageways and traffic jams, in dingy porn dens and in the midst of the city. It maybe in this pervasive sense of the possibility of horror to strike everywhere, and any time, in which the twenty-first-century structures of feeling and the discourse of the War on Terror re-enter the show’s imaginary landscape, without being made obvious parts of the narrative. While silencing Luther’s cultural background might thus infer a cosmopolitan attitude of its creators towards the postethnic, his being characterised so strongly by his anger and rage evokes the gendered racist stereotype of the “angry black man” (Wingfield 2007). However, that the series has managed to integrate this stereotype into the creation of a nearly superheroic figure on British television, is possibly just as outspoken a statement for diversity than a complex narrative embedding of John Luther’s cultural background could have been. Off screen, Idris Elba has been outspoken about the exceptionality of the creation of a black lead character on British television numerous times, for example, in a speech he gave in Parliament warning of the lack of diversity in the British television industry in 2016. Here, he pointed out the fact that he had to become successful in the US industry before the creation of Luther had become possible: “I knew I wasn’t going to land a lead role. I knew there wasn’t enough imagination in the industry for me to be seen as a lead. In other words, if I wanted to star in a British drama like Luther, then I’d have to go to a country like America” (Revoir 2016). While in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement the

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 77 sensibility concerning issues of representation has grown again in the United Kingdom, it is remarkable regarding the trailblazing success of Luther that Elba’s troubled hero has seen, as yet, no black lead successors on British television.

Heroics of refusal: Nordic Noir and the female detective in The Fall Crime drama has traditionally been a male-dominated, heteronormative genre, and this is also the case in the history of female detectives on British television. It was not until the early 1990s and the success of Prime Suspect (ITV 1991/1993) that British police procedurals increasingly featured female leads. In the twenty-first century, the share of complex female detective figures in British crime drama has risen exponentially, from Scott and Bailey (ITV 2011–2016), Vera (ITV 2011–), Broadchurch (ITV, 2013–2017) and Happy Valley (BBC 2014–) to Marcella (ITV/Netflix 2016–). The history of the extension of the representational space of female detectives as a reconfiguration of the heroic field will not be discussed here.6 These female-led crime dramas are not marked by the complex dynamics of a hero-villain ambiguity and the meta-heroic discourse that is so dominant in Luther and Sherlock. However, the relationship of The Fall’s main protagonists, Stella Gibson and Paul Spector, translated the fascination between hero and villain as the main theme of a crime drama into a female-led programme. As discussed, Sherlock and Luther used conventions of the superhero genre to update and reconfigure television detectives as ambiguous heroes. These larger-than-life heroes are defined by their mirroring relationship with a supervillain; as a result, their heroisation is complex and questionable and they are always in danger of stepping over to “the other side.” This mirroring of hero and villain always validates the villain: he or she is seen as on par with the hero. In the mirroring process, the dichotomous hero/ villain dynamics allow the fascination of the audience to oscillate between the two extraordinary figures, just as on the intradiegetic level, these figures are often fascinated with each other. In the game of mirroring between hero and villain in these series, the cross-validation of extraordinariness is handed out like a gift. In the ambiguity that ensues from this exchange of gratification, the figure of the anti-hero appears in the field of transgressive extraordinariness as hovering between, and sometimes changing position with both the figure of the hero and the figure of the villain. In particular, the relationship between Luther and Alice Morgan, discussed above, reflects this mutual infatuation of hero/anti-hero and anti-hero/villain, reflected in the first episode, for example, when Alice says to the titular hero: “Kiss me, kill me—do something” (I/1). The Fall, broadcast two years after Sherlock and Luther, added a twist to the dynamic of hero and villain defining each other by mutual fascination. This twist is explained by the series’ use of the conventions of Nordic Noir

78  Nicole Falkenhayner television, a variety of the crime genre that enjoyed large international success following series such as The Killing (orig. Forbrydelsen, DR 2007–2012), The Bridge (orig. Broen, DR 2011–2018) and Wallander (SF 2005–2011). The original Scandinavian productions were internationally successful, additionally, all of these series were reproduced in American or British versions. As television scholar Glen Creeber writes, Nordic Noir can be defined by a rather slow and understated pace, the dialogue often sparse, monosyllabic and the lighting frequently muted. While there is clearly action (it is after all, part of the crime genre), its drama also allows for long moments of reflection. (2015, 24–25) In Nordic Noir television, the social at large plays a pronounced role. This is due to the genre’s links to the social-realist tradition of Scandinavian crime fiction generally, and Swedish crime fiction, especially. Its examples have been described as expressing “an underlining fear that the power of the state has been subsumed by global capitalism” (25). Nordic Noir television emphasises the connection between the psychological interiority of its protagonists with their locations, by setting the series in decentred contexts, removed from the metropolitan; areas that are just as hurt by violent histories as its protagonists are. It is thus not by accident that The Fall, the BBC’s first original take on the genre,7 is set in Belfast, and “applies its melancholic undertones to a city which still carries the open wounds of the past” (29). Like the Danish predecessors, The Fall is fronted by a complex female detective, Stella Gibson, (Gillian Anderson), who must bring down the serial killer of women, Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan). Stella Gibson is a successful detective superintendent brought into Belfast from the Metropolitan police for an inquest. As suspicious attacks on women multiply during her stay, Gibson suspects the crimes to be related. Even though her intervention into the domestic cases is resisted by her male colleagues, she takes over the ensuing investigation. Significantly, as an English police officer from the metropolis in Northern Ireland, she “colonises” the authority over the case. As a female officer, she also usurps the authority of her male Northern Irish colleagues. The transgressivity and extraordinariness that characterise the male “super-sleuths” of Sherlock and Luther were translated for the character of Stella Gibson in specific ways: In the domain of characterisation, Gibson is shown as a woman who takes success and sex wherever and whenever she wants it (from both men and women), she is hard working, emphatically correct and professional. Her intellectual prowess and social abrasiveness, especially in her relationships with men, represent her as domineering and uncompliant. Visually, her status as extraordinary is not created through hero-shots or billowing coats, but by long sequences that focus on her face, or show her slowly moving through corridors to a backdrop of melancholic music. Her body is also displayed

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 79 as she is repeatedly shown swimming in blue-toned pools. An astonishing amount of time, especially in the first episodes, is spent on these sequences that just focus on the face and body of the detective, thereby aesthetically centering on and appreciating her. The melancholic atmosphere and pronounced slowness of representing Gibson are obvious nods to the characteristics of the Nordic Noir genre introduced above. Unlike Luther and other transgressive police officers, Stella does not cut procedural corners. Instead, her identity as a police officer is foregrounded repeatedly; for example, she makes a point of appearing at press conferences in her Metropolitan Police uniform, complete with hat (I/5), and when she goes to investigate crime scenes, she dons the appropriate body-suit of the crime scene unit (I/5). She appears heroic due to her stress on powerfully upholding “the rules,” rather than foregoing them. She thus upholds the ordering function of the police while, at the same time, exerts individual agency by transgressing the cultural “rules” of how a woman is supposed to behave in her personal and social interactions. Paul Spector is the villain of the series, a good-looking, loving husband to his less attractive wife, a doting father, stay-at-home dad and compassionate grief-counsellor. Behind his amiable façade, he is a serial killer of women, the man that Stella is looking for, and the audience knows this from the start. Gibson has secrets, too. She records her nightmares in a diary, an obvious therapeutic attempt to keep herself together. In The Fall, the “real” identities of the protagonists are hidden from view intradiegetically, but they are revealed to the audience from the start. This setup creates an uneasy level of intimacy, especially in the case of Spector, who aesthetically styles his victims as types of the cultural trope of the beautiful dead woman, which the camera work of the series reiterates—a representation which has led to criticism of the series in public reception.8 In later instalments of the series, Spector outlines his motivations, and the emotions that killing creates in him. These long sequences might lead to an ambiguous audience sympathy with the killer. The Fall operates on a more realistic register than Luther and Sherlock. The fact that Spector can be decoded as both a villain and as an anti-hero is therefore more problematic than in the case of the character of Alice Morgan discussed above. The careful psychological explanation of his motivations carries the danger, if not to justify them, then at least to make them appear understandable. This possibility to develop an understanding for a serial killer’s actions on a psychological level, combined with the voyeuristic display of the bodies of killed women problematises the distribution of audience sympathy in the case of Spector. The Fall innovates conventional representations of the figure of the detective and the figure of the villain. Like many of the new BBC crime series that were developed around the success of Sherlock, a “heroic” or “grandiose” confrontation between a master-villain and a master-detective seems to be staged. However, the seemingly cold character of Stella appears to have a steely moral defence with which she positions herself—at least

80  Nicole Falkenhayner verbally—against the killer who fashions his killing personality in a Nietzschean superman grandiosity. Paul Spector keeps a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra on the desk on which he “artistically” records and draws his killings. Stella, a woman represented as a staunch, “old-school” feminist—she calls men “aberrations,” for example (I/1)—is figured as heroic precisely because, for the first two seasons at least, she refuses to enter the game of hero/villain validation by repeatedly rejecting Paul as her shadowy other. Stella’s heroism is developed around the denial of a typically male and mutual gratification of status. Where Sherlock is fascinated by and, at times, truly afraid of Moriarty, and keen to move on with “the game,” Stella confronts her villain by refusing to enter the game in the first place. Paul fashions himself as a postmoral, Nietzschean superman. He expects Stella to validate his extraordinariness by being fascinated with his transgressions. But Stella defies this reading of him and denies him any special status. This is made most clear in the final episode of the first season. As the police investigation moves in on him, Paul gets into contact with Stella, who has volunteered to give him her private mobile phone number: Paul:  We’re very alike, you and me… Stella:  Oh, I don’t think so. Spector: We’re both driven by will to power, a desire to control everything and everyone. Obsessive, ruthless, living and breathing moral relativism. It’s just you’re bound by conventional notions of what’s right and wrong and I’m free. Stella:  How are you free? You’re a slave to your desires. You have no control at all. You’re weak. Impotent. You think you’re some kind of artist. But you’re not. […] You think I’d let you walk away? You try to dignify what you do but it’s just misogyny. Age-old violence against women. (I/5) In his final stand-off with Moriarty on a London rooftop in the episode The Reichenbach Falls (II/3), Sherlock defies Moriarty’s calling him “boring” because he is morally good: “I may be on the side of the angels but don’t think for one moment that I am one of them” and “I am you,” he exclaims. In contrast, Stella denies any ambiguous similarity to “her” villain, and with that, a reading of Paul as anti-hero: when he tries to stylise his murders as transgressive, Nietzschean “freedom,” Stella reveals him as being “boring”: nothing new at all, just the dismal, culturally ingrained violence against women all over again. In the second season, Stella continues to reject any attempts to elevate Paul above the ordinary. In the following exchange with her colleague Jim that is also linked to the series’ overarching statement about the problematic aspects of heteronormative masculinity, Jim tries to frame Paul as an epitome of pure “evil.” Stella responds: “Stop, Jim, please. Just stop. You can see the world in that way if you want. You know it makes

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 81 no sense to me. Men like Spector are all-too-human, too understandable. He’s not a monster, he’s just a man” (II/6). The critique that The Fall itself is misogynistic does not seem to be in accordance with the series’ representations of gender problematics on the dialogue level.9 Alan Cubitt, the author and, in the later instalments, director, repeatedly denied claims that his choices were problematic (Frost 2014), even those most criticised: that the psychopathic killer of women is represented by a physically attractive male actor, and that the camera lingers on the aestheticised display of dead female bodies and the naked male body of the killer. However, the show continued to be criticised into the third season, aired in 2016 (Jackson 2016). While the dialogue level of the series establishes Stella as a heroic feminist similar to her Scandinavian predecessors in the genre, in her attempt to break down the hero/villain game of mutual gratification, the visual level of the series often appears to counteract this aim: Paul is sexualised for the viewer, and Stella is often seen in her underwear or under the shower, with her mouth half-open. Whether this is misogynistic, or whether it can be understood as a post-feminist statement that a feminist can also be sexy, remains a matter of debate. It can also be argued that the attractive depiction of Paul Spector, and the intimacy with which the viewer is observing his crimes, carries a potential for voyeurism. Stella and the viewer cannot resist being drawn towards Paul and cannot fend off their fascination with his immorality. In this way, the series changes, but does not abandon, the hero/villain dynamics. Even if Stella pushes against Spector appearing as her anti-hero, the ambiguity remains. This ambiguity is made possible because the killer is a comparatively complex character, one who is devoted to his children and who is revealed later in the series to have been a victim of sexual assault as a minor. For example, when Spector is shot down in the final scenes of season two, Stella’s dismay cannot be explained only by her will for him to survive long enough to be brought into custody—instead, there seems to be a disturbing level of care she harbours for the villain. In this reading, the ambiguous relationship between Stella Gibson and Paul Spector is in fact the most thoroughly questionable hero/villain relationship of the crime dramas discussed so far, in its potential moral transgression as the series’ visual level seems to undercut its discursive narrative of a heroic “feminist killjoy’s” deferral of fascination with the killer.

Conclusions and outlook: From ambiguity to renewed clarity in the representation of the heroic detective on British television So far, this chapter has focused on BBC series that have reconfigured the figure of the heroic detective in the second decade of the twenty-first century. As the BBC became more interested in producing “quality” crime drama, the heroised, central figures became bound up in moral struggles with equally central villain figures. The two police officers that are the lead heroes of Luther and The Fall are represented as phenomenal and

82  Nicole Falkenhayner unquestionable in their central agency, and as extraordinary and unnormal as the Sherlock prototype. John Luther and Sherlock Holmes operate on a level of individual agency that moves them beyond the social. Stella Gibson walks the hallways of Belfast’s police stations as a self-determined feminist who disregards what is expected of her in any situation. General trends in film and television genres and their aesthetics have been incorporated into these hero detectives: the superhero genre and its connection to cinematic and graphic novel conventions in Sherlock and Luther, and the more melancholic aesthetics of the Nordic Noir in the case of The Fall. Luther and The Fall represent British spaces as connected to the characterisation of their heroic central protagonists and plots; for example, The Fall’s Belfast setting reveals the semiotic links between the traumatised and violated political space of Northern Ireland and the series’ overarching topics of violence, sinister desire and moral transgression. Luther and The Fall problematise the social imagination of the police as a heroic profession, in the sense of a main pillar of social order. The series dislocate the heroic agency away from the integrity of the institution that has become questionable. This is a trend similar to the spy dramas of the second decade of the twenty-first century discussed in Chapter 4. Instead, singular, extremely self-reliant figures, who, in their extraordinariness, increasingly take matters into their own hands are represented as heroic. The BBC’s successful six-episode mini-series Bodyguard (2018) again transforms this highly productive crime drama figuration. Bodyguard shows another shift in representational trends that leads an ambiguous heroic figure back to a restored moral clarity. The success of this more recent programme might indeed point towards a popular cultural fatigue with ambiguous hero/anti-hero figures. This observation also resonates with the representation of heroic figures in the newer British epic series discussed in Chapter 1. Bodyguard reinstalls the police force as a potentially trustworthy and able institution: the police struggle through dramatic pitfalls and breaches of trust, but ultimately re-emerge triumphant. When originally aired, the programme became the BBC’s greatest success in terms of immediate viewer numbers since 2008. Its final episode’s overnight ratings of the first airing on BBC One on Sunday, 23 September 2018 showed a figure of eleven million viewers (BBC News 2018). This success was brought about by a series that has a clearly focalised hero lead, who is surrounded by a strong ensemble cast and so does not offer a hero of the “lone wolf” variety represented by John Luther and Stella Gibson. The programme digs much deeper into contemporary British political trauma than any of the other crime dramas discussed in this chapter. The action-packed and complex plot of the programme addresses the failed war in Afghanistan, police and secret service corruption, fierce political power games, surveillance and Islamist terrorism. Bodyguard’s spectacularity and its story of corruption and betrayal is based on the different kind of police officer whose story the viewer follows:

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 83 unlike the usual homicide detectives, David Budd is an officer of the Royalty and Specialist Protection branch of the Metropolitan Police. He is also a veteran soldier returned from Afghanistan, and an estranged husband and father of two who suffers from acute and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder. He is not a detective—even though, as the series unfolds, we will see him do more detection work than Luther and Stella Gibson. Budd represents the hero as a protector. While this aspect is similar to the basic motivation of Luther, his function as bodyguard makes this much more pronounced. The heroism of protection that defines Budd is developed in the first episode’s opening plotlines: on a train with his two small children, he prevents a suicide bombing by negotiating with the bomber, a small, veiled woman strapped up in a suicide bomb vest. While he is drawn into the unfolding threatening situation, he starts to negotiate with the bomber, greeting her with a perfectly pronounced “as salāmu ´alaykum,” while other police set up snipers outside the stopped train. When the decision is made that the bomber will be shot, Budd physically protects the female bomber by standing before her in the shooting line of the snipers. He succeeds in stopping the other officers killing her: the woman is brought into custody and no one gets hurt. Already heroic after the first ten minutes of the episode, Budd is promoted and becomes the special protection officer of the acerbic Tory home secretary, Julia Montague. This new job increases his inner conflict. While he, a scarred Afghanistan veteran, nurses a profound hatred for the unapologetic political class that sent him there, as we learn from his conversation with fellow veteran Andy Apsted, he now has to protect one of them. The veterans are unforgiving about the fact that the problems and failures of the war are not addressed by the politicians. The link to actual British politics is repeatedly made: Montague’s hard-line stance shown in TV interviews echo the politics of Theresa May’s time as home secretary,10 as well as Montague’s plans to oust the (fictional) office-holding prime minister, and the important role that a photograph of Julia Montague and David Cameron (represented as a previous PM in the storyworld) plays in the unfolding plot. Montague, together with the heads of MI5 and fellow party politicians, represents the political class that led Britain to austerity and Brexit: they are figures driven by their own ambition and individual success. Counter-intuitively for a hero story, where we expect the main character to have a high degree of individual agency, in the first four episodes, Budd is shown as devoid of any agency as an individual. His conflicting allegiances to his experiences as a traumatised soldier, his professional duties, and his personal drives, repeatedly make him act in an indecisive manner. Although Budd hates Montague’s politics, he nevertheless becomes her lover. They develop a relationship in which he has no agency whatsoever, and he is referred to as Montague’s “monkey” by her upper-class MP ex-husband (I/1). When Montague is attacked by a sniper in episode two—who turns out to be no other than Budd’s friend and fellow veteran Andy Apsted—Budd

84  Nicole Falkenhayner puts on his police cap, grabs his gun and pursues the attacker to protect her, but he cannot protect his friend from killing himself. By hiding his connection to Andy Apsted, he has implicated himself. Ann Sampson, his superior at the Metropolitan Police, orders him to spy on Montague, which he agrees to do. Quite significantly, he seems to be defined by the serving attitude of his past as a soldier: he serves his superiors, if grudgingly, just as much as he serves Montague sexually. This serving is counteracted by his clandestine links to anti-government war veterans. Simultaneously, he performs the most outstanding action-hero tasks with a routine calmness. While from the outset it is made clear that this increases the problems of an already volatile personality, it is only when Montague is killed in a bomb attack that the tipping point in Budd’s heroisation is reached. He attempts suicide, arguably because he is traumatised, but, in the frame of the narrative positioning of his heroism, mostly because he failed to protect his warden and could not fulfil his duty. Recovering from his suicide attempt, he realises that his gun has been tampered with. Now developing a single-minded heroic drive to “set the record straight,” he disentangles a web of power play between politics, police, the veterans, Islamists, organised crime and MI5. He is also now prone to cut corners, and his investigations let him end up strapped in a bomb vest with a dead man’s switch. After discovering that the police and secret service set him up as a person of interest due to his links to Apsted, Budd manages to regain the trust of his fellow police officers and his boss. With this dramatic performance of the regaining of trust, Budd manages to pull the whole institution of the Metropolitan police out of the web of corruption. This is signified when his boss, who was represented as shifty throughout the series, defies the power of both the head of MI5 and the acting Home Secretary who were involved in the murder of Julia Montague. With Ann Sampson’s vow to bring them down, she reinstalls the police’s social contract with the public: “A woman was murdered. A crime was committed. My officers will investigate” (I/6). Bodyguard represents politicians and secret service officers that are implicated with Islamist terrorists, criminals and police insiders in a complex conspiracy. The master-mind bomb builder, sought after since the first episode, is revealed to be none other than the fragile Nadia, the woman Budd protected in the first episode, who was helped by a criminal and by a corrupt police officer. This plot twist questions the representations of Islamist terrorists as “others” to the British state that are frequently employed on British television in the twenty-first century, while it also comments on public preconceptions of religious Muslim women as oppressed victims. Although the police are represented as a part of a corrupted power complex, the plot of Bodyguard allows the officers to work through their implication with the secret service’s conspiracy, presenting the police as a public ordering institution with the potential to attempt to fix the broken social order. David Budd, the hero bodyguard who is “bloodied, but not bowed” (BBC News 2018) embodies the theme of society’s need for a recovery, both

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 85 socially and politically. While throughout the series nearly every person who was in conversation with him tells him that he needs therapy, the series ends with the hero accepting this fact, when he is seen going to a counsellor’s office, saying: “I am David. I need some help” (I/6). Bodyguard, and its public success, represents an astonishing recovery of the moral standing of the ordering forces in a more realistically framed series, or at least a heroic dream of the recovery of such a moral standing. This becomes especially obvious in comparison to the more unrealistic superhero figures like Sherlock and Luther, and also in comparison to the more psychological frame of The Fall. While the “Cumberbatch-Sherlock” and Elba’s John Luther do, to a certain degree, ironise the heroic, and Stella Gibson’s heroism is mostly figured by (possibly only seemingly) denying a killer self-aggrandisation, there is no ironic element in Bodyguard. Its dutybound hero can cry, break down, be devastated, but he still sticks to his moral compass, once he has found it again, without wavering. It is significant that in a popular culture characterised by irony, meta-quotations, and the multiplications of surfaces, Bodyguard does not only aggrandise David Budd as an outstanding individual. Instead, the programme simultaneously locates the heroic steadfastness within the cultural meaning of the professions that Budd embodies: “I have been a soldier. I have been a copper. You get to spot a bloke whose word’s bond” (I/6). Bodyguard, by leaning heavily on conventions of the political and spy thriller, but locating its action and its implicit narrative allegiance in the police force, can now represent a heroic police officer while simultaneously linking this heroic representation back to claims of realism. This aim of the series can be observed in comments by producer and writer Jed Mercurio, who repeatedly stresses its “reality effect” and “credibility”: A lot of drama, or some drama, is actually set […] in worlds that don’t exist. Things like amateur sleuths don’t exist in the real world, but that doesn’t stop drama about amateur sleuths being hugely successful. […]. In our case, we have a real specialist protection group, we have a real government, we have a real plausible threat that’s based on the kind of things that happen in the real world, and that’s the approach, and I suppose the intention there is to heighten the credibility of what we’re doing. (Gill 2018) The success of Bodyguard reveals a renewed interest in the way in which British television drama is representing non-ironic, morally steadfast heroic figures that are much less removed from social discourses than their predecessors were. Bodyguard is another example of a reconfigured heroising aesthetics, of a “real” hero story in so far as it invites a desire for the heroic back into the space of real, social life, despite of all the deconstruction work and loss of trust in public institutions that it also represents. Bodyguard

86  Nicole Falkenhayner might also be seen as an example of expressing British structures of feeling during Brexit, a process that left British politics in a state beyond repair, as a longing for order and heroic clarity.

Notes





1. See McElroy (2016), von Mueller (2010), Sparks (1992). 2. “Many still long for the return of officers on regular patrol through communities and argue that a visible police presence makes a big impact” (The Oxford Mail 2018). 3. See Colbran (2014) Greer (2010), Greer and Reiner (2015). 4. On the Cameron variant of Thatcherism, and the effects of neo-liberalist ideologies and policies on British culture, economics and society, see Berry (2011), Ali (2015), Littler (2013). 5. See for instance Polasek (2013), Porter (2012), Rives-East (2015), Neumann and Rupp (2016), Stein and Busse (2012), Poore (2013), Petersen (2014, 2017), Gregoriou (2013), Bochman (2014), Porter (2016), Riddell (2014) for the most pertinent aspects of these analyses, ranging from comparisons with the Victorian original, to the role of new media and innovative story-telling aspects in the series, to fan-studies and studies of identity. 6. A dissertation on this topic at the University of Freiburg by Özlem Sarica is forthcoming. 7. Followed by the Welsh-set I Gwyl/Hinterland (BBC 2014–2016) and the Scottish Shetland (BBC 2013–2019). The fact that the genre is interested in nonMetropolitan settings was productive in the context of the regionalisation of the BBC. 8. See Cooke (2014), Scott (2014), Jackson (2016). 9. According to Cooke, the “occasional pseudo-feminist nod to Gibson’s position as a lone woman in authority” (2014) was simply a veil to disguise the perverse fascination with the killer character. 10. For example, the “hostile environment policy” against immigration launched in 2021, see Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration (2016).

Works cited Ali, Tariq. 2015. The Extreme Centre: A Warning. London: Verso. BBC News. 2018. “Bodyguard Most Watched BBC Drama Since 2008.” September 25, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-45622655. Berry, Craig. 2011. Globalisation and Ideology in Britain: Neoliberalism, Free Trade and the Global Economy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bochman, Svetlana. 2014. “Sherlock Holmes, Tech-Geek. Uncovering New Media’s Significance in ‘Sherlock’, the BBC’s Modern Adaptation of Conan Doyle’s Stories.” Victorian 2 (1): 1–17. Bodyguard. 2018. Written by Jed Mercurio. Produced by Eric Coulter, Simon Heath, Elizabeth Kilgarriff, et al. London: ITV Studios Home Entertainment. DVD. Bude, Heinz. 2018. Society of Fear. Cambridge: Polity. Charles, Alex. 2013. “Three Characters in Search of an Archetype. Aspects of the Trickster and the Flâneur in the Characterisations of Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House and Doctor Who.” Journal of Popular Television 1 (1): 83–102. DOI: 10.1386/jptv.1.1.83_1.

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 87 Clarke, Alan. 1993. “‘You’re Nicked!’ Television Police Series and the Fictional Representation of Law and Order.” In Come on Down? Popular Media Culture in Post-War Britain, edited by Dominic Strinati and Stephen Wagg, 232–253. London: Routledge. Colbran, Marianne. 2014. Media Representations of Police and Crime. Shaping the Police Television Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cooke, Rachel. 2014. “The Fall – Misogyny in a Veil of Classiness?” The Guardian, November 16, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/16/ the-fall-misogyny-gillian-anderson-tv. Creeber, Glen. 2015. “Killing Us Softly. Investigating the Aesthetics, Philosophy and Influence of Nordic Noir Television.” Journal of Popular Television 3 (1): 21–35. DOI: 10.1386/jptv.3.1.21_1. Falkenhayner, Nicole. 2014. Making the British Muslim. Representations of the Rushdie Affair and Figures of the War-On-Terror Decade. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. The Fall. 2016. Written by Allan Cubitt. Produced by Allan Cubitt, Patrick Irwin, et al. London: Acron Media UK. DVD. Frost, Caroline. 2014. “‘The Fall Isn’t Misogynistic’, Writer Allan Cubitt Hits Back at Critics of Jamie Dornan, Gillian Anderson Thriller.” HuffPost UK, September 30, 2014. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/09/30/jamie-dornan-the-fall-gilliananderson-allan-cubitt_n_5907408.html?guccounter=2. Furedi, Frank. 2005. Politics of Fear. London: Continuum Books. Gilchrist, Sabrina. 2016. “Alice Morgan.” In Antihero, edited by Fiona Peters and Rebecca Stewart, 112–121. Bristol: Intellect. Gill, James. 2018. “How Accurate Is Bodyguard? How Jed Mercurio Created a Terrorism and Politics Thriller with heightened Reality.” Radio Times, August 16, 2018. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2018-10-24/how-accurate-is-bodyguardhow-jed-mercurio-created-a-terrorism-and-politics-thriller-with-heightenedreality/. Greer, Chris. 2010. Crime and Media. A Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Greer, Chris, and Robert Reiner. 2015. “Mediated Mayhem: Media, Crime and Criminal Justice.” In Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 5th edition, edited by Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner, 245–278. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gregoriou, Christiana. 2013. “The Televisual Game Is On. The Stylistics of BBC’s Modern-Day Sherlock.” Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 13 (1): 49–61. Hall, Stuart et al. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hodge, J. 1988. “New Bottles, Old Wine: The Persistence of the Heroic Figure in the Mythology of Television and Science Fiction and Fantasy.” Journal of Popular Culture 21 (4): 37–48. Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration. 2016. “Inspection Report of Hostile Environment Measures.” GOV.uk, October 18, 2018. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/inspection-report-of-hostileenvironment-measures-october-2016. Jackson, Jasper. 2016. “BBC’s The Fall Is Not Misogynistic, Insists Its Writer.” The Guardian, September 20, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/20/ bbc-the-fall-allan-cubbitt-gillian-anderson-dci-stella-gibson.

88  Nicole Falkenhayner Kelly, Helen. 2020. “The Bill Set to Return to Television Screens 10 Years After It Was Axed by ITV.” Daily Express, April 17, 2020. https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/ tv-radio/1270256/The-Bill-return-ITV-UKTV-Play-release-date-latest-updates. Krakowiak, K. Maja, and Mary Beth Oliver. 2012. “When Good Characters Do Bad Things: Examining the Effect of Moral Ambiguity on Enjoyment.” Journal of Communication 62 (1): 117–135. DOI: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01618.x. Littler, Jo. 2013. “Meritocracy as Plutocracy: The Marketing of ‘Equality’ Within Neoliberalism.” New Frontiers 80 (81): 52–72. DOI: 10.3898/NEWF.80/81.03.2013. Luther. 2019. Written by Neil Cross. Produced by Idris Elba, Phillippa Giles, et al. London: BBC. DVD. McCabe, Janet. 2007. Quality TV. Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London: Tauris. McElroy, Ruth. 2016. Contemporary British Television Crime Drama. Cops on the Box. London: Routledge. Neumann, Birgit, and Jan Rupp. 2016. “The Formation of Cultural Topographies and Popular Seriality. The Cases of Sherlock Holmes.” In Topographies of Popular Culture, edited by Maarit Piipponen and Markku Salmela, 159–188. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Newman, Kim. 2011. Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s. London: Bloomsbury. The Oxford Mail. 2018. “Top Oxford Cop says ‘Bobby on the Beat’ is a Thing of the Past.” January 8, 2018. https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/16390238.topoxford-cop-says-bobby-beat-thing-past/. Peters, Fiona, and Rebecca Stewart, eds. 2016. Antihero. Bristol: Intellect. Petersen, Line Nybro. 2014. “Sherlock Fans Talk: Mediatized Talk on Tumblr.” Northern Lights: Film and Media Studies Yearbook 12: 87–104. DOI: 10.1386/ nl.12.1.87_1. ———. 2017. “The Florals. Female Fans Over 50 in the ‘Sherlock’ Fandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 23: 1941–2258. Piper, Helen. 2015. The TV Detective. Voices of Dissent in Contemporary Television. London: I.B. Tauris. Polasek, Ashley D. 2013. “Surveying the Post-Millennial Sherlock Holmes. A Case for the Great Detective as a Man of Our Times.” Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies 6 (3): 384–393. Poore, Benjamin. 2013. “Sherlock Holmes and the Leap of Faith. The Forces of Fandom and Convergence in Adaptations of the Holmes and Watson Stories.” Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies 6 (2): 158–171. DOI: 10.1093/adaptation/aps024. Porter, Dennis. 2003. “The Private Eye.” In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, 95–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, Lynnette R., ed. 2012. Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century. Essays on New Adaptations. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland. , ed. 2016.Who is Sherlock? Essays on Identity in Modern Holmes Adaptations. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland. Reiner, Robert. 1985. The Politics of the Police. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Revoir, Paul. 2016. “Idris Elba to Warn MPs Over Lack of Diversity on British Television.” The Guardian, January 1, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2016/jan/17/idris-elba-black-actors-lack-of-diversity-uk-television.

Heroic TV detective in twenty-first century 89 Riddell, Fern. 2014. “Sherlock Holmes: A Very British Superhero.” Times Higher Education, February 1, 2014. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/ culture/sherlock-holmes-a-very-british-superhero/2010108.article. Rives-East, Darcie. 2015. “Watching the Detective. Sherlock, Surveillance, and British Fears Post-7/7.” Journal of Popular Culture 48 (1): 44–58. DOI: 10.1111/ jpcu.12232. Scaggs, John. 2005. Crime Fiction. London: Routledge. Sherlock. 2016. Written by Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat and Steve Thompson. Produced by Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, et al. London: 2 Entertain Video. DVD. Sparks, Richard. 1992. Television and the Drama of Crime. Moral Tales and the Place of Crime in Public Life. Buckingham: The Open University Press. Stein, Louisa Ellen, and Kristina Busse, eds. 2012. Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom. Essays on the BBC Series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Televisual. 2010. “London Belongs to Luther.” (May 2010): 10–12. von Mueller, Eddy. 2010. “The Police Procedural in Literature and on Television.” In The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson, 96–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wingfield, Adia Harvey. 2007. “The Modern Mammy and the Angry Black Man.” Race Gender Class 14 (1/2), 196–212.

4

Secret service TV drama Dubious ethics, dubious heroism Barbara Korte

The secret agent: (Anti)-hero for matters of the state Secret agents serve a state institution of their country, but in contrast to the soldiers and police officers discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 of this book, they operate in the shadows and often in ways that compromise laws, violate citizens’ civil rights and erode trust, not only in state institutions but more generally as an important facet of ontological security (Giddens 1990, 92). Through acts of betrayal, lying, causing bodily harm and killing, spies serve their society, paradoxically by contravening some of its fundamental values: truth, freedom, privacy, as well as people’s mental and physical integrity. Whereas members of the police and the military have a public mandate to transgress moral norms under clearly defined circumstances, the clandestine deeds of the secret services cannot be authorised in the same public way. Spy fiction in all media is therefore “heavily coded by ethics” (Denning 1987, 34). It typically reveals not only how its protagonists challenge morality, but also how they worry about their personal moral sense. The heroic status of secret agents is dubious and precarious; they are, in principle, more problematic to heroise than soldiers or police officers are. As the case studies in this chapter show, the secret agent is therefore a figure that foregrounds the “apparent paradoxes that surround heroism” (Franco, Blau and Zimbardo 2011, 99), and a heroised secret agent highlights what is problematic about the heroic, namely its inherent transgressiveness.1 The secret agent can never fully embody the hero triumphant, nor can spy heroism be exemplary. The secret agent is quintessentially antiheroic, a dark kind of hero at best, and in television drama, spies epitomise the “relative morality” of “ethically questionable” characters that contemporary television viewers appear to like better than straightforward heroism (Mittell 2015, 143). This also makes the secret agent a litmus test for the claim that contemporary culture is postheroic. Darcie Rives-East emphasises in her study of surveillance and terror in post-9/11 television culture that television is a medium in which the spying of secret agencies is “spied” on by the television viewer: “the audience gains a sense of watching and monitoring those institutions that are designed to

Secret service TV drama 91 watch and monitor us, the public” (2019, 11). This situation of double observation invites inspection of the precarious meaning of the heroic in the present era and especially its role in a culture and politics of fear (Furedi 2005, 2018). The question of spy heroism broaches fundamental traits of the contemporary understanding of the heroic, but, as this chapter will elaborate, it is also a lens that focuses in on the anxieties of contemporary societies relating to the efficacy and morality of the state, its institutions and practices. Spy fiction has had a special place in British popular culture since the late nineteenth century and it has always been most productive at times of political crisis. Burton (2018) discusses the history of spies in British cinema and television since the 1960s, when the genre flourished in the climate of the Cold War. Spy fiction fell briefly out of fashion with the end of the Cold War, but its popularity and topicality returned in the new scenarios of threat of the twenty-first century, so that “[t]he spy story and its sister genres of conspiracy and terrorist thrillers remain relevant in the contemporary period” and continue to play “an important role in British culture” (xxv, xvi).2 However, this happened with a significant shift of attention which Rives-East also notes for television programmes about the secret services: they now “reflect our culture’s doubts about the institutions we want to protect us from terrorist or criminal threats and our fears that they can take away our privacy and civil liberties” (2019, 8). This development within the genre can be explained by several factors. In Britain as in other countries, secret service activities gained a new importance in the post-9/11 world as an instrument to fight terrorism and guarantee safety. However, since this involved enhanced measures of surveillance, secret agencies increasingly became a source of concern and anxiety themselves: Many have felt that the practice of intelligence and espionage, often defended in the interest of national security and subject to an extraordinary or specialized ethics, has transgressed fundamental moral values and ethical principles; has been, in fact pursued for narrower private and professional interests; and, in the area of covert actions and special operations, has sometimes contravened basic human rights and decency. (Burton 2016, 143–144) There is now a branch of studies that exposes the paradoxes of surveillance as a pre-emptive measure of securitisation and its troubling effects on the public: “It seems that, ironically, today’s security generates forms of insecurity as a by-product—or maybe in some cases as a deliberate policy?—an insecurity felt keenly by the very people that security measures are supposed to protect” (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 100).3 New measures and intensities of pre-emptive security have put the secret services under critique and sparked a political as well as public debate concerning the legitimacy,

92  Barbara Korte accountability and transparency of intelligence activity, in Britain as much as in other liberal democracies. The secret services in the United Kingdom are now subject to scrutiny and oversight by Parliament and held accountable for their activities.4 In British popular culture this provided a central plot element for the James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015).5 Due to such highly visible representations, but also their everyday exposure to surveillance instruments such as the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, the British public are widely aware of infringements of their rights and privacy as part of security measures. While this awareness may not be uncomfortable to everyone, it may help to explain why whistleblowers who leak state secrets, rather than guarding them, are heroised at least in some parts of the public. However, what makes spying and leaking information so topical in the twenty-first century is not only the immediate context of securitisation. In a more fundamental way, these activities also resound with concern regarding the extent to which contemporary societies are saturated with technologies and social media, through which ordinary people willingly reveal private information about themselves and monitor others. Rives-East speaks of “a wider surveillance culture that has developed not necessarily in response to 9/11, but more in tandem with the post-9/11 years” (2019, 32). Current perceptions of the state and its institutions also shape the twentyfirst century’s interest in secret agencies. Spy fiction is inherently a political genre; it engages with prevailing attitudes towards the state, the government, the trustworthiness of individual politicians and the reliability of the democratic system. Because secret agents operate in the name of their state, but covertly and in dubious ways, spy fiction draws attention to political ethics and raises questions as to the principles on which a state works and how its institutions serve (or do not serve) the people. In British spy fiction, the secret agent is traditionally “bound up with nationhood and the idea of what it means to be British” (Goodman 2016, 1), and contemporary television spy drama is no exception. Its British (anti-)heroes draw attention to a situation where their country’s integrity and identity are under stress, where politicians fail to lead their country in crisis and where democracy is challenged. It is not surprising that spy drama has attracted political playwrights like David Hare and Howard Brenton, who also wrote scripts for two of the programmes considered in this chapter. Twenty-first-century spy drama captures moods of anxiety and insecurity— a structure of feeling that makes heroes and heroism seem desirable—and simultaneously scrutinises how well equipped the state, its institutions and personal representatives are to deal with such moods and the threats by which they are caused. In particular, spy drama, with its theme of deception, points to issues of trust vis-à-vis contemporary politics. It asks to what extent politics is determined by hidden machinations and conspiracies, and questions whether politicians belonging to social elites serve their electorate or themselves. In his popular history of Britain, Roy Strong voices widespread perceptions when he diagnoses Parliament’s ineffectiveness in

Secret service TV drama 93 political discourse: “The House was once the focus of major debates but now they are rarely of significance, the real issues being debated in the press, on radio and television” (2018, 526). The centre of power, Strong resumes, lies in the Cabinet, “although even that role can be eroded by a dominant Prime Minister such as Mrs Thatcher or Tony Blair, both of whom made extensive use of outside teams of advisers” (527). To what extent outside advisers have gained influence on political decisions was more recently apparent in the role of Dominic Cummins in the Brexit vote and its implementation—a role exposed in the television drama Brexit: The Uncivil War (2019) that was originally aired by Channel 4. In contemporary Britain, Roy Strong opines, “[t]he politician as statesman and hero has become a figure of the past” (526). Trust in leadership was an issue prominently raised in connection with Blair’s decision to align with the United States in the unpopular War on Terror (Lacey and Paget 2015, 5), and in the second decade of the twentyfirst century, the trustworthiness of Britain’s entire political league was undermined in the context of Brexit. The Leave campaign that would lead to an important decision about the country’s future depended on a well-paid outside adviser, employed the bluntest populist rhetoric, capitalised on a latent climate of fear and misinformed the British people. The following sections analyse four spy dramas of the post-9/11 era: Spooks (2002–2011), David Hare’s Worricker trilogy (Page Eight 2011, Turks and Caicos 2014, Salting the Battlefield 2014), The Game (2014) and The Night Manager (2016). All are productions commissioned by the BBC and reflect the public broadcaster’s “long-standing reputation for providing challenging engagements with contemporary national concerns” (Oldham 2017b, 167). The programmes respond to the political concerns and moods of their time of production, even if The Game is set in the period of the Cold War. The Cold War in British spy fiction is traditionally associated with MI6, the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence service. However, in the post-9/11 climate, MI5 appears to dominate British television drama. The domestic intelligence and security agency, whose coat of arms declares it responsible for the “defence of the realm” (“Regnum defende”), is of obvious significance to a national television audience exposed to terror on its home ground. The official website of MI5 (as of August 2020) includes a statement that resonates with key concerns of this chapter’s discussions: The men and women of MI5 are ordinary people, who do extraordinary things. They have a very strong ethos of public service, but yet their work often goes unnoticed in the public domain. They are intensely committed to keeping the country safe, and they are tirelessly professional and ethical in the way they conduct their work. (MI5 – The Security Service 2020) This self-description aims to promote MI5 but, even so, it points to the complications that are negotiated in the following case studies. While the word

94  Barbara Korte “hero” is avoided, it is declared that the “ordinary” MI5 officers accomplish “extraordinary” deeds for their country, thereby fulfilling an essential criterion for heroism. Furthermore, the text is careful to point out that the transgressiveness of extraordinary (heroic) deeds is contained by professional and ethical standards. If television spy drama were as balanced in its representation as the official MI5 text, it would lose the thrill and spectacle that audiences expect from the genre. The programmes considered here do provide excitement, but they also prominently engage with meanings of the heroic (also on a meta-level) and with the societal and political issues in which spy heroism becomes relevant. The chapter first considers the long-running series Spooks as a programme of the first decade of the twenty-first century. This is followed by a discussion of three shorter dramas from the second decade: the Worricker trilogy, The Game and The Night Manager. Together, these programmes form a cultural forum in which the question of secret agent heroism throws the dubious ethics of contemporary politics into relief.

Spooks and the defence of the realm The BBC aired the ten seasons of Spooks in primetime slots; the programme was highly successful.6 Responding to one of the most urgent national concerns during the first decade of the twenty-first century, Spooks is about a team of officers from a counterterrorism section within MI5. The series engaged openly with the contemporary dilemma of the intelligence services “in which the provision of good security had to be balanced with respecting civil liberties and ensuring the continued support of the population for security and intelligence policy” (Burton 2018, 380–381). The regular characters—a group of young field officers and some senior analysts, whose leader and mentor is Harry Pearce—reflect a state service that is committed to embrace social diversity and equality. The series thus enabled identification for diverse audiences in terms of age, gender and ethnicity, and it encouraged viewers to align with the characters,7 even though they are witnessed in situations where they violate laws and ordinary morality. As part of their duty, Spooks’s MI5 characters lie and deceive; they coerce, hurt and kill other people and invade their privacy. The characters themselves are shown to be aware of the moral dilemmas of their profession, for instance when a young officer is ordered to kill a renegade scientist (III/5).8 In another example (III/6), the team is held accountable for a collateral killing during one of its operations. One of the officers is put on trial for manslaughter and undergoes a crisis of conscience when she reflects on her behaviour. Spooks often stages situations where the double observation of spy fiction is made explicit with specifically televisual means. As Tim Dant points out in his study of television as a moral institution, viewers in front of the screen often watch characters watching screens while the same screens reflect their expressions and reactions. To Dant, such “compound, overlaid

Secret service TV drama 95 images” create “moral ambiguity” because they give us the character’s point of view, as well as “a perspective on the character” (2012, 86–87). It befits this moral ambiguity that the word “hero” is rarely used in relation to the MI5 characters themselves, and when it is used, it expresses doubt about their heroic status and the morality of their actions. This can be seen when, in the first three seasons, leading field officer Tom Quinn’s (Matthew MacFadyen) trajectory draws him deeper into doubt about the ethics of MI5. Shortly before Quinn decides to leave the service, he vents his frustration in a statement that exposes the precarious borderline between moral and immoral action in the spy trade: “Maybe there’s a lottery committee somewhere throwing dice day by day what we’ll be. Spy, tramp. Traitor, hero” (III/1). When Quinn has to force a scientist to cooperate with MI5 during an operation, he uses the word “hero” cynically and promises a heroic reputation as a mere lure: “Catch these bastards, you’ll be a hero” (III/2). Another means by which Spooks exposes a doubtful heroism of its spy characters are the surprising plot and character turns that were a signature feature of the series. Spooks gained notoriety for how it regularly replaced its field agents, sometimes in ways that interfered with the viewers’ alignment with the respective characters, and with their expectation that “television characters are mostly stable figures, accumulating narrative experiences more than changing from them” (Mittell 2015, 133). This is epitomised in seasons seven to nine, when Spooks has a lead character, Lucas North (Richard Armitage), who was imprisoned in Russia for eight years but then returned to MI5. He is introduced both as a victim of harmful secret service practices and as a potential traitor, as there are suspicions that the Russians might have turned him during his imprisonment. However, North then proves to be loyal and reliable for two seasons, saving his country many times. That Lucas North was a victim—his trauma of imprisonment is witnessed in flashbacks—and has remained psychologically fragile, makes his reconstruction as a heroic officer even more admirable. However, in season nine viewers are confronted with the disconcerting fact that North was a perpetrator before he came to MI5, a former drug smuggler and a mercenary responsible for a murderous bomb attack in the 1990s on the British embassy in Dakar. He was not even Lucas North then but John Bateman, an identity which he himself apparently suppressed to his subconscious. After it has been recalled to him, the former MI5 hero is willing to become his country’s traitor for a new life. The dialogue emphasises the radical nature of this character reversal several times. A former accomplice suggests that Lucas North is “a killer […] who fell asleep, dreamed that he was a hero. But now it’s time to wake up and remember the truth. The dream is over now. And the killer is awake” (IX/7). The oscillation between hero, victim and enemy, and the fact that the character never truly was Lucas North, perplexes his colleagues in the story, and it frustrated fans of the series.9 Even in his darkest phase, though, the character is never a straightforward

96  Barbara Korte villain. He is written as an anti-hero capable of retaining some of the sympathy the viewers invested in him in the course of the preceding seasons, and it is still possible to empathise with him when he eventually judges himself and commits suicide rather than killing Harry Pearce, whom he has lured to the top of a high-rise building. The demise of Lucas North, who jumps from the roof, takes place in front of the sublime vista of the London skyline; the iconic buildings of the capital such as St. Paul’s Cathedral serve as a reminder of the deeds he performed for his country. The Lucas North character embodies the precarious hero status of the secret agent, but in other instances, Spooks heroises its regular characters unambiguously, especially when it ascertains that MI5 is an institution the nation needs. One can see such heroisations in connection with Oldham’s claim that one intention behind Spooks was to reassert “a public service ethos within the framework of a popular genre” (2017b, 167), and with the critique that the series had a tendency to add spectacle, glamour and style to the work of MI5 (Wilkinson 2009, 50). While showing that MI5 has to do dirty work, Spooks leaves no doubt that it is a prime institution for keeping the United Kingdom safe and for restoring its safety after situations of acute crisis. Spooks’s first episode (2002) puts great emphasis on the fact that the main function of MI5 is “to protect Britain’s national security”; the service’s coat of arms is displayed in several shots. Harry Pearce’s team are presented as a heroic community who risk their life for the nation as bravely as the British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though, in contrast to the soldiers, their sacrifice will not be publicly known. The episode in which officer Adam Carter is replaced by Lucas North establishes a parallel between spy and soldier heroism in a very overt manner. In this episode, Adam Carter (Rupert Penry-Jones) is given a hero’s death on a day of national significance and with a strong assertion of patriotism. Carter’s last and fatal heroic deed takes place on Remembrance Sunday, a day of commemoration dedicated to heroic sacrifice in war. Terrorists have planned to sabotage the day’s ceremonies; they have kidnapped a soldier just returned from a tour in Afghanistan, and they have planted a car bomb at the site of the day’s main ceremony. MI5 learns about the bomb but decides that the commemorations must go ahead as planned. As Carter phrases it, “no fanatic […] is going to stop us from honouring our dead.” The episode was originally broadcast in 2008, when the new military-civilian covenant (see Chapter 2 of this book) had begun to generate a positive perception and heroisation of British soldiers. 2008 was also the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the First World War, and the war had been receiving a lot of media attention, also on television. This embedded the episode in a context when a patriotically charged cultural memory of the First World War (and its special connotations of sacrifice) overlapped with the ongoing conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. The link to honourable and lawful combat frees Carter from the stigma of spy heroism, and his final deed is the ultimate

Secret service TV drama 97

Figure 4.1  A hero’s death (screenshot from Spooks VII/1)

sacrifice: he drives the car in which the bomb is hidden into an unpeopled area, but he himself does not escape the bomb. His life ends in an explosion represented with the full force of the “cinematic sublime” (Comer and Vayo 2013, 5–6): a long sequence shows how the aftereffects of the explosion are seen and heard over London, including images of the Houses of Parliament (Figure 4.1). The explosion is shown repeatedly and in slow motion, and also from different visual angles, ­suggesting the extent of the disaster that Carter’s sacrifice has prevented, while on the sound level one hears a bell striking eleven—the hour when the First World War ended on 11 November 1918. This affecting presentation emphasises the emotional weight of the MI5 officer’s sacrifice by linking it with an emotionally charged cultural memory. Staging the deaths of both Lucas North and Adam Carter with images that link them with places of hero commemoration (St Paul’s) and of government (the Houses of Parliament) in the British capital, emphasises the connection between the work of the secret services and the nation. This connection was also used for political critique. Spooks was known for engaging with “contemporary political material which government, and some viewers, might find sensitive” (Nelson 2007, 20). The programme did not only expose the voyeurism of surveillance practices but commented, for example, on Britain’s experience of terror by “enemies within,” the rise of racism in the wake of terrorism,10 the consequences of the financial crisis,11 as well as the signs of growing conservatism and right-wing populism. Like other post9/11 spy fiction, Spooks criticised the “special relationship” that drew the United Kingdom into the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and portrayed tensions between the British secret services and the CIA, presenting the

98  Barbara Korte latter “either as a political bully or an unwanted interloper in British affairs” (Rives-East 2019, 31). Adam Carter almost blows the whistle when the CIA plan to use a terrorist attack to enforce a British political decision (VI/9), and Lucas North’s torture in the Russian prison by water-boarding can be read as an allusion to practices in US detention camps like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Spooks’s response to British politics and to threats to the state is twofold. Generally, the heroically precarious status of secret agents brings out the dubious sides in politics. But Spooks also shows its secret agents acting heroically to protect the state from its own political actors. In 2004, a reviewer noted that Spooks reflected the “shift in the broad thrust of popular political thinking since 9/11” when people began “to question the judgement of those who act in their name” (Woodhams 2004, 50). In the third episode of the fourth season, MI5 has to intervene when a new populist far-right party, the “British Way,” is on the brink of gaining a seat in the Westminster Parliament because an MP for an established party intends to cross the floor. The episode was originally broadcast in September 2005, a few months after the General Election in which Labour lost many seats due to a loss of trust in Blair’s politics. Neither the British National Party nor the UK Independence Party would have stood a chance to win a seat in the Westminster Parliament, but right-wing nationalist parties were on the rise in Europe, giving voice to frustration with the political establishment and concerns about globalisation and immigration. Looking back to the episode after the Brexit vote of 2016, it seems prescient when its leader proclaims to be “the voice of every frightened, disillusioned and angry person in Britain.” Spooks did not only criticise political extremism, though; its presentation of the political establishment is also far from flattering as politicians are shown to act on ethically dubious grounds or for self-serving aims. The series showed major conspiracies of high-ranking politicians working against British democracy, for example in the first two episodes of the fifth season, when plotters use terrorist attacks as a cover for their activities. At the beginning of the ninth season, Harry Pearce kills the retired Home Secretary after discovering that he was involved in a conspiracy that led to the death of one of Pearce’s most valued officers. At the beginning of the third season, members of the government even conspire against MI5 when they try to create a “single-track intelligence” that would be easier to control. To Pearce, this is “the nightmare of a Ministry of State security. Our very own KGB.” With such episodes, Spooks positioned its characters “in between the audience and the corrupt cynical workings of the political system and the state” (Thompson 2010, 435). Such workings often arouse the officers’ open contempt. In an early episode written by Howard Brenton, Harry Pearce tells one of his officers that “politicians are conniving wheelerdealing scum. Don’t have a fit of morals over them. They wouldn’t over you” (I/5). At the same time, however, the machinations of politics help to establish the MI5 officers as heroes because they defend the political system and

Secret service TV drama 99 the values of liberal democracy. Through its portrayal of secret agent heroism, conflicted and precarious as it may be, Spooks thus explored the ethics of politics, just as it explored the ethics of heroism itself. Spooks was a landmark production in British television spy fiction, and it anticipated many of the themes addressed in programmes made during and for the second decade of the twenty-first century. In this decade, led since May 2010 by a Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, the United Kingdom remained a country in crisis, not only for reasons of continuing terror and military engagement, but also due to a growing lack of confidence in politicians to deal with new problems: the dire consequences of the financial crisis for large parts of the British people, increasing class and race conflicts, the danger of the country falling apart in case of Scottish independence and the renegotiation of its relationship with the Continent after Cameron’s announcement of a EU referendum in 2013. Lack of trust in politicians and their capacity to provide solutions for these problems intensified the erosion of belief in democratic government that was already addressed in Spooks. In this context spy fiction remained a popular genre and was pursued by the BBC in a number of high-end television dramas. In contrast to the prolonged seriality of Spooks, these programmes were made in shorter forms and address the entanglement of spy heroism and political critique in a more concentrated way. These programmes continued many themes that occurred in Spooks, but what makes them distinct is that they no longer focus on a heroic community of secret agents. Rather, they locate heroism in individual agents only and undermine the idea that the secret services in total might be trusted to keep the nation safe and preserve its integrity.

The solitary agent-hero in television drama of the 2010s The Worricker trilogy consists of linked television dramas written and directed by David Hare: Page Eight (2011), Turks and Caicos (2014) and Salting the Battlefield (2014). Unsurprisingly for a political writer such as Hare, the three dramas use the spy and conspiracy genre very prominently in the mode of the state-of-the-nation play. The dramas are set in Britain in 2010, the year of a General Election, and highlight a prevalent lack of morality both in British politics and in the secret services. A moral conscience, and with it a heroic spirit, appears to survive only in solitary individuals. One of these individuals is an aging MI5 agent, Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy), who defends the realm by resisting the lies and cover-ups he perceives in the state and in his own service. Alan Burton calls Hare’s trilogy “one of the most substantial achievements of recent British spy fiction” because it depicts “the world of politics, security and intelligence as it settles into a new pattern” (2018, 382). The trilogy’s combination of spy genre and morality play received mixed reviews. To one critic, Hare did not offer thrilling spy fiction but instead “a series of stagey set-pieces in which characters pontificated about the War on Terror and the world’s moral bankruptcy”

100  Barbara Korte (Sweeting 2014). To another, “the three episodes form a disquisition on British and American wrongdoing in the war against terrorism thinly disguised as a John le Carré-style thriller” (Stanley 2014). However, precisely this didactic element makes the trilogy a rewarding case study for analysing the role of heroism in a corrupted political world. Worricker is a long-serving intelligence analyst whose character recalls the lonely and disillusioned spies in John le Carré’s Cold War novels. Worricker also resembles Spooks’s Harry Pearce: both characters are experienced officers who still believe in MI5’s mission to serve society, but are now concerned about the integrity of their profession. The Cambridgeeducated Worricker, an art collector and jazz lover, is clearly no field-agent action hero. Rather, he is introduced as a principled officer who is ironically aware of how MI5 has changed, not only because it gained power after 9/11 (while permitting itself to be dominated by the United States), but also because it is just as tainted by personal ambition and selfishness as contemporary politics. In Spooks, MI5 was shown to intervene successfully in political malpractice and cabal; in Hare’s dramas, MI5 is just as corrupt and self-interested as some politicians. Downing Street, in Worricker’s opinion, “used to be the height of a man’s ambition, but now it seems to be only a stepping stone” (Turks and Caicos), and the secret services of his country have become, ten years after 9/11, “an apparatus of bad practice which is out of control” (Salting the Battlefield). In all three parts of the trilogy, Worricker’s main antagonist is the Prime Minister, Alec Beasley, a character reminiscent of Tony Blair (Crace 2014), whose conspiring and self-serving dealings Worricker aims to reveal. Beasley, who likes to orate about “liberal values and the price of defending them in the modern world,” has kept secret from Parliament his knowledge about illegal US detention centres and torture camps, and, in order to protect his American source, has withheld “intelligence which might have helped save British lives” (Page Eight). Turks and Caicos reveals that the Prime Minister is involved in the world of shady finances and profits from dirty deals, including the building of the American camps. Amidst this corruption, Worricker remains true to his old-style secret service work and, most importantly, to traditional ideals and values. In contrast to other officers who do not dare to oppose the Prime Minister for the sake of their careers, Worricker lets himself be guided by his belief in honour, shame, decency and honesty, proclaiming that the “purpose of intelligence is to find the truth” rather than cover it up (Page Eight). Worricker’s heroism is essentially a moral heroism rooted in his sense of right and wrong, and it is directed against people in the highest offices of the state who act against the interests of the British people. A colleague asks Worricker: “Isn’t the temptation of heroism coming a little late in your career?” (Page Eight). Although this question is tongue-in-cheek, the narrative leaves no doubt that Worricker does act heroically when, risking his career and his life, he reveals dubious political manoeuvres and leaks at least part of the truth

Secret service TV drama 101 to the media. At the end of Page Eight he must leave the country to escape Beasley’s persecution, and when he returns to MI5 at the end of the trilogy, his re-institution is not triumphant. His actions have helped to remove the Prime Minister from office, but Beasley is not prosecuted and looks forward to a profitable career as political counsellor and international peacemaker. Worricker is a heroic character who, in a corrupt world, has to make corrupt deals and compromises to achieve his aims. Unlike Spooks’s Harry Pearce, Worricker would not kill a corrupt politician. Alan Burton aptly describes Worricker as “not somebody to beat the system,” but neither someone “to be crushed by it” (2018, 383). Worricker is not a world-changing hero, but he is brave and decent enough to use the agency at his disposal. The Game (one season with six episodes) is a more conventional Cold War spy drama set in 1972. It employs the genre’s familiar character types and tropes: defectors, double agents, moles and traitors. Alan Burton considers The Game among the wave of television programmes and films that have revisited the Cold War in the twenty-first century “for a nostalgic evocation of classic espionage settings” (2018, 399)—settings where clear political binaries still seemed to exist. However, while The Game is set in a period when threat and fear were focused on the Soviet Union, it does not suggest that Britain in the 1970s faced problems that could be resolved more conclusively than those of the post-9/11 world. In its title sequence and in inserts from 1970s news programmes, The Game presents Britain as a country troubled not only by the Cold War, but also by serious domestic problems that make the country vulnerable: the 1972 Miners’ Strike, the resultant nationwide power shortages and declaration of a state of emergency, as well as the imminent terror threat from the IRA. As portrayed in The Game, neither the state nor the secret services are well equipped to protect the country in this volatile situation. The target of MI5 in The Game is to defend Britain against a Soviet attack on its key institutions. These institutions are shown to be highly vulnerable and with a doubtful ability to govern and protect the country. In the spy “game” between East and West, the Soviets have infiltrated British society right to the top of the political elite, creating secret enemies within (which echo the “enemies within” of the post-9/11 world). They now plan a nuclear strike on Britain and a coup d’état. The conspiracy is revealed in the end, but trust in Britain’s institutions has been shaken. What links The Game and the Worricker trilogy—despite their different period settings—is their inspection of British state institutions, including MI5 itself, through a negotiation of the heroic. The central character of The Game is Joe Lambe (Tom Hughes), a young agent who has to redeem himself after a failed operation in the East. Rather than successfully turning his target, he fell in love with her. He is therefore under suspicion and must rebuild his reputation when he returns to MI5. In this respect, his situation resembles that of Lucas North in Spooks, but Lambe will not end a traitor. Otherwise, betrayal is everywhere in the series’

102  Barbara Korte plot: between enemy secret services, among MI5 personnel, and on a personal level between husband and wife. The Montags are married officers and Sarah, deputy head of counterespionage, will finally be exposed as the Soviet mole within the service, having betrayed her husband and all other colleagues. Such large-scale betrayal was also shown in the ninth season of Spooks, but here the status of the MI5 team as a heroic community remained intact, even when one of its members went astray. In The Game, a collective heroism seems out of the question, and where Spooks named the workspace of its officers “The Grid,” The Game significantly calls it “The Fray,” suggesting fight and contest, but also the state of being frayed and worn. In this environment, references to the heroic in the characters’ dialogue are almost always ironic. The head of counterespionage, an inconspicuous and covertly gay man, is dominated by his once-upper-class mother, who calls him “My Hercules” in the hope that he will “bring glory to our name once more” (I/1). In other instances, the possibility of a heroic reputation is invoked to lure people into becoming traitors. As Lambe tells one of the Russian sleeper agents, “this is an opportunity. Not just to repay your debt, but to be a hero. To be a soldier. To fight for something greater than us” (I/1). The viewers realise that this is a set phrase when, in a flashback later in the episode, Lambe repeats it to the Russian woman he tried to recruit, and he does the same again in episode three when he tries to turn another woman: “You end this, and you end this a hero.” A Russian defector counters Lambe’s insincere use of “hero” with the remark that the word has lost its meaning in the Cold War. For the Russian, heroism ended with the Second World War, when his father fought in Stalingrad: “That was a war that made heroes. Not this. Would our fathers be proud of us, Joe?” (I/2). As in the Spooks episode discussed above (VII/1), reference to lawful and open war is here used as a comparison for spy operations. However, while the Spooks episode uses the comparison to give its character Adam Carter an honourable and patriotic hero’s death, The Game uses the comparison negatively, pointing out that spying is nothing a nation can be proud of. After Sarah Montag has been arrested, Lambe uses the word “hero” cynically once more, accusing her of a wrong ideology: “When the world turns Red, you’ll be hailed as a hero.” To which Sarah answers: “Oh, I doubt that. I had a job and I failed because I was weak” (I/6). Doubt is the pervasive attitude which The Game projects about heroism, and yet it does not deny that heroic behaviour is possible at all. While Joe Lambe uses the word “hero” either for its glamour or as a pejorative term, his own behaviour does have heroic traits. Although he is an ambiguous figure at the beginning of the series, he develops into a character the audience has reason to trust, supported by the fact that Lambe forms a friendship with Fenchurch, a liaison officer from Special Branch, a police unit responsible for matters of national security. As a man of the police, Fenchurch cooperates with MI5, but he feels foreign in the secret service circle and questions the morality of secret service procedures. Lambe’s

Secret service TV drama 103 association with the policeman helps to anchor him on the “good” side. Nevertheless, Lambe is never referred to as a “hero” himself, even when he has revealed the mole and prevented a Soviet triumph. It seems as if the word has been so emptied of meaning that it can no longer be applied to a genuine heroic deed. Overall, like the Worricker trilogy, The Game conveys disillusionment with the heroic; the effect of heroic action is only temporary and will not lead to a resolution of the multiple crises Britain faced in the 1970s. The Night Manager (six parts, 2016) takes yet another approach to the spy genre and develops its own sceptical perspective on the heroic and its efficacy in the contemporary world. This expensive adaptation and relocation of a novel by John le Carré to the setting of the 2011 Arab Spring was aired in the BBC’s Sunday evening primetime slot. In contrast to the two programmes previously discussed in this section, The Night Manager does not focus on any of the major British secret services, and this is already a central element of its critique. The titular character, Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), is an ex-soldier who has left the British army disillusioned by the war in Iraq. He now makes his living in a (seemingly) escapist counter-world to war, as night manager in luxury hotels. Pine has removed himself from a war for which he could not see a legitimate purpose and in which he did not want to become a hero. If the heroic is thus withdrawn from a post-9/11 war, The Night Manager also withdraws it from the secret services and locates it instead in individuals who follow their own moral principles as they are caught up in conspiracies. The representatives of MI6 and the CIA are portrayed negatively; they act with moral callousness despite the fact that they are supposed to operate, as one character says, in a “new era of parliamentary accountability and transparency” (I/3). Indeed, British and American secret agents side with a villain who epitomises neoliberalism in the pernicious form of global arms dealing. Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), who poses as a respectable businessman and philanthropist, is described as “the worst man in the world” (I/1), and he owes this status to his connections in Whitehall, MI6 and the CIA, which help him to procure British and American arms illegally. As in the Worricker trilogy, a perfidious entanglement of state and business is thus exposed. For Roper, war is conducted for profit, and he does not worry about what kinds of politics his arms and services support: When a continent enters into chaos, that’s when opportunities open up. […] We can train armies to fight in deserts, mountains, we can teach them anti-guerrilla tactics, how to deal with political insurgency. And for a small surcharge, we can even send in teams of our own to deal with specific targets. Assassinations, fake terror plots, even the odd coup. (I/5) That Roper supports those forces in Egypt who aim to suppress the Arab Spring revolution marks him as an enemy of democracy. However, politicians and institutions of established democracies are also making deals with

104  Barbara Korte Roper and are thus unwilling to fight him. It is therefore the responsibility of a few morally committed individuals to stop Roper. Their solitary mission is directed against great power: that of the entrepreneur villain but also that of major institutions of their own state. Significantly, Pine admires Lawrence of Arabia, a British hero of tradition who was conflicted about his role in the British handling of the Arab Revolt during World War I. Pine’s admiration for Lawrence of Arabia at first suggests a link with imperial adventure, but more essentially it points to imperialism as a forerunner of present-day globalisation and as a cause behind many conflicts in the contemporary world. Pine’s life takes on a new heroic meaning when he commits to fight the evil that Roper impersonates. As a critic remarked, Pine’s motivation for his heroism is “all about being English” (Tait 2017), and he refers specifically to a passage of dialogue from the end of the first episode, which Joseph Oldham also cites as evidence of the series’ “moral directness” (2017a, 299). In this passage, Pine explains how his personal morality overlaps with his sense of representing his country—the same sense that led to his retirement from the army after his experience of Iraq: “Listen, if there’s a man selling a private arsenal to an Egyptian crook and he’s English, and you’re English, and those weapons can cause a lot of pain to a lot of people, then you just do it.” Like Johnny Worricker in David Hare’s trilogy, Pine acts according to a seemingly outmoded code of personal and national honour. One reviewer identified the character as a “contemporary Sir Galahad” and as belonging to “the kind of dauntless English hero that they don’t make the way they used to” (Rees 2016). However, Pine is not entirely alone in his fight. His co-hero is a pregnant woman, Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), the head of an understaffed and ill-equipped international law enforcement agency. Significantly, just as Pine left the army disillusioned, Burr has left MI6, not only because she had moral qualms about its operations but also because she felt discriminated against as a woman. Her issue with MI6 echoes the resistance of other women in the drama’s storyworld to harmful male authoritarianism: Sophie Alekan, who leaks important information to Pine in Egypt (and is killed for it), and Roper’s lover Jed (who is tortured when she helps Pine). The series makes a point to emphasise women’s role in a transformation for the better, a role that was also reflected in the Arab Spring movement. Burr is part of a growing female contingent of agents in spy fiction, but in The Night Manager her femininity serves to underscore—somewhat stereotypically—the humanity that motivates her actions. Like Pine, she is driven to hunt down the arms-dealing villain because the war in Iraq has shown her what weapons can do to human beings. Burr’s caring disposition is emphasised by her pregnancy, which prevents her from acting as an action hero. Nevertheless, she is portrayed as courageous, willing to take high risks and with a strong agency. Pine and Burr are of a kind, a heroic kind, because they have preserved their sense of good and evil and act on it. Paradoxically, even this heroism is tainted by the fact that they can only

Secret service TV drama 105 beat Roper in a dirty operation: Pine has to infiltrate Roper’s organisation under the guise of a criminal because otherwise the secret services would prevent the persecution of the true criminal. Indeed, after Roper has been apprehended in Egypt, he believes that his connections in politics and the secret services will soon get him released. Since Burr suspects the same, she does not interfere when Roper is kidnaped by “customers” he betrayed and who will presumably kill him. In an almost literal sense, the ending of The Night Manager confirms Lars Ole Sauerberg’s comparison of the secret agent to a public executioner because both do “the dirty work so that society can maintain its harmony” (1984, 113–114). However the official secret services have become too corrupt to perform this function for society, and it is relegated to outsiders like Pine and Burr. While their hands are not directly stained with Roper’s blood, The Night Manager demonstrates once more that the boundary between hero and villain is porous: the heroes need criminals to be able to sentence the criminal. Pine and Burr have high moral principles and are identified as heroic characters, but the corruption in their own state and its institutions does not allow them to reach their aims with clean measures; they have to lie, deceive and kill (by proxy)—just like the villain and the rogue agents that are their enemies.

Conclusion The television dramas analysed in this chapter use the figure of the secret agent to explore the nexus between heroism and the nation with a particularly keen note of critique. Secret agents belong to a state institution and act in the name of their country, especially when this country finds itself in crisis and under threat. The programmes considered above show secret agents acting heroically for the benefit of the United Kingdom. They also make it clear, though, that spy heroism is precarious because it is inherently dubious: secret agents operate in the shadows and with a perversely necessary violation of laws and norms. This makes spy fiction an ideal forum for critical debate about the meanings and cultural validity of heroism. At the same time, the morally flawed spy hero can be used as a lens through which to inspect the (im)morality of contemporary politics and its (in)capacity to deal with urgent political problems. As shown in other chapters of this book, such inspection also takes place in television drama about the military and the police. Spy drama, however, exposes its viewers to a situation of double observation (the spies are spied on by the audience) that intensifies the moment of critical scrutiny. Overall, spy television drama of the twenty-first century indicates a growing scepticism about the possibility of heroism in the British secret services that is accompanied by increasing erosion of trust in state institutions and political leadership. Spooks—even though it portrays the moral dilemmas of its characters—still presents an MI5 team that acts on a communal heroic spirit and believes in the Security Service’s mission to keep the United

106  Barbara Korte Kingdom safe. Later programmes are more doubtful about the secret services’ role in and for the state. They locate heroic action less in collectives and more in individuals who act out of a residual sense of personal honour and human decency that is also understood as quintessentially English. In The Night Manager, such individuals are no longer even part of the secret services, and these services are presented as institutions that side with evil rather than with good. And yet, despite the spy genre’s inherent anti-heroic bias, the twentyfirst-century examples analysed in this chapter do not entirely dismiss the possibility of heroism and the idea that a heroic disposition and heroic action can achieve something. In all examples, individuals with a conscience still act for the greater good, and it is suggested that such courageous individuals are needed as a corrective for unethical political practice. Paradoxically, a figure who acts clandestinely and with a dubious morality may thus fulfil a reassuring function in the contemporary culture and politics of fear. If the spy figure is a litmus test for the claim that the present is postheroic, British spy drama suggests a balanced attitude that does not fundamentally deny the validity and attraction of the heroic, but demands a differentiating and cautious approach.

Notes





1. See the introductory chapter to this book, p. 3. 2. On the history of the genre in cinema and television see also Miller (2003), Britton (2005), Wark (1991), Buckton (2015) and especially Oldham (2017b); a special issue on spy fiction of the Journal of British Cinema and Television (Shaw 2013) focuses on representations of the Cold War. 3. See also Lyon (2007) and den Boer (2010). For the productivity of surveillance in British culture see Falkenhayner (2019). 4. For oversight of the secret services see, for example, Gill and Phythian (2006), Bochel et al. (2014). 5. For a discussion of these films see Korte 2014 and 2018. 6. For further discussions of the programme see Nelson (2007, 142–147) and Oldham (2017b, 178). Burton (2018, 390–397) gives a survey of the whole series. 7. “Alignment consists of two key elements: attachment, in which we follow the experiences of particular characters, and access to subjective interior states of emotions, thought processes, and morality” (Mittell 2015, 129). 8. For a detailed analysis of this episode see Korte (2018). 9. See, for example, users on Spooks Forum 2010 (in the discussion thread “How did you feel about Season 9”). 10. Episode I/2 revolves around the attempt of right-wing supremacists to stir up racial tensions for political gain. In episode II/2 a Muslim man is affirmatively called a hero by one of the agents when he is killed in an attempt to prevent a radicalised boy committing a suicide attack; this is obviously intended to counter the discourse of Muslim vilification that began to spread in the United Kingdom in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. 11. Episode VII/5, aired in November 2008, shows an agent working undercover to stop a banker who attempts to bankrupt the country; national financial collapse can only be prevented at the last moment.

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Works cited Bauman, Zygmunt, and David Lyon. 2013. Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bochel, Hugh, Andrew Defty, and Jane Kirkpatrick. 2014. Watching the Watchers: Parliament and the Intelligence Services. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Britton, Wesley. 2005. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Westport: Praeger. Buckton, Oliver S. 2015. Espionage in British Fiction and Film Since 1900: The Changing Enemy. Lanham: Lexington Books. Burton, Alan. 2016. Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. . 2018. Looking-Glass Wars: Spies on British Screens Since 1960. Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press. Comer, Todd A., and Lloyd Isaac Vayo. 2013. “Introduction: Terror and the (Post) Cinematic Sublime.” In Terror and the Cinematic Sublime: Essays on Violence and the Unpresentable in Post-9/11 Films, edited by Todd. A. Comer and Lloyd Isaac Vayo, 5–13. Jefferson: McFarland. Crace, John. 2014. “Turks & Caicos; Arena: Whatever Happened to the Spitting Image? TV Review.” The Guardian, March 21, 2014. https://www.theguardian. com/tv-and-radio/2014/mar/21/turks-caicos-tv-review-bill-nighy. Dant, Tim. 2012. Television and the Moral Imaginary: Society Through the Small Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Den Boer, Monica. 2010. “Keeping ‘Spies and Spooks’ on the Right Track: Ethics in the Post 9/11 Intelligence Era.” In Ethics and Security, edited by Monica den Boer and Emile Kolthoff, 57–84. The Hague: Eleven International Publishing. Denning, Michael. 1987. Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Falkenhayner, Nicole. 2019. Media, Surveillance and Affect: Narrating FeelingStates. London: Routledge. Franco, Zeno E., Kathy Blau, and Philip G. Zimbardo. 2011. “Heroism: A Conceptual Analysis and Differentiation Between Heroic Action and Altruism.” Review of General Psychology 15 (2): 99–113. DOI: 10.1037/a0022672. Furedi, Frank. 2005. Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right. London: Continuum. . 2018. How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gill, Peter, and Mark Phythian. 2006. Intelligence in an Insecure World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goodman, Sam. 2016. British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire. Abingdon: Routledge. Korte, Barbara. 2014. “(Re-)Bonded to Britain: The Meta-Heroic Discourse of Skyfall (2012).” helden. heroes. héros 1 (2014): 68–77. DOI: 10.6094/helden.heroes. heros/2014/QM/09. .2017. “The Agency of the Agent in Spectre: The Heroic Spy in the Age of Surveillance.” The International Journal of James Bond Studies 1 (1): 1–14. DOI: 10.24877/jbs.7. . 2018. “‘I Do Not Like Moral Horror’: ‘Spooks’ and the Ethical Challenge of the Secret Services in Twenty-First Century Britain.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 15 (3): 418–435.

108  Barbara Korte Lacey, Stephen, and Derek Paget. 2015. “Introduction.” In The ‘War on Terror’: Post 9/11 Television Drama, Docudrama and Documentary, edited by Stephen Lacey and Derek Paget, 1–10. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Lyon, David. 2007. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge: Polity. MI5 – The Security Service. 2020. “Who We Are.” Accessed August 24, 2020. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/who-we-are. Miller, Toby. 2003. Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Nelson, Robin. 2007. State of Play: Contemporary ‘High-End’ TV Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Oldham, Joseph. 2017a. “From Reverential to ‘Radical’ Adaptation: Reframing John le Carré as ‘Quality’ Television Brand from A Perfect Spy (BBC2, 1987) to The Night Manager (BBC1, 2016).” Adaptation 10 (3): 285–304. DOI: 10.1093/ adaptation/apx005. . 2017b. Paranoid Visions: Spies, Conspiracies and the Secret State in British Television Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Page Eight. 2011. Written by David Hare. Produced by David Barron, David Heyman, et al. London: Universal Pictures UK. DVD. Rees, Jasper. 2016. “The Night Manager, Episode 1: Brilliant Event Drama.” The Telegraph, April 20, 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/02/19/ the-night-manager-episode-1-event-drama-of-the-highest-calibre/. Rives-East, Darcie. 2019. Surveillance and Terror in Post-9/11 British and American Television. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Salting the Battlefield. 2014. Written by David Hare. Produced by David Barron, David Heyman, et al. London: Universal Pictures UK. DVD. Sauerberg, Lars Ole. 1984. Secret Agents in Fiction: Ian Fleming, John le Carré and len Deighton. London: Macmillan. Shaw, Tony, ed. 2013. Cinema, Television and the Cold War. Special Issue. Journal of British Cinema and Television 10 (1). Spooks. 2002. Season 1. Written by David Wolstencroft, Ben Richards, Howard Brenton, Neil Cross, David Farr, Richard McBrien, et al. Produced by Simon Crawford Collins, Jane Featherstone, et al. London: Kudos. DVD. 2003. Season 2. Written by David Wolstencroft, Ben Richards, Howard Brenton, Neil Cross, David Farr, Richard McBrien, et al. Produced by Simon Crawford Collins, Jane Featherstone, et al. London: Kudos. DVD. . 2004. Season 3. Written by David Wolstencroft, Ben Richards, Howard Brenton, Neil Cross, David Farr, Richard McBrien, et al. Produced by Simon Crawford Collins, Jane Featherstone, et al. London: Kudos. DVD. 2008. Season 7. Written by David Wolstencroft, Ben Richards, Howard Brenton, Neil Cross, David Farr, Richard McBrien, et al. Produced by Simon Crawford Collins, Jane Featherstone, et al. London: Kudos. DVD. . 2009. Season 8. Written by David Wolstencroft, Ben Richards, Howard Brenton, Neil Cross, David Farr, Richard McBrien, et al. Produced by Simon Crawford Collins, Jane Featherstone, et al. London: Kudos. DVD. . 2010. Season 9. Written by David Wolstencroft, Ben Richards, Howard Brenton, Neil Cross, David Farr, Richard McBrien, et al. Produced by Simon Crawford Collins, Jane Featherstone, et al. London: Kudos. DVD.

Secret service TV drama 109 Spooks Forum. 2010. “How did you feel about Season 9?” Spooks Forum, November 9, 2010. http://www.spooksforum.co.uk/thread-1337.html. Stanley, Alessandra. 2014. “Just Can’t Trust Those Americans.” The New York Times, November 6, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/arts/television/ in-worricker-and-the-game-betrayal-always-lurks.html. Strong, Roy. 2018. The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present Day. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Sweeting, Adam. 2014. “Turks & Caicos, BBC Two, Review.” The Telegraph, March 20, 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radioreviews/10712718/Turks-and-Caicos-BBC-Two-review.html. Tait, Theo. 2017. “The Night Manager: Shaken, Not Stirred.” Sight and Sound, April 6, 2017. http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/ night-manager. The Game. 2015. Written by Toby Whithouse et al. Produced by Neville Radford. London: BBC World Wide. DVD. The Night Manager. 2016. Written by David Farr. Produced by Susanne Bier, Rob Bullock, et al. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. DVD. Thompson, Felix. 2010. “‘Coast’ and ‘Spooks:’ On the Permeable National Boundaries of British Television.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24 (3): 429–438. DOI: 10.1080/10304311003703074. Turks & Caicos. 2014. Written by David Hare. Produced by David Barron, David Heyman, et al. London: Universal Pictures UK. DVD. Wark, Wesley, ed. 1991. Spy Fiction, Spy Films, and Real Intelligence. London: Frank Cass. Wilkinson, Nick. 2009. “Spookmania and the Media.” British Journalism Review 20 (1): 47–52. DOI: 10.1177/0956474809104203. Woodhams, Ben. 2004. “The Revolution Will Be Televised.” TV Zone 180 (October): 48–52.

5

Merlin versus Misfits Heroic British youth telefantasy Nicole Falkenhayner

Sci-fi and fantasy television for young audiences In a classic text on the development and structure of the fantasy genre in fiction, Brian Attebery stresses the influence of romance as a form of storytelling on the modern genres of both fantasy and science fiction. While modern literature has largely abandoned romance elements in favour of psychological interiority and realism, Attebery points out that “the outgrown realm of romance never entirely disappeared. Instead, it was relegated […] to the margins: to children’s books and Saturday matinees and, in rationalized form, to popular storytelling modes like the Western, the detective story, and the formula fantasy” (1992, xi). Romance centres on heroic personnel, grand-scale plots and a specific chronotope that the literary scholar Michail Bakhtin called “adventure time.” “Adventure time” is inset into the narrative and consists of the “action” of the romance and the wondrous or magical coincidences that befall the protagonists (1981). This chronotope of adventure, which Attebery does not mention, can be seen as one of the elements that connects the genres of fantasy and science fiction to the romance tradition, as well as to the horizons of the heroic. Writing in the early 1990s, Attebery could still consider his list of romance-derivates on the “margins” of culture, and his list includes science fiction—“a genre with close historical and conventional ties to fantasy” (1992, 13)—superhero comics and horror fiction. By the end of the twentieth century, the popularity and economic potential of these genres moved the heroic base-structures of these kinds of fiction—with their often improbable and larger-than-life characters and events—towards the centre of popular cultural production, particularly in film and television. Sci-fi, fantasy and horror television dramas have critically been subsumed under the term “telefantasy” (Johnson 2005).1 While they were long perceived to cater to a marginal audience, sci-fi and fantasy in the twenty-first century experienced “a renaissance as mainstream ratings winners,” and British producers reacted to an increasing interest in fantasy drama (Rushton 2008, 20). To explain this renaissance, producers of television drama cite a link between new, real-life threats and the increased interest in telefantasy:

Merlin versus Misfits 111 telefantasies about heroic challenges that have been faced and overcome are a successful tool for escaping the real-life atmosphere of apprehension in a time of public discourse dominated by terrorist scares and the threat of an economic downturn. The fact that the genre has the potential to be morally charged (see the Introduction to this volume) also positions telefantasy within the horizons of the heroic: as Stephen Garrett of the production company Kudos remarks, “sci-fi can deal with complex moral issues that you couldn’t deal with in most dramas because people just wouldn’t watch it” (Rushton 2008, 20). This combination of a negotiation of moral issues with the action and adventure aspects of the genre, including techniques of mise en scène aiming to awe and overwhelm the audience, makes telefantasies prone to a heroising aesthetic and narrative structures and conventions. This specific combination of the wondrous and the morally charged also makes the genre specifically potent for translating the heroic for younger audiences. While J. R. R. Tolkien’s work provided “the mental template” (Attebery 1992, 13) for what is conventionally understood as the core type of the modern fantasy genre, the successful American television programme Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) has provided the template for the subgenre of youth telefantasy. For this series, at least, its specific heroic discourses and strategies—especially concerning the representational space for girl heroics (rather than simply female heroics) it provides—have already been researched (Hohenstein 2019). Apart from the specificities of girl heroism, Buffy can be said to display typical characteristics of the heroic youth telefantasy: the combination of totally fantastic—in the sense of impossible— events with the discussion of moral decisions, and the drama of negotiating a developing identity, played out between supernatural adventure exploits and typical youth discourses of awakening sexuality, friendship, loyalty, the discovery of individual talents and responsibility. Buffy’s international success also made the programme a forerunner in the expansion of the targeted audience demographic, due to its inclusion of romantic, emotional themes and a female lead. These aspects of genre hybridity have become staples of telefantasy, as “the new generation of fantasy drama is packaged to appeal to a wider demographic than the traditional geeky fans” (Rushton 2008, 20). That telefantasy has been successful in widening its appeal to a broader demographic is also reflected by the fact that by 2008, the primetime audience of dedicated sci-fi channels, such as the one hosted by NBC, was more than fifty percent female (20). The success of the Buffy template for telefantasy geared towards a young audience shows that, in contemporary culture, the teenage and young adult years are conventionally seen as a phase of life in which we pre-structure who and how we want to be later in life: it is thus bestowed, both socially and individually, with great significance. Youth telefantasy incorporates topics connected to personal growth and has a large capacity to resonate with the heroic; as a result, the genre becomes a prime site for providing

112  Nicole Falkenhayner a “moral imaginary” (Dant 2012, and the Introduction to this volume). The following pages will concentrate on two series from the first decade of the twenty-first century that are situated at opposite ends in terms of British youth telefantasy’s explicit engagement with discourses of the heroic in conjunction with identity formation and British discourses. BBC One’s adaptation of Arthurian legend, The Adventures of Merlin (2008–2013), is a very straightforward heroic drama, produced along the lines of formula fantasy. Merlin represents the most formulaic heroic and meta-heroic structure and aesthetics of all the programmes discussed in this book. But despite its “magic kingdom” setting, the programme reflects the British society of the early twenty-first century in which it was produced. E4’s Misfits (2009–2013) innovated the genre of telefantasy by making it both ironic and explicit in its tackling of contemporary British discourses of social inequality and abjection. The two series are also positioned on opposite ends of the youth telefantasy market in regards to their target audiences: Merlin’s heroic purity and bloodless sword-and-sorcery fights are aimed at family audiences, including older children or young teenagers, despite the fact that the later seasons are darker in tone and individual episodes have received a British Board of Film Classification rating of 12. At times, Misfits presents gory violence and sexuality and is very much aimed at an older teenager and young adult audience, which is also reflected in the ratings of its individual episodes oscillating between 15 and 18 (British Board of Film Classification 2019).

British telefantasy Beyond the focus on the heroic, this discussion of these series contributes to a growing academic interest in the British variants of telefantasy. The international success of these popular genres, both youth and adult varieties, have—with the exception of Doctor Who—been mostly received and researched as American products. Tobias Hochscherf and James Leggott, writing in 2011, still remark that British science fiction television has […] traditionally been an underresearched area, despite the many programmes being fondly remembered by viewers in the U.K. and beyond. The minimal presence of science fiction television within many accounts of British television culture can again be explained by its perceived cheapness or inferiority to Hollywood equivalents. (3) This is the case despite the number of “fondly remembered” examples of science fiction dramas and series which were singled out for remakes in the twenty-first century, from The Quatermass Experiment (BBC 1955) and A for Andromeda (BBC 1961), to Survivors (BBC 1975–1977) and Blake’s 7 (BBC 1978–1981). While Hochscherf and Leggott refer to the extreme

Merlin versus Misfits 113 heterogeneity of topics and aesthetics of British science-fiction cinema and television as a challenge for classification of a specifically British variant of sci-fi on screen, they nevertheless point out a number of differentiating markers of the British take on the genre, “including a kind of ‘realist’ impulse that emerges through a tendency for dystopian or post-apocalyptic scenarios, or through darkly satirical humor” (2011, 5). Earlier British sci-fi and fantasy were partially influenced by the great success of the gothic horror films produced by Hammer Films, who also made the original Quatermass Experiment film version (1953), thus accounting for its stronger interest in the darker and uncanny aspects of the genre. With innovations such as “supermarionation” puppetry in the 1960s for programmes such as Thunderbirds (ATV 1965–1966), British telefantasies were often forerunners in technical advances in the production of screen magic before computer-generated imagery. Advances in puppetry, for example in the British-produced fantasy classic The Dark Crystal (1982) were a pronounced mark of this. In the field of chroma key or colour separation technology, the 1984 BBC Christmas-serial The Box of Delights, aimed at a children and family watching audience, was highly ambitious for a small-screen fantasy programme in terms of its aesthetics (Peirse 2010, 110). Also, regarding the series The Tomorrow People (ITV 1973–1979), one could argue that this British programme already premediated an idiosyncratic form of youth telefantasy, as the series centres around a group of youths with superhuman abilities. While Hochscherf and Leggott lament the dearth of academic attention to British science fiction television “beyond the TARDIS” (2011, 2), this dearth was until recently even more pronounced when we regard British youth telefantasy. On British television, fantasy of the medieval or magical type was, for a long time, resolutely placed in the realm of children’s programmes, producing classics such as Catweazle (ITV 1970–1971). Particularly in the 1970s, British fantasy television produced for children often had sinister and esoteric overtones, showing an influence of late 1960s counterculture. This is observable in series such as Ace of Wands (Thames Television 1970–1972), which centres on the exploits of a telepathic stagemagician called Tarot; Children of the Stones (ITV 1977), centring on the Avery stone circle and narrating a story that combines the representation of an atavistic cult with speculations on advanced computer technology, and The Boy Merlin (Thames Television 1979), which shares some basic plot elements with Merlin, such as the Camelot court’s adversity towards the young wizard. The successful fantasy productions for children in Britain in the 1980s and early 1990s are often omitted from accounts of the genre’s history, as Alison Peirse has remarked, but she describes how the BBC serials The Box of Delights, Dark Season (1991) and Century Falls (1993) created a very specific, “child-centred” take on fantasy themes (2010, 109). Children’s fantasy was also popular due to the success of Harry Potter. For example, the children series The Magician’s House (BBC 1999–2000) clearly connected to the conventions of formula fantasy, similar to the classic The Owl Service

114  Nicole Falkenhayner (Granada Television 1969). Just like genre fiction in previous decades, telefantasy specifically geared towards the youth market is a genre that had been either relegated to the margins of both cultural production and scholarship, or nearly exclusively focused on American “teen TV” (Davis and Dickinson 2004, Ross and Stein 2008), with the exception of Lury’s 2001 volume and the more recent British Youth Television by Faye Woods (2016). Lury’s monograph provides a valuable historical study of the development of British youth television from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, but could not yet represent the ways in which the heroic has been re-assessed in British youth telefantasies of the twenty-first century, and Woods does not explicitly focus on the heroic in her discussions. Again, the exception to the rule is Doctor Who. Hardt (2020) has provided a comprehensive analysis of how the Doctor became the national treasure for British popular culture as which the programme is commonly perceived. Rather than simply asserting that Who was always already a British heroic programme, she traces the development of the programme since the earliest production plans of the BBC for a sci-fi programme in 1962 through to its youngest seasons, in which the titular hero experienced a gender-change and is now represented by the actress Jodie Whitaker (2018–2021). Especially insightful for the context of the present chapter are the results of Hardt’s work revealing that the original Doctor was not at all imagined as the heroic character as which especially the “New Who” since 2005 recast them, but rather as a weird scientist side-kick to a more classic romantic male protagonist who was then abandoned. Hardt shows that the “heroic inflation” (46) of Doctor Who, which was only developed when Russell T. Davies became showrunner in 2005, is decidedly an effect of social memory and cultural nostalgia that was created by a dynamic in which people who had been fans of the series as children now were producing it, writing its episodes and starring in it. In this way, a fictional character that had been the personal hero of several generations of British children was recast as a British cultural hero on national (and international) television. Similar to Moffat’s updating of a British popular culture icon with Sherlock, discussed in Chapter 3, the “New Who” internationalised the appeal of the series by paradoxically stressing its Britishness. This stress on Britishness is especially obvious regarding the heroising portrayal of the Doctor in the context of episodes that made use of the cultural capital of British heritage, as Shawn Shimpach has observed: Episodes have been generously sprinkled with winking reminders of British cultural pride, from the piling up of anachronisms such as the spectacle of Billie Piper floating over blitz-era London wearing a cool Britannia Union Jack t-shirt (“The Empty Child”) to episodes where the Doctor and his companion meet British literary luminaries like Charles Dickens (“The Unquiet Dead”), William Shakespeare (“The Shakespeare Code”) and Agatha Christie (“The Unicorn and

Merlin versus Misfits 115 the Wasp”). Visually, the program attempts to balance national heritage with cosmopolitan modernity. (Shimpach 2010, 165) In the first decade of the twenty-first century, new British telefantasy was produced with the aim to create an aesthetic audio-visual quality on par with the American genre successes such as Buffy and Smallville (2001–2011), a series about the teenage years of Clark Kent/Superman that narrates his journey to address his superpowers. The successful import of the American telefantasies Heroes (2006–2010) and Lost (2004–2010) spurred the British attempts at the genre (Rushton 2008, 20). The conventions of the American series are marked by the strong presence of heroic themes and central protagonists, and British television started to produce series with a similar focus on heroisation. The successful re-launch of Doctor Who, and its spin-off Torchwood (BBC 2006–2011) were significant in the development of British heroic youth telefantasy. Torchwood, despite a heterogenous quality of the episodes, rose from the more marginal BBC Three to BBC Two and finally to BBC One throughout its first three seasons. With its bisexual protagonist, Jack Harkness,2 and its envisioning of a mysterious alien-invasion defender team proudly set in Cardiff, Torchwood’s use of genre formulas appears fresh by stressing its marginal setting in Wales, thus also speaking to contemporary discourses of devolution Britain. The link to youth telefantasy is made clear when we take a comment by the programme’s creator, Russell T. Davies, into consideration: he claims that Torchwood was developed out of an idea for a British version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which he had previously named Excalibur and which was supposed to have a fantasy theme (Rawson-Jones 2006).3 Torchwood was sold to the US channel Starz for an unsuccessful fourth season in 2011 and the failure of the Americanisation of the programme attests the distinctive Britishness at the forefront of the series. The British series also owes its initial success to the way in which it demonstrates that British telefantasy can appeal to audiences beyond the family market and the “geek margin” (Television Business International 2011, 57–58). Even though the first season of Torchwood was broadcast after the 9 pm watershed that divides programmes suited for family watching from mature content, it proved very successful with younger audiences. The invention of the “Torchwood Institute,” a kind of super-secret service installed by Queen Victoria in 1879 as a result of her encounter with Doctor Who in the episode “Tooth and Claw” (2006), distinctly echoes concerns of the War on Terror discourse: Torchwood is an agency operating in secret to fend off and subvert alien aggression, and it evokes British cultural memories of heroic pride in the secret Bletchley House institute of code-breakers during the Second World War. The fact that Torchwood was unheard of in the Doctor Who universe before 2006 reflects the discourse of surveillance and security in the early twenty-first century, and the sense of threat and vigilance pervading

116  Nicole Falkenhayner the British cultural mood after 9/11 and the 2005 attacks on the London transport system. In this context, the imaginary of heroic secret agents simultaneously taps into and soothes an atmosphere of fear. Resembling, in this respect, the portrayal of MI5 in the series Spooks discussed in Chapter 4, the secret agency of Torchwood engages in dubious heroics to an even higher degree than the more realist spy series, with more extreme boundary crossings and practice of violence of the protagonists. That Torchwood is r­epresented as an originally Victorian institution that was never abandoned, re-asserts the Victorian age as a key pillar of British national identity and pride, a value-conservative undercurrent that clashes with Torchwood’s libertarian and progressive representation of sexual and gender fluidity. BBC Three also produced a trio of youth telefantasies in the timeframe discussed in this volume that all have a gothic, or even horror, overtone: Being Human (2008–2013), which centres on a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf living in a shared flat in London and trying to negotiate a normal life; The Fades (2011), a mini-series about a boy who can see the dead and has to fend off the apocalypse, and In the Flesh (2013–2014) about the rehabilitation process of a zombie in a dystopian, alternate present-day Britain affected by a zombie infection outbreak. These three series are all attempts to adapt globalised genre formulas for specifically British settings, and they explicitly link the fantastic and the heroic with the real-life drama of growing up. In this context, youth constitutes a horizon of heroisation of its own. During one’s youth, many fundamental aspects of life are experienced for the first time and therefore afford a strong affective investment—the young self, and most experiences it encounters, are immediately extraordinary as a result. As Howard Overman, creator of the telefantasy series Misfits notes, “being a teenager is such a challenging time that it instantly throws up conflict. Every emotion is heightened, everything is life-and-death important. That’s the drama” (Donaghy 2009). This specific teenage experience—the combination of an amplified search for orientation, a feeling of self-importance and a need for role-models for identity formation and decision making— makes heroic characters and stories so popular with young audiences. The deliberately “Britified” adaptations of formula fantasy, Merlin, and the superhero-genre, Misfits, are prime examples of this development.

“I have to prove it to myself”: The heroic as a metaphor for twenty-first century identity formation in The Adventures of Merlin In 2006, BBC One commissioned a new drama series centring on a juvenile Merlin, to complement its roster of weekend early-evening series geared towards “three generation TV,” in the words of the then BBC One commissioner Peter Fincham. Three generation TV, for Fincham, designated programmes that people could watch together with “their children and parents” (Deans 2006). In 2006, beside the newly commissioned teenage

Merlin versus Misfits 117 Merlin show, BBC One’s range of these programmes consisted of the new Doctor Who and Robin Hood (discussed in Chapter 1). Programmes that the BBC deemed to be fit for family watching on weekend nights had either a romance, sci-fi or a fantasy theme, and they all presented characters linked to British cultural heritage. Robin Hood is one of the most adapted folk-heroes of the adventure-romance genre and Merlin, the wizard of Camelot, is the mould for one of the stable figures of formula fantasy: the sage and magical guide. Doctor Who, Robin Hood and Merlin are fundamentally characterised by their heroic main characters, again pointing to the link between the tradition of heroic romance and the modern forms of genre fiction. The early twenty-first-century BBC programmes for family watching used popular heroic genres to promote a common set of values that make them typical of their time: all three programmes implemented the BBC’s colour-blind casting politics (see Chapter 1 for more on this) and adapted figures deeply embedded in national identity to promote values of an open, multicultural Britain in these programmes produced before the neo-conservative backlash of the second decade of the twenty-first century. As one of the many adaptations of Arthurian legend in modern and postmodern popular culture,4 Merlin offers a mixture of the fantastic and the universal, while creating clear links to the ethnically and religiously diverse twenty-first-century Britain in which and for which it was created. While firmly rooted within the adventure aspects of Arthurian tradition, its deliberate changes to the tradition enable it to address issues of race, class and gender. The programme takes up the most formulaic ingredients of the fantasy genre as an emulation of the heroic romance tradition: constant life-and-death situations, magic, swords, dragons and other fantastic beasts, love and loyalty. In the course of its developing serial arc over five seasons, it narrates the formation and growth of a heroic duo both familiar and defamiliarised: Merlin and Arthur. A twist in their conventional character constellation transforms the dynamics of the narrative structure of the Campbellian “monomyth” (Campbell 1968; see also Chapter 1 in this volume). Conventionally, Merlin is represented as the archetype of the magic guide, the wise old sage with beard, staff and flowing cloak, who sends the hero on his quest; in this youth telefantasy, the young Merlin is transformed into the “brains” of the operation. Merlin and Arthur become a “brain and brawns” heroic duo: Merlin is the smart one with the magic ability, letting him take on some aspects of the trickster hero, and Arthur is represented as a fighter hero defined by his physical prowess. The series also traces Arthur’s gradual development from an arrogant, needlessly cruel prince in the early episodes into a morally steadfast, just leader. The innovation in this constellation is thus not so much that Arthur and Merlin are depicted as young; rather, as Jon Sherman remarks: While stories of Arthur’s youth abound in literature, film, television and other media, as do tales of a young Merlin, the medieval and modern

118  Nicole Falkenhayner legends of King Arthur are devoid of instances where the two grow up together, making the BBC’s adaptation of the legend unique. (2015, 83) This unique combination enables the series to thwart and redistribute the heroic agency prototypically found in both medieval and modern adaptations of the Arthurian legends, and it also gives the series the possibility to strengthen the connections between the experience of the heroic and universal processes of growing up typical for youth telefantasy. From the middle of the series onwards, the heroes are confronted with a female duo of anti-heroes, Morgana (Arthur’s half-sister) and Morgause (Morgana’s witch half-sister).5 While Merlin and Arthur are positioned as clear-cut and “pure” heroes, it is the character of Morgana who experiences the strongest development: from the hero duo’s likeable sidekick, she develops into a fierce antagonist and tyrant ruler in the later seasons. With Merlin, the BBC made no attempts at positioning its take on Arthurian legend in any factual time period or place; this is announced in the series epigraph, which is spoken by the voice of “the great dragon” (who takes over the function of a gnomic magic guide that Merlin performs in other adaptations): “In a land of myth and a time of magic, the destiny of a great kingdom rests on the shoulders of a young boy. His name: Merlin.” As we are watching a story set “in a land of myth and a time of magic,” it is only a generic “dark ages” setting that roots the series visually in medievalist conventions. Camelot and its neighbouring kingdoms form a mythicalpoetical Albion, an “imaginary referent, a vague idea which we hold about the past” (Elliott 2014, 177), which Arthur and Merlin are supposed to unite as a political entity in the prophecy the dragon relates to Merlin in the first episode. While the series is thus clearly embedding its plot setup in the Arthurian tradition as the inaugural myth of Britain, it is simultaneously dislocating its setting from a recognisably British landscape, as well as from a clear definition of the series’ Albion as Britain. As Hutchings writes and Chapter 3 on crime fiction also discusses, “definitions of Englishness and Britishness often deploy particular notions of rural and urban landscapes” (2004, 28). However, Merlin’s Camelot was filmed in a French castle, and the landscape-scenes (partly filmed in Iceland) are also often represented as “fantastically” sublime with the help of CGI, showing a mountainous and heavily wooded setting that dwarves the protagonists. As Tollerton (2015, 116) observes, the words “England” or “Britain” are never uttered, and the simple, bright costumes resonate aesthetically with older Disney and Hollywood films with Arthurian and Robin Hood themes. The costumes of the female characters appear to be modelled on those of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) film trilogy. In contrast to later series such as the Last Kingdom (BBC 2015–2017), which represents the founding myth of a united England as historical fact (see also Chapter 1), Merlin consciously attempts to visually dislocate itself from the national myth,

Merlin versus Misfits 119 while simultaneously capitalising on its emotional charge for its British audience. In this setting, we find young Merlin, a boy gifted with magic abilities, who is sent by his mother to Camelot’s court physician Gaius as an apprentice. From the very first scenes, the viewer is aware of the peril in which the young wizard finds himself: he is coming to a land in which magic, a set of abilities and talents seemingly wide-spread and connected to a vaguely Celtic “old religion,” is persecuted with all the force of its absolutist law. Merlin’s special abilities, his extraordinariness, must remain hidden at all costs. As a result, the young Merlin is forced to develop into a trickster figure of sorts: he constantly lies about his magic and often uses it cheekily. In the very first episode, he learns from the dragon captured by King Uther, Arthur’s father, that it is Merlin’s duty to use his special powers to protect Arthur and ensure that the prince and Merlin himself can develop into the legends the viewer already knows they will become. Merlin is predestined to become a hero-maker: “Arthur is the once and future king who will unite all Albion. But he faces many threats from friend and foe alike. Without you, Arthur will never succeed. Without you, there will be no Albion” (I/1). The programme positions Merlin as king- and kingdom-maker, a role that Merlin already has in a medieval core text of Arthurian legend, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regnum Britanniae, as well as in popular-culture products such as the film Excalibur (US 1981) (Torregrossa 1999, 57). However, the series innovates this role by making Merlin a hero himself who is called to this task by another figure of authority, the dragon. Typical for the reluctant hero at the event of his call to adventure in the Campbellian monomyth, Merlin questions this tremendous destiny. However, the monomyth is comically subverted; Merlin is not reluctant because he thinks he is incapable of the task. Instead, Merlin is reluctant because he thinks Arthur, with whom he has already had two fights over the former’s unjust treatment of servants, is incapable: “There must be another Arthur. Because this one’s an idiot” (I/1)—to which the dragon replies that it is Merlin’s destiny to use his gifts to change that. So, while Merlin has a call to a most legendary destiny, he is faced with the bullying of an arrogant prince, in an environment decidedly hostile to his magic abilities. This setup leaves ample room for development. The viewer knows that Merlin will use his magic to repeatedly trick and save Arthur. However, no one in Camelot, except the court physician Gaius who has forsaken his own magic powers for “science” (I/1), can know that he is a warlock because that would lead to Merlin’s death. This setup is a tool for suspense throughout the series, and the narrative prerequisite allows the series to nod knowingly towards the audience: it is not until the final episode that Arthur realises that Merlin, his best friend and ally, is a wizard. The fact that Merlin’s magic abilities have to remain hidden, as well as the fact that magic, in the series’ storyworld, is a persecuted, denigrated way of being, rather than only an ability connected to the old religion, gave

120  Nicole Falkenhayner the series’ writers a number of possibilities for making the legend resonate with contemporary audiences. Firstly, heroic agency in Merlin is distributed primarily between the two main protagonists. The conventional functions of the Merlin figure, as sage and magic guide, are relegated to Gaius and the dragon, respectively. Merlin is neither Arthur’s sidekick, nor the other way around. Merlin’s fierce loyalty to and sense of responsibility for a man who might dismiss or even persecute him if he knew his true identity constitutes the main element of the heroism of character promoted by the series. When Arthur creates his fellowship of the Round Table by knighting his friends (III/13), Lancelot, who, apart from Gaius, is the only character who knows about Merlin’s “talents,” states: “It is you who should be knighted. You are the bravest of us all and no one even knows it.” Merlin’s heroism is heightened by the fact that he must keep it a secret. Although it becomes increasingly implausible throughout the series that no one realises that Merlin is constantly magically twisting the events in favour of the victory of Arthur’s knights, it makes him, to a certain degree, a puppet master who can use his extraordinariness to influence life and death. Nowhere is this power more obvious than in episode III/5, “The Crystal Cave.” Here, Merlin sees the future and decides to kill Morgana because he can see that she will turn into a tyrant, only to later change his mind and save her. Having caused her to fall down a flight of stairs, by which she has incurred a deadly brain injury, Merlin cannot bear the suffering of Arthur, Uther and Guinevere as Morgana is dying, and he decides to heal her. There is a shift in tone in this episode, one which is characteristic of the whole third season. The youth and coming-of-age topics are no longer depicted comically but move into a more serious field: Merlin is represented as the figure who has to decide the fate of Camelot long before Arthur becomes king. In Merlin, then, the hero is not solely the knightly warrior and good ruler, but the one who makes the hero, who assures that another can fulfil his potential. This is a very contemporary idea of heroism: the realm of the heroic has been redefined to signify the fulfilment of one’s own potential as much as the teasing out of another’s potential through heroic leadership, as it is promoted, for example, by the so-called “hero science” and humanist psychology, trends in US social psychology influenced by Campbell (Allison, Goethals and Kramer 2017, also Franco, Blau and Zimbardo 2011). On the visual and discursive planes, Merlin includes a number of scenes that use the persecuted, outlawed magic in Uther’s Camelot as a metaphor for religious and ethnic discrimination, echoing the contemporary growing Islamophobia in Britain post 9/11 and 7/7 (Tollerton 2015; see also Introduction). Tollerton’s reading of the role of “the old religion” in the series as a metaphor for the status of Islam in contemporary Britain is plausible, and it also resonates with the concerns of its contemporary Robin Hood, as discussed in Chapter 1. While there is no mentioning of an “old religion” in the latter series, it is similar to Merlin in its veiled criticism of the othering of Islam in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The

Merlin versus Misfits 121 creation of suspect communities and rising surveillance in Merlin is embedded and amplified in Uther’s persecution and discrimination of all magic people as a threat to his nervously guarded social order. But the othering of magic can also be read as referring to discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. This appears particularly plausible in season three—not only in the pained looks of Merlin at Arthur when the latter speaks of magic as “evil.” The fact that magic is a way of being for Merlin, and that his best friend rejects it, gives the dynamic between the heroic duo or “bromance” of the series another dimension connected to growing up and identity formation. Merlin’s fear of Arthur discovering his otherness mirrors the fear that many young homosexual men experience of losing friendships if their true identity is revealed. In season four, the chivalrous Prince Arthur is seen comically losing his trousers a number of times, with Merlin struggling to pull them back up and the two rolling on the floor (IV/3; IV/4), thus suggesting queer overtones. Magic as a metaphor for homosexuality can also be seen as an explanation for Morgana’s unbounded hatred for Uther. In episode III/13, she tells him that it was the “pain and isolation of having to hide and fear who I really am” which made her hate him, a statement which resonates strongly with autobiographical narratives of coming out by queer people who have fallen out with their families. Morgana’s hate and wickedness are portrayed as resulting from the pain of not being publicly accepted by Uther as his illegitimate, magic/queer daughter. Like Torchwood, Merlin was created at a time when the representation of homosexuality was entering into the mainstream. Merlin, like the other series discussed that were produced in New Labour Britain, promoted a diverse and tolerant society, a stance that decreased after 2010 in an increasingly conservative social and political climate. While homosexuality remains a subtext of the series,6 other topics of the twenty-first century—contemporary Britain specifically—are more obviously resonant in the negotiations of the heroic in this Arthurian remediation: multi-ethnicity and class. Merlin’s multi-ethnic cast increases the representational space for non-white characters in the (medievalist) fantasy genre (Tollerton 2015, 114). The setting of the programme in an unspecified legendary time and space is significant for the success of the series’ colour-blind casting, which it shares with Robin Hood (see Chapter 1), because its fantastical overtones defy objections to a diverse cast on the grounds of historical accuracy. While multi-ethnicity as a problem is never explicitly addressed, class repeatedly is. The series goes to some length to democratise its heroic personnel, transforming legendary noble characters into “lowly born” ones, thereby enhancing their heroic worth. The series, with its constant discourse of heroic destinies as well as its plot centred on heroic actions, obviously promotes a worldview in which clearly defined character traits—bravery, loyalty, moral decency, empathy and care—should lead to merit, regardless of descent. The traditional character of Guinevere is thus transformed from a high-born lady into the mixed-race servant girl

122  Nicole Falkenhayner Gwen, while keeping her character’s central position as main love interest of Arthur and Lancelot and, additionally, letting her personify the archetype of the caretaker (she is seen selflessly nursing Merlin, Morgana, her father, Gaius, Arthur and even Uther, who is responsible for her father’s death). Her rise through the social ranks is exemplified by her taking the Pendragon throne as Arthur’s widow at the end of the series. Lancelot, undisputedly the most popularly received knight of the Round Table, is not from a noble background and is depicted as ethnically different (he is played by Chilean-British actor Santiago Cabrera). After Lancelot saves Merlin from the attack of a griffin (1/5), Merlin uses trickster magic to help him fulfil his life’s dream of becoming a knight of Camelot. Merlin forges a fake “seal of nobility,” due to the fact that only nobles are allowed to become knights, a rule that Merlin rejects as “wrong” from the start, as does Arthur later in the episode in a confrontation with his stern father Uther. Right after the knighting of Lancelot, Uther becomes suspicious; leaning into a servant, he says, “take this seal to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the court genealogist. I want his opinion in the morning” (I/5). In the scene, which will reveal that Lancelot is a cheat, we find one of the many nods to the adult audience members versed in the history of Arthurian legend, as Sherman has observed (2015, 91). The librarian we saw in the background of a previous scene while Merlin magically forged the seal is revealed to be the author of the Historia Regnum Britanniae. This mix of generic scenes of teen films (a librarian annoyed by a clumsy youth) and a tongue-incheek reference to a canonical source of the Arthurian legend has an added level of comedy for the initiated viewer because the historical Geoffrey of Monmouth is presented as the genealogist of a fictional world, while his History of the Kings of Britain is, in fact, a strongly fictionalised account. This play with the actual Arthurian tradition lets Merlin appear as an example of a post-modern media culture which relies, in its updating of a traditional body of text, on hypertextual references.7 After Lancelot is revealed to have cheated, he confesses and takes his punishment without any regard for his own fate. Impressed, Arthur sets him free, and Lancelot, together with Merlin’s magic help, defeats the griffin and saves Arthur’s life. While now both Uther and Arthur want to redeem him, Lancelot chooses to leave Camelot, as he states, “to prove himself worthy”—Arthur and Uther respond that he already has, but Lancelot retorts: “I must prove it to myself” (I/5). This, again, connects heroism in the series with twenty-first-century values of self-worth, as fostered by ambition and achievement. Lancelot, after this inaugural episode, disappears from the series only to return with Percival at his side, at the hour of greatest need: Morgana and Morgause have established their tyrannical rule over Camelot with the help of an undead army (III/13). In this episode, Excalibur is revealed, and Arthur establishes his Round Table as a kind of rebel-group launching on a suicide-mission to bring down the witch-sisters’ tyranny. This episode also represents a turning point of the visual aesthetics

Merlin versus Misfits 123 of the series. Earlier episodes that established Arthur’s and Merlin’s intertwined heroism (such as I/10 and I/11, in which Arthur is revealed to be “pure at heart”), rely on a bright and polychromatic colour scheme. They fill the small screen with lush woods and snow-tipped mountains in the background, and, in I/11, the iconic presence of the white gleaming unicorn signifies the episode’s theme of heroic purity. Aesthetically, the first season in particular has more in common with fairy-tale films than with darker fantasy. In contrast, from III/13 onward, the screen is often dominated by dark, gloomy and barren landscapes, and Merlin’s clandestine nightly meetings with the great dragon take place on a moon-lit clearing. Visually, this supports the serial arc of the plotline that stretches over all five seasons: in hindsight, the earlier adventure-heroic exploits of Merlin and Arthur are comparatively playful tests for the terrors that await them. Visually, the series tracks a movement from day to night. There is a turning point when Arthur first summons his fellowship of the Round Table in III/3, and the setup of this scene’s protagonists is significant for the moral heroic agenda that the series promotes. The gender, race, class and age diversity of Arthur’s heroic community of the Round Table, which includes Gaius and Gwen amongst the traditional knights, is visually reminiscent of scenes in the original Star Wars trilogy, in which we see the (here, galactically) diverse rebellion planning their seemingly futile attacks against the homogeneously white and male Empire—at a round table, of course, harking back to the Arthurian model in return. As Arthur emphasises in his speech in this scene, the political system he wants to build is diverse, non-hierarchical and based on equality and personal merit, and this shows how resonant this formula fantasy youth series is with contemporary, egalitarian value systems—in comparison with the fiercely hierarchical and bloodline-based power systems of other successful fantasy series such as Game of Thrones (2011–2019). Regarding this stress on egalitarianism and the tolerance of diversity, Tollerton remarks that “surely no interpretation of Arthurian legend can entirely remove itself from making moral judgments that are based partially on the context from which it originates” (2015, 123), which makes the series strongly resonate with the concerns of the British people in the twenty-first century and, connected to that, the promoted libertarian values of its production home, the BBC (see also Chapter 1 in this book). Merlin, together with the BBC’s other pronouncedly heroic family programmes Doctor Who and Robin Hood, uses heroism to openly promote liberal, contemporary moral values. Significantly, especially from a post-Brexit perspective, all these series produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century use the heroic to elevate the moral values of an open society. In Merlin, as a series that centres on youth-related topics, these moral values include personal character improvement and the growing ability to act responsibly, the successful quest towards which is repeatedly remarked upon by the characters’ meta-comments directed at the development of the main protagonists, and is represented as an intrinsic

124  Nicole Falkenhayner part of their heroism. These meta-comments amass at the turning point of the series, from the middle of the third season onwards, when Arthur’s ascension to the throne is increasingly imminent. Merlin reminds Arthur of the arrogant brat he used to be, and Gwen and Uther voice how “proud” they are of him developing into a just leader. Gaius, in IV/3, reminds Merlin of “the bungling idiot who came trampling into Camelot” and voices his pride in who he has become. The series’ stress on using the heroic as a tool to promote personal moral improvement is also reflected in 2010 article in the US-based Journal of Leadership Education that advocates the didactic use of Merlin “to educate school children about principles of leadership” such as “‘empathy,’ ‘awareness,’ and ‘foresight’” (Tollerton 2015, 1228). Nelson and Walton (2014) have discussed Merlin as an initiation tale that teaches young audiences about adolescent relationships. Like older fairy tales and myths, youth telefantasies such as Merlin tap into supposedly universal aspects of human subjectivity and development, which links them intrinsically with the epic forms they adapt as their contemporary expressions. As Attebery writes: magical tales and supernatural ballads share with hero legends and stories of creation a sense of mystery and meaning that can be exploited by modern storytellers. […] Fantasy provides new contexts, and thus inevitably new meanings, for myth. […] Every fantastic narrative is ‘engaged in solving a problem or a set of problems specific to the time in which it was written.’ (2014, 2 Tompkins 1986, 38) This discussion of Merlin has demonstrated how intertwined the heroic programme of this youth telefantasy is with statements about and prescriptions for the development of young people into responsible adults of a tolerant, diverse and egalitarian vision of contemporary Britain. The series discussed in the following section uses the heroic to completely different means: to ironically point to the failings, troubles and injustices of twenty-firstcentury Britain towards the less privileged members of its youth population, and its discourse on their abjection.

The redemption of superhoodie: Superheroes and the British discourse on “feral youths” in Misfits In Britain in the twenty-first century, the term “feral youth” has become common to describe a jobless and uneducated generation growing into adulthood in the working-class estates of London and other larger British cities, as symbols for “Broken Britain.” While British youth generally have been increasingly stigmatised as “uneducated and antisocial” in the twentyfirst century and are met by a middle-class and middle-aged public with “growing anxiety” (Gonnermann 2019, 2014), urban youth have certainly

Merlin versus Misfits 125 carried the largest burden of this stigmatisation. During the recession following the financial crisis in 2008–2009 and austerity policies, the descriptions of these scare-figures was amplified, especially in conservative media (Sergeant 2009). One reason why feral youths or “ASBO teens” (referring to the law of the anti-social behaviour order, according to which young offenders of menial crimes could be sentenced to community service) were so prominent in public media is connected to the high number of CCTV cameras in the inner cities and large urban estates, which gave newspapers and television producers an ample supply of inciting footage of young people doing reckless or dangerous things. The rise in knife-crime among youths in Britain throughout the twenty-first century is also connected to the trope of feral youths. Feral youths seemed a fitting figuration of a state losing control over its young and, thereby, its future. The trope of the dangerous and uncivilised feral youth was also used to great effect in the reporting on the London riots in 2011 (Falkenhayner 2017), especially in the context of the initial public interpretation, in which the riots were denied any political impetus and motivation. Historical riots, such as the Brixton riots of 1981, were also the sites for looting and criminal behaviour, but this was in no way foregrounded to the extent that it was in the representation of the 2011 rioters as mindless, consumerist aggressors. Feral youth is a trope of class and race shaming—because those who are represented as feral are the children who grew up on estates at a time of public budget cuts, and are often of colour. Other terms that are connected to the discursive field of the feral youth are “the chav” and “the hoodie”: a young man looking for trouble who pulls the hood of his sweatshirt over his face to be unidentifiable on CCTV footage. As Woods writes, “this symbol of British youth underclass ‘threat’ later formed the centrepiece of the public discourse swirling around the English riots in the summer of 2011” (2015, 234). When Howard Overman, who had been a screenwriter for a number of Merlin episodes, developed his interpretation of the superhero genre with Misfits, he turned to “the least heroic group I could find” (Donaghy 2009): the disenfranchised and discursively abject underclass youth. Thus, “Misfits directly engages with a late 2000s media and political discourse” (Woods 2015, 233). Overman states that making a globally successful genre British was his main prerogative for the creation of Misfits: I’d wanted to do something new with the superhero genre for ages. Even before Heroes came out this was on my mind. It had to be uniquely British. In the same way that Shaun of the Dead took the zombie genre and made it ours—I wanted to do that with superheroes. (Donaghy 2009) Like the American series Heroes, which was a great success in the United Kingdom (Rushton 2008), and the 1970s series The Tomorrow People, Misfits

126  Nicole Falkenhayner is predicated on the fantasy that ordinary people develop superpowers— however, turning ASBO-teens into heroes gave this familiar idea a fresh twist and provided ample opportunity for a satirical re-appropriation of the superhero trope as a vehicle to create both humorous and socio-critical entertainment. A similar strategy was used in the film Attack the Block (UK 2011), in which a South London youth gang has to fight off an alien invasion. Set in Thamesmead, south-east London, and developing its storyworld around the local community centre, Misfits, in its two inaugural and signature seasons, presents us with a group of teenagers that resemble, as Woods notes, the “teenage archetypes” familiar from the iconic 1980s teen movie Breakfast Club (US 1985): “the shy nerd, the spoilt princess, the confrontational chav, the aloof athlete, the fast talking wise-guy” (2015, 236). Nathan, the slapstick wise-guy of Misfits, visually recalls Judd Nelson, the iconic bad-boy of Breakfast Club, as he is dressed in a chequered lumberjack shirt and black jacket in many episodes. However, Misfits leaves behind the realist premise of its forerunner and enters telefantasy territory by letting the five ASBO teens—as well as the whole city—become the victims of a freak thunderstorm (I/1). They are hit by lightning and, alongside others around them, they develop mysterious superpowers. These powers reflect their core personality traits and thus appear immediately ironic, especially in the case of the shy and conflicted nerd-character Simon, who is never paid attention by anyone, and whose superpower is: invisibility. The first season represents the characters trying to use their powers for their individual benefit and discovering the pitfalls of their superpowers—a metaphor for the typical youth topic of learning to come to terms with responsibility. When attacked by their probation worker, who, also ironically, has been turned “feral” by the thunderstorm, they kill him in self-defence. In the wound-up dramaturgy of the programme, he is not the only killed probation worker. Having to hide his body and their crime, the teens become bound by fate and develop into an (anti-)heroic community. In its style, tone and aesthetics, Misfits could not be more different from Merlin but, as youth telefantasies, they both employ aspects of the superheroic. The characters of Misfits have extraordinary powers similar to Merlin’s magic, which is often presented as similar to a superpower in the more conventional programme. In both programmes the trope of the superpower is used to negotiate core topics of growing into adulthood. Thus, in episode I/3, Alisha, a beautiful girl who has achieved an erotic power over men, who immediately want to have sex with her as soon as she touches them, is first seen using her power for her own pleasure. Later, she discovers that the power also works the other way around, so that men turn into lusting maniacs when they touch her: as a probation worker touches her skin, she nearly gets raped and has to be saved by Curtis, the most conventionally heroic character of the programme. Curtis is a star athlete set to take part in the 2012 London Olympics. He was embroiled in a drug razzia that cost him his nomination. In episode

Merlin versus Misfits 127 I/4, he tries to undo his fate, and, especially, that of his ex-girlfriend Sam, who had to go to prison as a result of the drug razzia. Curtis embodies the theme of exclusion of the under-class youth from the national imagination, when we regard the reference to the Olympics as a signifier for national pride. Black British Curtis is invited to this event of ultimate inclusion and elevation, only to be excluded after a mistake that might have turned out different for a white, more privileged young person. Episode I/4 is the least ironic of the series: Curtis’s superpower is an ability to rewind and forward time, fitting his character’s former identity as a star sprinter. He plans to undo what happened the night his ex-girlfriend was arrested. The timewarp sub-episodes show the evening of the drug razzia three times in the style of Groundhog Day (US 1993), representing Curtis’s determination and diligence until he reaches his goal. Simultaneously, the episode tells a story of the complexity of the consequences of our actions, notwithstanding their intention: during Curtis’s first attempt, his girlfriend Sam is stabbed by the drug dealer instead of being arrested; in the second, both he and his girlfriend go free. He wakes up, seeing his running suit on the wall, and his face in the newspaper, lauded as the budding Olympic hope, his ASBO life and his friendship with the other protagonists undone. As he passes by the community centre, however, he learns that Simon, Alisha and Kelly have been killed by the probation worker attacking them—all because he chose his career: “I wasn’t there! I wasn’t there” (I/4), he repeats to a confused Nathan to whom, in this timeline, Curtis is unknown. It is now that Curtis makes a decision that turns him into a “real” hero: he returns to the fateful evening at the club, replaying the razzia a third time. Saving Sam from detention, he makes sure that he is implicated by police in the botched drug deal. He decides to ruin his career so that he can, in the future, save his ASBO friends by killing the probation worker. He commits an act of self-sacrifice, giving up his career for others—a typically heroic act. However, his tendency to ensure that everyone is fine also gets him into trouble, because he now has two girlfriends: Sam and Alisha. In the first two seasons, Misfits managed to satirise the heroic and the tropes of superhero telefantasy, together with the received representations of underclass youth. At the same time, however, it found space in its plotline for actual heroic deeds, thus never fully undoing or denigrating moral and selfless aspects of heroism. But having Curtis struggle, in the follow-up episode, with the moral pain of deciding which of his two lovers to ditch, also relates his character to everyday young adult problems. While Curtis’s episode can be seen as a comparatively straightforward hero narrative, it is episode I/5 in which the programme displays all its wit to narrate the meta-heroic, highly ironic story of Nathan discovering his satirical version of heroism. The character of Nathan Young was one of the main attractions of the two first seasons of the programme. Actor Robert Sheehan’s rendering of fast-talking, pothead Nathan with a hyperactive attention deficit, full of himself and always denigrating himself at

128  Nicole Falkenhayner

Figure 5.1  Tilted hero-shot in Misfits (screenshot from Misfits I/6)

the same time, established the figure as the core character of the series. Nathan’s “heroic” destruction of a fictional neo-conservative cult, the “virtue organisation,” is another comment on the representation of feral youths as a threat to society. The organisation is founded by a young woman, Rachel, who, through the thunderstorm, has achieved the ability to brainwash people. Rachel transforms the loutish, promiscuous south London youths into studious, drug-free and chaste young people. The “virtue organisation” can be seen as a premediation of the looming conservative backlash in Britain in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and it also comments on an increasingly intolerant and hysterical public sphere, in which every transgression is turned into an outrage. In the climactic scene of the episode, Nathan, perched on the roof of the community centre with the cult leader, gives a speech asserting the right of youths to be irresponsible (Figure 5.1). Filmed from below against a backdrop of dramatic music, the brainwashed London teens gaze up at him in a mixture of bewilderment and awe, as he attempts to call them back to their “destiny”: She’s got you thinking this is how we’re supposed to be—well, it’s not! We’re young! We’re supposed to drink too much! We’re supposed to have bad attitudes and shag each other’s brains out. We are designed to party! This is it. If you could see yourselves. It breaks my heart. You’re wearing cardigans! We had it all! We screwed up better, and bigger, than any generation before us. We were so beautiful. (I/5) This scene uses the visual conventions of a dramatic, heroic stand-off between hero and villain and satirises it, thus commenting on the denigration of

Merlin versus Misfits 129 British lower-class teenagers as feral; the content of Nathan’s speech simultaneously points to the loss of radical youth subcultures in the twenty-first century. The scene ends with a scramble between Nathan and the neoconservative brainwasher, with both falling to their death. Nathan has sacrificed himself so his ASBO friends can return to their ASBO ways—a death that is at once ironic and fitting for his character. Tongue-in-cheek, he is the saviour of his generation’s right to be maladjusted. The episode, and the season, ends with Nathan seemingly dead in his coffin and finally revealing his superpower. Throughout the season, while all others were struggling to come to terms with their powers, Nathan seemed to have gone through the thunderstorm as the only one unaffected, a state of affairs he constantly lamented. But as he wakes up in his grave, he finally discovers that his superpower is immortality. And he discovers it as he finds himself buried alive, with only his iPod for company. It is such twists of dark humour that, apart from the link to British discourses, give Misfits its distinctly British tone, with bad turns of fate for the heroes unthinkable in US-forerunners of the genre, such as Smallville or Buffy. Misfits was also innovative in its aesthetic rendering of the telefantasy genre. To a British audience, its setting adheres to the social-realist representational conventions of British television and film that show Britain as a nation of deprivation and decline. The aesthetic possibilities offered by the Thamesmead lake and its four signature tower blocks were used to a defamiliarising effect, with long shots letting the blocks gleam in light reflected by the water, and using the geometric angularity of the setting’s brutalist concrete architecture to bring out its aesthetic appeal, similar, in this aspect, to the effect to which this architecture was used in Luther (see Chapter 3). Misfits was among the series that inaugurated an aesthetic that Glen Creeber has called “social surrealism” (2009, 429). Just as Overman took the trope of the abject feral youth and, with the meta-ironic use of youth telefantasy conventions, humanised as much as heroised his ASBOprotagonists, the visuality of the series also aesthetically heightened real-life British spaces often represented as abject in British public media discourses. Misfits does not partake in the voyeuristic display of poverty and the underclasses common in some strands of British cultural production in the 2000s, but rather aligns itself with what Woods calls “the recent cycle of youth exploitation films” (2015, 231), such as Kidulthood (UK 2005) and Attack the Block: “By focusing on the experiences and bodies of teenagers, the programme implicitly constructs a sense of empathy for those dismissed or feared in cultural and political narratives of urban youth” (Woods 2015, 232, see also Gonnermann 2019, 224–225). There is one character specifically by which the series heightens its reconfiguration of the urban British teen: Superhoodie first appears in episode I/5, racing on a BMX bike to save Nathan from the conservativebrainwashed youths who have surrounded him in a scene visually reminiscent of a zombie horde. While the mysterious figure is introduced as a strange

130  Nicole Falkenhayner side character, he is fully established in season two, where, other than the orange hoodie in which the viewer first saw him in I/5, he now dons a full hoodie-superhero suit. Episode II/1 opens with Superhoodie getting ready in his “technoid lair,” which aesthetically echoes “that of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy” (Woods 2015, 237). In a starkly cinematic long shot, with a slightly tilted perspective, the viewer sees him overlooking Thamesmead and shooting a paper plane over the lake, which the camera follows, until it hits Kelly comically in the eye and she reads its important message. It is Superhoodie (we learn later that he is Simon from the future) who is represented with all the visual conventions of the superheroic: “His silhouetted figure taking watchful pose high on the edges of tower blocks, signifying both his dominion of the space and his individuality and mystery” (Woods 2015, 237). This visual iconicity of the superhero as the urban protector, both mysterious and with a dominant amount of individual agency, was also used by the BBC detective series Luther and Sherlock, as discussed in Chapter 3. In Misfits, tropes of the superheroic are used to subvert cultural constructions of fear and abjection, “reworking the faceless hoodie’s fearful anonymity as a mysterious and commanding protector” (238).

Conclusion This chapter has discussed two early examples of a twenty-first century, distinctly British take on the heroic in the youth telefantasy genre. The two series in question, Misfits and Merlin, reside at opposite ends of the scale of generic conventions, along which similar programmes have evolved since (Woods 2016). Merlin used one of the oldest British legendary traditions of heroic romance and tropes of formula fantasy, while updating the myth’s heroic message for British audiences in the twenty-first century. While centring its characters and its setting in one of the most canonised medieval heroic traditions in the West, its display of a multi-ethnic, multi-class Camelot, and its metaphorical links to and rejection of forms of discrimination on the grounds of religion, class and sexual orientation, made the programme resonant with discourses of contemporary Britain. As Merlin is more closely aligned with family programming than other telefantasies such as Torchwood or Becoming Human (BBC 2011), its updating of the Arthurian legend is used to promote values of a contemporary open society as heroic: equality, responsibility, heroism of character and good leadership (in contrast to a more conventional mode of formula fantasy which often embeds the right to heroic extraordinariness in creed or class). Fittingly, Merlin democratised the heroic personnel of the Arthurian legend to present the contemporary viewer with mixed-race lower-class queens, and knights of noble heart, rather than noble lineage. By adopting telefantasy tropes ironically, Misfits further democratised the superhero genre and gave it a distinctly British twist. It linked the whole setup of its basic plot premise with contemporary British public discourses,

Merlin versus Misfits 131 criticising the representation of urban youth as feral and dangerous by redeeming the public scapegoat figure of “the hoodie” in its highly ironic invention of the Batman-like Superhoodie. To differing degrees, the success of both series is predicated on its young audiences’ literacy in popular media forms, visual conventions and preconceived tropes. Both Merlin and Misfits are generic hybrids, connecting fantasy television with youth problematics, and they are thus representative of the malleability and creative possibilities enabled by hypertextual references to different forms and traditions of heroic representations. Without the cultural knowledge of the American superhero genre, Misfits would make little sense as an ironic, socially aware, and very British satire, just as little as Merlin would make little sense without the audience’s prior knowledge of at least the basic tenets of the Arthurian legend and its many adaptations in modern popular culture. Both series manage to use the heroic to immediately connect it with concerns of growing into adulthood, thus displaying the affinity of heroism and being young in telefantasy. What makes the two programmes typical for their time, despite their many differences, is that they move beyond the more conventional renderings of heroic tropes in the fantasy genre, but simultaneously offer an appraisal of heroic behaviour. As many of the series discussed in this volume, both address and satirise the heroic on a metalevel. Additionally, they still assert the existence of a basic moral instinct and set of values that, on the one hand, make their heroes heroic in the first place, and on the other hand, humanise their protagonists. They show the lengths to which the tropes of heroism can be stretched in contemporary British television drama, and how productive their metaphoric potential is for cultural work—so that conventions of heroism can even be employed to dramatise the struggle to remain maladjusted.

Notes





1. In the British context especially, the distinction between fantasy, as denoting medievalist, fairy-tale and mythical themes, and sci-fi and horror is often not made. For example, the programme of the first “British tele-fantasy convention” held at the National Film Theatre in London in 1986 consisted overwhelmingly of programmes with science fiction, and sometimes, thriller-adventure themes (Mechele and Gittins 1986). 2. See Dee (2012), Dhaenens (2013) on the queer politics of Torchwood. 3. The title “Torchwood” resonates with the name of the magician Catweazle’s familiar, the toad Touchwood, in the classic children fantasy series cited above. 4. In cinema, for example: The Sword in the Stone (US 1963), Excalibur (US 1981), Arthur the King (1985), A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (US 1995), Kids of the Round Table (US 1996), King Arthur, Legend of the Sword (UK 2017), on television, most recently: Camelot (Starz Entertainment 2011); see also Harry (1999). 5. On Merlin’s depiction of Morgana as one of the most “fully realized versions” of her character, see Mediavilla (2015, 44–56). 6. For a queer reading of Lancelot in Merlin, see Brennan (2015).

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7. Sherman also remarks that this strategy of updating of iconic cultural material by twisting and changing, but still establishing links to originals, makes Merlin astonishingly similar in this respect to the famous updating strategies of the BBC’s Sherlock (2015, 87–90). 8. Tollerton in turn quotes from Oliver and Reynolds (2010).

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Merlin versus Misfits 133 Franco, Zeno E., Kathy Blau, and Philip G. Zimbardo. 2011. “Heroism: A Conceptual Analysis and Differentiation Between Heroic Action and Altruism.” Review of General Psychology 15 (2): 99–113. Gonnermann, Annika. 2019. “‘With Great Powers Come…’ Nothing: Superheroes, Teenage Delinquents, and Dysfunctional Community Structures in Misfits (2009–2013).” In Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation, edited by Ralf Haekel and Caroline Lusin, 261–280. Tübingen: Narr-Francke. Hardt, Maria-Xenia. 2020. “Heroes Through Time: Processes of Heroization and Heroic Moments in Doctor Who.” PhD diss., University of Freiburg. Harry, Kevin J., ed. 1999. King Arthur on Film: New Essays in Arthurian Cinema. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hochscherf, Tobias, and James Leggott. 2011. British Science Fiction Film and Television. Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hohenstein, Svenja. 2019. Girl Warriors: Feminist Revisions of the Hero’s Quest in Contemporary Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Hutchings, Peter. 2004. “Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television” Visual Culture in Britain 5 (2): 27–40. Johnson, Catherine. 2005. Telefantasy. London: British Film Institute. Lury, Karen. 2001. British Youth Television: Cynicism and Enchantment. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mechele, Tony, and Sarah Gittins, eds. 1986. Fantastic Television: Past Visions of the Future. Pamphlet. London: British Film Institute. Mediavilla, Cindy. 2015. “From ‘Unthinking Stereotype’ to Fearless Antagonist: The Evolution of Morgan Le Fay on Television.” Arthuriana 25 (1): 44–56. DOI: 10.1353/art.2015.0016. Merlin. 2018. Written by Johnny Capps, Julian Jones, Jake Michie, Julian Murphy, Howard Overman, Richard McBrien, et al. Produced by Johnny Capps, Julian Jones, et al. London: Network. DVD. Misfits. 2015. Written by Howard Overman, Jon Brown and Mike O’Leary. Produced by Murray Ferguson, Petra Fried, et al. Munich: Polyband. DVD. Nelson, Emma, and Ashley Walton. 2014. “‘Merlin’ as Initiation Tale. A Contemporary Fairy Tale Manual for Adolescent Relationships.” In Channelling Wonder. Fairy Tales on Television, edited by Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy, 5–63. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Oliver, Laura M., and Kae Reynolds. 2010. “Serving the Once and Future King: Using the TV Series Merlin to Teach Servant-Leadership and Leadership Ethics in Schools.” Journal of Leadership Education 9 (2): 122–134. DOI: 10.12806/V9/I2/ AB1. Peirse, Alison. 2010. “A Broken Tradition? British Telefantasy and Children’s Television in the 1980s and 1990s.” Visual Culture in Britain 11 (1): 109–124. Rawson-Jones, Ben. 2006. “Davies: ‘Buffy’, ‘Angel’ Inspired ‘Torchwood’.” Digital Spy, October 17, 2006. https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a38295/davies-buffy-angelinspired-torchwood/. Ross, Sharon Marie, and Louisa Ellen Stein, eds. 2008. Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Rushton, Katherine. 2008. “Sci-Fi Casts Off the Anorak.” Broadcast (May 06, 2008): 20. Sergeant, Harriet. 2009. “Feral Youths: How a Generation of Violent, Illiterate Young Men are Living Outside the Boundaries of Civilised Society.” The Daily

134  Nicole Falkenhayner Mail, September 19, 2009. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1214549/ Feral-youths-How-generation-violent-illiterate-young-men-living-outsideboundaries-civilised-society.html. Sherman, Jon B. 2015. “Source, Authority, and Audience in the BBC’s Merlin.” Arthuriana 25 (1): 82–100. Shimpach, Shawn. 2010. Television in Transition. Hoboken, NY: Wiley-Blackwell. Television Business International. 2011. “Trends.” (April/May 2011): 57–58. Tollerton, David C. 2015. “Multiculturalism, Diversity, and Religious Tolerance in Modern Britain and the BBC’s ‘Merlin’.” Arthuriana 25 (1): 113–127. DOI: 10.1353/ art.2015.0009. Tompkins, Jane. 1986. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790 1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Torchwood. 2012. Written by Russell T. Davies, Chris Chibnall, et al. Produced by Russell T. Davies, Julie Gardner, et al. London: 2 Entertain Video. DVD. Torregrossa, Michael. 1999. “Merlin Goes to the Movies: The Changing Role of Merlin in Cinema Arthuriana.” Film & History 29 (3–4): 54–65. Woods, Faye. 2015. “Telefantasy Tower Blocks. Space, Place and Social Realism Shake-Ups in Misfits.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 12 (2): 229–244. DOI: 10.3366/jbctv.2015.0259. . 2016. British Youth Television: Transnational Teens, Industry, Genre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Summary and Outlook Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner

This book has engaged with representations of the heroic in television drama produced in the United Kingdom during the first and second decades of the twenty-first century. The programmes investigated in the preceding case studies address aspects that are widely considered constitutive of heroic character and action: the heroic is extraordinary and uncommon; heroes demonstrate exceptional agency and a willingness to cross boundaries, and they take great risks and sacrifice their own well-being for a greater good. The case studies also reveal that heroic reputations do not automatically follow heroic action: in order to gain attention, a heroic deed must be witnessed by an audience, and heroes are constructed through acts of communication—in the twenty-first century, they are usually media constructs, including representations on television. Furthermore, the examples suggest different ways in which heroes can be made meaningful, and through which criteria their value and attraction for a society can be judged. Examined from a positive perspective, heroes use their exceptional qualities to help others and to act in the interest of their society. Viewed more critically, heroes are overly transgressive characters who violate the moral norms and laws that structure ordinary life. In such instances, heroes are perceived as anti-heroes or, in extreme cases, show a precarious similarity to the villains they oppose. Of course, television is also a medium that aims to entertain its audiences and often does so through the thrilling heroics of its characters. However, in the television dramas this book has investigated, this entertaining side of the heroic is often only a sugar-coating for a more serious engagement with the cultural and social meanings of the heroic. Overall, this book has established that television drama, notably in extensive, multi-part forms, is a significant site for the negotiation of the cultural meanings of the heroic in contemporary Britain, a country whose television culture has undergone significant changes. New markets, modes of distribution and devices for watching have impacted the way people engage with television in the twentyfirst century. It is still, however, a medium that reaches a great number of viewers, is embedded in people’s everyday life, and acts effectively as both a source and a seismograph of collective thinking and feeling. Broadcast

136  Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner television, with which this book has been primarily concerned, with a particular focus on publicly funded television, continues to reflect the needs and desires of its society; it retains, in Graeme Turner’s words, “the capacity to construct a sense of unity and belonging for citizens of the nation” (2009, 62). This aspect of television as a medium with the capacity to construct what Lauren Berlant has called “affective publics” (Berlant 2008, xi), also in a national sense, is sometimes considered an anachronism vis-à-vis the contemporary market dominance of globalised streaming services. However, there is evidence of the continued domestic relevance of television; television might, in fact, even see a renaissance, if the trend of increased viewing during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 is to continue. With its special communal relevance, television is an apt medium to reflect the twenty-first century’s renewed attention to heroes and the heroic. While much of the preceding century was characterised by scepticism (and sometimes even a debunking) of heroes, hero figures and narratives have become attractive again because they can serve as a projection screen for personal and social demands and desires. A need for heroes seems to arise in situations of accelerated change and perceived crisis, when established values and identities become instable and are at stake. At a time of political, social and cultural insecurity, when the dominant structure of feeling tends towards anxiety and fear, heroes symbolise strong agency, embody shared values and can serve as an anchor for collective identity. In this light, the resurfacing of the heroic in twenty-first-century Britain can be explained as a response to a range of entangled phenomena. These phenomena include the threat of Islamist terrorism, the global troubles created by a War on Terror that did not eliminate the threat of terror, and a securitised and monitored domestic environment that worries as much as it protects. Contemporary Britain is troubled by the negative consequences of neoliberal capitalism, one of which is growing inequality. Rifts that run through British society are connected with class as much as ethnic conflict. The 2010s in particular are marked by a re-increased fear of the other, directed towards immigrant and refugee communities, and mobilised by the Leave campaign in the Brexit debate. Devolution and nationalisms within the United Kingdom have given rise to further concerns about refigurations of national identity and a loss of national coherence. As in other countries, there are signs in Britain of eroding trust in politics and the institutions of democratic governance, and signs of a vague anxiety related to the technologised, mediatised, bureaucratised and consumerist environment that restricts people’s individual autonomy. Such social and cultural constellations have encouraged a reinstallation of the heroic in non-ironic ways. A new appreciation of the heroic began to become apparent at the end of the twentieth century, but the terrorist events of 9/11 were a catalyst for a renaissance of the heroic, as well as for a newly intensified academic interest in the heroic. The revival of cultural attention to the heroic does not imply a nostalgic return to simple or “pure” ideas of heroism. The contemporary appreciation

Summary and Outlook 137 of the heroic has its limits when heroic characters and actions are perceived as overly transgressive and as provoking widely accepted norms. Attitudes towards the heroic have also become more intricate in response to the ways in which British society has become more complex and diverse. As this book’s case studies have shown, British television drama exposes this variation and ambiguity of present-day notions of the heroic. It negotiates for its viewers what counts as heroic, who or what can be represented as heroic, and this negotiation is all the more effective because it happens in an everyday medium. The results of the case studies validate the claim that television drama is a productive site to investigate shifts in the social and cultural imagination of the heroic, and how the heroic is used in this media form to express changed structures of feeling in a society that finds itself in a climate of crisis, insecurity, disorientation and fear. This book is premised on the fact that multi-part television drama, especially in serial form, has a special potential to reveal the intricacies of contemporary ideas about the heroic. In comparison to other television forms, serial drama is expensive, and its producers have to be confident that their product has the potential to speak to the audience’s interests and emotional needs. Furthermore, present-day serial drama has developed sophisticated modes of narration, characterisation and televisual language that help to display the complexities of the heroic. Due to its sheer scope, multi-part television drama is able to challenge its viewers’ imagination and ethics, and engage them intellectually and affectively with the heroic: in comparison to the single film, serial drama can explore heroes and concepts of the heroic over an extended period of time, with continuities as well as variations, contrasts and reversals. Finally, a multi-faceted presentation of the heroic is encouraged by television drama’s generic diversity. Despite a trend towards hybridity, genre is still a valid factor in television production and reception, and it plays a significant role in configuring the heroic: in terms of specific aesthetic codes, and with respect to the way in which genres stand in a relationship to a culture’s dominant ideologies. As we have shown, the spy genre highlights social meanings of the heroic that the neo-medieval epic or the youth telefantasy cannot. The programmes we have studied take their own generic, aesthetic and discursive approaches to the heroic, but our chapters have also yielded results across such differences.

Prefiguration Our case studies have established that twenty-first-century representations of the heroic are prefigured by historical and mythical templates. Martial heroism appears to be a basic pattern of hero perception, and Chapter 2 has shown how established elements of warrior heroism (courage, manliness, a code of honour) have survived despite the fact that soldiering has undergone significant change and the template has been updated. More recent examples of prefiguration can be found in the Sherlock Holmes model that

138  Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner is discernible in contemporary police detective series, and the superhero template that we have shown to be activated with different inflections in Luther (affirmatively) and Misfits (ironically). The most blatant prefiguration occurs in the series with pre-modern settings and strong links to legend and myth: Robin Hood, Beowulf, The Last Kingdom and Merlin all draw on the monomyth of the hero’s journey (Campbell 1968) and its elementary plot and character functions. While the series actualise the monomyth for the twenty-first century, the structure of the hero’s journey and its constituent elements remain recognisable in all four examples. These series illustrate particularly clearly how temporal layers interact in portrayals of the heroic and create a tension between present and past, between tradition and the twenty-first century’s interpretative, emotional and identity needs.

Changing horizons of heroisation This tension between the past and the present directs attention to the fact that the scope for heroisation has widened significantly in contemporary society. With the exception of the pre-modern epic, heroisations in British culture were never exclusively restricted to the male hero, or the ethnically white hero, even though there was a strong bias. Contemporary British society is diverse on many levels, and television drama reflects this diversity, not only to comply with contemporary production codes, but also in order to appeal to its audiences. The case studies in this book observe that recent programmes have tended to distribute heroic character and behaviour more evenly between different genders, ethnicities, classes and regional identities. The examples of military dramas in Chapter 2 are a case in point: the soldiers heroised in these dramas have different class backgrounds (from a working-class private to a public-school-educated officer), and they represent all regions of the United Kingdom, as well as the ethnic diversity of British society. Most significantly, the case studies in this book reveal characters operating in a gender system where masculine and feminine identities are up for negotiation. The military drama Our Girl presents a female soldier as a decorated war hero and as a woman who has carved out a life for herself in a traditionally male homosocial environment. Physically brave women, even warrior women, appear in myth-based series such as Robin Hood and Beowulf, but also in realist police and spy programmes set in the present day. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 5, series such as Luther and Merlin have complex female anti-heroes and villains that proved highly attractive to audiences, and widened the scope for the portrayal of female characters within the heroic field, far beyond the generic femme fatale. A traditional nexus between the heroic and masculinity is likewise destabilised in many examples, and the heroic indicates the diversity of contemporary masculinities. The military dramas feature heroised soldiers whose masculinity incorporates conventionally “feminine” qualities of sensitivity and caregiving. Even the soldier action hero in Strike Back is depicted as a gentle person when he does not have to

Summary and Outlook 139 use ultimate force. The male heroes in the military dramas represent a range of contemporary masculinities, and this range is also re-projected into the series that are set in a pre-modern past. The Last Kingdom’s Uhtred is portrayed as a great warrior, but also as an affectionate father and lover, and as a man who is psychologically and physically vulnerable. The detective drama Luther portrays its titular character with an assertive, but also at times overreaching and threatening heterosexual masculinity, while programmes such as Sherlock, Torchwood and Merlin, with their more or less explicitly homosexual or bisexual characters, reveal that a greater plasticity of heroic masculinity can now be successfully represented on the small screen. We must concede, however, that the trend towards greater diversity is still limited. In the programmes discussed in this book, the heroic lead characters are still predominantly male, with the exception of Our Girl and The Fall, and they are also still predominantly white, with the exception of DCI Luther in the eponymous series. Our case studies seem to suggest that ethnically diverse casting may be stagnating in the 2010s, rather than progressing: Spooks, Misfits, Robin Hood and Merlin, with their ethnically diverse casts, were all produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Arguably, this development can be linked to the end of New Labour’s vision of a multicultural Britain and the resurfacing of open racism that many people of colour have been aware of in the neo-conservative climate that has emerged since 2010, and which has amplified since the Brexit referendum in 2016. The titular character of Luther may have paved the way in British television drama for black heroic leads, but as of yet, none have followed in his wake. It remains to be seen whether the revitalised public discussion on race and ethnic inequality that followed the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 will translate into a re-emergence of attention to ethnically diverse casting choices in the production of British television dramas. Female lead characters are on the rise in television drama overall—especially in British detective drama (Happy Valley, Marcella)—but this does not necessarily translate into pronouncedly heroic representations. An exception to this trend is, as so often, the iconic programme Doctor Who, in which the ability of the alien protagonist to regenerate into different forms made it not only possible, but plausible, to allow a woman to play the Doctor from 2018 onwards. If “the Doctor” continues to have the capacity to act as a heroic model especially for young viewers, the character’s assertive, fiercely egalitarian and anti-racist representation by actress Jodie Whitaker might provide a libertarian counter-influence of the newly entrenched ethnic and class borders in Brexit Britain for the generation growing up in these circumstances.

Heroes and the state of the nation Diversity is only one aspect of the state of the nation that is drawn attention to by heroisations in television dramas. The role that heroes can play for national integrity and identity is an explicit theme in several of our case

140  Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner studies. All series discussed in Chapter 1 draw on myths of English legend and history and are concerned with the nation in obvious ways: Robin Hood becomes the champion of a justly ruled England; Beowulf fights for the coherence and safety of the Shieldlands; Uhtred serves as a king who unites England against the Danes. This book has shown how these three series tie in with a spreading national sentiment in Britain, and England specifically, that began under New Labour and gained traction under the Conservativeled government during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Robin Hood, Beowulf and Uhtred, as well as King Arthur in Merlin, function as figures of a positive national identification at a time when the unity of the United Kingdom was becoming increasingly fragile. Beowulf and The Last Kingdom (first broadcast in 2016 and 2015, respectively) show a particular concern with the increased anxiety of immigration and “foreigners”— structures of feeling from which Brexit arose. Both series also revolve prominently around warrior heroes who make their communities safe and defend them against powerful enemies. Heroic leaders like Beowulf, Uhtred and Robin Hood may speak to those parts of the audience who have lost faith in the established institutions of politics, because these heroic leaders signal the importance of competent and trustworthy leadership by subordinating their prowess to the authority of a rightful ruler—just as Merlin, in the eponymous series, uses his wizardry to ensure the rule of King Arthur. Adhering to the quest-structure of the monomyth in popular culture, Arthur must first learn to become a rightful and moral ruler—but is then clearly presented as such a ruler. Our case studies have shown that the programmes set in the present day position their heroic characters differently towards the British state and its politics. The protagonists of the military, police and spy series serve institutions tasked to preserve the social order and keep Britain safe, but these institutions come under heavy critique, and the main vehicle of this critique is the heroic individual. The military dramas analysed in Chapter 2 present soldiers who serve heroically and honourably, but they doubt the legitimacy of a war waged on heavily contested politics. The police force in the series discussed in Chapter 3 emerges as a doubtful institution whose double position as controller of and carer for the social order is represented as deeply compromised by the desire for personal success and power struggles. While Luther appears as an (anti-)heroic, ambiguous individual who must constantly break the institution’s rulebooks in order to regain agency, equally transgressive figures, such as Bodyguard’s David Budd, struggle towards a reassessment and reinstalment of the trustworthiness of a thoroughly destabilised social institution. The success of Bodyguard, broadcast in 2018, appears to indicate a present need in Britain for a non-ironic recovery of a moral high ground, and for officers and state officials who mean what they say. This can also be seen as reflecting the growing uncertainty regarding the state of British society in the crises of the twenty-first century, culminating in the disruptive Brexit referendum of 2016 and its aftermath—a dramatic crisis of national identity and flawed political

Summary and Outlook 141 leadership that calls for heroic action. It is no coincidence that Bodyguard blends the police-detective with the conspiracy genre. In a genre traditionally “bound up with nationhood and the idea of what it means to be British” (Goodman 2016, 1), the secret agents discussed in Chapter 4 serve their country by acting heroically against Britain’s own crooked politicians and corrupt institutions. At a time when the efficiency and ethics of the United Kingdom’s state institutions and the leadership abilities of its politicians have come under scrutiny, the spy genre is quite obviously enjoying a new popularity. However, the heroic characters of these spy programmes, unlike the non-heroic members of British state organisations, are still value-driven and committed to serving their country loyally.

Morality All case studies of this book show a tendency to encourage a positive judgement of characters who act heroically in accordance with the established values and norms of their society—or in defiance of those values when they appear to be corrupted. The programmes thus bring the basic affinity of the heroic with morality in conjunction with a medium that, with its “mimetic force” and “embeddedness in people’s everyday lives” (Dant 2012, 2), is a prominent site where morality can be negotiated for contemporary audiences. The programmes applaud the characters who perform selfless good deeds or serve the greater good of their society. By contrast, acting with material motives is presented as an unheroic feature and is used to deheroise characters, such as the mercenary ex-soldier Danny in the military drama Occupation. At the same time, British television drama participates in a trend that addresses the fact that audiences are more intrigued by flawed heroes than by unambiguously good ones, and that they like anti-heroes even though they are morally transgressive. The case studies in this book provide examples of British television drama showing even fundamentally good heroes pushing or violating the boundaries of common morality. Even the community-serving heroes such as Robin Hood and Uhtred must be reminded of the limits of acceptable behaviour by other characters. In many instances, the heroes’ dubious behaviour involves excessive physical violence that cannot be justified by the situation in question. This is a systemic problem for the heroes who serve in the military or the police—institutions that ought to ensure safety and order but may have to resort to violence in order to do so. A lack of legitimation for violence in such cases may lead to a moral dilemma for the heroic character and for the audience, for example in Luther, where the police detective’s violence against suspects is a theme from the first episode onwards. When moral ambiguity dominates a character’s behaviour, hero narratives turn into anti-hero narratives. According to Jason Mittell, these antihero narratives “invoke relative morality” by juxtaposing a morally dubious character with straightforwardly evil characters in order to “highlight the

142  Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner antihero’s more redeeming qualities” (2015, 143). Anti-heroes are “morally complex,” displaying “hero-like characteristics for which they are admired, but simultaneously act in ways that can also be regarded as morally questionable and bad” (Janicke and Raney 2018, 2). Chapter 3 discussed the female police officer in The Fall as an anti-hero who cannot reject her mirroring relationship with the series’ serial-killer villain, even though she is constantly struggling against it. In Luther, the titular character’s fascination with a villain to whom he feels drawn likewise suggests a precarious border between (anti-)hero and villain. Indeed, in both cases the villains are alluring (also to the audience). As shown in Chapter 4, secret agents are almost predestined for the anti-hero function because they are professionally obliged to violate moral standards, basic laws and civil rights in order to serve their country. In democracies, they serve their society by contravening some of its fundamental values: respect for truth, freedom, privacy and the mental and physical integrity of its citizens. Whereas members of the police force and the military have a mandate to transgress moral norms under clearly defined circumstances, the deeds of the secret services cannot be authorised in the same public way. Spy drama therefore underscores the fact that heroic action can be problematic, and it illustrates how the heroic can be used as a lens through which to inspect the complex morality of contemporary society. However, while anti-hero narratives have currency in British television series, this book also suggests that audiences start to be bored by ambiguous hero figures in the most recent case studies considered. In the new epic dramas (Beowulf, The Last Kingdom) and the police/secret service hybrid drama Bodyguard, the heroes may be temporarily flawed, but there is no reason to doubt their essential heroism. While this observation needs further corroboration, such examples seem to point to a cultural desire for figures with strong agency in a climate of deep societal fractures and the loss of trust in the political system to provide effective solutions. Complexities of the heroic are served well by the fact that contemporary serial drama has become complex itself in terms of multi-thread storytelling with twists and turns, and a sophisticated televisual language. Complex tele­ vision, as Jason Mittell calls it, encourages a critical portrayal and judgement of (anti-)heroic character and behaviour. It presents complicated and contradictory heroes who are contrasted to other characters, and it provokes reflection about entrenched assumptions about the heroic.

Heroic and televisual meta-levels Such reflection is also encouraged by the meta-elements that this book has identified in several examples across genres. This meta-level aims at exposing the conventions and fashions in our understanding of heroes and heroisations, whilst also exposing the conventions with which the heroic is represented in television and cinema. In the spy programme Spooks, this is exposed by the characters gathering information and monitoring others, but on a meta-level, the presence of screens in the storyworld invites the

Summary and Outlook 143 real-world viewers to inspect the heroes’ spying activities critically. In a more direct approach, the military sitcom Bluestone 42 takes a satirical stance on the War on Terror, and this includes an exposition of how the media fabricate heroic reputations. Less satirically, Occupation shows the heroisation of a soldier through photographs and newspaper reports. It is perhaps surprising that we find the most consistent meta-approach to the heroic in a programme directed at a family audience: as observed in Chapter 1, Robin Hood makes frequent ironic references to conventions of hero narratives. By doing so, Robin Hood exposes its hero’s heroics (for example when they are shown in slow motion). The third season opens with an episode that stages the hero’s rebirth quite literally as a re-construction. Even to a young audience, the series lays bare that heroes are and have always been constructs— in traditional stories as well as contemporary television drama. The series Misfits plays ironically with the tropes of the superhero genre, applying them to protagonists who are members of a most unheroic, abject social group, and it parodies the heroic to represent a right to remain unheroic. As such examples show, the expositions of meta-heroic representation are often explicitly directed at the medium of television itself.

Affect and aesthetics The presentation of characters as heroic marks them as extraordinary, and this fact alone mobilises the viewers’ attention and affective reaction. Heroes can be liked and admired, while villains generate fear and loathing (but can also be enjoyed as villains); even anti-heroes, such as the Lucas North character in Spooks, invite sympathy and empathy. As pointed out in the discussion of Adam Carter’s hero death in Spooks, while the affective dimension of the heroic is sometimes made explicit in the dialogue of a programme, a non-verbal aesthetic can create a more intense affect in connection with the heroic. As shown in Chapter 4, Carter’s death is staged with overwhelming pictures and sound, which create an effect of the sublime that befits the act of great nobility shown in the scene, as well as its great violence. Indeed, the “cinematic” quality of contemporary television has only recently enabled this medium to present the heroic with the awe-inspiring images and overwhelming sound that have long been reserved for heroic scenes in cinema. Not surprisingly, such sublimity is frequently used in the epic series discussed in Chapter 1, not only in shots that show the heroic characters in grand landscapes and against dramatic skies, but also in violent battle scenes. Despite the critique and irony that the heroic is attracting in the twenty-first century, it is still depicted with splendour.

The postheroic This leads us, finally, to the frequent claim that the present era is best characterised as postheroic. As Sibylle Scheipers points out regarding heroism in warfare, for which the post-heroic was first coined, this label must be

144  Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner employed with caution because the social construction of heroes is generally a process “in which the meaning of heroism is contested and constantly reinterpreted,” so that it is “next to meaningless to speak of the current era as a postheroic one” (Scheipers 2014, 15). There are anti-heroic moods and periods that tend more towards scepticism than appreciation of heroes, but even then the heroic remains residual and ready for reactivation—without erasing awareness of the problematic aspects of heroism. There is evidence that such reactivation already began in the 1990s, concurring with a new taste for spectacle and an emerging new national feeling. For the twenty-first century, the case studies suggest a prevailing attitude that is critical of some aspects of the heroic, but also accepts that heroes and heroisms fulfil cultural and social functions and can, or should, be appreciated under certain circumstances. When postheroism is understood to refer to a co-presence of hero criticism and hero appreciation, it is a concept that is useful to describe the negotiations of the heroic in the series discussed in this book. Criticism and appreciation, as well as enchantment and scepticism, co-exist and blend everywhere (if with differing biases) in the programmes considered in this book: in the new epics as well as in the realist military, police and spy dramas. A postheroic attitude is wary of the heroic, but it does not deny either its validity or power of attraction. This power is demonstrated, not least, in youth telefantasy programmes: aimed at an audience of teenagers and young adults, this kind of serial drama is a site where representations of the heroic amass and are passed on to new generations.

Final outlook Together, the examples discussed in this book attest the resilience of the heroic in twenty-first-century (British) culture, demonstrating that the heroic is a cultural paradigm with many facets. In turn, this book has used the heroic as a research perspective and tool for cultural analysis. The heroic commands attention and emotional engagement, not only to itself, but also to the social and cultural phenomena with which it is entangled. By looking through the lens of the heroic, we can identify hotspots of cultural debate and eruption points in the dominant structure of feeling. This book has investigated the horizons of heroisation in British television drama at the height of broadcast television’s creative and technical development, as well as during a decline in independent national drama production, at least on a grand scale. High-budget television series are still being produced for national release by conventional broadcast television, and national public broadcasters still have the prerogative to produce local programmes with local content. However, they are affected by spending cuts (Martinson 2015) and the general transformation of television culture. In particular, the development of the main on-demand streaming services, Amazon and Netflix, into production magnates has shifted concepts and whole series away from national producers and towards a production style

Summary and Outlook 145 that immediately addresses an international audience. The loss of the BBC’s successful series The Crown (2016–present) to Netflix is an example of the trend that much of the high-potential concepts of British television professionals will be produced as “Netflix Original Series” in the future. However, The Crown is also an example of the fact that Britain’s creative television infrastructure is an asset in a fiercely embattled global market, as well as in a British context. While not necessarily as entangled with British discourses as the nationally produced series discussed here, the continuing appeal of the heroic and heroising themes is discernible in many Netflix series. A recent example is the high-budget production of a prequel series to Jim Henson’s fantasy cinema classic, The Dark Crystal (US/UK 1982). Like the original feature film, the Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019) tells a quest story in which a dying world must be saved from corruption, and its connections between ecological demise and resistance to tyranny make it even more topical in 2019 than it was in 1982. Like the original, the prequel was filmed in London, and its aesthetics are based on the concept art of British fantasy artist Brian Froud. Netflix launched this series with an exhibition and preview at the British Film Institute in London, rather than in Los Angeles, revealing that Netflix is choosing to retain a British legacy in new international TV productions that are highly invested in heroisation. An even more recent example of the persistence of the rhetoric and aesthetics of heroisation in British-produced television drama is the mafia series Gangs of London (2020) produced by Sky Atlantic. The series was the second-most successful production for Sky Atlantic since its launch (Carr 2020), and it negotiates the heroic codes by which the gangs justify their brutality and criminality. While this code is increasingly dismantled in the course of the first season, the first episodes are marked by long monologues in a high-heroic tone, and the community of English Travellers is represented as characterised by a death-defying, almost archaic sense of loyalty. At the time of writing, Britain witnessed one of the most problematic years in its recent history; the country left the European Union at the end of 2020, while the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic have seen the country emerge with the highest death rate in Europe, and its national economy with its highest deficit since 1961. Among these shocks, we perceive the beginning of a possible caesura in the structures of public feeling pertaining to hero­ isations. As was exemplified in the Introduction of this book by evoking Banksy’s mural of a boy discarding his superhero figures in favour of a doll of an NHS nurse, the heroic might well shift its shape again in the wake of recent national experiences. A tremendous national deficit might hamper independent and state-funded British television production to a degree that could make the first two decades of the twenty-first century seem, in hindsight, to be a golden age of British-produced quality television—not only in terms of aesthetic richness, but also in its investment in the negotiation of the heroic and heroisation. However, based on the claim that attention to

146  Barbara Korte and Nicole Falkenhayner the heroic is amplified in times of insecurity, British television drama will likely continue to produce and negotiate heroes, and the approach of this study may be useful for future investigations of British culture.

Works cited Berlant, Lauren. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Carr, Flora. 2020. “Gangs of London Becomes Sky Atlantic’s Second-Biggest Original Drama of All Time.” Radio Times. May 14, 2020. https://www.radiotimes.com/news/2020-05-14/gangs-of-london-series-sky-atlantic/. Dant, Tim. 2012. Television and the Moral Imaginary: Society Through the Small Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goodman, Sam. 2016. British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire. Abingdon: Routledge. Janicke, Sophie H., and Arthur A. Raney. 2018. “Modelling the Antihero Narrative Enjoyment Process.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 7 (4): 533–546. DOI: 10.1037/ppm0000152. Martinson, Jane. 2015. “BBC Cuts: What Will Have to Go?” The Guardian, September 7, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/sep/07/bbc-cutsbbc4-cbbc-cbeebies-news-channel-licence-fee. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Scheipers, Sibylle. 2014. “Introduction: Toward Post-Heroic Warfare?” In Heroism and the Changing Character of War: Toward Post-Heroic Warfare?, edited by Sibylle Scheipers, 1–18. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, Graeme. 2009. “Television and the Nation: Does This Matter Any More?” In Television After TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, edited by Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, 54–64. London: Routledge.

Index

A for Andromeda 112 Ace of Wands 113 adaptation 67, 103, 116–118 adventure 5, 12–13, 40, 45, 48, 110–111 The Adventures of Merlin 112, 116–124 aesthetics 6, 30, 68, 82, 85, 113; see also audio-visual code; genre; music; sound; space; spectacle; sublime; visual style affect 2, 27, 143; -driven 3, 73; affectivity 3, 6, 27, 30; affective: climate 29–30; charge 3; publics 136, society 6; studies 3; see also anxiety; emotion; fear; structures of feeling agency see heroic Albion 118–119 anti-hero see hero anxiety 6, 91–92, 140 Arab Spring 103–104 Attack the Block 126, 129 attraction 22, 67, 106, 135, 144; see also hero audience: alignment 95, 106n7; sympathy 75, 79; see also television audio-visual code 68 austerity 7, 75, 83, 125 authority 31, 35, 37, 39, 40, 44, 64–65, 69, 78, 119, 140 Bakhtin, Michail 110 Banksy 4, 145 Batman and Robin 68 Being Human 116 Beowulf: Return from the Shieldlands 12, 22–23, 30–37 The Bill 64–65 Blackadder 5, 59 Blake’s 7 112 Bluestone 42 13, 45, 58–60 Bodyguard 69, 82–85

boundary work 3 The Box of Delights 113 The Boy Merlin 113 Bravo Two Zero 46 The Breakfast Club 126 Brexit 2, 7–8, 30–31, 139–140 The Bridge 78 Britishness 6–7, 11, 27, 114–115, 118 Broadchurch 77 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 111, 115 Burke, Edmund see sublime Call the Midwife 11 Campbell, Joseph see monomyth Carlyle, Thomas 37 Carré, John le 100, 103 Casualty 11, 76 Catweazle 113, 131n3 Century Falls 113 Children of the Stones 113 Churchill, Winston 4 cinematic see television class 124–130 cohesion 2, 12, 21, 30, 40 Cold War 91, 93, 100, 101 comedy 5, 24, 45, 60, 122 comic 48, 68, 110 commemoration 96–97 complex TV see television conservatism, conservative 6, 7, 37, 64, 97, 99, 117, 121, 125, 128–130, 139, 140 Cool Britannia 5, 114 Cornwell, Bernard 22 crime drama 13, 64–49, 74–75, 81–82; see also detective; police, procedural crime fiction 67, 78, 118 The Crimson Field 46 crisis: financial 7, 24, 97, 99; political 46, 91; refugee 8, 30; social 46, 91; see also social order

148  Index cultural forum 1, 14, 94 cultural heritage 46, 117 Dark Crystal 113, 145 Dark Season 113 The Darkest Hour 4 deheroisation see heroisation detective 64–67, 69–70, 77–78, 139–140 devolution 7, 24, 115, 136 diversity 8, 76, 94, 123, 138–139 Doctor Who 5, 6, 114–115, 139 Downton Abbey 36 Doyle, Arthur Conan 67 emotion, emotional: charge 119; engagement 114; needs 137; see also affect; fear empire, imperial 5, 8, 47–48, 59, 104, 123 Englishness 37–38, 118 epic 12, 21–22, 27, 30–33, 137–138, 142, 144 ethics, ethical 31, 40, 57, 90–92, 137, 141; see also morality ethnicity, ethnic 7, 12, 22–24, 35–36, 138–139; see also postethnic Excalibur 115 extraordinariness 77–78, 119–120, 130 The Fades 116 The Fall 13, 77–81 fantasy 110–115 fear: culture of 6; politics of 6, 75, 91, 106; society of 6, 74 feminist 80–81; post- 81 feral youth see youth financial crisis see crisis First World War 6, 62n12, 96–97, 104 Game of Thrones 22, 31, 34, 123 The Game 93–94, 101–103 gender: bias 12; equality 57; fluidity 115; see also feminist; heteronormativity; masculinity; misogyny; post-feminist; sexuality genre 12; affordances 4; conventions 14, 66, 68; television 12, 82; see also adventure; comic; comedy; crime drama; crime fiction; fantasy; historical fiction; horror; military drama; spy fiction; thriller Groundhog Day 127

Happy Valley 77, 139 hero: adventure 52, 123; anti- 3–5, 67–70, 141–143; attraction of 22, 106; Byronic 69; Campbellian 21; debunking of 5, 136; definition of 3, 14, 60; function of 1, 11, 29, 36, 38, 142, 144; failed 5; flawed 141; folk 12, 29, 117; humanitarian 13, 53–54, 60; imperial 5; military 5; national 47; quest 117, 140, 145; saviour 2, 26–28; scepticism of 14, 47, 105, 136, 144; soldier 57; superhero 4, 13, 67–68, 124–127, 145; trickster 24, 117, 119, 122; warrior 34–37, 137, 140; see also myth; prefiguration; villain hero’s journey see monomyth hero-shot 28–29; see also aesthetics Heroes 115, 125 heroic: action 1, 3, 26, 106, 135, 142; ambiguity 8, 67, 70; collective 26; community 14, 96, 102, 123, 126; conventions of 30, 40; death 96; definition of 14, 60; democratisation of 130; destiny 33, 121; figuration 2, 65, 70; function of 26, 38; meta11–13, 28–29, 77, 143; sacrifice 96; renaissance of 67, 136; see also ethics; morality, postheroic heroisation: horizons of 4, 138, 144; process of 54 heroism: civil 2, 11, 58; collective 102; doubtful 95; everyday 11; female 111; girl 111; humanitarian 55, 57, 61; martial 44, 57, 137; soldier 5, 13, 44, 60; precarious 90–91, 98–99, 105, 135, 142 historical fiction 36 history 6–8, 22, 48, 92, 140 honour 21, 31–32, 39, 44, 60, 96, 137 horror 110, 113 The Hurt Locker 59 identity: cultural 38; collective 3, 136; communal 27; contested 1; formation 112, 116, 121; global 37; national 21–22, 39–40, 116–117, 140 immigration 7–8, 30, 98, 140 imperial, imperialism see empire In the Flesh 116 Inside London Fire Brigade 11 intertextuality 24

Index 149 irony 85, 143; ironic 12, 69, 102, 136, 140 Islam 6, 55, 119, 120; Islamism 7, 35; Islamophobia 120 Kidulthood 129 The Killing 78 King Arthur 118, 140 The Last Kingdom 12, 22–23, 30–31, 36–40 The Last Place on Earth 5 leader 2, 23; leadership 12, 22–23, 30–31, 36–39 legend 14, 22–30, 117–120, 138 Life on Mars 66 Line of Duty 66 London’s Burning 76 Lord of the Rings 118 Luther 13, 69–77 M*A*S*H 59 magic see fantasy The Magician’s House 113 Marcella 77, 139 masculinity 24, 35, 48, 66, 80, 138–139 medium, media: entertainment 2; forms 131, 137; mass 14, 71; new 7; public 125, 129 memory: collective 2, 4, 33; cultural 10, 40, 46, 96–97; social 114; see also commemoration; history; identity; nostalgia; television Merlin 113, 117 meta-heroic see heroic MI5 see secret service Midsomer Murders 67 military 44, 48; see also state institution military drama 58, 138–140 Misfits 14, 124–130 misogyny 80 monomyth 12, 21, 40, 117, 138 morality, moral: ambiguity 95, 141; gut 71–72; judgement 8; relative 8, 23, 61, 90, 141; see also ethical, ethics moral imaginary 8, 112 multiculturalism 5, 7, 35 music 36, 68, 78 Muslim see Islam myth 21–22; mythical 22, 33, 40, 67, 118, 141; see also hero; heroic; legend; monomyth

nation, national; see Britishness; commemoration; hero; history; identity; memory New Labour 5–7, 26–27, 139–140 The Night Manager 14, 93, 103–105 Nordic Noir see crime drama nostalgia 2, 5, 8, 114 Occupation 13, 49, 52–57, 141 other 35–36; othering 120–121; otherness 36, 121 Our Girl 13, 57–58, 138 The Owl Service 113 Page Eight 14, 93, 99–101 parody 24 patriotism 93 police 13, 64–66; procedural 64–65, 70, 74; see also state institution politics, political: British 75, 83, 86, 98–99; disenchantment with 31; erosion of faith in 7; mood 5, 9; strongman 23, 50, 40; see also authority; crisis populism 7, 30, 97 postcolonial 4, 13, 50, 60; see also empire; imperial postethnic 76; see also ethnicity postheroic 2, 13, 21, 46–47, 143–144 prefiguration 137–138 Prime Suspect 77 quality TV see television Quatermass Experiment 112–113 quest see hero race 36, 76, 125, 139; see also ethnicity; multiculturalism reality effect 36, 85 remediation 23, 121 representation 4, 13, 45, 65, 79, 143: issues of 77; popular forms of 2; progressive 116 Robin Hood 12, 22, 141 Robin Hood 12, 23–30, 121, 138 safety 34, 47, 64, 91; see also security Salting the Battlefield 14, 93, 99–100 satire 59, 131 Scott and Bailey 77 Second World War 2, 4–5, 45–46, 102, 115

150  Index secret service 90–92, 99–105; see also state institution security: securitisation 12, 91–92; see also ideology; safety; surveillance seriality 99; see also television sexuality: bisexuality 115, 139; heteronormativity 48, 75, 77, 80; heterosexuality 71, 139; homosexuality 71, 121, 139 Sharpe 5 Sherlock 6, 13, 67–71, 80, 137 Skyfall 92 Smallville 115, 129 social imaginary 3 social order 13, 32, 65–69, 84, 140 soldier see hero sound 11, 33, 53, 97, 143 space 70, 76, 82, 102, 129 spectacle 6, 35, 39, 48, 94, 144 Spectre 92 Spooks 10, 14, 94–100, 105, 139, 142–143 spy fiction 90–92, 94, 97, 99, 105 Star Wars 123 state institution see military; police; secret service; social order state of the nation 1–2, 21–23, 139 streaming see television Strike Back 13, 47–52, 138 structures of feeling 2–3, 30, 36, 74, 137, 140 sublime 6, 96–97, 118, 143; aesthetics of 12, 27 superhero see hero surveillance 90–92, 115, 121 see also War on Terror Survivors 112 The Sweeney 66, 73 teenager see youth telefantasy see fantasy television: audience 9, 39, 40, 65, 67, 92; broadcast 9, 16n19, 144; cinematic 11, 130, 140; complex 142; history 64, 73; serial 11; streaming 9, 136, 144; producers 125; production 137, 145;

quality 67,145; trends 31, 68, 82, 120; see also aesthetics; genre terrorism 5–6, 14, 45–47; terrorist attacks: 7/7 6, 116, 120; 9/11 5–6, 91–93, 97–98, 100–101, 136; see also War on Terror thriller 85, 91, 100, 131n1 Thunderbirds 113 Tolkien, J. R. R. 111 The Tomorrow People 113, 115 Torchwood 115–116 transgression 64–65, 81–82; transgressiveness 3, 90, 94 trauma 6, 4, 82 trope: of the angry black man 76; of the beautiful dead woman 79; femme fatale 75, 138 Troy: Fall of a City 21, 41n13 Turks & Caicos 14, 93, 99–100 Vera 77 viewers see audience Vikings 22 villain 3, 13, 64 75, 77 violence 29, 35, 37, 44, 60, 80; see also misogyny, transgression; war visual style 31, 70, 73 voyeurism 81, 97 Wallander 78 war 25–26, 44–46, 60 War on Terror 12, 25–26, 40, 44–46, 60–61, 93, 115, 136 warrior see hero Warriors 46 Weber, Max 44 Williams, Raymond see structures of feeling The Wire 70 World on Fire 46 Worricker trilogy see Page Eight; Salting the Battlefield; Turks & Caicos young adult see youth youth: feral 14, 124–125; telefantasy 111–113, 144; television 114