Better than it needs to be

Will this do?

As you’ll know if you read our Mixtape at the end of October, Tobias and I didn’t enjoy the BBC’s new cosy-crime series Ludwig. Our frustration with it has become disproportionate; we went on holiday recently and about 5% of our conversation was about Ludwig, which is objectively tragic. So – with apologies to those of you who liked it – this is an attempt to articulate why: not so much why we didn’t like it, but why it upset us so much.

The sci-fi author and critic Theodore Sturgeon gave his name to Sturgeon’s Law, which states that ‘90% of everything is crap’. He was talking specifically about sci-fi, but it gets applies to all kinds of genres and specialties. (The secular philosopher Daniel Dennett claimed it applies to ‘physics, chemistry, evolutionary psychology, sociology [and] medicine’ as well as ‘country and western, and rock music’.) Most things are shonky and formulaic and deeply forgettable, and that’s fine. Nobody can be brilliant every time; lots of us can’t be brilliant at all. You can make a perfectly passable piece of pop culture by hitting your expected marks (and it’s clear from the reception that Ludwig hit its marks). And you can make an argument that the brilliant stuff only exists in the context of the crap stuff.

The thing about Ludwig is that — unlike most things — it could have been in the other 10%. It had a great cast, a decent budget, an interesting idea and a clear inspiration in Inspector Morse. If the people behind it had doubled down and finessed the shit out of it, it could have been great. For some reason — and who knows what it was — they did not do this. The gap between the potential and the end result is particularly frustrating because it feels relatively small. I think this is where a lot of our obviously insane angst about Ludwig is coming from: that it could have been so much better.

People — us included — will watch and listen to all sorts of nonsense. Life is chaotic, we’re all tired and/or lazy, and there’s a lot of cultural chum out there. There are tens of thousands of hours of content that are perfectly sufficient for their purposes: they’re not objectionable, they’re not incompetent, they’re not offensive. I, for instance, will happily watch Santa Claus: The Movie every December, despite knowing that there is absolutely no excuse for it. But the fact that we all watch the cultural crud doesn’t mean we don’t know the great stuff when we see it.

And so here’s my theory: you achieve greatness in popular culture by being appreciably better than you need to be. Not ‘awe-inspiringly brilliant in any possible context’: not the Mona Lisa or a Bach concerto or King Lear. Just better than the audience expected, better than your comparators, better than you needed to be to get recommissioned, better enough so that the people watching forget they’ve got a phone in their hand. Whether you’re making a CBeebies kids’ programme or organising the coverage of Stoke vs Blackburn, you become great by over-delivering so much that the audience can’t help but notice.

We’re talking about pop culture here: art that is intended to be popular, art that is aimed at a broad audience. And the most important word in that sentence is ‘audience’. When you sweat blood to make something better than it needs to be, you’re respecting the audience. When you make something that is — as OFSTED used to say — ‘satisfactory’, you’re entering into a collusion with the audience: we’ll make any old shite, you’ll watch any old shite, let’s pretend this is a good use of everyone’s time so that nobody has to feel bad.

But when you have something that could be great and you decide to shove it out the door without properly finishing it, it just feels like you’re flipping the audience off.

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Once you identify this difference, a lot of apparently eccentric or cutesy cultural takes begin to make sense. Take Paddington 2 (2017), for instance. I’m not going out on a limb in saying that Paddington 2 is a good film; everyone knows it’s a good film. The significant thing is that it’s not just ‘good, for a family film’; it’s better than most of the critically acclaimed films made in the same year, including Lady Bird, Dunkirk and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. It could easily have gotten away with being substantially less good; it had a guaranteed audience of under-tens and would have made money even if it was bad. But the team behind it seems to have been driven by a mania for excellence. One might have expected the creative team to think: ‘it’s a sequel to a very popular film about an imaginary bear, everyone can knock off on time’. Instead, they seem to have approached it like Michelangelo approached the Sistine Chapel.

Two bits in particular stand out for me: Simon Farnaby’s turn as a security guard, sipping his tea and burbling about an ‘unusually attractive nun’; and Hugh Grant’s song-and-dance performance in spangly prison-wear right at the end. These sequences are good in lots of ways but the important thing, so far as my theory is concerned, is that they are surprising, in the particular if not in the general; things happen that you could not have predicted. Most things you see on the screen (any screen) could have been put together by any reasonably talented group of professionals. Absolutely any screenwriter could have written some passable boilerplate dialogue for ‘an incompetent security guard’; I honestly, literally could do that right now. But the smug tea-sipping and Farnaby’s peerless physical goofery belong only to Paddington 2. The film bears [sorry] the distinctive signature of a particular group of talented creatives.

It feels appropriate to illustrate this theory using Hugh Grant’s career, because Grant has exactly two settings: ‘will this do?’ and ‘eat my dust, motherfucker’. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) is much, much better than any rom-com needs to be. (The opening sequence with all the ‘fucks’ surely inspired the famous sequence in The Wire ten years later. This is what I mean by ‘eccentric cultural takes’.) Films like About A Boy are exactly as good as they need to be, which is why nobody ever talks about them.¹ And A Very English Scandal (2018), like Paddington 2, is pulverisingly good. (Both of these feature Ben Whishaw too, so maybe people just need to put Ben Whishaw and Hugh Grant in everything.) 

In A Very English Scandal Grant plays the mid-century British politician Jeremy Thorpe, who was prosecuted for inciting the murder of his ex-boyfriend. Compare it with last year’s Stonehouse, which was about another semi-forgotten British political scandal. Stonehouse starred Matthew Macfadyean and Keeley Hawes, both of whom I would lie down in the road for; it’s about weird British politics, which is something I’m more than-usually interested in; it looks great. It wasn’t bad. But it was just sort of… adequate. It was there. It was definitely a TV programme that you could watch with your eyes, and that’s really all you could say about it. It had a kind of leaden adequacy; it gave you everything you expected, and nothing you didn’t. It featured a cardboard-cutout KGB operative, ‘comedic’ interludes derived from Stonehouse’s incompetence, and Kevin McNally as Harold Wilson saying things like ‘I’ve got the IMF banging the door down and a tricky by-election in Knaresborough next week, I don’t need one of my MPs going berserk!’. Whereas A Very British Scandal could very easily have slipped into predictable creative channels and got away with it, because the real-life events on which it was based were so deliriously strange; but it resisted this predictability, and in doing so was much better than it needed to be, funny and scary and profound. I will bet any money that the people who pitched Stonehouse cited the success of A Very English Scandal as a reason why they should get commissioned; and on paper they are, indeed, two very similar propositions. And yet one was fabulous and one was… fine.

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Once you identify this difference you can see it everywhere: Ghosts and Derry Girls versus every other network sitcom in the UK in the last five years; Band of Brothers versus Masters of the Air; Wallace and Gromit versus almost every other family animation. Audiences can just tell when someone has sweated blood. Pop culture that’s created in this way cannot help but project a demonstrable respect for the audience.

This is what Ludwig doesn’t do. It doesn’t respect its audience. It doles out a carefully measured ration of quality; it doesn’t go the extra mile. It doesn’t think we, the lumpy sofa-bound Sunday night proles, are worth the work. It’s not bad, but it’s something worse than bad: it’s exactly as good as it needs to be, and not one whit more. There are no surprises, no subversions of expectations, no sudden clear pools of excellence. It feels cynical, as though someone has calculated exactly how sufficient it can be without ruining anyone’s reputation. In the world of tech development they talk about MVPs, ‘minimum viable products’. Ludwig is a minimum viable prestige BBC dramedy. It’s the equivalent of leading a race with ten metres to go and suddenly walking off the track because you’ve achieved your step-count for the day; it’s lame.

There’s a clip that does the rounds on social media in the UK every so often. It comes from a mid-afternoon, midweek group tie between England and Tunisia during the 1998 World Cup. In the days leading up to the game – this was at the height of the ‘90s football boom in England – the joke was that the entire adult population was going to have to call their boss and pretend to be sick so that they could stay at home and watch the match. At the beginning of the coverage, Des Lynam stared down the lens and said mildly: ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ It was just one little line, but it said a lot about the approach of that particular creative team at BBC Sport. The joke wasn’t about the match, or the players; it wasn’t even about Des Lynam, although he delivered it perfectly. It was, instead, an explicit acknowledgement of the thing that makes everything else possible, the only reason the match was being played, the only reason Des Lynam had a job in the first place: the audience.

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Talking of middle-brow detectives in ‘varsity towns, you could always watch Endeavour

1. I can’t decide which category Love, Actually is in, but I do know I have to watch it when Tobias is out because it makes him very angry.