Narrative Leaps

My too-often repressed sad and geeky side rejoices at the recent references to Quantum Leap that have been cropping up in Heroes. They began subtly, with the character Hiro Nakamura materialising in scenes of mid-western cornfields and weatherboarded homesteads akin to time-traveller Sam Beckett's childhood home, but the latest episodes have seen a marked escalation in parallels between the two U.S. television series. Hiro has had the odd Beckettian "Oh Boy!" slipped into his dialogue and his recent descent into brain tumour induced madness even saw him reciting Quantum Leap's iconic opening monologue. As if more keen eyed viewers hadn't noticed that the poor chap had been "trapped in the past... driven by an unknown force to change history for the better... and hoping each time that his next leap would be the leap home" for quite some time now! The writers managed to put the icing on the dramatic cake for me personally by also weaving in a clever homage to one of my favourite films, A Matter of Life and Death, in one of the latest episodes to air over her in the U.K. Hiro faced a trial while his tumour was being operated on, being judged in a kind of heavenly court and with his life dependent on the verdict. As his friend Ando watched the operation through glass and ultimately celebrated the survival of a bedridden and bandage-headed Hiro, the scenes mirrored the film exactly. For a fleeting moment it felt as if the majority of the major cultural reference points in my head were being shown on my television screen.

So what does all this mean? On a purely pragmatic level I can conclude that the people that write Heroes are a similar age to me and grew up absorbing the same media that I did. The television shows and films that first sparked their creative interest were the same as mine and it was inevitable that this would eventually bubble over onto the contemporary screen. Once you start following this train of thought, though, you begin to wonder what was so special about these particular media offerings that made them so memorable and inspiring. Originality has a clear role to play here. Consider the respective plotlines of Quantum Leap and A Matter of Life and Death. A genius scientist careering around in the space/time continuum, accompanied by an oft-married admiral in hologram form - where did all that come from? Or a hero pilot with a penchant for poetry somehow missing out on his alloted slot in heaven because of a pea souper fog, but finding love instead - could you think for a way of explaining that to potential financiers today? I'm almost tempted to write that you couldn't make it up, but of course you can only make it up, or at least that's what some supremely talented people did several years ago, the consequences of which were two of the most unique ideas for film and television entertainment that have ever graced screens large or small. Originality alone cannot hold the interest of an audience, though. They need to be captivated by a story.

The thing that first drew me to the film collaborations of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, of which A Matter of Life and Death is one, was the quality of the the narrative. These are well structured stories but it's not as simple as providing the audience with a beginning, a middle and and end. In fact, most of the films don't really end cleanly. Yes, Squadron Leader Peter Carter survives his brain tumour, but that seems to be only the start of his life with June, his love interest. In A Canterbury Tale the feared glue man is unmasked, but he is never really punished for his crimes and those complicit in his capture have their own stories to conclude beyond the scope of the film. They go off into battle or to pick up the pieces of relationships fractured by war. There is always some kind of redemption, but it is never complete or total, never too cosy. You get a profound sense of these stories being mere threads in a much broader narrative cloth. They are just spectacular facets of a life that we as an audience can recognise and relate to. They're fantasies grounded in reality, perhaps or just moments in time.

On one level the moments in time presented by Quantum Leap could be seen to be quite self contained little narratives of around forty five minutes in duration; episodic tales usually concluding with a happy ending and a little taster of where Sam Beckett would leap to next. Never having writers shy of piling on the sentiment, heroic Sam could be seen helping a young man with Down's Syndrome into employment, winning a crucial high school basketball game or saving his own brother from a sad demise in Vietnam. Each episode was complete in its own right, but regular viewing was rewarded with glimpses of the wider picture. We learned about Sam's childhood growing up as a boy genius, about his relationships and about the Naval career of Al ("... an observer from his own time who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear..."). Perhaps we start to care what happens to him, even recognise aspects of our own lives in his, and thus we keep on watching. The door is also quietly opened for the viewer to ask broader questions about the collision between science and morality. Is it right for Sam to use his genius in Physics to travel through time and change history for his own benefit? Should he try and stop his fiance leaving him at the altar or save his sister from marrying an abusive man? Should he save his brother's life or tell Al's wife that her husband is in prison in Vietnam rather than dead? Again we as viewers are encouraged to make connections with a broader spectrum of ideas and outcomes beyond the central narrative, engaging and identifying more strongly with that narrative in the process.

In Heroes, too, we have been seeing lovable Hiro suffer as he grapples with both ill health and the ethics of time travel. He was intensely compelled to save the life of the woman he loved, even though several other characters warned against it, citing the clear dangers of meddling with history and the potential consequences of doing so for the present day. Overall as a drama, however, Heroes is very different to the shows and films that it pays homage to. It has a huge cast of characters displaying a wide range of superhuman abilities, each with their own back stories, families and friends. They interact in extremely complex ways across a diverse selection of geographic locations and we can go for several episodes without hearing from some of them, only for them to reappear and their particular story strand to by picked up again. There is an enormous amount for the viewer to have to take in and we have to accept a degree of narrative confusion if we are to continue watching the series. We are aware that the creator of the show, Tim Kring, has some kind of overall story arc in mind, but the conclusion that he is working towards is hidden from us. It's not like Sam aiming to make that leap home or Peter Carter being allowed to love June. We can only speculate as to where it's all ultimately leading , but we can probably assume that it won't be a conventionally satisfying end such as a happy-ever-after romance or a safe and sound forever world.

It is the nature of entertainment today that we rarely have a clear view of the end at the beginning. We sometimes strap ourselves in for the ride and see how the twists and turns pan out, but more than that we like to be in the driving seat too. A recent Sunday Times article about the computer game Heavy Rain spoke about our desire to be presented with multiple options, almost infinite narratives from which we can pick and choose according to how we play the game. Entertainment is becoming individualised. All stories have root in the ideas of one individual, but we are moving beyond just taking that individual's idea and creating something that can be universally understood from it, or creating broadly recognisable worlds to engage the audience. On one level, Heroes is Tim Kring's personal quest to take the narratives from his mind to some kind of public conclusion, much as Donald Bellisario wanted to do with Quantum Leap or Powell and Pressburger with A Matter of Life and Death. Kring's narratives, however, can be seen as modern, or even postmodern. They aren't conventionally linear. They have dead ends as well as loops, twists and turns. Characters come and go, sometimes never to be heard of again and sometimes we struggle to make sense of the flashbacks and connections, the subtle changes in histories and the perpetual shapeshifting. Accepting the Heroes universe is at times very difficult and direct identification with the themes and characters requires the audience to work quite hard. This is television entertainment for the interactive age, where people are used to being confronted with an abundance of choice or possible outcomes and having to navigate their own way through them. We may not be able to actually influence what happens on screen, but there is scope for us to interpret what's going on in many different ways, drawing the multiple threads together to make something very original for ourselves in ways that earlier dramas never allowed.

The references to older iconic television shows and films in Heroes emphasise the kind of time travel with which we are all familiar - the unstoppable forward movement of time, our existence in the present and our memories of the past. These shows and films paved the way for the complex serials of today. Their strong narratives and originality laid the foundations upon which new directions in screenwriting have been built. The writers of Heroes clearly hold them in deep affection, so they refer to them out of respect, but they also seem to want to demonstrate how far filmed dramas have come. They remember the old days fondly, but they recognise that they're at the cutting edge now, and they probably secretly hope that one day someone is going to reference their work in the stories that have yet to be told.

Longevity Explained

The husband and I celebrate twelve years together today. Well, to say "celebrate" is probably an overly enthusiastic use of words. Over dinner and Ice Road Truckers on Channel 5 we may somehow acknowledge with faint disbelief the length of our union, before commenting on the quality of the tomatoes or the trashiness of the television show. Still, twelve years as a couple and around six months of those as young marrieds merits some kind of tribute. I offer, then, a small sketch of a Sunday afternoon.

After a weekend buried deep in the Six Nations Rugby, complete with takeaway pizza and a distinct lack of activity beyond the sofa, I felt we were settling into a pleasingly relaxed groove. The Sunday Times flopped down on the coffee table with a satisfying thud and as I started to brew the tea I looked forward to us slowly dissecting the paper in the cosy warmth of our flat. Rain and wind lashed the windows, but the rattle of the sashes didn't detract from the snugness of the indoors. A proper Sunday clearly stretched out before us, unstructured and yet absorbing. Then, just as the comforting smell of toasting muffins began to waft from under the grill, the husband peered at me from behind the Culture supplement and said: "I don't feel like just hanging around the flat today."

I did not share his enthusiasm for venturing out into the tempest, but when he has his heart set on something it is very difficult to argue with him. After twelve years together he also knows exactly how to persuade me to do stuff. He promised a flask of tea in the car and the opportunity for me to wear my snow trousers. Fleecey lined, teflon coated leg huggers, baggy of crotch but obscenely comfortable and warm, with a zip-up pocket for my BlackBerry, I do not have enough occasions in life to wear these trousers. They are not what you would call socially acceptable everyday wear. They require a certain extremeness of conditions and terrain where hiking boots are necessary. So yes, I thought, let's throw those boots in the car and go. Let's throw caution to the sat nav and go on an adventure. Let's twist and turn through the Sussex country lanes and ponder just how the water on the flooded roads seems to be flowing uphill.

As we drove the husband bemoaned the fact that it had stopped raining and the gale seemed to be abating. Clearly the backdrop to his Sunday outdoors wasn't meant to be cheerfully sunny or calm. Of sun, though, there was no sign and under leaden skies we began to skirt the faintly sad suburban borders of Eastbourne, where grey concrete tower blocks blended into monochrome cloud. The sat nav woman commanded that we take a right turn, away into the town's green margins, and before we knew it we found ourselves on the quiet coast road out to Beachy Head.

On the exposed clifftop we were flayed by the strong winds, our layers of fleece fluttering ineffectually about us. It was bitterly cold, but thankfully the rain held off and the husband was able to enter into a manly struggle with his camera equipment against the elements. He photographed lighthouse and cliffs, his freezing fingers attempting to play with exposure settings in the bleak, wintry gloom. I gazed out at the sea below, sipping from the flask and tucking the wayward curls of my unruly hair back into my woolly hat, lest I gave the impression of some tea-toting medusa madly stalking the cliffs. There was no shelter up there to speak of, just the magnificent desolation of where land meets sea and many, many monuments, echoes of civilization in a place where people are quite small and insignificant in relation to the greater elements. This headland was a notorious suicide spot, a place where guns once stood and warplanes flew overhead and a place where people go just to look out at somewhere that isn't there, pondering the locations on the compass rose and drawing lines out to destinations far across the waves.

It was too cold to walk about there for very long. Cobwebs successfully blown away, we headed back to the car, arm in arm and laughing at the sheer madness of the idea of a clifftop jaunt on a day like today. At the edge of the car park was a hardy looking ice cream van, sticking two stalwart fingers up at the weather, defiantly selling frozen snacks to frozen folks. Ruddy of face and unable to feel our extremities, neither of us could resist the desire to have an ice cream. With a chocolate flake, naturally. Ninety nines in hand, we watched the seagulls turn their mad turns, buffeted by the breeze and crying their throaty signature coastal caw. We love to do idiotic things like eating ice cream at Beachy Head in the middle of a February gale and it follows thus that we love each other. Twelve years of being together and I can't sum it up much better than that.

R.I.P. Sir John Dankworth

The grey February skies don't cover the promise of a brighter earth beneath them, it seems. My gloomy Sunday morning cup of tea was accompanied by Eddie Reader on Radio Four telling the world how supportive and generous John Dankworth was as a musician, her articulate sadness heralding the news of his passing. The trumpeter Guy Barker was delivering a similar eulogy this morning on the Today programme. These people played with Dankworth, shared his enthusiasm for jazz and performance and now feel his loss as keenly as the millions of ordinary folks who were fans of his music, holding him in great affection in his role as musician, band leader and patriarch of a flourishing jazz dynasty.

The ordinary folks turned out in their droves a couple of years ago when Dankworth and his wife, Dame Cleo Laine, were given the accolade of headlining a concert in the Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall. It was something of an eightieth birthday celebration for them both. A jazz prom with two such legends was more than I could resist, so I attended. The place was packed with an interesting crowd of relaxed retirees for whom Dankworth and Laine provided the soundtrack to youthful escapades. At the pre-prom talk the crowd listened politely to Radio Three's Geoffrey Smith talk about Dankworth's recording career, but they saved their real applause for the great man himself as he casually strolled into the hall. The chipboard BBC table and cheap plastic chairs on stage suddenly seemed to morph into the comfortable leather of a gentleman's club, with the venerable jazzman chatting with affable ease about Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington as if they were simply men at the local corner shop who we'd all met - old, respected friends and colleagues from way back whom everyone must surely have had the chance to play with.

At the concert itself the atmosphere was extraordinary. Dankworth led the orchestra through a selection of his own compositions and jazz standards. People tend to think of jazz as being a rambling, free-form sort of music, but in this case Dankworth's leadership was a model of concentration and precision. He ensured that each soloist had their turn in the spotlight and yet that the ensemble always combined with the most powerful effect. Alternating between playing clarinet and sax himself, he displayed the hunched-over absorption of the reedsman, but never lost that crucial awareness of his fellow musicians. He was an elderly many then but he was still fleet of finger and keen of ear, never missing a beat or a note and still being able to clearly communicate his own personality through whatever he was playing.

Dankworth had a quiet style of showmanship, confident and assured without a hint of ego. When he introduced his wife he was clearly proud that this formidable force of nature, this melodic vocal hurricane, was his partner in music and in life. Dame Cleo had recently had some surgery and was assisted by a walking cane, but happily bantered away with her husband. Her singing voice was certainly unaffected. The marital dynamic between them was almost as entertaining as the musical performance. Entering their eighth decade, their strong personalities were undiminished and it was easy to see how they sparked off each other in happy creative abrasiveness. They performed an encore of "Take the A Train" that was impossible to forget, speedy and deft, tripping between lyric and melody easily but powerfully and completely overflowing with an energy that would put many younger performers to shame. In the heat of the summer prom hall, it was a joyful blast of pure cool. The audience went wild.

Now in February's wrong kind of cool, we feel the chill of fate parting this great jazz couple. John Dankworth died, but within hours Dame Cleo and her children found solace on stage, performing and no doubt letting the music take them over, gaining strength from turning in a performance worthy of the man who was sadly unable to join them that evening. And that's where the sunlight starts to peep through the clouds a little. To say that we will not see the like of John Dankworth again is to give in to unfounded pessimism. The baton has been passed, the music still carries on. As Eddie Reader said, we should all open up our windows and play John Dankworth's music loud out into the streets for everyone to hear. The guy was a legend and he left an incredible legacy of music behind him. Just because he had to saunter off stage, it doesn't mean that the music has to stop too.

Flights of Fancy

The more I see of life, the more inclined I am to think that there is a world which I inhabit and a world which children inhabit and they are perpetually distinct. To expect my own peculiar brand of supposedly grown-up reasoning to be understood by a young person is foolhardy in the extreme.

At a recent family gathering my young nephew was playing with Lego at the dinner table. The offspring of my husband's younger sister, he's still vaguely fascinated by having a new auntie to play with and for some reason he was keen to show me the results of his constructive labours. So my meal was punctuated by perusals of various different permutations of cars made from bricks. I responded to each one with an appropriate level of auntly enthusiasm.

A small, familiar figure appeared at my right hand side as I reached for the Merlot. "This one," it said with great gravitas, "is a hoover car." A hoover car? Finally something I could approach with more genuine excitement. As the little plastic vehicle scooted across the tablecloth I suggested it might be picking up crumbs along the way. Concentrating hard on steering around a wineglass, the nephew agreed. So, warming to my theme, I said that I could do with a hoover car to help me clean my flat. I asked if it might hoover the road, too, as it drove around. Here the wheels nearly came off the little hoover car muse that had been gathering momentum in my head as the conversation developed. "Why would it need to do that?" The nephew asked, furrowing his five year old brow. "Erm, because there are lots of hedgehogs that get squashed trying to cross the road and they need to be cleaned up," I replied, slightly worried about the macabre turn I'd suddenly steered our discourse down. Luckily the little chap accepted this explanation with barely an acknowledgement, which allowed my overactive imagination even more free reign. We would create the Dyson Formula One Racing Team, kitted out with brightly coloured hoover cars that didn't have to make pit stops to change their dust bags. From that moment on, any Lego car that did not possess suction capabilities was dismissed out of hand. Hoover cars were the way of the future.

I was so proud of myself for holding his interest for so long and I was sure he was soon going to proclaim me his favourite auntie. To be honest I'd enjoyed spinning a bit of a yarn and making up a totally bizarre fantasy. Only on the long drive home did it occur to me that little boys, for all their bizarre enthusiasms, aren't usually terribly interested in housework. Gradually the penny dropped. I realised that he had meant to show me a hover car, not a hoover car. I am a fool. I still like the idea of the Dyson F1 team, though.