It’s all down Hill

Press, 26 August 1986, Page 17

It’s all down Hill

Ken Strongman

on television

On Mondays we are back in the familiar frenzy on the Hill. Vicious looking, lowering faces smile falsely from a statutory mixture of more ethnic types than any other series manages to achieve. The "Blues” aspect of the Hill must refer in part to most scenes being set in a murky darkness, even in the precinct station. Why? What does it mean? Perhaps it hints that even more sordid things lurk beyond the gloom?

This is a world in which graffiti rules okay. Bricks and concrete are relieved only by the garish paraphernalia aped by the disadvantaged. When life is not peering through the gritty grey murk, it takes place in harsh, primary The whole idea of subtlety has melted in the sweat-drenched heat and disappeared along the gutters.

The same old characters are playing out their lives on one another. Between them they accomplish the depth of near credibility. Certainly, the inhabitants of the Hill are more credible than their English counterparts in "The Bill.” It affects realism, fairly convincingly, although the type of

reality it shows is nasty, grimy and frequently bleeding. The lesser characters, such as Renko, merely provide a background of humanity against which Furillo and Davenport battle in their kind of righteousness. Furillo always looks neat and calm, the only semi-upright man who remains effective in a world of graft. He fights against backhanders, low morale and the furrowed brows of puzzled misunderstanding, with little possibility of compromise in his demeanour.

Joyce Davenport is even more probable than Frank Furillo. She fixes the world with a gaze that pierces through her black horn-rims, bursting to fight injustice and determined to act as an intermediary in man’s inhumanity to man. Surrounded by an atmosphere so thick it can almost be smelt through the box, she remains cool and detached. Of course, the horn-rims are removed in symbolic shortsightedness as she turns her more personal attention on Furillo.

All this happens against that background of constant noise which is fast becoming a hackneyed way of making fiction seem like fact. There is the buzz of a horrible world going about its horrible business. There are squeals, sirens, horns, crashes, and always chat, chat and more chat

Everything is highly predictable, battering us over the head with the one point several times over. A series or two ago of “Hill Street Blues,” we knew that the press of bodies, the lack of space, the heat and the noise push people, including the fuzz, into irritation, aggression and violence. Guns and knives, always at hand, are used casually. Functioning as a kind of nucleus of this, Mick (“Animal”), remains charmingly wrapped up in his own terror, growling at the world in all its guises. In a recent episode, the mayor’s alcoholic son appeared in Court, having stolen the family car. Poor old care-worn Furillo tried to intervene between the parents, whilst Joyce defended the young man. He, meanwhile, said to an astonished Court “I really

wanna kick, but I made a mistake. I really wanna kick if I can be allowed to do detox, but if I’m on medication, uh, uh, uh, I dunno.” Such mastery of the American form of the English language mystified everybody, including the viewer.

So, we are back with the Hill and you either like it or cannot stand it. Either way, it is perhaps worth considering that there is more than one type of television realism. To be dramatically impressive, things do not have to be nasty and sordid. Just for a change, it would be good to see something that concentrates on the positive.