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| CAPITAL
CITY Tuesday 26/09-19/12/89, ITV reviewed by David Agnew |
October
2000
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In 1989, Euston Films gave us a drama drenched in Thatcherite trappings exploring the allure of the bright lights and the big city. This 13 part series, Capital City, presented the saga of Shane-Longman, an up and coming investment banking house in London. Whilst primarily an LA Law style ensemble piece, it mainly centred around the developing romance between primaries desk trader Declan McConnachie and Michelle Hauptmann, a trader for Shane-Longman's German branch based in England. We had of course seen British business soaps before, but not like this. Howard's Way, whilst embracing the dominant materialist impulses of the 1980s, still nominally remained a cosily parochial Sunday night family drama. This new programme took us viewers right into the buzz of the hitherto hermetically sealed corporate trading room, giving us an insight into the realities of black market and insider trading, of these money-fixated high fliers (i.e. wankers) networking and closing deals in the City. For all the soap opera packaging, this was television cynically and snobbishly predicated on the basis of giving the people a glimpse of the high octane 100K per annum world that was otherwise inaccessible, devoid of even the dubious virtue of quasi-Dynasty kitsch to redeem it. At a time when the "yuppie" was being thoroughly demonised in our culture, it was obvious that the likes of Declan, Hudson, Max, Leonard, Sirrka and Chas would fail to win the hearts of the nation. Debuting on ITV right at the arse end of the glitzy, go ahead aspirational '80s, it was equally self-evident that Capital City had arrived far too late to profitably surf the Trading Places/Wall Street zeitgeist. As most 1980s drama became inextricably linked to the trends of the society it reflected, the very rationale for the programme amply demonstrates the state of utter uncertainty that stifled much television drama during that awkward transitional period from one decade to the next. Like the BBC's appalling Trainer, Capital City was inexplicably renewed for a further season and like Trainer, it was a tawdry throwback to a long gone era, no more than a contrived irrelevance. It took programmes such as the blackly comic Making Out - who needs a phalanx of stripe-shirted tossers when you've got Margi Clarke ruling the roost? - and the sitcom Get Back (featuring Ray Winston, Larry Lamb and a youthful Kate Winslet) to tentatively bring the realities of recession, redundancy and retrenchment to an early 1990s audience. Indeed, seven years later on BBC2, a depiction of the hedonistic high-flying lifestyles of a bunch of ambitious 20-somethings was finally done right when we made the acquaintance of Anna, Miles, Milly, Egg and Warren and saw exactly what the denizens of Capital City lacked: a touch of basic humanity. Young City professionals need the likes of Amy Jenkins to represent them as real people. Capital City deserves recognition in a pantheon of underrepresented programming not because it is a laudable example of popular television but because of its political and pop-cultural literacy, because of its value as a historical document. Its glossy production values offset by vacuous, unprepossessing characters and storylines utterly bereft of any true intellectual, moral or dramatic substance, this was the ultimate distillation of life for the privileged few during the latter years of Thatcher's Britain, set in a London that swung like a corpse on the end of a rope. |
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