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David Pirie was a film academic and journalist before turning to fiction, so
it is no surprise that of the major television writers to have emerged in the
1980s, he is probably the one whose work is the most sensitive to literary as
well as film and television heritage. Both the negative and positive sides to
this approach can be seen in his three-part drama Natural Lies, which begins by
quoting directly from two very different films.
Its opening shots of a blonde woman running down a road wearing only a trench
coat deliberately recalls the start of the classic noir thriller Kiss Me Deadly
(US, 1955). As in that film, the woman is later killed in a bath, the
investigation into her death uncovering a criminal conspiracy. This is
ingeniously followed by an extended section that explicitly echoes (and even
quotes dialogue from) The Big Chill (US, 1983), with its assortment of
middle-aged friends brought together by an unexplained death. Although about a
national crisis, this emphasises that the drama will stay focused on the loves,
fears and betrayals of this once unified and loyal group. The scope is thus much
more familial and restricted than Edge of Darkness (BBC, 1985), which the
casting of Bob Peck as the mild-mannered and basically decent hero inevitably
points to.
Pirie and director Ben Bolt's experiments with Hitchcockian pastiche are much
less successful, however. Elements such as a mysterious blonde woman, a smooth
and smiling villain and a finale in which major characters falls to their death
from a great height are instantly recognisable but like the (literally)
cliff-hanging climax, the effect is strangely comical and half-hearted, never
giving any real sense of jeopardy.
Where Natural Lies truly stands out, however, is in its dramatisation of the
panic over mad cow disease and the Tory government's reaction to it. One of the
programme's consultants is Professor Richard Lacey, the eminent University of
Leeds scientist who first exposed the worldwide threat of BSE infection. The
government shunned his warnings at the time and it wasn't until 1996 that the
then Health Minister Stephen Dorrell admitted that BSE was the most likely cause
of CJD in humans. Natural Lies thus, despite its limitations, deserves very
special consideration, not only for taking the health scare seriously and
refashioning it into an accessible television drama, but also for its prescience
for doing so in 1992.
Sergio Angelini
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1. Alone in the night (2:49)
