*or her.
I got up to a post in my Facebook timeline about the return of the BBC's popular and acclaimed series Merlin return in September. I have several family members who think the show is brilliant and, while I've been enchanted by the older portions of the Arthurian Legend since I was little - I would be suspicious of an 8 year old boy who didn't Arthur and Merlin were brilliant - my viewing experience of the BBC's Merlin has not been a happy one.
The hook the BBC seemed to hang the series on was having "Prince" Arthur and Merlin both the same age as young men. Merlin is a closet wizard and Arthur is a prissy toff.
While the cynic in my instantly detected the scent of cashing in on the Harry Potter cashstorm - Colin Morgan's Merlin is just a scar and glasses away under-grad Harry - I had bigger problems with the series once I started watching it.
First, perhaps, a confession - I'm a stickler for detail. However, I am not of the opinion that any work, historic or present, in necessarily exempt from reinterpretation. Many of William Shakespeare's plays were his own take on existing public-domain stories, infused with his own sensibilities and allegory of the world he was writing in. It is interesting though that my favourite of his plays, The Tempest, was not based on an existing story and seems intensely personal - some might even say self indulgent if the possibility he wrote the role of Prospero for himself to play is true.
So what do I like about the series?
Richard Wilson and Anthony Head. Wilson I always find charming and endearing. He seems to bring a sense of amiable gravitas (if that's not an oxymoron) to everything he does. Similarly, Head seems able to approach even the silliest material with flair.
It's also filmed on Super16, but that is a personal fetish issue.
What don't I like...?
It's difficult to know where to start. Firstly, I think the series was borne out of a cynical premise to combine two popular franchises, namely Harry Potter and Smallville, to create what a Hollywood exec would call a four-quadrant property. The result feels like the raped and hollow shell of 1,400 years of accumulated source material.
As with the BBC's other "fuck history" series Robin Hood, Merlin is distractingly anachronistic. I'm not so much referring to the fact that the locations, costumes and martial equipment seem firmly drawn from the High Middle Ages, which has been happening for hundreds of years and Merlin cannot be blamed for. I'm referring to the penchant for mixing early 21st Century grammar and idiom with stabs for florid, ungainly cod-Elizabethan English when the writers seem to put down the Xbox controller long enough to remember they are supposed to be writing something set hundreds of years ago.
While we're on the subject on anachronism, the series - as with Robin Hood - came into some criticism for the historicity of including black characters. It is hard to know where to stand on this. For one thing, since Britain was once part of the Roman Empire, merchants and traders would have visited England's ports from all over the Empire. That some may have chosen to settle here after the end of the Empire is certainly not inconceivable. However, that there would have been enough social mobility in such a hierarchical culture for some to have risen to the rank of knight may be giving too much credit to their white contemporaries. In truth, though, I am too ignorant of the subject to be able to say either way.
My biggest problem with the series by far, however, is the writing. God! The terrible, terrible writing. The characters are lazily drawn. The dialogue is, at times, excruciating. I have no idea why anyone is doing anything other than that is their role in the story. The tone bounces around from "mild peril" to awkward slapstick and stilted banter.
Worst of all, without an over-arching story the monster-of-the-week formula can quickly become tiresome and the heroes reactive. This is further highlighted by the fact that the central conceit that Merlin must conceal his magical powers or risk death forces every story to play out the same way:
There is a threat to Camelot/Arthur/a friend that Arthur or the knights fight, but it cannot be defeated by conventional means. Merlin does some research/talks to his master/a dragon and finds out how to defeat it. He then goes through a period of indecision as to whether defeating the foe or his own safety is the greater priority. Eventually Arthur fights the monster again (usually following a teary "You're no match for him/I have to try" conversation), is knocked out and Merlin uses magic at the last second so Arthur can take all the credit.
Take the hint, already!
As with Smallville the end result is the "heroes" end up seemingly impotent, and all the characters rather stupid.
Thus far there has only been one episode which has significantly deviated from this tedious formula, and it turned out to be excellent with one or two exceptions.
I am referring to the first series episode The Beginning of the End. When Mordred (shown here as a boy, probably only ten years younger than Arthur) is separated from his guardian, wounded in the citadel. The heroes swing into action to prevent him from being executed by the zealous King Uthur. Here, Mordred is shown as an innocent member of a persecuted minority, and the right course of action causes all the heroes to invert from their normal positions.
Arthur is placed in a conscience vs duty conundrum that sets him at odds with those around him. Merlin, meanwhile, has been informed the adolescent Mordred will grow up to kill Arthur, and is instructed to let him die. Taking a group of characters, all of whom want to do the right thing, and setting their ideologies and methods against each other is just good drama.
I won't deny I felt a genuine thrill when Arthur drew his sword to defend Mordred from his own knights. Yes, I thought, this is the first glimpse of the noble king of legend I have seen - a man who will protect the weak from the strong at his own risk. The foreknowledge that the little boy he is defending will one day become his doom makes the scene even more potent. Whether Mordred himself is aware of his destiny is left open to interpretation.
What made this not only the best episode of Merlin, but also a good piece of television in general is that the conflict was personal. Uthur is cast as Hitler and Athur, Merlin, Morgana as the Resistance. Arthur's knights suddenly become the SS. As with The Doctor being separated from his TARDIS and sonic screwdriver in The Eleventh Hour episode of Doctor Who, Mordred's plight is a problem Merlin's magic can't fix. As with another great Doctor Who episode Blink, Merlin himself is comparatively absent from the story's climax.
As good as I thought The Beginning of the End was (barring dissonant attempts at slapstick humour to "lighten the mood" in a story about a small boy who faces public beheading), it served to highlight what I thought was the biggest problem with the series - the writers just don't seem to understand the characters' relationships.
I'm not so much referring to the palpably homoerotic tension between Merlin and Arthur that even Russell "Yes, of course straight men are attracted to gay men and will have sex with them if it is vicariously titillating to the writer regardless of how at odds it is with the established character" T Davies might find slightly embarrassing. I'm referring to the archetypal interplay between the characters.
That Arthur is deposed by his son (traditionally Mordred) and both end up killing each other is an expression of a huge tragedy. It is worth pointing out that Mordred was not originally Arthur's son, but his nephew. Early writers quickly realised, however, the dramatic potential of making theirs an Oedipal conflict. Similarly, Arthur must eventually grow out of his need for Merlin's help. As his teacher, Merlin must one day be succeeded by his pupil. Within characters such as the Fisher King are ancient and deeply codified notions of the sympathetic magic and divine quality of kings and their lands.
I'm not saying it should be this way because that is the way it has always been. There have been as many different version of the Arthurian Legend as there have been intervening generations. With BBC's Merlin and Channel 4's Camelot, the current fashion seems to be showing him as young and inexperienced, kind of King Arthur Begins or Casino Camelot. When the French writers took up the story he and the Knights of the Round Table became love-struck dandies.
My point is, if you must dick about with a classic, add something new. Improve it, show how it is still relevant. Don't just plough through some of the oldest and most enigmatic literature in Western Europe, puck out a few names and concepts, strip it of everything that made it interesting or enduring and collect your pay cheque at the end of it.
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