Mobile phones are killing plots

Fawlty Towers. Basil Fawlty (John Cleese). Copyright: BBC

It must be hard writing a dramatic script in the modern era, same for a sitcom. How many times have you watched a classic old thriller or farce and thought 'why doesn't she text him?' or 'nowadays they'd just ask Alexa' or 'use Google Maps mate!' Technology may help us navigate our lives, but it knackers a lot of narratives.

A recent discussion with the writers of BBC Radio sitcom Ankle Tag concluded, "Many sitcom plots could have been sorted with one text". Elis James pointed out that if Sybil and Basil from Fawlty Towers had been in a WhatsApp group together, many of the problems in the hotel would have been averted.

If the James Bond movie Casino Royale was made today it'd probably be called casino.com - or cashino, if Sean Connery was saying it - and be entirely set in Bond's back bedroom. He'd get an email from M explaining the mission then, instead of heading out, would just play a live game online. The set-piece high-stakes poker game with the weepy-eyed bad guy would essentially be conducted in his pants. At least that way he'd never meet and get all weepy-eyed about Eva Green.

Times have changed. Hollywood comedy dramas about global finance - The Big Short, The Wolf of Wall Street - were a bit hard to follow already, but the wheeler-dealing is bewildering now. Bond would probably soon find himself in need of the help of some London criminal solicitors if he tried to meddle in the worlds of cryptocurrencies and such like.

Stag. Image shows from L to R: Cosmo (Rufus Jones), Ledge (JJ Feild), Ian (Jim Howick), Neils (Pilou Asbæk), The Mexican (Amit Shah), Johnners (Stephen Campbell Moore). Copyright: BBC / Idiotlamp

Modern comedy dramas that mix thrills with comedy, like Stag (pictured) and The Wrong Mans, have to be inventive in their scripts to stop phones being a central escape route for their characters before Episode 1 has even finished. Future shows may have to work in even more convoluted bits of plot, to circumvent the fact that everyone involved would just WhatsApp the police, or GPS their way out of danger.

Earlier this year Sky Movies released their own football-related feature film, Final Score, starring former Bond villain Dave Bautista as the hero, Pierce Brosnan - the former Bond - as the villain's brother, and British sitcom alumni Amit Shah (Whites, Crashing, Hospital People), as a heroic steward. The concept was quite clearly based on Die Hard, but with the siege taking place not in a big office block, but in West Ham United's old stadium. The plot: some former Soviet military types are searching for Brosnan's character, so track him down to Upton Park, and hold the whole place hostage. To do that undiscovered, though, there's a quick scene where they blow up every mobile phone tower in the local area, which seems an awful lot of effort to go to. Couldn't they just grab him while he's getting a hot dog outside?

Give it a few years, and every future comedy drama will probably be set either on a plane - no phone signal, although they do increasingly have wi-fi now, so that might not work for long - or in prison, although it's hard to get much sympathy going when everyone's a villain. So perhaps they need to explore new no-phone locations. Sky's forthcoming comedy drama, Temple starring Mark Strong, is set in an abandoned subterranean network of tunnels - handy!

So perhaps look out soon for a Bautista, Gerard Butler or Bruce Willis type starring in a Die Hard-style epic set at a swimming pool, where everyone's phones are in their lockers and someone needs to save the customers before they over-wrinkle. It's just a shame someone used the name Deadpool already.

Published: Saturday 17th November 2018

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