'Life' Really Matters

A very sad thing has happened to my favourite series...Channel 10's 'Life'. NBC have cancelled it. Of course its a lot to expect a weird sexy stylish cop drama full of good actors, to last. It did have that quintessential good guy Damian Lewis in it and he has a long list of credits in English TV and stage behind him, but he took to being American like a duck to water. Beautiful accent, scary with a gun etc etc.

'Life' had a lot of weird things. Odd and very funny sexual politics, a bizarrely balletic flow of movement and a very tricky plot line. It was drama for grown ups I thought and now its over. But its worth remembering that it actually got on screen in the first place.

In this day of bullying, its interesting to know that Damian Lewis' background is the high flown school of Eton in England. Apart from surviving the inbuilt hustling which is routine in most 'public' schools in England, Joanna McCallum, the daughter of Googie Withers (The Lady Vanishes) and John McCallum (Skippy producer) told me she was discussing confidence with him one day and he admitted that the school had helped him there. I don't know that a childhood in top hat and tails is always a good thing for an actor but it seems to have given him a great work ethic - he not only has the accent but also the body language and rhythm of the character he plays. Compare that to his performance as the uptight Soames Forsyte in the ITV series 'The Forsyte Saga.'

As much as an English or Australian accent is very rare to find in American films so it is rare to hear it convincingly on the other side of the ocean. Rachel Griffiths is an acknowledged master of it for 'Brothers and Sisters' and she does it meticulously line for line. Everything is different including the way the tongue moves to form the words. She once showed me some exercises in an Art Gallery behind cupped hands. It is not a beautiful thing to see two people trying to manoeuvre their tongues to the idiosyncrasies of American dialect and I think we needed Restoration style fans to hide behind.


To see what actors really do even in top class drama, click here: