sidelined

It’s nearly time for the Ashes. So, this fortnight I’ve been training. I’ve hired Bodyline, because I never actually watched it before. The DVD says it was made in 1984, when I was in year 10, and I guess my cricket-hating mum didn’t put it on. Maybe she didn’t realised Gary Sweet was a red hot spunk (bloody Mum). I remember it screening again in 1988, but I didn’t watch it then either. These have been serious oversights, so allow me now to pay homage to great Aussie TV writing and Australian cricketing history.

So, the series. Remarkable for being the only Australian historical TV drama in living memory to fail to cast Bill Hunter in a key role, Bodyline launched the careers of Hugo Weaving (as Douglas Jardine) and the aforementioned redhot Sweet (as Our Don Bradman). In fact, I well remember the discussions over who was spunkier. Clean, wholesome Sweet (that’s what we thought he was then – we didn’t know what a talent Sweet had for malice) or the dark, complex Weaving? Now you’d definitely have to say Weaving, because he plays more interestingly evil bastards than Sweet does, but in those days …

Anyway, bouquets for the series’ sense of history, and its fine evocations of print and radio journalism, which result from the fact that it was made by journalists, including the late, great Denny Lawrence. Did you know that the term ‘bodyline’ came from the fact that a journo couldn’t fit the question ‘how long will they continue to bowl at the line of the body’ into his telegram because he was threepenny short, so substituted ‘bowl bodyline’? I didn’t, and now I do. And it was just so good to hear the wonderful voice of Norman May playing the radio broadcaster.

Having never seen it I was still well aware that it was a series about the drama of Bodyline – the costs to the Anglo-Australian relationship, the cost to the game of cricket, and the fact that we lost the bloody Ashes in such damnably unfair circumstances. What I didn’t realise it did was so sensitively portray Jardine. It sets up so nicely the expectations put on Jardine as a son of Empire, and his own loneliness and sense of being an outsider. These factors mean that you don’t think of Jardine as a cold, heartless, anti-Australian cruel Pommy bastard so much as a cold, heartless, anti-Australian poor Pommy bastard.

What I loved best was the sense of class (yes, I know we aren’t supposed to be talking about politics, but class did matter in cricket, as it does now). Working class professional English bowlers, like the legendary Harold Larwood, who would do anything their captain said, because they were born to it, even though their feet might bleed in the process. Jardine, man of the Raj, Oxford Harlequin capped. Ruthless amateurism, which elevated cricket to a religion. Knockabout Aussies playing for the love of the game, or just because they were bloody obsessed by it. The fact that the only two men on the English team who tried to tell Jardine to stop his damnably cruel tactics were the aristocrats (one of whom was played by John Doyle). The social and class ruptures caused by Jardine standing up to the lot of them to tell them he was going to do it his way. The timid colonial Australian administrators, not daring to tell the Mother Country to get stuffed. The unswerving loyalty Jardine wins from his team, despite his cruelty, because his game of Whatever It Takes To Win the Eshes (Jardine’s pronunciation) pays off.

Anyway, I just loved it. So well shot, so nicely done, so many long lingering shots of dodgy bowlers done up to look kind of professional, so many sequences designed to show us what a good loveable Aussie bloke the Don was, even though he too was a cruel, cold, heartless bastard. It showed how the Packers made cricket, even in 1932. It is a series in search of a voice coach, but what a bloody fine Australian piece of fillum making!

But it has one fatal flaw. It bloody stops in the middle of the story. It ends just after the second test, at the point at which Jardine’s team say they’ll support him no matter what it takes, or costs, because he keeps them winning (that bit reminded me of the Liberal cabinet but we are not supposed to be talking politics here). That completes Jardine’s character arc, which starts right at the beginning of the series when he is a tiny lonely boy exiled to school, at which point he becomes a complete outsider. The support of the team means that, at last, and maybe just for a minute, he is in control, on top, inside, loved.

But … then the whole thing ends without telling you a single thing about what happened next, or telling you what happened to Jardine or Larwood or Bradman or his team or how they got The Ashes back. It doesn’t even tell you why Jardine’s relationship breaks up (you know it does because his bird, played by Heather Mitchell, says ‘when he went to Australia I lost him’). Did you know Harold Larwood emigrated to Australia after finishing cricket because he found the stick he got in England unbearable and he could handle the stick he got here? The series doesn’t tell you that, but he did, and isn’t that interesting? Now, do you agree, such abrupt endings are not cricket?