Cult TV: Artemis 81

The first in a series of posts where I bang on about old TV shows that most people won’t have seen and even if they have, they probably won’t really remember them.

I like a good bit of cult TV. I can be very forgiving of bad special effects, wooden acting and lumpen scripting if there’s a good idea or a striking notion at the heart of a TV programme. Yeah, I like a good bit of cult TV.

Unfortunately, Artemis 81 is not good. In fact, it is pretty bad. It starts as it means to go on, with a ponderous, over-talky moment where two sons discuss with their mother whether or she/it should go to earth and kick some butt (they're gods or aliens or a cross between the two, see). Any credibility this opening sequence might have is undermined by (a) the wanky dialogue and (b) the fact that one of the sons is played by Sting. Wrapped in a bed sheet.

Then we go to a DFDS voyage in the North Sea. Now, I personally buy into the idea that evil would be attracted to DFDS as they are an appalling company with precious little commitment to their customers. But that’s for another day. We have a long sequence aboard the ferry in which the guy who played the Old Man in the first two Robocop movies lurks around looking suspicious (including spending a lot of time on the car deck). He also has ridiculous hair, making it clear that he’s not going to be on the side of good. Then we learn – ever so sloooowwwwly – that various people who were on the ferry voyage have topped themselves. We don’t really ever see this happening; mostly we see the aftermath. Which is a problem, since it robs the first hour or so of much of its drama.

But the first 90 minutes or so are consumed by the investigation of this mystery. I say “mystery”, but I’m probably being overly generous here. Anyone not terminally retarded could probably pick up on what is going on very quickly. So instead we are expected to focus on the characters learning what we already know is going on. Which is another problem. Because the two main protagonists – Gideon and his needy lady friend Gwen – are simultaneously as dull as dishwater and unpleasant. Gideon is a self-regarding, emotionally cold (until he meets Sting, but more on that later) knob who is also capable of being staggeringly stupid (he spends a good five minutes trying to work out where the head is to a statue despite the fact that he himself spent a while holding the head and commenting on it – honestly, if you’re going to be so stupid, you deserve to be blown up). You wonder what Gwen sees in him. Then you realise that Gwen is a frumpy misery who, in real life, you would make every effort to avoid. Frankly, these fuckers deserve each other.

But back to the point. The first 90 minutes are spent on this (non-)mystery. Then, just at the moment that Gideon pretty much figures out what is going on, his camper van blows up for no real reason and he is knocked out of a phone box onto a cliff. At which point, the writer’s LSD must have kicked in and the bad trip began. Because it is here that the film jumps the shark and we descend into unmitigated bullshit. The first half of the film, while slow, self-important and ponderous, had its moments – and also created some striking imagery (such as the cold, isolated areas of countryside where the suicides took place as well as the ferry half shrouded in fog). The second half of the film is just total toss.

Sting rescues Gideon from the cliff face in a RAF helicopter and takes him to his hut. There, they fanny around for a while with Gideon apparently falling for the Police’s front man – leading to the moment where the camera closes in on Hywel Bennett’s jowly face neatly framed by Sting’s nipple (an image that surely no-one would ever need or want in their head). From there, they go to a disease ridden city for more fannying around in a cathedral where Gideon tries and fails to save a woman’s life. It’s never made clear what the city is meant to be – in the Eastern bloc or a vision of the future, who can tell? Perhaps a more pertinent question would be why should we care? The film has become about listless people looking miserable in dank surroundings. If I want to see that I’ll go to Redditch; I don’t need to see it on a BBC film. Fortunately, the writer (who must have been on the absinthe by this stage in the proceedings) has another ace up his sleeve as Gideon aways to a secret bunker where a couple of his friends happen to be being kept as prisoners and are being brainwashed (seriously – I’m not making this shit up). He and Gwen escape, having killed one person each, before going off and having a row about the nature of writing in the middle of a bloody field. As if the show hadn’t been tedious enough, we now get to see the two lead actors having the sort of debate that would be beneath even an English Literature GCSE student. Once that’s out the way we get to the climax, which consists of a slow drive across Britain to stop The Old Man From The First Two Robocop With The Stupid Hair playing the organ (which somehow will bring the demon to the earth blah blah fucking blah). Once this is done, we get a bit more ponderous dialogue before the film ends with Sting looking sad. Frankly, that’s the best bit of this whole sorry farrago. Given I believe Sting to be a cunt on a cosmic scale, any time he is made to look sad is grand with me.

That’s the story. Or rather, that’s the stream of consciousness that the writer vomited forth onto his script without ever bothering to edit it for coherence and relevance. But it doesn’t quite capture how shitty this movie is. At times it is so po-faced that you just have to laugh – at it, rather than with it. In fact, at its worst moments, the show resembles an attempt to do Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace with a straight face. But that’s not the biggest problem here. The biggest problem is that everything about this film seems to exude the idea that it is in some way an important cultural event. Even the run time (a merciless three hours to tell a story that could be told in about an hour) seems to suggest that this sees itself as IMPORTANT. It isn’t. It is just total crap. God knows what the viewers watching this film for the first time over the festive period made of it all. Probably that they are being punished for sins in a past life. But the fact that the BBC wasted so much time and money on this is staggering. Artemis 81 is self-important toss that is in love with its own (non-existent) brilliance. There is some great cult TV out there; this is not an example of it, no matter what it might think about itself.