Dead Head: Anything for England
The second episode of Dead Head takes us into the show's depiction of the upper circle of hell, as depicted in the upper classes of England. This takes the form of Hugo, the MI5 man, taking Eddie into the dreaded countryside and rubbing up against the upper classes.
Something I'm only noticing on repeated viewings of this show is that it is very heavily culturally coded, and I think possibly one of the things some viewers may miss is that what is depicted here is not actually the upper classes at all. This is explicitly stated in the DVD commentary when the writer, Howard Brenton, states that the show was intended to depict the decline of the upper classes into Hooray Henrys, a decline which I suppose has culminated in people like Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. However this decline is visible in the show without the need for the commentary or me to tell you, because Britain is such a highly stratified society where slight changes of pronunciation and taste can indicate huge social differences. At one point Hugo (Simon Callow) tells Eddie (Denis Lawson) that he is 'top drawer'. This is how we all know that he isn't top drawer at all, and this isn't made explicit at all. If you're actually out of the top drawer you would never feel the need to tell anyone; far from sheer wealth or status, the actual top drawer has something else, and you can tell it immediately. It also doesn't need to announce itself.
So there is a theme in this circle of hell that the ruling classes are well into their decline, and the sheer corruption of the powerful echelons of society is much of the theme of this episode, including that the brutal murder of a girl (by someone very high up ) must be covered up at the expense of a Tory-voting commoner.
The show takes an interesting approach to the murder, which may or may not be a criticism, which is that most of the show is spent on the other themes of city vs country, poor vs rich, and only abou ten minutes is spent actually explaining the point of the 'Jack the Ripper' theme of the show at all. Hugo explains the whole thing to Eddie over dinner between the 10 and 20 minute points of this episode, and now I put it like that I think this is a valid criticism, that the Jack the Ripper theme is too easily forgotten in the show. So here it is in case you missed it: someone very high up has committed a whole lot of sexual offences and murdered a young woman, and that this death is being elaborately covered up by the establishment, using Eddie as their Patsy. Eddie has been chosen because the perpetrator of the crima also happens to be sleeping with Eddie's ex-wife, which is intended to give him a motivation for this. (Of course this picks up on the ongoing conspiracy theories that a member of the royal family was Jack the Ripper and sets Eddie up to be betrayed by the one thing he holds most dear). This is why the disembodied head of the woman was planted on him by MI5. As I say this paragraph is the entire essential plot of this show shorn of all the other themes, and you could be forgiven for missing it completely.
Otherwise the show accurately portrays the Yuppie/Hooray Henry culture of the 1980s. It then cleverly gives us yet another inexplicable event right at the end.
Once again, I'm really appreciating this show with the more effort I spend on it, as it's multi-layered and some of the more intelligent television from any time.
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