O tempora! O mores!

It's been a long wait -- decades, he's been talking about it; since the last century -- but finally Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is nearly here. I hadn't realized how much he's modelled the story on the Catiline conspiracy, which resonated with me because six or seven years ago, having had a TV project blow up because of circumstances beyond my (or anyone's) control, I was told by the network executive who commissioned it that she felt I owed her a show.

Unable to return to the original concept, the rights in which Jamie and I were in the process of recovering from a delinquent former business partner, I started developing a couple of alternatives, one of which was this:

ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

Civilization is fragile, and finding that out can be a terrifying thing. When you discover that the laws that kept you and your loved ones safe are being burned down in a firestorm of hatred and hardline politics. When lawgivers are denounced as saboteurs, when fanatics seize power and whip up the mob with ranting and lies. When decency and compromise have fled and you can see the cracks spreading through society all around you…

Welcome to Rome in the 1st century BC.

The life of Cicero, from the Catiline conspiracy onwards, is an amazing, dramatic, twist-filled story of trust and betrayal, alliances and vendettas, triumphs and scandals, optimism and civilized values versus self-interest and the threat of political violence.

Look at that. The story should be fresh as today’s news, but those togas and laurel wreaths and mannered period speeches can make everything seem very far-off. Irrelevant. Safe.

So what we’re going to do is set the whole story in modern dress with modern dialogue. The events are the same. The people are the same – only they look and sound like modern politicians in present-day settings.

It’s a way to bring it all home, uncomfortably so, to make us really feel the gut-wrenching danger and turmoil of those times. It’s a technique we’ve seen applied to Shakespeare (think of Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus) but in this case we’re applying it to an original script based on real events.

We’ll stick to real Roman history whenever possible. This is supposed to be a modern I Claudius meets The West Wing, not a vaguely Roman-themed fantasy. That said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and (just like in I Claudius) we’re taking historical events as the basis for our drama, but we don’t have to be dictated to by them.

Cicero’s life gives us a story spine to connect all the major events in the collapse of the republic, but Mark Cicero is not the sole character. This is an ensemble drama (again, The West Wing springs to mind) that can pick up other characters and include flashbacks to earlier events. We also have the option to show earlier events (in the Social War that established the dictator Sulla, for example) in diegetic form, as newsreel footage for example. (Roughly: events of Luke Sulla’s early dictatorship will appear to take place in the mid-1970s, Serge Catiline’s execution in the 1990s, etc, with the main storyline appearing to happen right now.)

That was the basic idea. I played around with an opening scene just to get a feel. We might never have used the scene in the finished script; writing it was just part of my process. I liked the idea of a bunch of Romans talking in a sauna to start off with, so they’re wearing towels and for all the audience could tell it might be actual Ancient Rome, and it’s only at the end of the scene when the peppy business-suited assistant looks in that we see it’s all styled like modern-day.

The project never happened -- this time for reasons unconnected with deranged business associates, but simply because the show the network wanted was adventure sci-fi in a Doctor Who-meets-MCU mold, like the one we'd written before. Nowadays, after the triumph of Succession and with the possible last days of the US republic on the horizon, maybe it would be possible to go back in and repitch it. But I'm inclined to let Mr Coppola tell his version instead. He's done a few pretty good movies in his time, after all.

Lies, damned lies, and British newspapers

Last month on my own blog I discussed an example of bone-idle British journalism at its worst - and its worst is very bad indeed. In this case, the newspaper in question had apparently got a school leaver to précis a piece from a rival paper, adding her own interpretation of the original article in between quoted extracts.

The original piece, which appeared in the Telegraph, was by Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal. The rip-off version, which appeared in the Daily Mail, managed to completely reverse the meaning of what he was saying. If the misinterpretation was wilful, then it was a disgrace; if it was the result of stupidity or carelessness then it was a shambles.

Well, Mr Bond, the first time is happenstance. But this week anybody unfortunate enough to look at the Daily Mail will have seen an even more odious example of its descent from journalism into propaganda, in the form of an attack on the BBC that is clearly designed to pave the way for the UK government to reduce or abolish the licence fee. Naturally the very thought of that has the Mail flapping its wings like an excited harpy, as (along with 90% of Britain's often foreign-owned and extremely partisan press) it hates the idea of an independent, publicly funded media entity with a remit to be unbiassed and informative in its reporting.

Here are the facts. The Mail article fails to mention that £270m of the licence fee was taken to support Welsh language channel S4C and a slate of government projects including broadband rollout and local television. By the Mail's calculations, programme costs don't included edit suites, newsrooms, and (especially dear to my heart) story development, and yet without those there would be no programmes. The Mail claims that the BBC "pumps money" into its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. In fact the two are obliged by charter to conduct business at arm's length; BBC Worldwide receives no share of the licence fee and generates money (for instance by sale of BBC programmes to other countries) that feeds back into programme-making in the UK.

The bottom line is that, completely contrary to the Mail's assertions, 90% of BBC spending is on content, distribution and related support costs. And that figure is independently verified, as the Mail must surely be aware.

This is only the latest blast in a long propaganda campaign that the Mail has been running with the apparent aim of stirring its readership into a state of high dudgeon against the BBC. For example, there was this 2008 report about how BBC "wasted" £45,000 ($70,000) on a party to promote the TV show Merlin. Yet that's a perfectly reasonable cost of doing business, and it paid off. Merlin has now sold to over 180 countries, netting over £100 million in revenue for the BBC on an outlay from the licence fee of less than £40 million. Bearing in mind that the primary purpose of the BBC is to create programmes for the British public, and that turning a profit is a secondary concern, I'd say that was a pretty good return on investment. But not in the eyes of the Mail, whose proprietor has opted for non-domicile status and is a contributor to the Conservative Party, who for years have been trying to chip away at the BBC's popularity - which, I'd venture to say, is considerably higher among the general public than that of either Lord Rothermere or the Tories.

If the UK electorate is gulled by propaganda like this into allowing politicians to scrap the licence fee, the BBC will be severely weakened and we will have lost a vital source of objective reporting and high-quality programmes that are the envy of the world. All to make nasty little rags like the Mail better able to serve their paymasters. So wherever you live in the world, next time you come across a news piece that is striving so desperately to convince you of something, remember to ask yourself: cui bono?