Last Saturday night BBC4 broadcast a new comedy drama set in the New Town area of Edinburgh. Written by Annie Griffin, who was previously behind the excellent Book Group series on Channel 4, New Town is a semi-surreal murder mystery with a cast of social climbing characters who live in the most exclusive (and expensive) area of the Scottish capital. Beautifully shot and sharply written, architecture is at the centre of the plot. At the end of the episode, a representative of Scottish Heritage is pushed (or did he jump?) from the top of an 18th century church; the very church that is being considered for conversion into retail units or, most horrific of all, a car park. The same man was having an affair with a ruthless local estate agent called Meredith, who specialises in strong-arming people into buying flats they can’t afford, and encouraging them to use the services of arch-modernist architects Purves and Pekkala.
So how do architects come out of all this? Not well. Not well at all. Purves and Pekkala are played by Mark Gatiss and Finnish actor Max Bremer (pictured above) as a pair of creepy, inhumane, artistic obsessives: think Gilbert and George in Le Corbusier glasses. They wear identical clothes at all times and show no love towards their son, who is also kitted out with the same spectacles. They swap cryptic quips about Rem Koolhaas, Herzog + de Meuron and Alvar Aalto over dinner. They refuse to let their clients pick the tiles for their bathrooms. They live in a starkly furnished house with black walls and black furniture. Most unnervingly, they literally salivate with excitement when sharing a joint hallucination about how they will use hefty steel girders to create an avant-garde interior to the historic church (this bit is depicted in a stunning animated sequence in which the viewer is flown through a two-dimensional architectural drawing).
But it isn’t just the architects who fare badly: architecture itself is seen as highly suspicious. Desirable Georgian terraced housing is lusted after by the grasping, greedy and socially inferior. The heritage crowd are shown as fusty and complacent, the modern architects as unfeeling and arrogant. Even the New Town area itself is shown, in an opening school-play scene, to have grown out of a distaste for the poor from high-flying 18th century Scots like Robert Adam. The only really sympathetic characters are a put-upon lawyer who doesn’t care about living in the trendy part of town, and one recent arrival in New Town: a young, aspiring artist called Rhian who hails from the rural island, Vatersay. Her innocence and interest in drawing pencil sketches of nature is shown as a pleasant contrast, not only to the overtly ‘cool’ abstractionists in her art class, but to the cold, hard stone of upper-class Edinburgh itself.
None of this is to discount New Town as a television programme; insanely unrealistic as the plot and characters may be, it’s interesting to see such anti-architecture prejudice so well-written, directed and produced. It will also be intriguing, if this pilot episode gets made into a full series (which it really should), to see how the architectural theme develops over six episodes. More importantly, though, I want to know who murdered the man from Scottish Heritage.
For the next few days, New Town can be viewed on BBC iPlayer here
