Speak Up!

Are you, like me, a Johnny-Come-Lately when it comes to The Wire? Have you, like me, had your ears burned off by various persons for the last 7 years constantly saying: "Have you seen The Wire yet? You'll love it, especially since you're from Brixton"? Possibly you haven't had the 'Brixton' bit, unless of course you live in Brixton, and if you do I don't know whether I should congratulate or commiserate; one man's Brixton is another man's poison.

But I digress. I'm afraid I have to admit to having actively avoided The Wire, largely because I don't get those seemingly endless US drama series, like 24, Heroes etc. I mean, life's too short to watch 24 episodes of anything isn't it? On top of which they all seem to lack any real humanity and humour, just 24 hours of the po-faced intensity the Yanks are so good at. But I've run out of places to hide, BBC2 is now well into series 2... and so am I. But am I alone in only picking up on about 50% of the dialogue? What's that about?

The Wire suffers from the same excess that makes going to see a Hollywood film such a chore, much of the talking is buried under swathes of sound, to the point where I actually give up trying to work out what they're saying and conclude that they don't want me to hear it in the first place. In one of last week's episodes there was a scene in a bar that lasted a good 5 minutes. Various characters conducted conversations which might have been important to the plot, I'll never know as the first part of the scene was played out to the accompaniment of a DJ and, just in case we were beginning to be able to pick out the conversational jist, was replaced for the last 2 and a half minutes by a live band! Confused, I asked a Wirehead of my aquaintance what I'd missed: "Oh", he said, "You weren't supposed to hear what they were saying." "Ah" I rejoindered, and that was all I could think to say.


I mean, we're used to indecipherable lyrics in Pop, working out what they're saying is half the fun, but isn't dialogue kind of important to drama?