Lost & Tom Brown's Schooldays

This article first appeared in The Age on April 2, 2005

Lost (Channel 7, 8.30 p.m.) returns this week after it's Easter break so it seems timely to ask: has Lost lost the plot? I loved the first few weeks, but, a bit like 24, it relies on adrenalin to keep it going. Once it's interrupted by an interval of a few weeks viewer's lose momentum, and Lost's flaws become clearer. This week Sawyer inexplicably and unconvincingly refuses to relinquish asthma medicine he's looted from the plane, putting Shannon's life at risk. The group response to this? Torture of course, just as there was in 24. Torture in these shows is a bit like the adrenalin shot injected into the heart after an overdose: a desperate attempt to bring something to life when things seem perilous. What makes it particularly stick in the craw is that the torture is meted out by Sayid, a former member of Iraq's Republican Guard (played by the obviously British-Indian Naveen Andrews). As if an American would do it, right? (For more on that subject watch The Lynndie England Story, SBS, 8.30 p.m., Tuesday.)

Lost has become hidebound by formula - a trap that Desperate Housewives (Monday, 8.30 p.m., Channel 7) hasn't fallen into. Every episode of Lost is set over a 24 hour period and each has a back story to one of the character's lives. Over the weeks these back stories have become insanely elaborate and irrelevant and they slow down the actual plot: how will they survive? (Other than sun-baking and flirting in between the bouts of torture.) What is the island's secret? At this rate we won't find out until we are beyond caring. And while Desperate Housewives, also centers around a secret we don't care so much about, it has, over the weeks, worked on characterization and maintained a tight script. The result is that it evokes feelings other than mindless anxiety to hook in the viewer.

For violence more shocking, but less gratuitous, watch the marvelous - if grueling - Tom Brown's Schooldays (8.30 p.m., ABC, Sunday). I haven';t read Thomas Hughes' novel so can’t compare, but this candid portrayal of the culture of bullying at the prestigious Rugby School in the 19th century is painfully reminiscent of debates about bastardization in the military, and bullying at schools today. What is less modern, perhaps, is that poor Tom Brown has no sense that the world could be any other way. 'Of course you believe in violence,'he says to his little friend. 'You're British.'

Things do begin to change when the progressive headmaster Dr Arnold (Stephen Fry) arrives and attempts to instill notions of Christian compassion rather than Born to Rule bullying. But this is no fairy tale and Dr Arnold struggles as much as Brown to make sense of, and control, the mindless violence that is around him. Like Brown he even indulges in it at times.

I was reminded of the untimely death of Maria and Elizabeth Bronte after they were sent to a particularly tough boarding school. Here too, parents put their children's lives at risk thinking they are doing the best thing for them. Alex Pettyfer is wonderful as the vulnerable, but increasingly defiant Tom. Joseph Beattie plays Flashman, son of one of the school's principal sponsors who's sense of privilege has turned him into a sadist of the highest order. While Tom Brown's Schooldays can be clunky at times - presumably because large sections of the book have been cut - it is a potent story of, and metaphor for, the perils of childhood both 200 years ago and today.

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