With a tiny fanfare, Channel 4 has launched its first vertical drama, The Guest List. Five episodes, each around 90 seconds long and designed to be watched “vertically” on a phone, will drop at weekly intervals on social media platforms.
The drama follows the bite-sized adventures of a group of London career girls. Blink during episode one, and you’ll miss PR Amaka and her distracting gold eyeshadow trying to join a boat party on the Thames after her phone has been nicked. At top speed she’s kicked out of a rickshaw and told that the Thames is a 45-minute walk away. Will Amaka make it to the party in her strangulating bandage dress? And will anyone care enough to wait a whole week for the next 90-second episode?
As the long winter nights set in, and we yearn for the expansive box sets that the streamers used to do so well, are not these perfunctory, sugar-rush vignettes – the dramatic equivalent of a packet of jelly tots – a sign of End Times in entertainment?
Hollywood studios have embraced them with a fervour ignited by their vast earning potential. But the results – girl falls for star ice-hockey player, he departs in pursuit of his puck but returns years later, having realised he loves her (basically, Eugene Onegin on ice) – argue a convincing case for brevity in art being the soul of schlock.
By coincidence, Caryl Churchill’s latest drama, Triumph, opened at the Almeida Theatre just before The Guest List dropped. Around 20 minutes long, the play features a blonde-wigged press secretary announcing the latest achievements of an emperor to the press pack. Her words are taken from accounts of monstrous imperial behaviour by the Roman historian, Suetonius.
The Guest List is Channel 4’s first ‘vertical drama’, designed to be watched on a phone
The play was greeted with critical acclaim that amounted to a defence of short works – and across the centuries there is no shortage of fine examples. Take Suetonius’s near-contemporary, the poet Martial, whose epigrams combine brevity with satire, obscenity and melancholy to offer an unforgettably pungent portrait of his times.
Fashionable prose miniaturist Jenny Offill’s novel, Dept. of Speculation, described by a critic as “like your cleverest friend’s Facebook updates”, can trace its fragmentary form as far back as the “faits divers” – brief news items, dismissively known as “chiens écrasés” (run-over dogs), turned into art by the critic and polymath, Félix Fénéon, who wrote more than 1,000 of them for Le Matin in 1906. Published as Novels in Three Lines, and variously compared with haikus and cocktail olives (by Julian Barnes, an admirer), they are a piquant exercise in turning banal catastrophe into art.
Nicholas Hilliard’s exquisite portrait miniatures, György Kurtág’s musical shards, Eric Satie’s Vexations – a small theme with the enigmatic possibility of being extended to vexatious length – all exemplify the might of the minuscule.
And if you seek a perfectly formed blockbuster show this autumn (one that doesn’t involve being herded like cattle into a crush), the Dulwich Picture Gallery offers a rare opportunity to see the complete set of Hokusai’s Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji. Modestly sized, exquisitely detailed, thrumming with human drama, from the hapless sailors desperately bent over their oars beneath the looming wave to the child with a turtle on a string in The Waterwheel at Onden, they contain multitudes (and they’re definitely not meant to be viewed on a phone).
Try full access to The Telegraph free today. Unlock their award-winning website and essential news app, plus useful tools and expert guides for your money, health and holidays.
