Fifteen years on, Doug Lucie's 1997 media satire feels both dated and prescient. It's set at the wedding of the daughter of a suspiciously familiar Australian media mogul, and the real action takes place in a trophy-filled side room, where the slickly menacing new editor of a Sunday newspaper (Mario Demetriou) is firing members of the old guard.
Pathos is done better than comedy in Sebastien Blanc's uneven revival. The third scene is the best, in which Seamus Newman's old pro political editor goes from cocky complacency to quiet meltdown after the Westminster world that has been his life for decades is callously snatched away from him. The last scene, wherein Stephen Chance's wily foreign correspondent takes a measure of revenge on his bosses, is both good fun and gratifyingly plausible given recent events in the Murdoch empire.
The cast don't have the comic chops to carry off the blokey humour of the earlier scenes, and there are numerous anachronistic references in the text that should really have been pruned or updated. But 'The Shallow End' was savagely on the money in its prediction of the dumbing down of British culture, anticipating everything from 'Big Brother' to the rise of spin doctors with depressing accuracy.