This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 12th March 2016.
Doctor
Thorne: Sunday, STV
The Aliens: Tuesday, E4
Stop/Start: Friday, BBC One
Paul
Whitelaw
Paupers! Mourn
ye not for the demise of Downton Abbey, for oleaginous Tory apologist Lord
Julian Fellowes hath returned with another luxury bauble of frock-coated period
drama! Let joy be unconfined.
An adaptation
of a 19th century novel by Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne stars
Tom Hollander, looking for all the world like a limited edition Victorian Lego
man, as a kindly physician struggling to protect his sweet, penniless niece
from a whirling community of money-obsessed snobs.
Fellowes, an
awful snob himself, does at least ridicule their grasping aspirations; if he
wasn't working from another writer's text, he'd almost certainly ask us to
sympathise with them in some way.
With its ludicrously heightened summer colour palette and near-impenetrable conversations involving
the surnames of characters we hadn't met yet – Fellowes dumps exposition with
all the finesse of a blunderbuss - the first half of episode one felt like a
silly French & Saunders spoof of This Sort Of Thing.
But when the
simple narrative eventually became clear – unbeknownst to anyone but Thorne,
his niece is the heir to a fortune owned by Ian McShane's entertainingly crude
Lord of the manor - it revealed itself to be a fairly diverting social satire
elevated by a fine cast.
The Americans
will love it, which is the main thing as far as ITV are concerned.
An aggressively
unfunny black comedy with ham-fisted allegorical pretensions, The Aliens
depicts a 21st
century Britain identical to our own, except for the presence of humanoid
beings from another planet who are forced to live in a fortified urban ghetto.
This vilified
underclass are pejoratively known as “Morks” (geddit?) and, having presumably
replaced travellers, immigrants and benefit claimants as society's knee-jerk
victims of choice, fulfil the nasty human urge to blame someone else for our
problems.
It's a premise
more or less stolen from the superior South African sci-fi film District 9,
but whereas that had something valuable to say about racism, The Aliens
strikes a weirdly reactionary tone for a show that presumably hopes to promote
an anti-prejudice message.
Its stained
with sniggering homophobia and a general meanness of spirit which not even the
likeable hang-dog presence of This Is England and Being Human
star Michael Socha can alleviate.
He plays a
border patrol guard whose bigotry will obviously be challenged following his
discovery that – in a twist visible from space – he's half-alien. This pivotal
plot point is typical of how poorly conceived the show is: he's somehow
survived into his twenties without realising he's half-alien, despite the fact
that he's the only member of his team who's physically incapacitated by the
technology they use to keep aliens in their place.
Socha deserves
better than this. So do we.
Written by and
starring Jack Docherty of Absolutely fame, Stop/Start is the
latest promising pilot from the Comedy
Playhouse strand. It's a Glasgow-based post-modern sitcom in which three
couples in varying states of dysfunction share their inner monologues via
direct-to-camera asides.
Sharp, funny
and refreshingly unsentimental – some of its brutally frank observations elicited
gasps from the studio audience – it's that rare beast: a middle-class,
middle-aged relationship comedy with obvious popular and critical appeal.
Its central
device could potentially annoy, but Docherty and a great cast including John
Thomson, Kerry Godliman and Nigel Havers sell it expertly. More please!
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