TV Review: WITNESSES and THE JAVONE PRINCE SHOW

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 25th July 2015.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/lifestyle

Witnesses: Wednesday, Channel 4

The Javone Prince Show: Sunday, BBC Two

Paul Whitelaw

Shot through an endless drizzle, French thriller Witnesses (Les Temoins) is so irredeemably gloomy it make the average UK cop drama look like a DayGlo bouncy castle pumped with laughing gas.

And that's quite reassuring. So often typecast as sex-fuelled paragons of ineffable cool and glamour, it's good to know that our Gallic cousins are just as miserable as the rest of us.

But is it any better than the average UK cop drama? On the basis of episode one, I'm not entirely sure. By acquiring this six-part series, Channel 4 are obviously hoping to repeat the success of their last French import, The Returned. But that was a stylish and unusual supernatural drama with a compelling central hook. Witnesses is far more generic.

It's certainly atmospheric. The rain-spattered coastal setting is glumly arresting, and the climactic scene involving a suspended trolley car had an unnerving, almost dreamlike quality that one doesn't often see on British television.

Also, despite its clichéd cop show trappings, the mystery at the heart of Witnesses is pleasingly bleak and perverse: three seemingly random corpses are removed from their graves and posed in a show home, like a macabre facsimile of the perfect family. Pourquoi? 

What is their connection with the enigmatic former police chief who – and this is odd behaviour, you must admit – keeps a framed photograph of the car crash that killed his wife? And why does the woolly-hatted female protagonist insist on entering patently threatening crime scenes on her own, armed only with a torch? Has she never seen The Killing?

It all adds up to a mildly intriguing riddle, but whether it will eventually pay off is anyone's guess. The heavy-handed fairytale symbolism of a big bad wolf and a little girl in a red duffel coat suggests, worryingly, that the writers have po-faced pretensions which aren't as clever as they think. It's early days, but already I'm beginning to suspect that, for all its surface sophistication, Witnesses may turn out to be a rather daft affair.

It would be nice, in an ideal world, to report that The Javone Prince Show launched a bright new star into the comedy firmament last week. But the world is far from ideal, hence why it gets the painfully uninspired sketch shows it deserves.

A young black comic and actor, Prince is a fairly charming character whose eagerness to please almost makes up for the weakness of his material. But no amount of charm can rescue this tired ragbag of second-hand observations about “the black experience” in Britain today. 

A series of sketches about the way some white people behave anxiously and patronisingly around black people was never developed beyond the very basic point it was making. But that didn't stop Prince and his writers from hammering it into the ground.

They also seem to believe that the spectacle of a plummy-voiced white chap speaking street slang/jive talk is fundamentally hilarious. Why else would they steal this already limited joke from Armstrong and Miller?

Berating this good-natured and well-intentioned show gives me no pleasure, but there is just no getting around its objective mediocrity. It's a failure on practically every level.

TV Review: THE OUTCAST and INSIDE THE KU KLUX KLAN

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on Saturday 18th July 2015.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/lifestyle

The Outcast: Sunday, BBC One

Inside The Ku Klux Klan: Monday, Channel 4

Paul Whitelaw

An expensive-looking holiday in other people's misery, The Outcast is a hazy, haunted post-war period drama that never connects on an emotional level.

Its failure to communicate is, I suppose, entirely in keeping with its themes of repression and mute isolation. But that's a charitable view: The Outcast is about damaged people incapable of expressing themselves, but that's no excuse for such slow, alienating, bone-dry execution. What's the point of a story that fails to engage?

Our protagonist is Lewis, a damaged soul from an upper middle-class family immersed in tragedy. Lewis' happy childhood was obliterated by the death of his beloved mother, who drowned before his eyes. Traumatised, his inability to explain what happened to his remote war veteran father triggered an endless downward spiral.

Packed off to boarding school, he retreated further into himself, his deep emotional trauma undiagnosed and misunderstood by everyone around him. As the narrative skipped forward like a series of depressing diary entries, we observed this scarred child of the seen-but-not-heard generation morph into an angry young man with a disastrous diet of medication: self-harm, alcohol, arson and sleeping with a woman who resembles his stepmother. Freud ahoy.

This, clearly, is a well-intentioned story about the tragic consequences of a “pre-enlightened” age when the concept of bereavement counselling was the stuff of a madman's dream. A potentially interesting subject, but writer Sadie Jones fails to make us care about Lewis as we should.

He's automatically sympathetic by dint of his circumstances, but we never get beyond his troubled surface. He's outwardly numb, so that's partially by design. But as Jones subjects him to misery after misery, he feels more like a maltreated marionette than a three-dimensional character. Jones uses him to make a point, meaning that – contrary to her intentions – the endless indignities heaped upon him become borderline comical.

It's formally quite bold in that it relies as much on silence and imagery as dialogue – Lewis' inner turmoil is signified by a sound effect of blood raging noisily through his skull. But The Outcast is hobbled by its self-conscious solemnity.

As the likes of Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux have shown, one of the best ways of understanding – and undermining – crazy extremists is by humanising them. That is, to show them going about their everyday, often hapless business in such a way that they no longer feel threatening. When fear becomes pity, a monster is robbed of its power. That's the idea anyway.

Did Inside The Ku Klux Klan succeed along these idealogical lines? A documentary following a Missouri chapter of this notorious racist movement, it certainly confirmed what we already know - that racists are sad, angry, deluded, insular, paranoid, dysfunctional human beings desperately lashing out at an imagined foe to blame for their unhappiness. But if we already know this, what purpose did it serve?

If you ignore racism it won't go away, that's not what I'm suggesting. Racists aren't like bees - I really can't stress that enough. Bigotry of all kinds should always be exposed and challenged. I just don't think another documentary about a tragic bunch of ignorant rednecks is particularly useful.

The programme made the important point that, despite their threadbare currency and easily mockable foolishness, the Klan are still guilty of appalling acts of violence. We can't laugh them into obsolescence. That wasn't the programme's intention, but unlike Ronson and Theroux at their best, it basically amounted to a despairing, common sense sigh in the face of immovable bigotry.

TV Review: A SONG FOR JENNY and THE AUTISTIC GARDENER

A Song For Jenny: Sunday, BBC One

The Autistic Gardener: Wednesday, Channel 4

Paul Whitelaw

Julie Nicholson, a Church of England vicar, lost her 24-year-old daughter Jenny in the 7/7 London bombings. Jenny was one of 52 people killed that day. Though it focused on the Nicholsons alone, one-off drama A Song For Jenny was a sincere tribute to each of those victims and the 52 families who will forever mourn their loss.

Scheduled to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of this senseless attack, the film followed Julie (Emily Watson) through every harrowing stage of her ordeal.

As with most dramatisations of real-life tragedies, the early scenes were suffused with a weighty sense of impending horror. Julie received a concerned call from her other daughter as soon as news broke of an unexplained tube explosion in London. Initial confusion gave way to mounting panic as Jenny proved unreachable by phone. All the family could do was wait and watch as the reports grew graver. Then came the inevitable, devastating news.

Numbed by shock and grief, Julie's London odyssey unfurled as a literal manifestation of, in her own words, Jenny's stages of the cross. It was a painful, almost masochistic form of catharsis. The scene in which she delivered the last rites over Jenny's remains was unbearably sad. Yet she found no comfort in her faith; God couldn't fill such a vast, unyielding void. Though it wasn't mentioned on screen, Julie is no longer a priest.

Nevertheless, this was ultimately a story of cautious hope and renewed faith - not in a higher being, but in humanity. After Julie, dazed and alone, viewed her daughter's body in London, a taxi driver insisted on taking her back to Reading with no charge. This simple act of human kindness took on enormous significance as part of her gradual journey towards some kind of peace. Despite her anger and hatred towards the bombers, eventually she refused to let those emotions overwhelm her love for Jenny.

A sensitive, intelligent actress capable of exuding anguish while remaining outwardly still, Watson was ideally cast as Julie. Her dignified performance was supported by a thoughtful screenplay from playwright Frank McGuinness. A fine, valuable, compassionate film.

The aptly named Alan Gardner is an award-winning garden designer. With his affable demeanour, neon red hair, rock tattoos and nail varnish – he looks like a psychedelic Ken Dodd - he's an unusually colourful addition to TV's never-ending roster of green-fingered artisans. He's also autistic.

In The Autistic Gardener, he assembles a team of horticultural enthusiasts from various points on the autism spectrum as they set about transforming various neglected gardens into imaginatively sculpted wonderlands. Mercifully bereft of patronising sentimentality, it's a good-natured and responsible series in which people with autism unassumingly raise awareness of their condition while exercising their creative abilities.

They build their confidence and gain a sense of achievement, their 'employers' get a groovy new garden to play with, and we enjoy the whole undemanding process while chortling at Gardner's self-aware narration, in which he cheekily mocks the clichéd conventions of the TV makeover genre. Everyone's a winner, baby.

With supposedly well-meaning yet problematic shows such as The Undateables, Channel 4 is often guilty of treating people with disabilities as outsider novelties. The Autistic Gardener treats them as equals. So hats off to all concerned. When was the last time Alan Titchmarsh reaffirmed your faith in human nature?

TV Review: ODYSSEY + ARENA: NICOLAS ROEG... IT'S ABOUT TIME + NOT SAFE FOR WORK

Odyssey: Sunday, BBC Two

Arena: Nicolas Roeg… It's About Time: Sunday, BBC Four

Not Safe For Work: Tuesday, Channel 4

Paul Whitelaw

Having spied Channel 4's success with Homeland, BBC Two is presumably hoping to grab some of that US import thriller action with Odyssey. But on the evidence of its opening double-bill, this 13-part series is possibly too sprawling, laboured and muddled to capture a comparable audience.

Set in the US and Africa, it tries to tackle all the major geopolitical issues of the day – war, terrorism, corporate corruption, grass-roots protest, media hysteria and the financial crisis – in pursuit of a supposedly grand statement about the interconnectedness of our global catastrophe.

Unfortunately, these noble ambitions are scuppered by an uneven patchwork narrative involving a drab homeland conspiracy and a Mali-based strand in which Anna Friel's

US army officer makes a dangerous trek across the desert. This latter strand is far more engaging and suspenseful than anything else in Odyssey; it flags drastically whenever Friel isn't on screen.

Her impressive performance is matched by Omar Ghazaoui as the Malian teenager who becomes her unlikely ally. Mercifully free of mawkishness, their relationship is the only interesting aspect of the show.

To carry off something on this scale requires depth, focus and precision; Odyssey is a hectic splurge. One might charitably defend its approach as an intentional attempt at reflecting the complexity of the issues at hand. But really it's just sloppy story-telling. While I'm glad that American TV dramas are gradually trying to explore geopolitics in a relatively thoughtful way, Odyssey' is less than the sum of its parts.

It's surprising to learn that, during its 40 years on air, cerebral arts strand Arena has never crossed paths with visionary British film director Nicolas Roeg. After all, they're a perfect match. But not only was Nicolas Roeg... It's About Time his first Arena profile, it was also the first time he's participated in a documentary about his work.

A suitably elliptical tribute to his unique vision, it was more interested in exploring Roeg's thematic obsessions than providing standard biographical details. Famed for his non-linear narratives and emphasis on psychological displacement, it wove thoughtful analysis of his films – including obvious touchstones such as Performance and The Man Who Fell To Earth – with quietly revealing, twinkly pronouncements from the man himself.

It was, in typical Arena style, an attempt to capture the spirit of the artist. While newcomers to Roeg's work may have preferred a more conventional approach, that woud've missed the point of this masterful impressionist. And at least it didn't ruin the ending of Don't Look Now.

More bleak than funny, comedy-drama Not Safe For Work is nevertheless an intriguing howl of anguish about a dysfunctional bunch of misfits working at a moribund immigration department.

Hitherto best known for her role as deadpan hedonist Vod in student comedy Fresh Meat, the excellent Zawe Ashton stars as a recently divorced civil servant who reluctantly relocates to Northampton from London due to budget cuts.

She's dismayed to discover that her new manager is a former underling who only got the job after pretending to be a devout Muslim. A befuddled, work-shy, drug-guzzling mess, Danny's inspirational motto is “work hard or go home.” He's also played, not as a wacky grotesque, but as a pathetically vulnerable soul by another highly promising young actor, Sacha Dhawan.

Seemingly written from a place of genuine pain and offbeat compassion, Not Safe For Work is full of bracing, downbeat promise.

TV Review: BLACK WORK and THE BANK

Black Work: Sunday, STV

The Bank: Tuesday, BBC Two

Paul Whitelaw

Now firmly established as TV's foremost leading lady, Sheridan Smith can take her pick from the finest showroom vehicles. So one wonders what she saw in Black Work, which so far feels only marginally more distinguished than any number of pot-boiling crime dramas.

Perhaps all will become clear in the remaining episodes. Smith's instincts are usually worth trusting, so I'm willing to give it a chance.

She stars as Jo, a Yorkshire policewoman who finds herself trapped in a quagmire of guilt and suspicion when her detective husband, Ryan, is murdered. Prior to his demise, she and Ryan had grown apart, apparently due to his lengthy absences from home. Jo had even contemplated an affair with a colleague, although it seems their relationship developed no further than weekly meetings in a swimming pool car park.

But Ryan was harbouring a much darker secret. Turns out he wasn't teaching cop cadets in London for the last three years. Instead he was working undercover in pursuit of gun-runners. Killed in the line of duty, apparently his heroic efforts had finally toppled them. But why are the police acting so suspiciously regarding the details of his murder? And what of these whispers about rogue behaviour during his time undercover? There's only one thing for it: PC Jo must mount her own investigation.

A grieving, guilty wife exploring her dead husband's covert double life is an interesting premise, and so far Black Work succeeds in the traditional thriller sense of not knowing who to trust - although Jo and Ryan's superiors, played by Douglas Henshall and Geraldine James, could only be shiftier if they had handlebar moustaches to twirl.

With her tear-sodden face to the fore, Smith is typically convincing, as are the actors playing her children – the youngest is that unnaturally natural little girl from Our Zoo, which was also written by Black Work's Matt Charman. But I can't shake the nagging suspicion that it's just a middling, mechanical drama with an unusually strong cast. We'll see.

One of Black Work's nominal themes is our growing mistrust of the police. But they're probably still a notch above bankers, whose reputation currently flounders at an all-time low.

Cue The Bank, a new documentary series which, by following the staff at a high street branch of RBS-owned NatWest, aims to spotlight the human face of this maligned industry. But why? Though customers often vent their frustration at these footsoldiers, no one actually blames them for the financial crash. They didn't start the fire.

Sure enough, the staff are a sympathetic bunch doing their best under trying circumstances. Unlike their unaccountable paymasters, they haven't received a bonus in years.

They're also burdened with the hopeless task of rebuilding trust and reaching customer service targets. This seems to involve asking if customers are “extremely satisfied”, even if they return dissatisfied at a later date.

Though no one in the programme was judged unfairly, a serious lapse of taste occurred in the soundtrack department. The use of a whimsical jazz score was horribly at odds with the seriousness of the subject matter. It was more suited to a frothy doc about cat shampooing, not one involving people struggling with debt.

And call me a pie-eyed idealist if you will, but I'd much rather watch an uncompromising profile of the rapacious banking overlords responsible for destroying millions of lives. That will be with us soon, I'm sure.

TV Review: HUMANS and PRIZED APART

Humans: Sunday, Channel 4

Prized Apart: Saturday, BBC One

Paul Whitelaw

Set in a parallel present where lifelike synthetic humans are as commonplace as iPads, sci-fi drama Humans takes the bold – some might say foolhardy - step of exploring territory that many great writers have traversed before.

Yet while the questions it poses are familiar – is artificial intelligence capable of feeling? Do we have the right to create it? Are we in danger of being usurped by the technology we're increasingly reliant upon? - it handles them with care and, in terms of world-building, precise attention to detail. 

And while it's too early to say if Humans will add up to much, at least its influences are openly acknowledged in a rather playful way.

It began with a harassed husband and father purchasing an android servant – known colloquially as synths – to help around the home. His wife, Laura, is a busy lawyer beset with mid-life malaise (none of the humans in Humans are happy). She's grown distant from her family, a problem compounded – despite her husband's contrary intentions – by the arrival of Anita, a strikingly beautiful synth whose eerily perfect countenance sets Laura on edge.

A sly wrinkle on the notion of a spouse feeling threatened by a partner's interest in a younger model – a theme echoed by the sub-plot involving a detective and the hunky synth who cares for his sick wife - this dysfunctional domestic setting is a master-stroke. It grounds an essentially fantastical premise in plausible reality. Though we automatically feel sympathy for Anita – after all, she's only following pre-programmed orders – we regard her with suspicion when viewed through Laura's eyes.

Sure enough, Laura has reason to be paranoid. It gradually transpires that Anita belongs to a rogue group of synths who have somehow developed independent thoughts and feelings. She's merely pretending to be subservient. But why?

Meanwhile, her fellow sentient synths are on the run from scientists fearful of their advanced state. This conspiracy thriller element coexists smoothly with the claustrophobic unease of the suburbanite scenes and an intriguing strand involving a widowed scientist (William Hurt) and his malfunctioning synth/surrogate son.

A droll sense of humour also ensures that Humans never feels pompous, even when confronting its hefty moral quandaries head-on. With its chilly aesthetic and dry spurts of satire, it occasionally resembles one of the better Black Mirror episodes. I particularly like the way our world, with no cosmetic alterations at all, is depicted as a bland, cold, chrome and glass wasteland.

But Humans wouldn't work if it was wholly cynical. It succeeds in asking us to sympathise with Laura and invest in Hurt's Geppetto/Pinocchio plight. Plus the horrifying pathos of robots cursed with living souls haunts the show throughout; the scenes depicting a sentient synth sold into prostitution make their point with unsparing yet compassionate intensity.

Regardless of noble intentions, the whole enterprise would capsize completely were it not for an utterly convincing performance from Gemma Chan as Anita. Mercifully free of the body-popping tics which often blight actors playing robots, her subtly precise, blandly benign demeanour is unsettling and – given what we know of her true nature – ineffably sad.

By sheer coincidence, Prized Apart marks the first instance of a quiz show devised and fronted by robots. A conceptually flawed bore, it sends members of the public on a Moroccan quest to win £100,000 via harness-enhanced stunts. Meanwhile, their loved ones back home in the studio provide half-hearted commentary in a sterile hangar commandeered by chief Auton Emma Watson.

None of it makes sense. The location segments don't gel with the stilted studio diversions – they're clearly not happening simultaneously - and there's never any sense of genuine peril, triumph or momentum. Imagine I'm A Celebrity... without the celebrities. Or Bake Off without the baking. Or life without meaning. That still doesn't come close to the echoing pointlessness of Prized Apart.

TV Review: STONEMOUTH and THE INTERCEPTOR

Stonemouth: Monday, BBC One

The Interceptor: Wednesday, BBC One

Paul Whitelaw

“Hi, is that Peter Mullan's agent? I've got a part he might be interested in; a gruff Scottish hard man who – what? He'll do it? Great!”

Fine actor though he is, Mullan could growl and scowl through his role in Stonemouth in a state of deep somnambulance. Given the thinness of his material in this case, I wouldn't be surprised if he did.

Based on a novel by Iain Banks, it's a lacklustre neo-noir yarn in which a young man, Stewart, returns to an Aberdeenshire coastal town to investigate the supposed suicide of his best friend, Cal.

A charismatic rebel, Cal was the son of a local drugs kingpin (Mullan, natch) and the brother of Stewart's estranged paramour, Ellie. An unwelcome presence in Stonemouth, Stewart was literally run out of town two years prior after humiliating Ellie on the eve of their nuptials. Consumed with guilt and regret, he's desperate to make amends by reconnecting with Ellie and avenging Cal's death.

God knows I'm not asking for sympathy, but I almost bored myself rigid writing that brief synopsis. Stonemouth is hackneyed beyond belief. Transposing an archetypal Western/film noir storyline to contemporary Scotland can't disguise its tired familiarity. On the contrary, it merely draws attention to its clichéd, self-conscious failings.

Stewart's semi-hard-boiled narration, a staple of the genre, isn't lyrical enough to excuse its function as a clumsy source of exposition. Indeed, the dialogue as a whole is awkwardly mannered and glib. What may have looked witty in print, sounds hopelessly unnatural when spoken aloud.

Surveying the new décor of his former local, Stewart opined, “I prefer the comforting ambience of the masonic conspiracy.” Later Ellie's sister declared, “My apparent lack of remorse isn't a coping mechanism.” Yuk. That's not dialogue, it's typing with fists.

Despite the dead-weight he's carrying, English actor Christian Cook – replete with passable Scots brogue - does a decent job as Stewart. Though too handsome to convince as a lovelorn everyman, he has a certain droll charm. And Mullan, well, Mullan hits his mark with practised professionalism.

While certain dryly comic moments work quite well – e.g. rival kingpin Gary Lewis's inept efforts to assure Stewart that he had nothing to do with Cal's demise – Stonemouth is fatally soulless, flat and cheap-looking. Not so much a hotbed of turmoil, more a knackered mattress of sin.

But it's a mind-blowing trip into the wild unknown compared to The Interceptor. This brazenly hackneyed thriller follows – hell yeah – an acutely observant, maverick customs agent recruited by an off-grid squad of law-enforcers intent on targeting powerful white collar drug magnates.

As a child, our brooding hero witnessed his dad being killed by a drug-addled wrong 'un. Yep, it's personal. Make no mistake, this man is on a righteous moral crusade. Scores must be settled. Brows must be furrowed.

He knows it's untouchable Mr Big, that bespoke criminal in his so-called suit and tie, and not your addict scrabbling on the street who is responsible for devastating everyday crimes. Damn right he does. It's a valid target, but his aim is scatter-shot. He's too emotional, just too damn close to the case.

In the unlikely event that any of these nuanced character motives went over your head, a Scottish boss with the truculent demeanour of an errant Beechgrove gardener was helpfully on hand to spell it out in bluntly literal detail.

I've no idea how a dramatist can write tosh like this and not feel hideously embarrassed. I hope the cheque was worth it. If, like me, you've never wondered what a Richard Madeley take on The Wire would be like, then The Interceptor refuses to honour that indifference.

With his casual, star-making charisma, lead actor O-T Fagbenle imbues this arrant pablum with far more class than it deserves. At least it's never boring, but only in the sense that it doesn't sit still: a desperate magician trying to disguise his hack-work with slick patter and an aggressive frilly shirt.

Its cynical professionalism almost makes me hanker for the student-level blandness of Stonemouth. Almost.