This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 25th July 2015.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment