This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 1 October 2016.
Damned: Tuesday, Channel 4
The Fall: Thursday, BBC Two
The Level: Friday, STV
There
was once a time, not so long ago, when Jo Brand was negatively pigeonholed as a
sardonic comedian who joked about nothing apart from chocolate and how rubbish
men are. Yet in the last few years, quietly and assuredly, she’s recast herself
as the tragicomic queen of socially conscious sitcom.
Having
tackled the thankless lives of NHS nurses and community care assistants in the
wonderful Getting On and its recent
sequel Going Forward, she now turns
her attentions to social workers in Damned.
Like Getting On, it’s a sympathetic
yet unsentimental comedy inspired by her own experience – a former psychiatric
nurse, she’s the daughter of a social worker – in which harassed carers strive
to do their best under trying circumstances.
The
title comes from the apt observation that social work is an unfairly vilified
occupation in which employees are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. It’s
set in a Children’s Services department where the lifts, toilets and especially
the people who work there, are knackered.
Brand’s
character, Rose, is the spiritual twin of Nurse Kim Wilde from Getting On, a caring professional whose
jaded surface belies a genuine desire to help.
Her
similarly careworn friend and co-worker Al (Alan Davies) is the only other
“normal” member of a staff which includes Peep
Show’s Isy Suttie as a bafflingly exuberant temp, Himesh Patel as an
ex-policeman and humourless stickler for the rules, and the great Kevin Eldon,
that always welcome Zelig of British TV comedy, as an endearingly innocent
office manager.
It’s
a classic workplace sitcom in many ways – long-suffering protagonists
surrounded by “wacky” supporting characters – but it’s largely successful in
its attempts to fuse traditional gags with unforced pathos. Despite the necessarily
stark backdrop of abuse, neglect, illness and desperation, it’s a fundamentally
warm, likeable show.
Co-written
with Morwenna Banks and Will Smith of, respectively, Absolutely and The Thick of
It renown, Damned confirms
Brand’s status as one of the most thoughtful writer/performers in TV comedy.
Back,
unbidden, for a third series, exasperating thriller The Fall is a textbook example of a show that doesn’t know when to
quit.
It
began as a gripping, if questionably violent, cat-and-mouse drama about a
detective hunting a serial killer, but gradually devolved into a
self-indulgent, risible chore.
Its
failings were epitomised by this opening episode, which was preoccupied by an
interminable effort to rescue Paul Spector from death’s door. Why should we
care if he dies or not? He’s a psychopathic, misogynist murderer, and a boring
one to boot.
Whereas
once she proved intriguingly aloof, Gillian Anderson now looks truly fatigued
as DS Gibson. The Fall should be put
out of its misery.
Philip
Glenister scored the easiest pay cheque of his career in The Level, a silly crime drama in which his character was murdered
within the first 10 minutes.
He’ll
presumably return in flashbacks/dream sequences, but the sound of him laughing
all the way to the bank is the only note of joy in this drab account of a
compromised detective trapped in a mild nest of intrigue while self-medicating
her preposterously lenient gunshot wound with ibuprofen and gauze.
You
know you’re watching a redundant thriller when the scenery – Brighton in this
case – is more engaging than the story.
And
how’s this for dialogue?
“The
boss says you used to be school friends.”
“Yeah,
when we were kids.”
The
ideal age to be school friends, I find.
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