TV Review: THE LAST POST + PORRIDGE

This article was originally published in The Courier on 7th October 2017.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

THE LAST POST: Sunday, BBC One

PORRIDGE: Friday, BBC One

History is an endless spin-wash of repeated mistakes, never to be learned from. That’s the sobering message at the heart of THE LAST POST. It’s a sound point, but I didn’t enjoy this new drama from Peter Moffat (Silk; Undercover; Criminal Justice) in the slightest.

Caked in sweat, violence and despair, it’s set in a British military police compound in Aden, Yemen, in 1965.

Aden was one of the oldest colonies in the British Empire. By the mid-1960s, it was a moribund anachronism, one of the final, desperate shreds of this shameful chapter in our great nation’s mission to civilise the world with politely armed oppression.

Potentially fascinating subject matter, but The Last Post is just another staidly prestigious production in which the usual stock cast of decent actors go through the motions while a writer hits you over the head with their political point. Yes, I get it, Peter. The torture of prisoners in Yemen really did resemble the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Let’s smack ourselves sore on the back for recognising that.

It’s such a boring shimmer of expensive waste. The excellent Jessica Raine does a good, committed drunk-act in a drama that no one will remember in six weeks time. The cinematographer might get a BAFTA. Earnest speeches will be made from the podium. Life marches on.

Last year’s unpromising pilot for a new series of the classic prison sitcom PORRIDGE was greeted with a shrug from most viewers and critics, hence the ensuing bafflement when the BBC announced that it had been picked up for a series.

The pilot wasn’t terrible, but it felt pointless. Although episode one of the new series was an improvement – it felt more comfortable in its own skin - there’s still no way of forgetting that you’re not watching Ronnie Barker and co delivering a masterpiece. It’s difficult to appreciate this Porridge on its own terms.

Of course, everyone involved in the production must be acutely aware of that. It’s written by the estimable Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, creators of the original, who couldn’t write a bad half hour of comedy if they tried. But I do wonder whether, in their heart of hearts, they’d rather be writing a brand new sitcom, rather than a tribute to one of their previous successes.

They haven’t altered the original formula at all, which works both for and against it.

Fletch’s grandson is a chip off the old recidivist block. That is, he’s exactly the same character, albeit played by someone else (Kevin Bishop). The younger Fletch is a cyber-criminal (how terribly modern) serving five years in a prison which just so happens to employ a tough, no-nonsense Scottish warder with a well-meaningly lenient sidekick. History repeating, once again.

Bishop has clearly studied Barker’s performance and delivers a likeable imitation. I don’t envy him having to step into such enormous shoes, but he doesn’t embarrass himself in the slightest. Clement and La Frenais still know how to write for Fletch. Again, however, that only serves to encourage comparisons with the original.

It’s a prison from which they can never escape.

This new Porridge is occasionally quite funny, but it’s essentially a competent facsimile of a superior work. It doesn’t really need to exist.

TV Review: APPLE TREE YARD + THE CULT NEXT DOOR

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 28 January 2017.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

APPLE TREE YARD: Sunday, BBC One

THE CULT NEXT DOOR: Thursday, BBC Two

Tired of all the usual Valentine’s Day platitudes? Then why not zing the strings of your lover’s heart with a card declaring: “Sex with you is like being eaten by a wolf”?

Call me old-fashioned, but lupine evisceration doesn’t sound terribly sexy. Then again, to the best of my recollection I’ve never been seduced by a handsome civil servant in a crypt beneath the House of Commons.

That unlikely setting is where our story began in APPLE TREE YARD, an uncomfortably uneven thriller starring Emily Watson as Yvonne, a respectable genetic scientist, and Ben Chaplin as the wolfish stranger who detonates her polite upper middle-class existence with a series of thrilling sexual encounters in public places (including a café bathroom conveniently bereft of other afternoon customers).

Middle-aged Yvonne is unhappily married to a university lecturer (Scottish actor Mark Bonnar, who’s cornered the market in instantly suspicious characters) who, or so it would blatantly appear, has had an affair with a younger student.

After delivering evidence to a Parliamentary select committee – erotically-charged events at the best of times – she’s whisked off her sensibly-shoed feet by Chaplin’s carnal politico. Suddenly she feels desirable again, and so embarks on a risky affair.

Were it not for some typically solid, nuanced work from Watson and a shocking final scene, most of Apple Tree Yard’s opening instalment would’ve come across as little more than an unusually earnest Mills & Boon fantasy.

Granted, it played a fairly diverting guessing game. It began in media res with a manacled Yvonne being led to the dock, so something awful was bound to occur (it wouldn’t be much of a drama otherwise).

Like Yvonne, we don’t know anything about her nameless seducer. Is he just a harmless swinger, or something much darker? That wolf reference was already risible, but was it also a heavy-handed allusion to his swanky sheep’s clothing? So far at least, all of this turned out to be an effective piece of misdirection.

Having being led to assume that Chaplin’s character was the sole cause of Yvonne’s foreshadowed demise, in the final scene she was viciously raped by a hitherto inconsequential supporting character.

It’s impossible to fully assess Apple Tree Yard on the basis of one episode, especially in light of its horrific denouement. Its borderline silly aspects may prove deliberate in hindsight, there to lull scoffers into a false sense of security.

This is the story of a woman being punished for daring to enjoy the sexual freedom afforded to men. It’s the story of a rape victim.

If handled carefully, it could prove far more indelible than its initial impression.

A disturbing account of brainwashed incarceration was exposed in THE CULT NEXT DOOR, which told the true story of three women who spent more than 30 years in a Brixton flat under the tyrannical spell of an insane Maoist doomsday preacher.

Directed with typically blunt delicacy by the documentarian Vanessa Engle – a film-maker renowned for historical explorations of leftist politics - it allowed two of Aravindan Balaksrishnan’s prisoners to speak for themselves.

One of them, Katy, was born in captivity. Balakrishnan’s daughter, she’s a young woman with the mental age of a ten-year-old.

Despite finding shards of gallows humour within the rubble of its deadly serious subject matter, Engle’s film mounted a sorrowful case against extremist political maniacs who draw vulnerable people into their hermetic orbits.  

TV Review: MY MOTHER AND OTHER STRANGERS + THE PITY OF WAR: THE LIVES AND LOVES OF THE WAR POETS

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 19 November 2016.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

MY MOTHER AND OTHER STRANGERS

Sunday, BBC One

THE PITY OF WAR: THE LIVES AND LOVES OF THE WAR POETS

Sunday, STV

As befits the spirit of Remembrance Sunday, our rival networks came together last weekend to commemorate both world wars.

Despite being tainted with a nagging tug of predictability, BBC One’s MY MOTHER AND OTHER STRANGERS is a fairly promising new drama about life in a rural Northern Ireland parish in 1943.

The opening scenes didn’t bode well. They unfurled in a studiously tasteful procession of wartime clichés: children staring up at bombers flying overhead; women in woollen berets riding bicycles; flat-capped men grumbling about spam; US airmen swaggering into town on a wave of big band jazz (“All right, boys, this is a dance, but they call it a ceilidh!”).

The only thing missing was our old friend, the untethered horse cantering down a cobbled high street.

Thankfully, those dubious first impressions were gradually laid to rest. Much like Call the Midwife, this is a cosmetically pretty – it’s beautifully photographed - yet fundamentally solemn and understated Sunday night confection.

Our protagonists are the Coyne family. Mother Rose (Hattie Morahan, hitherto best known as the neurotic Jane from Outnumbered) is an educated Englishwoman whose role as a pillar of the community still can’t overcome her alien status. Although somewhat snobbish, she’s perceptive, humane and – so it transpired – willing to take up arms.

Her conflicted Irish husband, Michael, runs the local boozer, while her teenage daughter and young son (whose weathered adult narration, courtesy of Ciaran Hinds, provides the requisite air of ambiguous nostalgia) struggle to make sense of their war-torn playground.

In time-honoured and occasionally over-literal fashion, it’s a child’s-eye view of a perplexing adult world.

When Rose encountered a Tennyson-quoting US army captain (Mad Men actor Aaron Staton) on a picturesque clifftop, the stage was set for an inevitable “will they, won’t they?” romance. Likewise, there were few surprises in the story of Rose’s innocent daughter falling for a charming American airman. His cards were marked from the moment he appeared.

Nevertheless, it was a rather poignant vignette about adolescent confusion and the tragedy of young men being sent off to certain death. These stories are fictional, although loosely based on actual incidents. A palpable sense of sadness permeates proceedings, and writer Barry Devlin isn’t afraid to explore the underlying darkness, violence and bigotry of his rain-drenched parish.

If he cuts back on the clichés, then I don’t see why this sincerely tender drama couldn’t run and run.

Though generally dismissed as a bulwark of bottom-drawer populism, ITV is very occasionally capable of producing programmes of surprising sensitivity and depth.

THE PITY OF WAR: THE LIVES AND LOVES OF THE WAR POETS was one such anomaly.

This one-off docudrama paid tribute to the soldiers whose experiences in the trenches during World War One inspired some the greatest anti-war poetry ever written.

It was framed by John Hurt as an ageing Siegfried Sassoon, still haunted by the war 50 years later. The great Thespian’s husky voice caressed Sassoon’s starkly disillusioned words, while younger actors read from letters, diaries and poems to provide a horrifyingly vivid picture of life on the frontline.

The emotionally-charged yet platonic mentor/student relationship between Sassoon and Wilfred Owen was touchingly portrayed. Owen, our greatest wartime poet, was killed in action just one week before Armistice Day. But his harrowing work lives on.

This graceful programme served as a fitting testament to the subversive genius of two outstanding poets, and to the fallen soldiers whose hellish nightmare they immortalised so unsparingly.

TV Review: DAMILOLA, OUR LOVED BOY + CLOSE TO THE ENEMY

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 12 November 2016.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

Damilola, Our Loved Boy: Monday, BBC One

Close to the Enemy: Thursday, BBC Two

  

Nigerian schoolboy Damilola Taylor was 10-years-old when he was fatally attacked on a Peckham estate in November 2000. The image of this innocent, smiling child seared itself on the nation’s consciousness, an unwitting emblem of growing fears over inner city knife crime.

Following a prolonged, controversial trial, two teenagers were eventually charged with manslaughter.

The shock of this senseless crime still reverberates, hence Damilola, Our Loved Boy, a deeply moving drama made with support from the Taylors.

Primarily framed through the eyes of Damilola’s father, Richard, it went behind the headlines to explore the anguish of a family struggling with unimaginable tragedy.

The establishing scenes of the Taylors living a happy life in Nigeria – Richard was a successful businessman with government connections – were weighted with a sense of impending horror.

The Taylors moved to England so that Richard’s British-born daughter could receive urgent NHS treatment for her epilepsy. Writer Levi David Addai didn’t need to stress the terrible irony of parents losing a child while seeking to save the life of another.

Damilola’s excitement about moving to this land of hope and glory was heart-breaking. Breadwinner Richard stayed behind as the family moved into a cramped Peckham flat. Seven months later, Damilola was dead.

Certain scenes lingered long after the credits had rolled. The mounting panic of Damilola’s mother when he didn’t return from school; his guilt-stricken older brother phoning Richard to break the awful news; Richard visiting the scene of Damilola’s murder, then eventually breaking down away from the gaze of the family for whom he tried to remain strong.

With admirable honesty, it depicted Richard as an often myopically proud and moral man who, via sincerely noble deeds in the local community, neglected the needs of his family while trying to make sense of Damilola’s death. But that was his way of dealing with guilt and grief.

Sensitively handled by all concerned – Babou Ceesay was particularly outstanding as Richard – this necessarily upsetting film succeeded by stating its nuanced, complex case without a trace of tabloid hysteria.   

One thing we can all agree on about divisive auteur Stephen Poliakoff is that no one makes television quite like him. He’s an eccentric genre unto himself. For some, his work is agonisingly mannered and opaque. For others, myself included broadly speaking, those affectations are often quite appealing.

So what to make of Close to the Enemy, in which he rakes over his trademark obsessions with hot jazz, war criminals and the haunted glamour of barely populated luxury hotels? It’s tempting to assume that he’s trolling his critics with a Bingo-card summation of every Poliakoff drama ever made.

Set in the bomb-damaged London of 1946, just as the Cold War began, it pivots on a strange performance from Jim Sturgess as a maverick military intelligence agent tasked with securing the services of a reluctant German scientist.

With his shop-damaged chocolatey diction and eyebrows a-cocked a la Roger Moore, he appears to be sending the whole thing up. I don’t quite know what the hell he’s doing, but it’s certainly entertaining.

Like Poliakoff’s last tribute to his own oeuvre, Dancing on the Edge, it’ll probably squander its vague promise by drifting languidly up its own fundament. In which case, the BBC may finally decide to stop throwing money at this self-indulgent oddball.

But I must admit, it’s perversely pleasing that he’s managed to reign unfettered for so long. There’s something to be said for public disservice broadcasting. 

TV Review: NEW BLOOD + UK'S BEST PART TIME BAND

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 11th June 2016.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

New Blood: Thursday, BBC One

UK’s Best Part Time Band: Friday, BBC Four

I don’t know what’s worse: the murky world of illegal medical testing, or New Blood, an atrocious BBC thriller about the murky world of illegal medical testing.

Written – or rather, assembled – by Anthony Horowitz, the creator of somnambulant detective drama Foyle’s War, it’s a bizarrely inept, dated concoction. With its hackneyed script, woefully over-stylised direction and one-note acting, it’s like a bad ‘90s children’s drama fused with Hollyoaks After Dark. 

Horowitz, who’s 61, has committed the excruciating crime of delivering an old man’s idea of a cutting edge youth drama.

The plot? Well, if you must. A group of penniless British backpackers answer an advert for paid medical testing while travelling in India. For some reason, one of them goes crazy and stabs a nurse with a scalpel. Six years later in London, another member of the group is found dead after falling from a building. It looks like suicide, but Rash, an ambitious young PC, suspects foul play.

Meanwhile, Stefan from the fraud squad has gone undercover to investigate a corrupt pharmaceutical company. Even though he lives with a bunch of lazy Poles – not my assessment, that’s how they’re depicted – his attempt at a Polish accent makes him sound like the world’s worst Borat impersonator.

Somehow – it doesn’t really matter – he and Rash eventually team up to expose a conspiracy that so far involves a predatory homosexual, a stereotypical oddball who lives with his mum, the kind of sexy female assassins who only exist in bad thrillers, and Scottish actor Mark Bonnar playing a sinister man from the ministry, just as he did in the recent Undercover. 

His presence serves as a reminder that, for all its flaws, Undercover was a far superior conspiracy thriller than New Blood. Then again, so is an average episode of Father Dowling Investigates.

Horowitz is obviously trying to say something important about state corruption and the trials of modern metropolitan living, but he delivers his message with all the subtlety of an H bomb. 

It’s a blandly mechanical drama, unencumbered by depth or nuance. Every line of dialogue is lazily culled from the big book of cop show clichés: poor Mark Addy is particularly ill-served by the thankless role of a truculent copper defined by a constant belch of tiresome sarcasm.

Conclusion: Horowitz wrote this, barely, while recovering from the effects of a medical experiment gone wrong. It’s the only feasible explanation. 2016 has been an exceptional year for BBC drama so far. This is a major step backwards.

A benign antidote to The X Factor, UK’s Best Part Time Band is a cheerful series in which comedian and DJ Rhod Gilbert trawls the country looking for, well, the title says it all. There’s no prize as such. Instead it aims to celebrate people who make music for, in Gilbert’s words, “the sheer bloody love of it.” They aren’t after riches and fame, they simply dig what they do.

In the latest episode he travelled around the north and the midlands with affable Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook, who offered polite constructive criticism and advice to various unsung musicians.

An eclectic bunch, they included a “modern mariachi” band who rehearse in the bedroom of their primary school teacher/leader’s mum, a punk band consisting of junior doctors, and a ska band fronted by three middle-aged factory worker brothers.

Without resorting to cheap sentiment, it’s a quietly heart-warming tribute to everyday folk with talent, commitment and desire.

TV Review: CHURCHILL'S SECRET + MURDER + BROKEN BISCUITS

A version of this article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 5th March 2016.

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

Churchill's Secret: Sunday, STV

Murder: Thursday, BBC Two

Broken Biscuits: Friday BBC One

Michael Gambon is an actor who's never been troubled by vanity. 30 years ago he gained TV immortality as the psoriasis-ridden centrepiece of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective. In Churchill's Secret he reaffirmed his prone position as Britain's leading bed-based Thespian. It was a finer performance than most actors manage in a vertical lifetime.

In 1953, during his final term as Prime Minister, Churchill suffered a life-threatening stroke which left him in no state to govern. Unbeknownst to the public at the time, the king was on his deathbed, leaving Britain without a leader.

Though he eventually recovered and lived for another 12 years, this standalone drama proved quite effective in examining the trials of an almost mythical symbol of indomitable spirit struggling with mortal decay. It was King Lear, basically, but with a vaguely happy ending.

A slurring mound of crumpled pathos, Gambon's Churchill was surrounded by his family – and by tacit extension, the nation - in a state of disarray. Having lived for decades in the Great Man's shadow, how would they cope without him? They needed him, were defined by him. But did he ever truly need them? Yes, as it turned out.

Chief among his bedside fretters was his loyal wife, Clemmie, played by Lindsay Duncan with her usual powdery steel and poise. Her determination to preserve his dignity was quite touching, but typical of the (very British) reserve which defined the production; unseemly displays of sentiment were kept under wraps.

While its avoidance of schmaltz was commendable – just think of how glutinous this story of undying love between a Great Man and his Rock could've been – its reserve worked against it in the end; while it's probably asking too much of a drama to teach us anything “new” about Churchill at this stage, this modest little chamber piece didn't say much of interest about him at all.

He was an irascible ox with a marshmallow centre? I suppose that counts as insight, of sorts.

It's a shame, as on the whole the script managed to avoid the usual biopic crime of grinding heavy-handedness. That is, apart from when it came to Romola Garai's no-nonsense northern nurse – no screen northerner has ever been shown to suffer nonsense knowingly – who wasn't so much a character as a fictional plot device against which Clemmie could deliver exposition and gradually unload her repressed emotions.

The subtext of Garai's nurse being a working-class, left-wing modern woman rebelling against Churchill's patriarchal empire was so half-hearted, they needn't have bothered.

It was a quietly admirable production in many ways, but like Churchill after a few too many brandies and cigars, it could only be approached at arm's length.

The disappointing follow-up to a BAFTA-winning single drama from 2013, Murder comprises three plays in which a small cast of actors explore different facets of a fictional murder case via monologues delivered straight to camera. This inventive approach worked the first time, but here the effect proved cold, mannered, alienating and pretentious. 

For a supposedly intense meditation on grief and trauma, it was curiously flat and underwhelming; an overcooked bore. The mystery involving the corpse of a man dragged from the River Tweed near Peebles wasn't sufficiently interesting, and for all his attempts at emotional complexity, writer Robert Jones failed to get under the skin of his tortured characters. An ambitious failure, sadly.

Writer/director Craig Cash (The Royle Family; Early Doors) employed a similar stylistic approach to more promising effect in Broken Biscuits, a sitcom pilot shown as part of the BBC's Comedy Playhouse strand.

Indebted to Alan Bennett's peerless Talking Heads, this compendium of gently overlapping vignettes was faultlessly delivered by a cast including Alison Steadman and Alun Armstrong as fussy B&B owners – Steadman's fixed grin was a particular highlight – plus Stephanie Cole and Timothy West as a gossipy couple obsessed with their smoke alarm. But the most intriguing segment involved a young doctor and his disabled brother, whose wry inner monologue only we were privvy to.

Infused with Cash's usual warmth and observational wit, I hope it returns for a full series. Plus, any show that uses Tom Waits' heart-tugging Take It With Me as its theme song is A-okay by me.

TV Review: WAR AND PEACE + DEUTSCHLAND '83

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 9th January 2016.

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

War and Peace: Sunday, BBC One

Deutschland '83: Sunday, Channel 4

Paul Whitelaw

The prospect of reading War and Peace is so notoriously daunting, its mythical reputation as an insurmountable literary Everest is probably more well-known than the contents of the book itself.

Most of us know the gist of Tolstoy's epic tome, thanks to endless references in popular culture. But have you actually read this gargantuan Napoleonic saga? I haven't. However, I've seen Woody Allen's hilarious parody, Love and Death, more often than I've seen my own reflection. Isn't that enough?

Even Andrew Davies, who adapts classic novels for breakfast, hadn't read it until the BBC asked him to write a six episode adaptation. Despite his trepidation, he eventually discovered that it wasn't an impenetrable chore after all, but a page-turner packed with romance, drama, action and satire. 

Of course, this will come as no surprise to anyone who's read it, but as we've established, no one ever has.

Davies is the ideal man for this ambitious task. He has a gift for condensing classic texts without sacrificing the essentials. His adaptations are accessible, but hardly dumbed down. The opening scene of this impressive production was a deft case in point. Set during a lavish drawing room ball, it introduced a banquet of characters without any fuss or confusion - unless you were playing familiar TV actor Bingo, in which case you probably missed most of the dialogue.

If a visiting alien were to switch on a TV at random, he'd be forgiven for thinking that the only working actors in Britain are Stephen Rea, Jim Broadbent, Tuppence Middleton, James Norton and Rebecca Front. They're all great, but must they appear in everything?

A refreshing presence among this plethora of ubiquitous faces was American actor Paul Dano as nebbishy hero Pierre. The illegitimate son of a wealthy nobleman, his liberal idealism is tested when he suddenly inherits a vast fortune. 

Played by Dano as a fretting, fumbling, bespectacled mouse caught in the sights of an oncoming lawnmower, Pierre contends with a scheming uncle – Rea, looking as always like a camel sucking a lozenge wryly – and an arranged bride (Middleton) who'd rather have his money than his milksop body. 

She's also having an incestuous relationship with her brother, a bizarre sub-plot which, according to Davies, is subtly implied in Tolstoy's novel. I'll take his word for that.

Despite his respect for his source materials, Davies is a mischievous adaptor. I can't be alone in detecting the ribald double-meaning of lines such as: “You need to let the old Count see you before he dies.” That's no accident, it's a cheeky Max Miller gag.

Director Tom Harper (This Is England '86; Peaky Blinders) also deserves credit for creating such a visually sumptuous, pacey treat. It doesn't drag in the slightest. A co-production with the Weinstein Group, no expense has been spared on striking costumes and palatial European locations. The grimly insane battle scenes, though presumably populated by just a few dozen extras, are a bold lesson in creative editing. Yes, the cast is over-familiar, but they fill their roles with aplomb. It's a stunning production oozing with charm, wit and class.

Old Tolstoy will be delighted by the boost in book sales.

Showing as part of Channel 4's admirable new commitment to foreign drama, Deutschland '83 is a Cold War thriller steeped in suitably pallid period detail. Unfortunately, it squanders an intriguing premise – a young East German solider is press-ganged into working undercover in the West – with a curiously superficial tone. It's so light and predictable, all potential tension is lost.

I'm usually a sucker for any '80s-based political drama stacked against the backdrop of nuclear annihilation, but even I must concede that Deutschland '83 is, at best, only mildly diverting.

A disappointment, but looking on the bright side there should hopefully be some gems in the rest of Channel 4's new overseas consignment. Onwards and upwards, as Brezhnev used to say.

TV Review: LUTHER + LOVE YOU TO DEATH: A YEAR OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 19th December 2015.

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

Luther: Tuesday, BBC One

Love You To Death: A Year of Domestic Violence: Wednesday, BBC Two

Paul Whitelaw

There was a moment in the latest episode of Luther so perfect in its knowing heavy-handedness, I suspect that writer Neil Cross has been waiting to use it ever since he created this uniquely ludicrous series.

As we reconvened with TV's most dysfunctional maverick cop, he was living in a remote cottage on a much-needed leave of absence. The location of his hideaway? On the edge of a precipitous cliff. That's right, he's literally living on the edge. In case you didn't pick up on this hilariously blatant visual metaphor, Cross even had a character point it out. That one moment encapsulated the tongue-in-cheek absurdity of this bombastic thriller.

After being told that Alice, his psychotic paramour, wasn't dead after all, Luther (Idris Elba) returned to London to find out the truth. This involved a series of, even by his standards, insanely reckless set-pieces. Only Luther would breeze into a pub full of armed criminals and, while staring down the barrel of a gun, defuse the situation with insouciant amusement rather than chair-tossing aggression. King of the barely calculated risk, he makes Jack Bauer look like an over-cautious pen-pusher.

Later he barged into a building rigged with explosives and emerged, via an air duct, without a scratch. Luther, played by Elba with a fascinatingly unfathomable, charismatic eccentricity/wooden sincerity (possibly both), is basically an indestructible superhero living in a heightened universe of grotesque, violent fantasy. The back-in-business scene of him putting on his familiar grey overcoat was the “Hell yeah!” equivalent of Tony Stark climbing into his Iron Man costume.

Typically, his latest nemesis is no mere murderer. No, he's a grandiloquent serial killer with a penchant for cannibal erotica. I wouldn't expect anything less.

Some have argued that Luther wallows irresponsibly in OTT violence, but surely that's the point? We're not supposed to take it seriously. Cross is fully aware of all the cop show tropes and clichés, hence why he has such fun with them. It's why Luther is far more entertaining than most UK detective dramas. It is, like the man himself, a brazenly confident, self-amused barnstormer.

Sadly, thanks to Elba's rising international profile, it's only back for two episodes this time. I hope he always finds time in his schedule to return to this preposterous role.

Mindless escapism is all very well, but we should never ignore the reality of unflinching documentaries such as Love You To Death: A Year of Domestic Violence. A sad, humane, compassionate film, it shed light on the shocking issue of fatal violence against women.

In 2013 alone, 86 women were murdered either by their partner or ex-partner. The programme honoured them all by listing their names and the circumstances of their deaths. Its point was clear: these were human beings, not mere newspaper headlines.

Some of the women received more attention via emotional testimonies from their friends and families. These accounts were necessarily blunt and upsetting. Shying away from the violent details of such crimes would rob them of their awful truth.

A heavy sense of tragic inevitability permeated each of these stories. It was a sobering litany of oppressive, violent, mentally ill men terrorising women behind closed doors. Meanwhile, their loved ones were left behind to grieve and pick up the pieces.

Without doubt one of the most important pieces of television I've seen in some time.

TV Review: CAPITAL and ARENA: NIGHT AND DAY

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 28 November 2015.

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

Capital: Tuesday, BBC One

Arena: Night and Day: Sunday, BBC Four

Paul Whitelaw

Like a sinister live-action Pigeon Street, Capital unfolds on a single London street populated by residents from various economic and ethnic backgrounds. Modern Britain in microcosm.

One morning they each receive a mysterious postcard through their letterboxes, bearing the stark legend: “We Want What You Have.” The sender of this subtly threatening missive had yet to be revealed by the end of episode one of this intriguing new drama, but whoever they are it's probably safe to assume that they're making a vigilante stand against rocketing property prices in the area.

Adapted by leading TV dramatist Peter Bowker from the best-selling novel by John Lanchester, Capital makes no bones about its satirical intent. Yes, it's occasionally heavy-handed – the closing montage of our miserable protagonists scored to Hark! The Herald Angels Sing! was straight out of an EastEnders Christmas special – but that's surely intentional.

Credulity may have been stretched by the closing shot of “We Want What You Have” daubed in enormous letters along the length of the street, but only if we approach Capital as an earnest piece of social realism. It's not. It's a tragicomic polemic.

That layer of discomfiting humour is typified by Detectorists co-stars Toby Jones and Rachael Stirling as an investment banker and his spendthrift wife. Owners of a multimillion pound property that would've once been home to lower middle-class families, their unhappy, sterile existence is a nightmare vision of success. Their children are just another accessory, an achievement on a par with their house extension.

Upon being informed that he'd received less than half of his promised £1m bonus, a furious Jones delivered the key, soul-shrivelling line: “What use is £30,000 to anybody?!”

Neighbours include Gemma Jones as an elderly widow with a terminal illness who's witnessed decades of change first-hand, a Zimbabwean refugee living under a false identity, a Polish builder tasked with building dream homes for his employers, and a Muslim family with two adult sons, one righteously devout, the other more measured in his beliefs.

However it pans out, it's refreshing to see a primetime TV drama tackling immigration, greed and social inequality in a witty, thoughtful, timely manner. Despite being set in a city where, unlike anywhere else in recession-hobbled Britain, property prices continue to soar, its themes strike a chord nationwide.

A harbinger of quality, that bobbing neon Arena bottle scored to Eno's Another Green Day is the most weirdly moving ident in British television history. Arena: Night and Day paid suitably esoteric tribute to its record-breaking 40-year reign as our greatest arts strand.

Introduced by John Lloyd as “an evocation” of its irreverent, witty spirit, this new film was a beautifully edited, dawn-to-dusk archive mosaic starring such diverse luminaries as Orson Welles, Poly Sytrene, Francis Bacon, Tony Hancock, Kendo Nagasaki, Gerald Scarfe, Yoko Ono, Mel Brooks, Sister Wendy and Elvis Presley's personal cook.

Its diversity was illustrated via highlights such as a massed ukulele recital at a George Formby convention in Blackpool, Andy Warhol and William Burroughs schmoozing at the infamous Chelsea Hotel, a politely baffled Mick Jagger being introduced to every single member of a Moroccan drumming troupe, and Jeffrey Bernard avoiding deadlines while boozing with Tom Baker in Soho.

A mere best-of compilation wouldn't have done justice to Arena's unconventional vision. This charming celebration was the perfect birthday gift.

TV Review: LONDON SPY and JOSH

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 14th November 2015.

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

London Spy: Monday, BBC Two

Josh: Wednesday, BBC Three

Paul Whitelaw

A few years ago Ben Whishaw starred in Criminal Justice, a gripping BBC drama about a young man trapped in a waking nightmare after being wrongly accused of murder. Last week he starred in London Spy, a gripping BBC drama about a young man trapped in, well, you get the picture.

It's easy to see why Whishaw, a fine, interesting actor, gets cast in such roles. His ability to project boyish, vulnerable charm makes him an ideal candidate for torture of this kind. The scrawny sod, he's innately sympathetic.

In London Spy he plays Danny, a lonely gay romantic on a path of self-destruction. Early one morning by the Thames, after a solitary night of hedonism, he has a chance encounter with Alex, a fellow lost soul.

In typical romantic fiction style, they couldn't be more different. Danny is garrulous and indie-kid scruffy, while Alex is an inscrutable model of Savile Row elegance with the face of a sad-eyed camel. After a faltering start, they eventually embark upon an intense eight-month relationship.

Socially maladroit Alex claims to be a virgin, so Danny – who has a complex sexual past – takes care of that. They fall madly in love. It's all rather touching, and hardly what you'd expect from a drama titled London Spy. We're all expecting some sort of thriller twist, of course, but the slow-burning build created an unexpected, disarming mood.

Then one day Alex mysteriously disappears. Danny is heartbroken. Under curious circumstances, he eventually manages to enter Alex's apartment, where he's shocked – as you would be – to discover a secret attic full of bondage gear drugs, sex toys... and Alex's corpse squeezed inside a trunk.

Suddenly, and quite brilliantly, a sensitive love story has transformed into a bizarre, dark conspiracy thriller. Naturally, Danny is suspect number one, but how can he answer questions about a partner who'd apparently lied to him all along? It's a classic Hitchcockian 'Wrong Man' premise, made all the more effective for taking its time to establish character first.

Handsomely shot, thoughtfully written and superbly performed – Jim Broadbent, without a hint of “old queen” cliché, is wonderful as Danny's wealthy saviour/mentor – London Spy is one of the boldest dramas of the year so far. Despite playing along with standard spy conventions, it's emotionally richer and more offbeat than yer average thriller.

Writer Tom Rob Smith is the partner of Ben Stephenson, the Controller of BBC Drama Commissioning. Normally that would set off the nepotism klaxon to cacophonous levels, but in this case it's clearly been commissioned on its own merits. No, really. It's excellent.

By contrast, Josh, a new sitcom vehicle for comedian Josh Widdicombe, is entirely standard stuff. Based around three flatmates in their early thirties, plus their know-it-all landlord (Jack Dee, clocking in), its humour is almost exclusively based around tired, overdone pop culture puns and references: vaguely amusing pub banter at best.

It's also cursed by a particular kind of 21^st century comedy performance style that's like Kryptonite to myself and anyone else who's latched onto it. It's basically an irksome marriage of Alan Partridge emphasis, Martin Freeman awkwardness and Bill Nighy vagueness, which around 80% of British comic actors under 40 have appropriated in the last decade. 

Widdicombe is particularly guilty. He sounds like a helium-addled Partridge with lockjaw.

Still, nice use of Big Maybelle's version of 96 Tears over the end credits. I'll give them that.

TV Review: RIVER and THE RETURNED

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 17 October 2015.

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

River: Tuesday, BBC One

The Returned: Friday, More4

Paul Whitelaw

Just when you thought the hoary old cliché of the troubled detective with an extensive vinyl collection had been pummelled beyond repair, along comes River to show that there's life in the old dog yet.

The effectiveness of this new cop drama from Abi Morgan (The Hour) is enormously surprising, as from the moment I first heard about it I assumed the worst. After all, the very concept of a maverick cop named John River sounds ridiculous. 

It reminded me instinctively of Simon Day as John Actor in The Fast Show's Monkfish sketches (“John Actor is a tough, uncompromising inspector/doctor/vet...”).

However, putting aside the vast unlikelihood of the great Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard playing a character named John River, this is undoubtedly the most confident attempt yet at transplanting the existential angst of Nordic noir to British climes. Face facts, From Darkness.

The opening ten minutes alone offered some of the most arresting drama I've seen on TV all year. Scored to Tina Charles' disco classic I Love To Love, the sequence immediately established a warm, understated chemistry between the endearingly discomfited River and his more exuberant partner DS Stevenson (the always believable Nicola Walker, who also shines at the moment in ITV's above-par crime drama Unforgotten).

Their affectionate banter was punctured suddenly when River spotted a petty drug dealer. Chasing him on foot, our wheezy, ageing hero unwittingly drove the suspect to his death. The scene that followed seemed standard at first: River's weary chief (the wonderful Lesley Manville of Mike Leigh renown) arrived to chastise him for causing the young man's demise.

As Stevenson offered him support, the camera span around slowly to reveal a gaping wound on the back of her head. She'd been killed in action, and now exists only in grieving River's mind. It's a measure of how well this twist was handled that its invocation of another great comedy sketch – Chuffy, the imaginary sidekick from Armstrong & Miller – didn't make me laugh. It was so unforeseen, I admired its audacity.

It transpired that River is haunted by other ghosts, namely a murdered teenage girl whom he'd failed to rescue, and – there's no way of describing this without it sounding ridiculous – a 19^th century serial killer (Eddie Marsan, another gifted Leigh veteran). They're voices in his head, a manifestation of his troubled psyche. Ghosts who assist him in solving problems. 

If his noggin wasn't already crowded enough, the episode ended with a bedtime visit from the innocent man he "murdered" at the top of the episode. It's quite a party in there.

Judged incorrectly, this swirling cavalcade of psychological eccentricity could easily descend into farce. But so far at least, River gets the tone just right. It's rather subversive and unusual in an intelligent, dry-witted way. Skarsgard inhabits the role of River with sad-eyed charm and intensity. For once, the old cop-with-a-difference cliché seems justified.

Bathed in shades of medicinal green and nocturnal red, it's also directed with a sharp eye for striking composition. Delightfully, this highly promising show confounded all my expectations.

One of my favourite dramas of recent years, The Returned made good on its title last week for a second series of French supernatural mystery. Despite its ambiguous finale, I actually felt quite satisfied with series one as a self-contained piece. Is another series necessary?

Steeped in glacial intrigue, the opening episode suggested that there's more to be gleaned from this everyday saga of a remote French town populated by photogenic zombies.

Granted, thanks to a two year transmission gap between series, it took me about half an hour to fully remember who the hell everyone was. But once the fog had cleared, I was cautiously hooked all over again.

God only knows if it'll ever make complete sense, but that's not really the point. It's a disquietingly atmospheric mood piece, an exercise in odd, beautiful Twin Peaks-esque style. I'm glad it's back, to linger in the memory like one of River's manifests.  

TV Review: AGATHA CHRISTIE'S PARTNERS IN CRIME and LIFE IN SQUARES

This article was originally published in The Courier on Saturday 1st August 2015.

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

Agatha Christie's Partners In Crime: Sunday, BBC One

Life In Squares: Monday, BBC Two

Paul Whitelaw

Though never as popular as Poirot and Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford were fond favourites of their creator Agatha Christie. She first introduced these happily married sleuths in 1922 and returned to them sporadically throughout her career. Their final appearance was in the last novel published before her death in 1973.

The Tommy and Tuppence canon is slim, however, hence why it's rarely been adapted for television. So, seeing as Poirot and Marple have been milked dry, no wonder the BBC have turned to the Beresfords for one more squeeze of the udder.

The first thing you notice about Agatha Christie's Partners In Crime is how expensive it looks. That £6m budget is visible in every vintage car, costume and immaculately dressed location. But these glossy trimmings can't compensate for the second thing you notice: there is zero chemistry between David Walliams and Jessica Raine as Tommy and Tuppence.

Walliams has shown in the past that he's a decent dramatic actor, but he looks painfully ill at ease here. Then again, even the world's greatest Thesp might struggle with such a poorly written role.

By rights, we should regard Tommy as a charming idler who gradually overcomes his natural cowardice by plunging into danger alongside his intrepid wife. But he comes across in this adaptation as such a soggy bore, it's no wonder Tuppence looks so exasperated with him. Their adventures are supposed to be a thrilling escape from their aimless existence, not from their marriage. A few flashes of warmth aside, they don't even seem to like each other very much.

Raine fares better as Tuppence, whose thirst for adventure drives the plot. Ably assisted by a bevy of attractive hats, she plays her with a kind of prim seriousness that occasionally bubbles over into breathless enthusiasm. It's telling that the best scenes involve her investigating the case alone. But she's got no chance of injecting any spark into her scenes with Walliams.

Even moments which should play to his comic strengths – e.g. Tommy being propositioned by prostitutes – are played monotonously straight. It's as if he's deliberately acting against his natural instincts, to prove there's more to him than camp tomfoolery. All he's proved is there's less.

However, despite his flat performance, the show does work in places. It wisely obeys one of the cardinal comic-thriller rules, namely that the villains must be genuinely threatening. Indeed, Partners In Crime is surprisingly violent at times, but that just adds to the zippy sense of peril. If the villains weren't authentically nasty, then we wouldn't buy into the central conceit of two ordinary people being dangerously out of their depth.

It also clatters along in a busy riot of twists and clues, so much so that the plot almost doesn't matter. While that may irk Christie purists, it does at least result in a fairly enjoyable piece of Sunday night escapism. You'll barely remember a thing about it afterwards – Walliams looks lost during it – but it passes time agreeably enough. So that's £6m well spent, then.

A more modest affair, Life In Squares is an intriguing period drama about the Bloomsbury Set, that radical group of intellectuals who cocked a snook – and more besides – at the strictures of Victorian England.

It's an elegantly claustrophobic meditation on sex and art as intensely entwined bedfellows, as Virginia Woolf and her artist sister Vanessa fight to establish independence years ahead of their time. An intelligently written, subtly performed and beautifully photographed slow-burner with occasional flashes of fire. 

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.