TV Review: NATIONAL TREASURE + PARANOID

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 24 September 2016.

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

National Treasure: Tuesday, Channel 4

Paranoid: Thursday, STV

Operation Yewtree and the VIP sex scandal is one of the biggest talking points of our age, so it was only a matter of time before it became the subject of a TV drama. Although the estimable Line of Duty recently employed it as a bold thematic plot point, National Treasure places the issue centre stage.

The treasure in question is Paul Finchley, a much-loved fictional comedy legend played by the similarly beloved yet non-fictional Robbie Coltrane.

He’s a charming, loving family man. His wife (Julie Walters) adores him even more than his public. He seems harmless. And then one morning the doorbell rings.

The police question him about an historic rape allegation. He denies all wrongdoing. The press get hold of the story – seemingly after a tip-off from the cops – and his life falls apart.

Gradually it’s revealed that Finchley isn’t as cuddly as he seems. He watches porn, cheats on his wife and sleeps with prostitutes. He’s seedy, dubious, but that doesn’t mean he’s a rapist. Does it?

Taking as his cue the compulsion, both in the media and among sections of society, to judge public figures before they’ve been proven innocent or guilty, writer Jack Thorne encourages us to regard Finchley with cautious suspicion.

An intriguing scene with Finchley and his psychologically damaged daughter (Andrea Riseborough) is key to the ambiguity running throughout episode one. When she tells him about a violent dream she had in which he sexualised her, is she unlocking a traumatic childhood memory?

Coltrane is superb as the pathetic, troubling, yet weirdly vulnerable Finchley, and Thorne handles this sensitive material in a measured way.

When more women came forward to accuse Finchley of sex offences, the stage was set for an exploration of a contentious area. But I worry that, should Finchley be found innocent, then this topical drama may lend credence to the dangerous culture of victim-blaming. Also, in purely dramatic terms, if Finchley is guilty, then the story might unfold exactly as expected. But as we know from real life, such stories often do.

Thorne, having decided to tackle such a complex issue, will have thought about this challenge in some depth – I admired his avoidance of obvious character exposition and authored moralising - so it will be interesting to see if he succeeds in overcoming potential pitfalls.

If he does, then National Treasure could be the nuanced, thought-provoking drama this subject both deserves and demands.

Aren’t you sick of thrillers in which people with mental health issues are portrayed as dangers to society, especially when – cliché of clichés – they’re off their meds? Paranoid was guilty of this and more.

A quotidian police procedural, it features standard beats such as a quipping crime scene investigation, cops receiving cryptic messages from a mysterious stranger ahead of the game, and a psychiatrist helpfully providing simplistic medical exposition. It even threw in a female Scandi-cop for good measure.

It attempts to embellish its investigators with details of their troubled private lives, but Scott & Bailey it ain’t. However, this allows the ever-reliable Robert Glenister to deliver solid work as a depressed copper suffering panic attacks. Elsewhere, Lesley Sharp is unnervingly serene as a strangely observant Quaker (the most sinister kind of Quaker).

Both deserve better than Paranoid. Although billed as a conspiracy thriller, it fails to provide the intrigue, drive and scope that the genre requires. How can you be thrilled when you don’t care about the conspiracy?

TV Review: INDIAN SUMMERS and REGINALD D. HUNTER'S SONGS OF THE SOUTH

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

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

Indian Summers: Sunday, Channel 4

Reginald D. Hunter's Songs Of The South: Saturday, BBC Two

Paul Whitelaw

Thanks to a lifetime of constant disappointment, I admit I'm prone to making massive, unfair presumptions about things I haven't actually experienced for myself. That's why, before I'd even seen it, I rashly presumed that 1930s period piece Indian Summers would be a ponderous and starchy affair: a prissy Merchant/Ivory knock-off. Actually, it's rather engaging.

Hyped as Channel 4's most expensive ever drama, and scheduled up against JK Rowling's similarly class-focused The Casual Vacancy on BBC One, it can't afford to fail. On the evidence of its first two episodes – there are ten in total – it appears to be succeeding on its own intriguing, languid terms.

Granted, certain characters haven't quite clicked yet. Alice, the sister of smoothly chiselled Private Secretary Ralph, is presumably intended as the moral, tender heart of the series. So far this role has been defined by winsome glances and little else. And Dalal, who last week took a bullet during a botched assassination attempt on Ralph, feels rather limp for such a prominent character.

Ralph himself is more interesting, largely on account of his darker traits. A typical child of Empire in his patrician attitudes towards the Indian people he's been sent to govern – this week he was quick to dismiss Ghandi's peaceful nationalist cause as a terrorist movement – he nevertheless adores his adopted country. It would be all too easy to present these toodle-pip colonialists as outright villains. But the underlying political thrust of Indian Summers is more nuanced than that.

An effective note of intrigue was maintained throughout the episode when it transpired that Ralph had a prior relationship with his would-be assassin. Indian Summers is rather adept at teasing such mysteries.

Practically everyone in the show is nursing a secret of some sort. It remains to be seen whether their revelations are worth the wait, but I'm particularly intrigued by Julie Walters as the colourfully named Cynthia Coffin, a scheming, fag-smoking East End matriarch and charismatic hostess who appears to be ruling an entire subcontinent by pulling Ralph's strings. It's an interesting reversal of the class system back home, where a woman such as Cynthia would never be granted such authority. It's a ripe old role for Dame Julie, and she tackles it with enigmatic relish.

Production-wise, Indian Summers glistens with a sticky, inescapable heat. The chaste sex scenes may be gently torn from the pages of Mills & Boon, but the show isn't lacking in sun-kissed atmosphere. It's a promising saga.

The balminess continued in Reginald D. Hunter's Songs Of The South, a thoughtful three-part travelogue in which the droll African-American comic explores the origins of American popular music.

To a wonderful soundtrack of bluegrass and country, he began by travelling from Kentucky to Tennessee. The highlight was his detour into the uncomfortable realm of minstrelsy – white singers performing in blackface – where he encountered the argument that Stephen Foster's minstrel standards, which often sound offensive from a modern standpoint, were actually fairly liberal and progressive for the time.

Hunter gently dismissed this theory as a retrospective attempt to “lend dignity to a fiction created by a white man”, while concluding that minstrelsy is an important, albeit difficult, part of the American legacy and shouldn't be swept under the carpet.

An avuncular and sanguine guide, Hunter's almost poetic sincerity elevates this series beyond the bland triviality of most celebrity travelogues.