TV Review; KIRI + HARD SUN

This article was originally published in The Courier on 13th January 2018.

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

KIRI: Wednesday, Channel 4

HARD SUN: Saturday, BBC One

Miriam is an experienced social worker who one day makes an error of judgement that leads to tragedy.

She arranges an unsupervised visit between foster child Kiri and her birth grandfather. While Miriam is gone, Kiri is apparently abducted by her ex-con father. A few days later, her body is found. The finger of blame points towards Miriam.

This is KIRI, a compelling new drama starring the great Sarah Lancashire. It’s written by Jack Thorne, author of the Yewtree-inspired National Treasure. Kiri is inspired by another explosive issue torn from the headlines, namely the unjust vilification of social workers.

Miriam becomes a convenient scapegoat. The media hounds her. The public turns against her. She’s thrown under the bus by her employers. She drowns herself in booze.

The murdered girl is black. Her adoptive parents are middle-class and white. This complicates matters even further. Within days of Kiri’s disappearance, yer actual John Humphrys is on Radio 4 chairing a debate on the ramifications of children being matched with families from different cultural backgrounds. Right-wing tabloids accuse social services of “ticking their lefty boxes”. It all feels depressingly real.

Thorne is fascinated by the ways in which the media manipulates, exploits and simplifies complex emotional issues. It constructs binary narratives blithely untroubled by shades of grey. It gorges on grief and enflames prejudices it helped to create in the first place.

Though his writing becomes slightly didactic when his passion and sincerity gets the better of him, for the most part he devises plausible scenarios, searching arguments and convincing characters. Miriam, with all her quirks and flaws, is a gift for Lancashire, who’s always at her best when suffering in a pool of anguish and gallows humour.

Thorne succeeds in his goal of humanising social workers. They are, after all, human. They sometimes make mistakes, but they also do a lot of good. You never read about that in the press, of course. Kiri shows what happens when social workers, who devote their professional lives to helping people, end up needing help themselves.

A nuanced polemic and compassionate character study, Kiri is a valuable piece of work.

“Nuance” isn’t in Neil Cross’ vocabulary. The Luther creator deals in heightened pulp fiction powered by graphic violence and a grim world view. He probably wrote Victorian Penny Dreadfuls in a previous life.

His obsessions reached some kind of crazed apogee in HARD SUN, a propulsive sci-fi conspiracy thriller which, like Luther, treads a fine line between entertaining largesse and outright nonsense.  

Blokey Jim Sturgess and the quietly charismatic Agyness Deyn are mismatched London coppers who discover that the Earth will be destroyed by an unspecified solar catastrophe in five years (yes, the Bowie song does appear). The governments of the world want to keep this rotten news under wraps, lest the human race goes bananas.

What’s more, Sturgess appears to be a dodgy copper up to his neck in all sorts of chicanery, while Deyn’s mentally ill son tried to kill her via stabbings and arson. She’s also secretly investigating Sturgess. What a carve up.

In typical Cross fashion, Hard Sun revels in audacious set-pieces and gore. In order to enjoy it you have to set your brain into the appropriate gear. Suspension of disbelief is key.

It is, by its very precarious nature, a show that could go either way, but episode one set things off in agreeably crackerjack style. I’m a sucker for paranoid dramas wreathed in apocalyptic futility, and Hard Sun doesn’t disappoint on that front.

TV Review: DAMNED + THE FALL + THE LEVEL

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 1 October 2016.

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

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.