Different worlds... and there’s no telling who the goodies are
KIRI Wednesday, 9pm - Channel4 MCMAFIA Sunday, 9pm - BBC1
PERHAPS it is an age thing. But, as I seem to recall mentioning here recently, there is precious little in the way of must-see television nowadays.
I’m old enough to recall the days when you’d be out of the loop if you hadn’t seen the previous evening’s episode of Grange Hill, Not The Nine O’Clock News, Top Of The Pops or a whole range of other stuff. There are few enough programmes in the current line-up that would leave you feeling like a social outcast if you had missed them.
That said, it is the exception that proves the rule.
One of the first that springs to mind is National Treasure, the 2016 four-part drama about a celebrated TV comedian (played by Robbie Coltrane) being accused of historic sex abuse. Coltrane and his supporting cast, including Julie Walters, Andrea Riseborough and former Blackadder star Tim McInnerny, were all magnificent. But it all would have been for nowt if it wasn’t for the pin-sharp screenplay by Jack Thorne.
Now he has returned with Kiri – another four-parter – which stars Sarah Lancashire as a social worker. I’m not sure any of us who remember her brilliant comic turn as ditzy barmaid Raquel in Coronation Street could have imagined Lancashire as a serious dramatic actress, but of course she proved us all wrong with Happy Valley.
Credit it where it is due, she does it again here in Kiri. Her character Miriam Grayson appears at first as a cheery sort with an amusing line in quips about her pet dog’s flatulence.
Except it isn’t quite that straightforward. She has a fractious relationship with her terminally-ill mother, routinely goes out with a hip-flask full of hard liquor and is quite understandably haunted by the cancer-related death of her son at the age of 13.
Nor, to put it mildly, are things going well on the work front for Miriam. When she makes a unilateral decision to let the eponymous Kiri (Felicia Mukasa) – a young black girl about to be adopted by her white foster parents – have an unsupervised visit with her birth grandparents, it ends with the nine-year-
old being abducted and killed.
The main suspect so far is Kiri’s natural father, a drug dealer and all-round wrong ’un, but presumably there will be a number of twists over the next three episodes.
Perhaps the most striking aspect, though, is the kidnap victim dying in the early part of the first instalment.
It will be interesting to see how the pace is maintained in the weeks ahead. But on the evidence so far I’d be tempted to lay a fiver on them keeping it up.
Meanwhile, McMafia continues to deliver the goods. It is increasingly clear that the fresh-faced and borderline respectable banker Alex Godman (James Norton) is getting in way over his head in terms of his dealings with global crime networks.
Or is he? Maybe he has more in common than we realise with the Russian mobsters who also happen to be his nearest and dearest. Only time will tell.
Given his marriage proposal to girlfriend Rebecca (Juliet Rylance), it can only be assumed that Alex has a positive outlook on the future.
I hope that he isn’t expecting his dad Dimitri (Aleksey Serebryakov) to be around for the big day, though. Because if his enemies don’t get him first, then the fact that he is practically on an IV drip of top-grade vodka surely will.