Why Alex Godman has all the makings of a Russian Godfather
BSunday - BBC1, 9pm ELIEVE me, I really don’t want to bore you with the details of my CV. Even I find it difficult to feign interest in them. But I must tell you about an old boss of mine – long before I worked on this newspaper, obviously – and his insatiable need to know what members of his staff were up to at any time of the day or night.
Perhaps the best way of explaining it is by saying that this bloke spent more time on the phone than Buzby. The call could come at seven o’clock in the morning or eleven o’clock at night or any time in between.
Even if you had only nipped out to the loo in the middle of the working day, there was a good chance he’d be on the blower wanting to know your whereabouts.
It hardly needs spelling out that this was stressful and irritating enough in itself. But what made it far worse was that in every voicemail – and he always, always left one if his call had been missed or, more usually, ignored – he would insist he was ringing about an ‘urgent’ matter that needed to be dealt with immediately.
It eventually occurred to me that if everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent. So I simply deactivated my voicemail and, what’s more, started putting my phone on either silent or vibrate mode all the time. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Old habits die hard and I’m still following a similar regime all these years later.. I’ve put the voicemail back on, but the ringer is left switched off at least 90% of the time. The downside though, is that I find myself instinctively reaching for my phone any time the telltale vibrating buzz comes up on some programme on the telly.
It has been a particular problem over the course of McMafia, where the various international gangsters involved seem to do much of their communication by text message. Much as I found it annoying, I’d still be reluctant to make too much of an issue of it with any of them. Probably best to let these things go.
By any stretch of the imagination, it has been a turbulent few months for banker Alex Godman (James Norton).
Let’s see now. There isn’t enough space here to list everything he has experienced and witnessed over the course of the eight-week run, so I will have to
do an edited version of the highlights.
For starters, he embarked on a hectic round of jet-setting that must have resulted in every page of his passport being stamped.
Even though I am probably missing out on a few here, he touched down at one point or another in Tel Aviv, Paris, the south of France, Prague, Geneva and Moscow.
Along the way he saw his Uncle Boris getting his throat slit with a caviar knife; his vodka-sodden father trying to commit suicide and then getting Alex’s own exgirlfriend pregnant; and his own pregnant fiancée being shot in the stomach. Never a dull moment, as they say.
Yet if any one of those traumas would be enough to reduce the rest of us to the status of a gibberish wreck, Alex is clearly made of sterner stuff.
It must be that boarding school he went to. Throughout it all he remained totally unflappable, not to mention immaculately tailored in his Savile Row finest.
Still, as last Sunday’s final episode began, I could see it all ending in tears for him.
He still looked like too much of a big girl’s blouse to really muscle in effectively as a player in global organised crime.
But I badly underestimated him and, when he coolly pumped the requisite rounds of lead into arch-enemy Vadim (Merab Ninidze), it was clear that he had done the full Michael Corleone. Respect.