John le Carré adaptation that will keep us riveted for the next five weeks
Doing Money RTÉ One, Sunday The Little Drummer Girl BBC1, Sunday Condor Universal, Monday
PERHAPS there’s an element of the rose-tinted glasses to this, but I’m fairly certain I remember a time when television stations treated the Sunday night of a bank holiday weekend, especially the last one of the year in October, as something of a mini-Christmas. Hokey as it might have been, there very likely would have been a variety special, followed by a blockbuster movie. When families are at home, or visiting parents down the country, and the children are allowed stay up a little later, it seems to me to make sense that RTÉ would show a family-friendly package on a bank holiday Sunday night.
Instead, last Sunday, we got Doing Money, the very harrowing tale of a young Romanian woman kidnapped off the streets in London by fellow Romanian thugs and warned that her family back home would be harmed if she didn’t agree to become a prostitute.
And so Ana was trafficked to Ireland and made to ‘do money’ in popup brothels, sold like meat for sexual gratification to men who either wanted to harm her, or to treat her as an imaginary girlfriend because they lacked the looks or social skills to find a real one.
All attempts to escape this horrendous fate were thwarted, until finally, while working in a brothel in Northern Ireland, Ana befriended a local lad who with his paramilitary brethren beat the living daylights out of her captors and ran them out of town. Believe me, I’ve never been a terrorist sympathiser, but I can’t have been the only one who cheered when the Romanian lads had seven shades of you-know-what kicked out of them, because their injuries paled into insignificance against what they did to the teenage, and even underage, girls they forcibly pimped.
Doing Money was a riveting and deeply disturbing slice of drama based on a true story and, in the end credits, we were told Ana’s eventual testimony before the Northern Ireland Assembly (remember that?) helped secure the passage of the 2015 Human Trafficking And Exploitation Act, the first new law against slavery anywhere in the UK for over 200 years (though her captors received only two years in prison).
It was a vital piece of television – and the astonishing lead performance by Romanian actress Anca Dumitra, all vulnerability and defi- ance in equal measure, should be well up there when the IFTAs are being decided – but I still think it was shown on the wrong night. Scheduling is a fine art, and anyone working in television surely wants as many viewers as possible to tune in to a programme, especially one as important as this. I got into trouble for voicing this, but it fairly wrecked my mood for the evening by being a sobering end to a carefree day. Rightly, I was reminded that every day is like that for girls forced to have sex against their will while the money goes to others, but that isn’t the real point.
RTÉ showed The Young Offenders, the movie on which the wonderful TV series is based, on Monday night, and I strongly believe they should have been flipped. Give us a laugh on a bank holiday Sunday and we can take whatever you throw at us on Monday. We’re also used to hard-hitting reality on Monday nights thanks to RTÉ Investigates.
I checked, and there was little social media reaction to Doing Money, so I suspect many also found the subject matter just too heavy for the night that was in it, and it genuinely deserved the widest possible audience. If you missed it, it’s not on the RTÉ Player, but BBC2 is showing it this week. Well, tomorrow night actually. That’ll be, well, Monday.
At the same time on Sunday, BBC1 was showing the first episode of
The Little Drummer Girl, which I caught up with later. From the same production team behind 2016’s other masterly John le Carré adaptation, The Night Manager, it proved a slow burner, but a hugely engaging one. It’s the story of Charlie, a young English actress played by the quirky Florence Pugh, seduced by a stranger (Alexander Skarsgård of True Blood and being ever-so-slightly drunk on The Late Late Show fame) to accompany him from a Greek island holiday to Athens. There, she is to be recruited by an Israeli avenger called Kurtz (a superb performance by Michael Shannon), who hopes to use her to infiltrate a cell of Palestinian terrorists killing Israeli targets in Europe.
Set in 1979, it brilliantly captured the fashions – and political causes – of the era, and even offered a chilling reminder of life in two Germanys, and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Directed by Korean Chan-wook Park, and filmed in brilliantly expressive style by his fellow Korean Woo-hyung Kim, it promises to keep us riveted for another five weeks.
Max Irons, son of Jeremy and our own Sinéad Cusack, popped up as Charlie’s boyfriend in The Little Drummer Girl, but took centre stage in Condor, Universal’s new series based on the 1970s novel Six Days Of The Condor by James Grady, and inexplicably filmed with Robert Redford as Three Days Of The Condor, before now being reduced just to Condor; if anyone ever makes it again, presumably they’ll just call it Con.
Irons plays CIA analyst Joe Turner, the only survivor of the massacre of everyone in his office after he stumbles upon information that could compromise his superiors. In the opening doublebill, he finds himself falsely publicly accused of himself being the gunman.
With his best friend shot dead attempting to help him, the uncle who recruited him powerless to help, and now holed up in the house of a Tinder date who thinks he will kill her, it marks a welcome return of the paranoia genre that last came to full fruition in the Nixon era. Now what possibly could have made programme makers think the time was right to revisit such themes?
This John le Carré adaptation looks set to keep us engaged