Enjoy the silence and forget the fornication
Normal People BBC1 Monday/RTÉ One, Tuesday
Van Der Valk UTV, Sunday
The Real Marigold Hotel BBC1, Thursday
Blackpool Big Night Out BBC2, Monday
SILENCE is a powerful tool in the hands of an interviewer. If a guest hesitates, there is no need to fill in – by leaving that one beat, that moment of stillness, you often arrive far quicker at the truth. For Marianne and Connell, the teenage couple at the heart of Normal People, silence has the opposite effect. Instead of awkwardness, it seems to bring comfort, because each in their own way is a misfit, and in their silence there is a mutual understanding.
The BBC dramatisation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling novel, also shown on RTÉ, is a wonder. I read the book and admired it but I found the dialogue oddly jarring at times. I realise now that what I neglected to do was adjust my ear to the cadence of their voices while I was reading; I forgot to allow them their silence.
On screen, it is a thing of wonder. Marianne tells Connell she likes him. Later, he asks if she meant she liked him as a friend or ‘some-Daisy thing more’. Pause. ‘Something more,’ she says. Pause. ‘’Yeah, I thought that all right. I was just checking.’
Oh, my, the nervousness of youth captured perfectly, the fear of exposing vulnerability writ large. Soon, the couple are enjoying enthusiastic sex. This was the subject of a hilarious debate on Thursday’s Liveline, when a few relics of ‘ould daycency’ lifted the phone to tell Joe it was like a porn film.
It wasn’t. The honest portrayal of sex on television is a rare thing, and one telling moment – the two starting to laugh when he couldn’t get her bra off without a struggle – actually was much more intimate than the physical business that followed. I found it neither titillating nor even remotely pornographic. Instead, it felt universal, tender, beautiful, and a wonderful depiction of the thrill of discovering the physical manifestation of sexuality, a vital, heart-racing moment on the way to becoming an adult.
Of course, everything doesn’t stay rosy. Where Connell is sporty and popular at school, he hides his intellect to stay in with his friends. Marianne, anti-social and quirky, has brains to burn, and when they end up in college, it is she who blossoms while he struggles. Much of this has to be telegraphed rather than spoken, and the two leads, Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, simply are transcendent. As I mentioned last week, we are not going to see much in the way of new drama this year with productions shut down, but even in a busy year, this still would feel like a major event. Director Lenny Abrahamson has set the tone just right in his opening six episodes, and given us something sublime.
Against all the odds, I thoroughly enjoyed the first two-hour standalone episode of the rebooted detective series Van Der Valk on UTV. It was unexpected because I still have strong memories of Barry Foster first time round between 1972 and 1992, and they’ve ditched one of the most memorable theme tunes in television history (I have it on a 45 somewhere), and the location work in Amsterdam was confined to such a small area, they might just as well have set it in Leicester. Van der Valk himself is now played by Marc Warren, and has acquired a few more modern Scandi-style characteristics of the veteran cop – unlucky love life, overly sardonic, all too willing to go against the direct orders of superiors and so on.
So why did I like it? Well, it was plot driven, which actually is becoming something of a rarity, and the convoluted story – a kidnapping that goes wrong, an attempt to embarrass a politician by revealing a long-term relationship and his fathering of a son with his secret partner, a surprise twist at the end – was sufficiently meaty to keep me engrossed. I look forward to more.
The same can be said of The Real Marigold Hotel, which kicked off on BBC1 on Thursday. This year’s crop of celebrities trying to decide if they could retire to India included Susie Blake (Hilary in Mrs Brown’s Boys), former East-Ender John Altman (how on Earth can he be 67?), singer Barbara Dickson and children’s entertainer Paul Chuckle, who spent most of the first episode chewing Immodium because he immediately succumbed to the runs.
The real stars, though were Britt Ekland – and Duncan Bannatyne’s hair. I spent most of the episode trying to work out which shade of Just For Men the former Dragons’ Den investor appeared to have bathed in, before settling on Freshly Painted Garden Fence.
One moment of joy was Britt Ekland, explaining to young Indians she was in the Bond film, The
Man With The Golden Gun. ‘Ah, that was the Pierce Brosnan era,’ one of them replied. She let go of the fact it actually was the Roger Moore era. I liked her, though. The former wife of Peter Sellers and the former girlfriend of Rod Stewart, there was an admirable defiance when she said: ‘I’m my own trophy, no one else’s.’
Finally, a trip down memory lane. As a child, I was taken to Blackpool often over the years. After the Pleasure Beach and fish and chips, we’d go to a show – I remember seeing Les Dennis and Dustin Gee, Frank Carson, Little and Large, and so on. It was glamorous back then, but when I returned in 2006, it was a dump, sadly.
BBC’s Blackpool Big Night Out was a reminder of its heyday, and I wallowed in every second. With our future mobility looking uncertain right now, it was comforting to revisit the past. It a human instinct. We’re all normal people.