Give us good old laughs not contrivance, Frasier
When Frasier was spun off from Cheers back in 1993, the first episode was called The Good Son. In it, Frasier Crane, the snooty psychiatrist with what we Irish would call notions, allowed his infirm cop father Martin to move into his chichi apartment. There was an immediate row about Martin’s battered old recliner, held together with duct tape, and Frasier failed to convince him to use an expensive Eames chair instead.
It was symbolic of the clash in their personalities, Martin a down-to-earth everyman, Frasier lofty and, for a shrink, pretty devoid of empathy. Thirty years later, and 19 after the last of the original show’s 11-series run ended, Frasier is back. While everything is different, everything stays the same.
Single again after the end of the relationship that led him first from Seattle to Chicago, Frasier is back in Boston, the home of Cheers. His 32-year-old son Frederick (Jack CutmoreScott) has dropped out of Harvard and become a firefighter instead. A frontline worker, he has taken after his late grandfather, not his neurotic dad (or his mother, Lilith for that matter).
In a plot contrivance, the two move into an apartment together, and the first episode is called The Good Father. Whether you see that as a neat piece of symmetry, or just a lazy attempt at recreating the odd couple dynamic, is up to you. The similarities don’t end there. In Cheers, Frasier told his barfly friends his father was dead, later explained away as embarrassment at having to admit he wasn’t as posh as he would like others to believe. In the second episode of the reboot, we learn Frederick also has told his fire station friends his father is dead, only this time to make himself seem more humble and less privileged.
That’s a bit bogus, though, because it doesn’t seem like a natural progression in Frederick’s life. When we last saw him, he was 15, a timid and sometimes creepy child prone to allergies, but are expected to believe that soon afterwards, he became a strapping firefighter. Would he really have abandoned his classical education just to spite his helicopter parents? Well, maybe. As for the updated equivalent of the battered recliner, the first thing Frederick does is instal an air hockey table beside Frasier’s Coco Chanel chaise longue. In that, at least, some things never change, though it soon is banished anyway.
The main additions to the cast are Nicholas Lyndhurst, Rodney from Only Fools And Horses, as a jaded, alcoholic psychiatrist who was an Oxford classmate of Frasier, and David, the son of Niles and Daphne. David is, like his father, socially gauche and occasionally hapless, and again this doesn’t ring true, because Mancunian Daphne was too street smart to ever allow that happen. Despite these niggles, I did laugh, quite a lot at the second episode in fact. There’s the sense that once the scene-setting is out of the way, character development can proceed apace, and it certainly seems like there will be decent mileage to be hammered out of Freddy’s workmates. Despite the wobbles, I’m cautiously optimistic that my favourite sitcom of all time will get back into the groove. And, just to warn you, there’s a vignette at the end of the first episode that might induce just a little sob.
You might sob during The Reckoning too, but for different reasons. The BBC’s dramatisation of Jimmy Savile’s vile sexual assaults on girls and boys is a tough watch, and while nothing is explicitly shown, the hurt and shame of his victims is more than enough to turn your stomach at his depravity. Steve Coogan gets the essence of the man to a T, but it’s still hard to know why this was made in the first place. Yes, the intercut interviews with his real-life victims, now in their fifties and sixties, point to the fact they wanted this drama to maybe bring closure denied to them during Savile’s life, since the full facts emerged only after he died. Nonetheless, it all feels intrusive, and provokes a great deal of anger as this predator operates in plain sight, but no one does anything to stop him because he’s one of Britain’s biggest stars. There was an extra gut punch when I noticed real-life footage of him at the Central Remedial Clinic in Clontarf. We had enough perverts of our own without inviting another one over.
Finally, the second series of Hidden Assets came to an end on RTÉ One, and if you’ve yet to catch up – spoiler alert – stop reading now. The biggest shock was seeing Inspector Christian De Jong (Wouter Hendrickx) get shot dead at close range by the assassin, who in turn was killed by De Jong’s deputy Vince.
Belgian police mole Mila at least got her comeuppance, as did Frances Swann (Karine Vanasse), who would stop at nothing to gain control of the port of Antwerp.
But the biggest shock came right at the end, when it emerged that Bibi Brannigan Melnick (Simone Kirby) far from being the victim throughout the second series, had fooled everyone, even detective sergeant Claire Wallace (Nora-Jane Noone). Bibi had been scheming all along to get what she wanted, which was around €400m for helping a different consortium win the day. It all was damnably clever, and brilliantly written by Peter McKenna, who also gave us Kin.
Surely there has to be a third series, in which Bibi gets her just desserts – and hopefully there will be more space too for Cathy Belton’s CAB detective Norah Dillon and her whiteboard skills.