No love for Domhnall’s bizarre passion-killer
Alice & Jack
Channel 4, Wednesday/All 4 streaming
Dancing with the Stars RTÉ One, Sunday
True Detective:
Night Country
Sky Atlantic, Monday/streaming on Sky and NOW TV
You wait ages for one romantic drama to come round, then two come at once. Just like buses, though, there’s every chance the first will be spotless, and full of pep on its first run of the day, while the second will be wheezing up hills and generally running at a much slower speed. Last week, I wrote about One Day on Netflix, which since its launch has been the No.1 choice on the streaming platform in 33 countries. It is a certified global hit, largely because of the chemistry of the leads, Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall, and also because they have created characters you care for.
Oh, that the same could be said for Alice & Jack, perhaps the most bizarre Valentine’s night programming in history. On the one day a year everyone is supposed to be filled with the joy of love, Channel 4 weighed in with might best be described as ‘Abnormal People’.
Alice (Andrea Riseborough) and Irishman Jack (Domhnall Gleeson) meet in a London bar via a dating app. He is an earnest biochemical researcher, looking for cures for diseases. She immediately interrogates him as to his motives – is he in this line to save the life of someone he knows, or just for the glory of it all? Her questioning is so dogged and borderline psychotic,
Jack should be seeing more red flags than Tiananmen Square. Instead, at her invitation, or demand really, they go back to her flat and have sex.
The poor craythur isn’t even allowed get some rest after his exertions, because Alice wakes him and tells him to leave, albeit in slightly more robust language.
Jack clearly is slow on the uptake, because far from thanking his lucky stars that Alice was leaning over him only to wake him, and not remove his spleen with a rusty fork, he has become immediately and terrifyingly infatuated. We’ve all heard of treat ’em mean and keep ’em keen, but Alice takes this to a whole new level. They meet again some months later, again instigated by her, and have sex again. He leaves to buy coffee and croissants and she practically has an abandonment fit because he’s been gone mere minutes, even though keeping him dangling for months on end seems not to perturb her at all. Then, of course, she dumps him for a second time.
At the cinema feeling sorry for himself, he meets Lynn (Aisling Bea), who is also Irish. They hit it off and start dating, only for her to soon discover she is pregnant. Jack, who seems to sleepwalk through everything, suggests marriage, and that’s what they do, despite barely knowing each other. Out of the blue, Alice starts calling Jack again, but he switches off his phone, so she shows up at his office and they start an affair. Why he agrees to it is anyone’s guess. Perhaps attraction really can sometimes be so strong it proves utterly irresistible, but I would suggest it’s something best outgrown in your teens. To add insult to injury, the dialogue is clunky, and the pacing funereal. Most of all, the problem is that while the romantic tribulations of teenagers, in One Day and Normal People, can be viewed with affectionate nostalgia through the prism of older age, that same life experience makes you want to grab Jack, give him a good shake, and tell him to cop himself on.
Talking of chemistry, there has been much speculation that Jennifer Zamparelli and Doireann Garrihy have none of it at all on RTÉ One’s Dancing with the Stars. Given that all their lines are scripted, they’re hardly going to sound natural in their exchanges, though, so it seems rather depressing that when two men present a show, the notion of chemistry never even enters the equation, but when it’s two women, everyone wants to believe there’s some behindthe-scenes sturm und drang.
We’re pretty much at the halfway point of the dancing show, which means it’s time to ratchet up the real drama, namely who will be next to leave. Instead, on Sunday night’s episode, everyone was dancing for immunity from tonight’s first danceoff, so no one left at all. Knowing the innate Irish love of the underdog, my strong suspicion is that Eileen Dunne will be spared the axe. As always, there are some on the show who are routinely overmarked by the judges, especially Rosanna Davison. As the field narrows, the public will have a greater say, and my strong guess is that they will stick with Wild Youth’s David Whelan, and probably the plucky Davy Russell too who, just like many of the horses he rode over the years, has come on in leaps and bounds.
After a lukewarm and pedestrian two-thirds of its run, True Detective: Night Country, exploded in violence in Monday’s penultimate episode on Sky Atlantic (and Sky Showcase and NOW TV). The extended finale tomorrow has a lot of loose ends to tie up, but while the story has been sketchy and maddeningly reliant on supernatural jump scares (including one that made me spill my gin and tonic), there’s no doubting the quality of the performances, especially by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as uneasy allies searching for the truth about a murder years before.
At its most interesting when it poses moral dilemmas, not least about cops who not only cover up crimes but actually commit them when they believe they have right on their side, it nevertheless has been an often frustrating watch. Albeit nothing compared to watching Jack following Alice down the rabbit hole, where no doubt she already has a saucepan of water boiling on the hob and is eyeing up the nearest bunny.