Slick Rick has last laugh
THERE’S a line in a Tennessee Williams play that has always stuck in my mind. It’s not a line one person says to another, just a stage direction in the deeply autobiographical, hauntingly sad 1944 play, The Glass Menagerie.
The scriptwriter is describing a room and a photograph of the long- vanished father. ‘ He is smiling in a way that says, “I will be smiling this way forever”.’
We all know someone like that: irresponsible, given to vanishing, a bit of a cad and somehow, always getting away with it.
I thought of that line constantly throughout ORDINARY LIES
( BBC1), another very good, very moving piece of drama. This wasn’t, as in previous episodes of the ensemble morality saga, a story about a simple fib that got out of hand. The life of charming mechanic Rick was one whole giant lie, a fib about and to himself, a constant covering up of his true nature.
Ditched by his wife, Rick ended up lodging with Mike, who saw having a house guest as a welcome diversion from his own marital tensions. But the minute Rick and Mike’s 15- year- old daughter Ruby set eyes on one another, we knew the tensions were only going to mount.
The ensuing story planted itself firmly in a queasy grey area. Ruby wasn’t a child but she wasn’t ready for adult choices either.
Rick finally grew up but only after the damage was done. It was a tale you watched between your fingers, wanting the wrong to be discovered, fearing the violent consequences, and Max Beesley was superb as the vengeful dad, sick with rage and scotch.
I’m undecided about the final scenes though.
Although Rick had to flee, leaving his house to his wife, he basically got away with it. He seemed to have suffered a little as he realised both that he loved Ruby and that he couldn’t be with her. All that vanished as he drove away, though, the final shot of him smiling, as he’d be smiling forever.
There are people just like that, of course. Sometimes though drama has a duty, not to show people just as they are but people getting just what they deserve. If there was a moral in Rick’s tale, I’m not sure what it was.
I never thought I’d hear Stacey Dooley, on BBC 3, saying: “It’s an issue I’m keen to raise with the newly appointed chief of the local justice department.”
In a new series of STACEY DOOLEY INVESTIGATES ( BBC3), the lass plucked from the Luton Airport perfume counter goes airside again, this time on the trail of new, dangerous drugs and the people who profit from them.
It’s a very far cry from the young presenter’s earliest television appearances, in which she wept incoherently around the Developing World like some jet- lagged gap- year kid who’s seen her first beggar.
Some people are fortunate enough to start their TV careers at an age when they can still grow, and grow Ms Dooley has, into a flak- jacketed journalist of note.
Risking her neck in Mexico, the epicentre of an explosion in addictive, destructive crystal methamphetamine, she tackled local politicians, hitmen, grieving families, even one victim of the wave of drug crime so recent he was still covered in blood.
If the odd, pompous cop or politician assumes she’s just a daft kid from Luton, then more fool them.