Pulling in One direction
DO THE makers of ONE OF US (BBC1) have a mischievous sense of humour? That phrase has a certain resonance for anyone over the age of 40 and it’s nothing to do with high jinks of a murderous kind in the Scottish Highlands, rather, “Is he one of us?” is what Mrs Thatcher asked when differentiating between the wets and the dries in her party.
Goodness know what she would have made of this new take on the phrase as the Iron Lady and Scotland never really got on.
No matter, One Of Us is billed as a dark drama set in the Highlands and it certainly wasted no time in cutting to the chase. It opened with a touching wedding scene, the following one, though, was considerably less touching with the heavily pregnant bride and groom lying dead with their throats cut.
Unless there’s some twist in the forthcoming episodes, we know who did it as Lee (Owen Whitelaw), an Edinburgh heroin addict, promptly set off to the Highlands with the postcode of one of the victim’s parents programmed into his vehicle’s satnav. What we don’t know is why.
We also don’t know the identity of the second murderer because after a terrible storm blew up while he was on his way, Lee conveniently crashed his car near one of the parental properties rendering him unconscious for just long enough for the family to get him inside.
Even more conveniently, the other victim’s family lived across the road and it was simply far too easy for both clans to recognise Lee when his mugshot appeared on TV in connection with the murder and… well, suffice to say the next morning Lee, too, had shuffled off this mortal coil.
Coincidences aside, this was a terrifically suspenseful kick-off to a four-part series, very reminiscent of those Agatha Christie “and then there were none” set-ups.
One of the parents is Louise, played by Juliet Stevenson, a woman whose lips were made to quiver and who can reliably be expected to interject any amount of misery into any proceedings. She duly came up with the goods.
Another mystery is why, cooped up there in the Scottish Highlands, the characters’ accents ranged from English to Northern Irish but as the very last scene took place in London and centred on a no-good absent father, we will no doubt find out in due course.
Gripping stuff that had me hooked from the very start.
There was a novel lesson in how to meet a new man when you’ve just been dumped in BEAUTY AND THE BAKER (C4) – use the men’s loos in a top-class restaurant and wait for a drop-dead gorgeous bloke to emerge from the stalls. That was how Noa met Amos but it didn’t hurt that Noa (Rotem Sela) herself sported supermodel looks and was the offspring of a billionaire.
Noa was a model – it would have been unrealistic to have given her character any other profession given her appearance – but frankly Amos the baker (Aviv Alush) could have been a mannequin too.
This was a sort of Notting Hill transported to Israel: superstar woman and humble bloke must battle their very different backgrounds in pursuit of love.
If you would like to find out if they succeed, however, you will not do so on Channel 4. It is showing the first episode as a taster and the subsequent nine parts are available only on All 4 or as a box set.
That is if you can handle all that physical perfection.