The kid gloves come off
IT’S easy to see a tiny sliver of a person and assume it’s the whole. I’ve spent the past two years nodding to a distracted, scruffy-looking fellow dogwalker in a local park, without realising she was once a pop legend. Embarrassing but not, like the assumptions in KIRI (C4), the sort of thing that ruins lives.
Writer Jack Thorne set out his stall early in this promising fourparter, as we watched Miriam (Sarah Lancashire) taking her elderly, flatulent dog for a walk.
They cornered a man walking his own dog on some wasteland, where Miriam rapidly said too much, too fast, about her dog’s various illnesses and her “vision”, and the man edged warily away.
In the following scenes, Miriam was shuttling between schools and squats and the Family Services Unit, clearly a time-served, respected social worker, as well as the mad dog-lady on the heath.
Don’t make assumptions, we were warned, but Sarah Lancashire’s all-cylinders portrayal of the scotch-swigging, blunt as boot-nails Miriam tempts everyone into it.
In the office the new boy offered her a slice of his home-made cake. She took it, put it back when she heard it was coffee and walnut. Eyes were rolled, glances exchanged. You could see how some might treasure the likes of Miriam, and some might be waiting for a chance to get rid of her.
They found it, seemingly, in last night’s episode as Miriam, trusting her judgment, allowed black foster-child Kiri Akindele (Felicia Mukas) unsupervised time with her birth family. In the car, on the way there, Kiri said this visit was all to do with her being a black girl, fostered by a white family.
“If this was only about race,” Miriam replied, “My life would be a lot simpler,” a prophetic line as it turned out. Shortly after Kiri had been left with her quiet, dignified grand-dad, Tobi (Lucian Msamati), her father Nate (Paapa Essiedu) pulled up in a flash car, music blaring. Some time after that Kiri’s body was found in bush, the car was found elsewhere and, as yet, no trace of the father.
In the rush to blame it wasn’t long before Miriam was being hauled over the coals in the office and in the press. Bosses questioned her unorthodox way of doing things, her “bold decisions”.
Newspapers claimed it was all about race, that Kiri had been ill-advisedly rushed into a visit with her birth father because of “PC” qualms over black kids going to white families.
Suspended from duty yet still, clearly a valued colleague to some, Miriam ended up puking on the floor of one of her former charges, the roles reversed. Meanwhile Nate, a man with a chaotic past, remained missing and Kiri’s death unexplained. You want to start working out what happened but you realise as you do so, that involves jumping to conclusions. This story urges us not to.
After dismissing moisturiser and revealing the surprising side-effects of sun cream THE TRUTH ABOUT LOOKING GOOD (BBC1) ended on a psychology experiment. This, using Photoshopped images and a roomful of chatty strangers, suggested we find other people, and indeed ourselves, more attractive after we’ve had a conversation.
No need to rely on wrinkle serums, eye-brighteners, sagreducers and the like, just go out and be friendly. Handy advice if you’re the outgoing type. Does it work if you just stay at home and talk to yourself in the mirror?