He’s Simm-ply the best
IF YOU’RE ever asked to name your favourite actor, I think you’re meant to say Robert De Niro. At least that’s the answer I’m usually given if I pose the question myself, either when I’m interviewing celebrity types or when I’m struggling to make small talk at a dinner party.
Personally, though, I think my favourite actor may well be John Simm, who’s back on our screens again tonight in a fine new eight-part conspiracy thriller called STRANGERS (ITV, 9pm).
All right, Simm may not have De Niro’s depth, range, intensity or Oscar collection but in British TV drama terms there are few who can match him when it comes to portraying Ordinary Bloke Who Suddenly Finds Himself Way Out Of His Depth And Hasn’t A Clue What To Do Next.
Yes, I do like a character I can identify with.
In this new story Simm plays Professor Jonah Mulray, an academic who’s built himself a solid reputation as an expert on international relations.
Rather weirdly, Jonah actually hates travelling (“I just don’t trust planes”) but he’s about to find himself with very little alternative when he discovers that his beloved wife Megan (Dervla Kirwan) has been killed in a car crash in Hong Kong.
Theirs, we soon establish, has been a rather unusual marriage, in that Megan has been living and working on the island, far away from the man with whom we assume she’s been deeply in love, for several months at a stretch.
When he arrives there, however, still traumatised by what’s happened but wanting to complete the grim formalities as soon as possible and bring Megan’s body back to Britain, Jonah is in for a shock.
It turns out the woman he thought he knew so well has been secretly leading a double life and on a pretty mind-boggling scale. As viewers, mind you, we’ve already half twigged that this might be the case: this is clearly a drama that’s going to include flashback scenes of some considerable significance, or else why hire an actor of Dervla Kirwan’s stature, rather than someone a whole lot cheaper whose finest achievement so far has been, say, a Twix ad?
But what exactly Megan has been up to and who with, and what for, and for how long, and why, well, we’re just going to have to wait and see.
Elsewhere tonight, BLACK EARTH RISING (BBC2, 9pm) is another new eight-parter, in this case a powerful international thriller created by Bafta-winning writer Hugo Blick. Starring Michaela Coel (below) and Harriet Walter, it’s largely centred on the West’s difficult relationship with modern-day Africa, with Walter playing an international criminal lawyer, Eve Ashby, and Coel her adopted daughter Kate, rescued as a child from the Rwandan genocide. Mother and daughter already have a strained relationship, that’s fairly evident right from the start, but this is taken to breaking point when, to Kate’s disgust, Eve controversially takes on the war crimes prosecution of a man who once helped stop the genocide of Kate’s people.