The show so bad it makes the rest of the Beeb look brilliant
As evil master plans go, this is brilliantly deranged. someone in a production backroom at New Broadcasting House must be cackling softly in a swivel chair while stroking a bouffant Persian cat.
The sheer calculated horror of this scheme was revealed halfway through The Interceptor (BBC1), the action drama about a police surveillance squad that was widely hailed as a heap of unmitigated cobblers when it debuted last week.
it’s a shockingly bad show. The acting, the dialogue, the cliches, they all reek. But as bearded hero Ash scampered across the roofs of canal boats at london’s Camden lock in pursuit of a gunman, the logic of this awfulness snapped into focus. The Beeb is doing this on purpose. it’s deliberately dreadful.
Think about it. There’s the accents, for a start — O-T Fagbenle, who plays secret policeman Ash, and half the cast speak in the laughably fake Caribbean Cockney that’s so fashionable these days.
Back in the Thirties, when American films arrived in our cinemas, impressionable British youths adopted Hollywood accents — think of Private Pike, trying to sound like a Chicago hoodlum in Dad’s Army.
Today’s faux Jamaican patois is just as pretentious and ridiculous, but harder to understand.
Then there’s the picture, stretched across the middle of the screen, with a great black bar top and bottom, like a Western movie shot in Cinemascope. When it happened last week, my first assumption was that the cat had sat on the Tv remote again. in fact, The interceptor had turned my Tv into a letterbox, just because it could.
switch on the subtitles in an effort to decode what Ash is mumbling and the words are dangling half in and half out of the letterbox. This makes them illegible: not only is it impossible to guess at Fagbenle’s dialogue, but we can’t read it either.
The plots are beyond dire. An undercover unit called UNiT is tracking a london drugs dealer. We know this Mr Big is a major gangster because he has a white goatee and cheats at golf.
Played by Trevor eve, apparently he’s escaped from an eighties episode of Minder. His idea of throwing his weight around is to exert an iron rule of fear over the golf club committee.
The undercover coppers swagger around, smouldering with covert cool: they know the best way to spy on crooks is to strut as if life is one continuous selfie.
early on, Ash was earwigging in a cafe, with his cheeks sucked in so hard he was in danger of swallowing his teeth. The BBC has worked very hard to make The interceptor so eye-smartingly appalling. They’re gambling that all the mediocre, nothing special shows they have planned between now and 2016 will look fabulous by comparison — so by the time the Corporation’s Royal Charter comes up for renewal next year, we’ll all be raving about their great dramas.
it’s a plan so dastardly it’s criminal genius.
Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell are adopting the opposite tactic in Long Lost Family (ITV). They have a superb format, which they nudge and tweak to produce fresh stories.
it’s usually about grown-up children looking for their birth parents, but Ron was a 70-yearold Welshman who had lost touch with his little sister when he was just six years old: their unmarried mother couldn’t cope with two children. All his life, Ron had struggled with feelings of shame: ‘i was kept and she wasn’t. it made me feel terribly guilty.’
His joy when his sister Christine was tracked down in New Zealand was childlike.
like a little boy looking forward to Christmas, he counted down the days until they were reunited: ‘ Only two more sleeps, one more sleep, woke up this morning — no more!’
Christine had only one clear memory of her brother: running over a stone bridge with him. ‘He stopped and waited for me to catch up.’ They were brought back together on that very bridge.
At its best, long lost Family seems almost to have the power to catch people’s dreams in a net and display them to us.