This Irish stew would never pass muster down at the Queen Vic
The spin-off series is conclusive proof that nobody in TV has the faintest clue what they’re doing. It ought to be a simple science, easy as cutting a shoot from a healthy plant and repotting it.
And sometimes it works. There have been some classics: Z Cars gave us Softly Softly, Cheers spawned Frasier, happy Days took a surreal turn and delivered Mork And Mindy.
But many more have been disasters. Matt Le Blanc’s spin-off from Friends, called Joey, was such a prize turkey that it should have come with bread sauce and stuffing. Knot’s Landing made its parent show, Dallas, look as profound as a Russian novel.
eastenders has staged a few special episodes over the years, such as the one- off that recalled Dot’s war years as an evacuee, but Kat And Alfie: Redwater (BBC1) is the first that can truly be called a spin-off series.
Ambitious and far removed from Albert Square, starring two of the soap’s best-loved characters — played by big-name actors Shane Richie and Jessie Wallace — it must have looked on paper as if it had a real chance of success.
Not a hope. The six-part series was doomed before it started, because neither writer, cast nor anyone else had a clue what sort of story it should be.
Kat thought she was still in a soap, and went searching in an Irish seaside village for her longlost son, who’d been adopted 33 years earlier.
Alfie kept trying to create cliffhangers, literally. One day he was stumbling towards a sheer drop in the dark, the next he went climbing and had a panic attack. This was pointless, meaningless melodrama, more attentionseeking than acting.
Meanwhile Ian Mcelhinney was striding around like Clint O’eastwood in an ankle-length coat and his hat over his eyes, a refugee from an Irish cowboy film.
And psychopathic priest Father Dermot (Oisin Stack) was playing at Scandinavian crime thrillers. he gave his first victim a communion wafer then baptised him to death in the sea while absolving his sins.
In the background were dozens of extras apparently supplied by the Irish Tourist Board, who called out lines like: ‘We’re all on pints and whiskey chasers here!’ The show’s strongest feature was the gorgeous harbour village, but the producers weren’t even sure what to do with that. Instead of having it as the constant backdrop, the way Doc Martin does with the Cornish idyll of Portwenn (aka Port Isaac), half the scenes here looked studio-bound.
But there wasn’t much else to watch at 8pm, assuming you couldn’t stomach the political drone-athon on ITV. Flicking through the channels, however, uncovered a bit of a gem — the first of a documentary series about famous women and their sisters.
A Tale Of Two Sisters (Yesterday channel) started by dissecting the relationship between pre-war celebrity aviatrix Amelia earhart and her younger sibling Muriel, a stay-at-home housewife who nonetheless lent her adored older sister the money to buy her first plane.
It was crammed with beautifully restored newsreel footage that left no doubt Amelia would have been a star in any era. She didn’t play up to the camera, her looks were gawky and her body was gangling — but she possessed electric charisma.
The story of her disappearance over the Pacific in 1937 is well worn, yet this programme sizzled with real drama as it traced her final flight. This was telly that actually knew what it was doing.