Rats at home, a murderous lover — no wonder Paula’s a bit mopey
THe only good thing about Paula (BBC2), a truly bleak drama about the dire fallout from a one-night stand, is that anything else you ever experience will feel more cheerful than this.
You could put on damp clothes and read French philosophy while listening to Leonard Cohen songs and it would put a smile on your face after Paula.
Denise Gough stars as the title character, a chemistry teacher. She wears a face so glum, she must have weighted her cheeks with lumps of lead. She looked as if she’d been copying a sad-face emoji when the wind changed.
Tom Hughes, last seen as Prince Albert in victoria, played handyman James, who kept two wives in a dingy slum flat and battered them, when he wasn’t off blackmailing schoolteachers or beating them to death with bricks.
In this first instalment of the three-part drama, which features Paula’s liaison with James, the whole shambles was filmed with a murky net curtain over the lens and the lights out.
every now and then, one of the cast would emerge into daylight and blink: Paula went for a slow, miserable trudge on the beach with her earphones in and scowled at the sea for a couple of minutes without saying a word.
Mostly, though, this was set in
TALL TALE OF THE WEEK: Comedian Vic Reeves is to guest star in Coronation Street (ITV), playing a telly presenter. Vic says he’s been a Corrie fan since Episode 1... screened when he was not quite two. A likely story.
darkness. James’s flat only seemed to exist at night, when he mooched sulkily between his wives’ mattresses on the floor.
He drove round in a van with a haunted cement mixer in the back — it would start banging ominously, then a child with a blood- smeared face would leap out at him.
Paula had a rat-infested basement where she went when she wasn’t feeling miserable enough.
eventually, she called James to come and block up the rat-holes: he didn’t give her a quote but later charged her more than £500. Paula seemed to think this was quite normal, which suggests that either she doesn’t hire many builders or she had an awful lot of rats in that cellar.
The action did pick up slightly in the final 15 minutes, after James had beaten Paula’s ex-lover to pulp and dumped his body in a quarry.
A detective, who had apparently been sitting in a nearby cinema throughout, waiting for his cue, arrived to start questioning people. He hasn’t interviewed the ghost in the cement mixer yet — that’ll probably happen next week.
If it’s glum you want, the excellent history series A Tale Of Two Sisters (Yesterday Channel) recounted the cautionary story of Unity Mitford, who fell in love with Adolf Hitler and ran away to Berlin, where she lurked in his favourite restaurants until he noticed her. Unity truly believed that her ‘boyfriend’ meant no harm to anyone, which just goes to show that some girls have terrible judgment when it comes to men.
When Hitler invaded Poland, she was so aghast that she sat on a bench in a Munich park and shot herself in the head.
The truly awful twist was that, although the bullet lodged in her skull, she didn’t die but lingered with brain damage for a further nine years.
oddly, Unity wasn’t one of the two sisters of the title. The documentary focused mostly on Fascist Diana, who married oswald Mosley (a sort of poundshop Hitler) and Communist Jessica, who was so determined to live a working-class life that she took her baby and moved to a terrace in Rotherhithe, in London’s Docklands, where the child died of measles.
The archive footage, including clips of the Mitford family’s home cine- film from the Twenties, was expertly restored if sometimes replayed too often. Top-notch stuff.