The Loch mystery so ludicrous it makes Nessie seem believable
Put down your toast and let’s play a game, like the White Queen in Alice In Wonderland, of believing six impossible things before breakfast. I believe Diane Abbott can count to 20, Jeremy Corbyn is your cuddly uncle, and the real Elvis Presley is living incognito in Las Vegas . . . with Princess Di. I even believe in the Loch Ness monster.
But I cannot bring myself to believe in telly’s latest attempt at Scot- noir murder mystery, The Loch (ItV).
this disjointed head-scratcher of a crime serial piled so many ludicrous events into its first hour that by the end I couldn’t help laughing in disbelief.
For a start, there was the victim, who was chucked over a precipice . . . but not before he’d had his brain extracted through his nose, like an Egyptian mummy.
None of the Plods at Loch Ness police station seemed very surprised by this. they reckoned it was standard psychopath behaviour, to taunt the detectives.
A bunch of local teenagers played a prank, trying to pretend that Nessie was dead by assembling a dinosaur corpse on the beach with bones and offal pinched from a nearby abattoir.
Ah, youthful high jinks. Which of us can truthfully say we didn’t lark about with a few binbags of dismembered cattle parts when we were younger?
the pranksters didn’t seem too concerned to discover that among the intestines and other playthings was a human heart. teenagers are notoriously difficult to impress, but surely this was worth an ‘eww, totally gross!’ — all it got was a grudging, ‘whatever . . .’
Siobhan Finneran, playing DCI Lauren Quigley, was deeply shocked, so much so that she attempted a posh English accent. It didn’t work: she sounded like Bet Lynch impersonating the Queen.
‘You have a cold-blooded predator in your town,’ warned Quigley, and she wasn’t talking about the wolf that was hanging round the abattoir at night, hunting for scraps. Strictly speaking, wolves have been extinct in Scotland since 1743, but as we’ve agreed to believe in the monster, we can’t quibble about an overgrown Alsatian.
the real mystery about the Loch is how it could be so preposterous yet so predictable. Among the whirl of new characters was a boy in a coma. In the final shot, the camera hovers over his head. Surely his eyes won’t suddenly snap open. It’s just too cliched. But ping! there they go, wide open. I don’t believe it.
The Handmaid’s Tale (C4) would be an unbelievably heavy-handed satire on trump’s America, if it weren’t based on a novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood nominated for the Booker Prize more than 30 years ago. In this ten-part adaptation, Elisabeth Moss (Peggy from Mad Men) is a slave in a religious dictatorship, whose domestic duties include attempting to bear children for her lord and master, the ‘Commander’.
In the mornings she goes shopping, at night she is powerless to resist his wanton demands. But while her cruel slavemaster is slowly losing his heart to her, our brave little maid is flirting dangerously with the sexy chauffeur. It’s like Barbara Cartland with a degree in English Lit.
Moss’s voiceover is often stilted and literary, and the costumes that are supposed to evoke Christian fundamentalism really do nothing but add a layer of silliness: the handmaids wear red riding hood cloaks with crisp white headgear that looks like an Ikea lampshade.
But every scene is beautiful, composed in palettes of pastel drenched in blurred light. there may never have been a prettier tV show. Schlock it certainly is, but it’s gorgeous schlock.