Mercifully, you don’t have to like lawyers to love this top drama
Lawyers. Members of the world’s second oldest, and most disreputable, profession. so cold-blooded that, it’s said, after a nuclear holocaust the only surviving creatures will be cockroaches and lawyers.
so they’re not the most natural stars for a drama about families, love and romantic secrets.
The Split (BBC1) mines the same seam as recent relationship serials such as Doctor Foster — no murders, no terrorists, just lots of lies and intrigue.
But writer abi Morgan isn’t making life easy for herself. Gangsters, undertakers, even advertising executives can make lovable characters. Lawyers are more difficult.
even worse, heroine Hannah is a divorce lawyer with no scruples about using a child as leverage. Her client is an unfaithful wife who wants her ex-husband, a stand-up comedian, to stop doing gags on stage about their break-up.
Hannah’s answer is to withhold all access rights. No weekend visits for Daddy (Mathew Baynton) until he submits to his ex- wife’s demands. and when Daddy spots his child sitting in the lawyer’s office, playing video games all alone, Hannah summons security to throw the poor man out.
Nicola walker plays Hannah in a blonde wig, a dead ringer for Fay ripley in Cold Feet. she presses every button to make her character likeable — forgiving her snide, manipulative mother, adoring her goofy husband, larking about with her competitive younger sisters.
Trouble is, all four of those characters are lawyers, too. It’s starting to look as though The split might be a publicity stunt to make cockroaches seem more likeable.
Because this is a drama about friendships and feuds between women, the men are flimsily drawn.
Hannah’s old boyfriend (also, surprise surprise, a lawyer) is a two-dimensional charmer. stephen Tompkinson is a self- pitying businessman who buys his mistress a boob-job and wonders why his wife Goldie is cross.
Meanwhile, anthony Head is Hannah’s father, missing for 30 years, who reappears in a London park and says nothing — he just smiles wetly, while his daughter unburdens herself of a lifetime’s pent-up emotion.
No doubt many male viewers will feel aggrieved at such tepid portrayals. Here’s some advice, chaps — don’t call your lawyer. Instead, let a powerful cast, which includes Deborah Findlay as the mean matriarch and Meera syal as the wronged Goldie, get on with it. we don’t have to like them to relish the drama.
During the inevitable scene in the ladies’ loos, Goldie offered Hannah a wet wipe. Having just watched Fatberg Autopsy: Secrets Of The Sewers (C4), I was out of my seat, pleading with the screen: ‘Don’t flush it away!’
wet wipes, and not cockroaches or atomic bombs, could be the cause of civilisation’s downfall.
Presenter rick edwards went wading about in the goop under London’s pavements, and discovered a solid mass of fat half a mile long — with the consistency, he claimed, of ‘crumbly cheese’. This fat consists of 90 per cent cooking oil, poured down the drains by the capital’s cafes and restaurants. That explains why the build-up is especially bad around Leicester square.
But greasy eateries have been dumping oil down the gratings for centuries. The added ingredient is wet wipes, those soggy squares of man-made cloth that — like plastic — take millennia to disintegrate.
The fat sticks to the wipes, more wipes stick to the fat, and so on till all London is bunged up.
rick had to spend a long time waist-deep in slurry to learn this. He looked like he was secretly enjoying it. well, it’s honest work. Try explaining that to a lawyer.