Women admire her strength. Men find her alluring. As critics hail Bodyguard, why Keeley Hawes is TV gold
BODYGUARD BBC1 ★★★★★
ANY WOMAN who can single-handedly bring up four unruly children is capable of running a country. True, she’s just an actress playing the role but it’s no surprise that Keeley Hawes, beloved for portraying matriarch Louisa in The Durrells, can be a ruthlessly ambitious politician in Bodyguard (BBC1).
She plays Home Secretary Julia Montague, plotting her most direct route into No 10. ( Where writer Jed Mercurio got the inspiration for the character of a female Home Sec, aiming for the top job with almost robotic precision, it’s hard to imagine!)
One moment Julia is ladling compliments onto her new police protector, played by Richard Madden, the next, she’s snapping: ‘I don’t need you to vote for me, only to protect me’ — and, when she’s expecting a gentleman caller, tells the bodyguard to ‘f*** off — no offence’.
The hapless assistant who spills coffee over Julia’s blouse, moments before an interview on Andrew Marr’s show, is lucky to be merely dismissed and not ritually disembowelled in Parliament Square.
In fact, the one disappointment about Bodyguard is that Keeley Hawes is not in every scene. She’s portraying a political chancer that viewers could quickly love to hate as much as wicked Francis Urquhart played by the late Ian Richardson in House Of Cards.
This six-part series opened with a 20- minute action sequence that saw former special ops soldier David Budd (Madden) confront and disarm a suicide bomber on a packed commuter train.
Every shot told us something crucial about Budd, played by Renfrewshire-born Madden with a bull-necked truculence.
In the first few seconds, we realised he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because, dozing on the train, he heard the clatter of the tracks as machine-gun fire.
It’s this economical style, this trick of sketching his characters with quick, deft lines, that made Mercurio’s police corruption serial Line Of Duty so widely admired. Budd appears more complex with each scene. By the time he’d disarmed the woman bomber, handed her to the police and averted mass slaughter, we’d learned enough about him to fill a novel.
This is a man who cannot switch off for a moment, who searches for danger with every glance. He is able to foil the bomber because, for a split second, he’d already seen a man on the platform behaving suspiciously with a mobile phone. BUDD’S punctilious respect for authority is a pretence, and he has no qualms about disobeying direct orders. His controlled calm is fake, too: there’s violent rage, bubbling under the veneer.
He’s a good father but an impossible husband, who is taking the break-up from his frightened wife badly — so badly, in fact, that he drops dark hints about harbouring suicidal thoughts.
Most of all, Budd blames politicians for everything that he went through while serving in the Armed Forces.
He had vowed, while fighting in Afghanistan, that if he ever found himself with one of Westminster’s finest in his sights, he’d pull the trigger and take revenge for the comrades he’d seen killed. And now he’s guarding the Home Secretary . . .
All the best heroes are filled with inner turmoil and conflicting desires, but this lad’s off the scale.
Bodyguard is headline drama. Small wonder that so many Beeb stars were clamouring for cameos: watch closely and you’ll see or hear Martha Kearney, Laura Kuenssberg and John Humphrys from the BBC’s News team among many others.
With the second episode tonight, the BBC has taken a risk in launching it as a double bill over the Bank Holiday weekend, while much of the country might be away from their TV sets.
Also, the Beeb hopes to steal a march on ITV, which is launching its own autumn season next Sunday with yet another adaptation of Thackeray’s 1848 classic novel Vanity Fair.
The BBC’s bold manoeuvre deserves to pay off.
If you missed the first episode last night, I urge you to quickly catch up on iPlayer, for Bodyguard is intelligent, psychological storytelling so gripping you’ll have to remind yourself to breathe. BODYGUARD continues on BBC1 tonight at 9pm.