So were YOU blown away?
JAN MOIR’s Bodyguard verdict (and that fiendish plot explained!)
SO NOW we know the terrible truth. Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes) really is dead. she wasn’t resting. she wasn’t just stunned. she is no more, she has ceased to be, she has expired and gone to meet her maker. In last night’s finale of Bodyguard (BBC One), millions of viewers anxiously watched for a resurrection scene featuring the Home secretary. Would she appear in the shower, soaping herself with the conceit that it was all a dream, just like Bobby Ewing in Dallas? Could she have been faking her own death in a complicated attempt to flush out those who were trying to kill her? Or was she being kept captive against her will, by any number of bad guys (and gals) who wanted her out of the way?
sadly, none of the above. Tough, brilliant, uncompromising, scheming Julia was a marvellous character, her strengths and weaknesses laid bare in another great performance from Miss Hawes. The flick of an eyelid, the tremor of her hand, the way her power heels rang through the corridors of Westminster? All pitch perfect. We wanted much, much more of her – but tragically she really did die in the bomb blast in episode three.
Bodyguard writer and creator Jed Mercurio took a huge risk in killing off Julia, thus snuffing out the sexual tension and emotional dynamic at the heart of this six-part series.
The relationship between Lavender (Montague’s security code name) and her bodyguard David Budd (Richard Madden) was the only sparky reprieve in what became an increasingly complex and dark thriller. Did this drama ever really recover from her demise? Perhaps not. How I kept yearning for Julia to jump out from behind the sofa, her cut-glass voice delivering another withering putdown before she crashed back into bed with her darling Budd.
Post- Julia, it all roared into a straightforward whodunnit, albeit one that played with audience preconceptions about gender and race, testing bias and prejudice with every twist and turn.
Early in the series, Mercurio was criticised in some liberal quarters for using so-called ‘Islamophobic stereotypes’ in a key scene that featured Nadia (Anjli Mohindra) as a terrified would-be suicide bomber. It was also wrong, apparently, to depict a Muslim woman as a submissive drone, controlled by her husband.
It certainly was. Nadia finally revealed herself to be the chief bomb maker, a vortex of evil fed up of being dismissed as a passive wife. ‘I built all the bombs. You all saw me as a poor oppressed Muslim woman. I am an engineer. I am the bomb maker,’ she crowed while in custody, a terrible expression of triumph and glee spreading across her face.
ELsEWHERE there was police corruption (of course), political dirty tricks (natch) and a plotline that was largely powered by the actions of key female characters. Although she had spent much of the last five weeks hovering around like a copshop Countess Dracula, her chalky face set in grim folds and her accent inexplicable – Geordieshire? Leedspool? – the heroine of the hour turned out to be Met Commander Anne sampson (Gina McKee).
‘A woman was murdered. A crime was committed. My officers will investigate,’ she barked, as the sinister chap from security services and the creepy cove from the Home Office scuffed their shoes like schoolboys.
The inside man turned out to be an inside woman, when Budd’s boss Chief superintendent Lorraine Craddock (Pippa Haywood) was revealed to be in the long-time pay of organised crime bosses, siphoning out operational information in return for hard cash.
What on earth had she done with all that money? surely there are only so many boxy beige M&s blazers a woman can buy?
Meanwhile, terrible things were happening to Budd. He was always covered in questionable bloodstains, which appeared to have been shot at close range by a toddler armed with a squeezy tomato ketchup bottle.
And the poor bloke spent about an hour of this special 75 minute episode strapped inside a suicide vest, stretching credulity to the limit when he clambered out of a London dungeon and on to the city’s streets. For this scene he seemed to have applied a fresh raspberry jam face pack and had thoughtfully thrown a makeshift cape over his bombs.
There is a fine line between great drama and absurdity, and there were moments when Bodyguard and its bloodied Caped Crusader nearly fell into total farce. Yet it never did. The tense scenes managed to be both gripping and touching as this wounded man struggled on with his quest for the truth. Who had killed his beloved Lavender?
When Budd finally confronted her killer he howled. He roared. He almost turned green and burst out of his shirt. No wonder sampson sent him to Occupational Health to sort out his problems.
‘My name is David, I need some help,’ he told the shrink. He sure does! He had an affair with the Home secretary, he has been affected by PTsD, no end of baddies want him dead and no one believes he is telling the truth.
Yet somehow, there was a happy end for sergeant Budd, when he drove off into the sunset with his wife at his side. And despite the lashings of tomato sauce and the weird women, that was the most unbelievable thing of all.