For all its ridiculous plots and overacting, I’ll miss Homeland
The most celebrated, A-list facial hair in showbiz is back, and every strand is bristling with supergroomed charisma. Mandy Patinkin’s beard, the only face-fuzz with its own lifestyle coach, is the true star of Homeland (C4). Mandy, who plays America’s spy chief Saul Berenson in the hypermanic thriller, compares his beard to an Olympic athlete who cannot be his best unless he works continuously with one trainer.
At the show’s outset in 2011, he endured weeks of frustration as first one beard-tamer and then another fluffed his fur. ‘It was making me crazy,’ he says, ‘and so I insisted: “I need one person who can do this right.” ’
That person is Audrey. her hands are the only ones permitted to trim Mandy’s mane. It isn’t clear whether Audrey is male or female, but as we’re talking about a beard on a bloke named Mandy: everything is topsy-turvy in tellyland.
It’s no coincidence that Audrey wasn’t used for just one season of homeland, the sixth — easily the worst. That’s the one where action hero Quinn got killed off and the heroine, unstable CIA maverick Carrie (Claire Danes), spent most of her days doing childcare.
Season seven was a return to form, hitting its climax with Carrie gibbering and drooling in an ex-Soviet gulag. Now she’s out, but the Russkies have custody of her memories . . . and a slice of her sanity. During her debrief, she can’t remember anything about her last six months in captivity.
Berenson knows she must have divulged state secrets under torture — he just can’t be sure whether she’s now an enemy agent. It’s a neat twist on the original homeland set-up, which saw Carrie and Saul investigating a U.S. war hero suspected of being a double agent. That takes the show back to its beginning, in what has already been announced as its final series.
For all its lurid overacting and preposterous plots, I’ll miss homeland when it’s over.
There’s never been a psychological spy drama like it: Carrie and her panic attacks are a world away from the icy calm of John le Carre’s female operatives.
The fact she has only a tenuous grip on reality doesn’t stop Saul sending Carrie straight back into the field. Why should it? There’s always been a Freudian aspect to this story: he’s the sadistic father figure, she’s the rebellious child who rolls her eyes and spits defiance but, in the end, will always obey Daddy.
This time, she’s in Kabul, taking on the Taliban. Carrie’s not scared. After all, there’s little left to frighten her.
One look at Bertie Carvel’s false teeth in The Pale Horse (BBC1) might send her running for the nearest CIA bunker though. As the Bible- quoting shopkeeper Zachariah Osborne, Carvel and his choppers were hamming it up with glee — like Dickens’s oily Uriah heep auditioning to play hannibal Lecter in The Silence Of The Lambs.
Rufus Sewell, as amateur detective and philanderer Mark easterbrook, pitched his reaction to Zachariah just right: part revulsion, part frozen horror.
More of the psycho in the brown Open All hours coat, and less of the hocus pocus, would have made this a much better murder mystery.
Too much of the supernatural leaked into the solution. Mark was apparently dead in the final scene, an unwitting ghost trapped in hell who reads of his own demise in the newspaper. Who killed him? By implication, it was his wife hermia (Kaya Scodelario), who awoke from a coma to discover three witches at her hospital bedside. But I thought their curses were bogus . . .
Not at all a satisfactory ending.
FAMILIAR FACE OF THE
WEEKEND: ‘We’ve met before, I believe,’ said DCI Fred Thursday to hairdresser Mrs Radowicz in Endeavour (ITV). Too right you have, guv’nor — in real life, actors Roger Allam and Rebecca Saire are married. It’s a small world inside the box.