Flaming fiddles! That’s music to give you a murderous migraine
CONVENTIONAL wisdom holds that the worst sound in the world is probably Eighties punk songstress Toyah Willcox doing karaoke, accompanied by a tone-deaf bagpiper with a grudge.
But conventional wisdom hasn’t sat through an hour of Death And Nightingales (BBC2), a Victorian melodrama set in the boggy back of beyond in Northern Ireland, to the constant screeching accompaniment of an ear-splitting folk fiddle.
Music used well in drama can colour our emotions subconsciously, preparing us for twists and crises.
Music that sounds like a herd of cats clinging desperately to a blackboard by their claws, to avoid being fed into a food blender, adds nothing to the story except a migraine.
The sonic message was these characters were country folk, whose lives were driven by dark currents and base instincts, and that Nothing Good was going to come of it all.
But we didn’t need a violin played with a hacksaw to convey this. It was obvious from the first moment, when a young woman perusing a book of poisons suddenly sat bolt upright and stared at the camera, as though a mouse had crawled into her bloomers.
Ann Skelly plays Beth, who lives with her drunken, lecherous father (Matthew Rhys, with a Harley Davidson of a handlebar moustache).
She dreams of murdering him with cyanide, but spends her days instead reading Keats and puncturing the cattle with a long knife, to let out gas whenever an unknown blight causes them to swell up like zeppelins. I don’t remember James Herriot having to do that, but maybe I missed an episode.
One afternoon, while dragging a dead cow out of a ditch, she falls in love. She can’t help it: her boyfriend is played by Jamie Dornan, doing his shy, unsure act that says: ‘I’ve forgotten my lines again, and do you really think I’m good-looking?’
Ann should count herself lucky. This three-part drama is written by Allan Cubitt, whose perverse thriller The Fall cast Jamie as a sexy serial killer — so gorgeous that policewoman Gillian Anderson’s buttons popped off her blouse when she thought about him.
All this might make Death And Nightingales seem more exciting than it actually was. Each scene was slow and static, and the intermittent dialogue was horribly pretentious. At one point, Ann murmured to herself: ‘The heart breaks to go from this place, love it and hate it like no place else on earth, tomorrow I leave it for ever.’
At least, I think that’s what she said. I couldn’t really hear over that flaming fiddle.
The boggy back of beyond proved an irresistible draw for Professor Alice Roberts, who provided a survey of 2018’s best archaeological finds in Digging For Britain (BBC4).
She was unlucky to be scheduled opposite Tony Robinson’s second bout of Egyptian Tomb Hunting over on Channel Five. Indiana Baldrick’s adventures were blockbusters compared to the scholarly research of Prof Alice.
But she reported on some extraordinary artefacts, including a coppersmith’s workshop on the Orkney shore, dating back to the Viking era, with the workman’s greasy handprints still visible on the anvil.
And a band of Second World War enthusiasts discovered the wreckage of a Spitfire, flown by Flight Lieutenant Alastair Gunn, who went on to become one of the heroes of the ‘Great Escape’ from PoW camp Stalag Luft III.
The show’s format is too rigid: intro, scenes from a dig, interview in the museum lab, on to the next item. But some of the history unearthed was amazing.