We’re all the prisoner of gruesome thrillers
Russell’s album with Aled Jones, In Harmony, is out now. For Russell’s tour: russellwatson.com
ANOTHER week, another severed head in a TV drama... the latest was on (BBC One, Sunday) the gripping drama from the men behind The Missing which, unsurprisingly, is darker than Holly Willoughby’s roots. Twists come faster than a 1960s dance night in this creepy Amsterdam-based thriller, complete with a cellar full of kidnapped girls and a bijou transsexual brothel.
The Missing’s frazzled French sleuth Julien Baptiste has been coaxed out of retirement to help worried Edward Stratton find his missing niece Natalie.
Stratton is played by Tom Hollander who definitely isn’t in Rev mode. His character is an obvious sleaze-ball, sex worker Natalie is not his niece and a decapitated head was last seen in his kitchen attracting flies.
It had been removed with a chainsaw by a chap claiming to be a meter reader. (The moral? Always read your own meters). Although you’d probably need a larger sheet of polythene than the one he used. Think of the splattering.
The despicable deed was done to the feel-good sound of Let Your Love Flow by the Bellamy Brothers – Tarantino would approve. The killer was Constantin, a violent Romanian gangster who views Baptiste as just a “geriatric”.
Fans of The Missing know he’s much more than that. Julien may be old and world-weary, he may have a comedy limp, but he’s also smart, likeable and tenacious. Prone to gloom too. “I’m not the man I was,” he tells Marta, the Dutch police chief (also his old flame.) Local villain Dragomir isn’t the man he was either, having fashionably transitioned to Kim. On (BBC One, Tuesday) home of this month’s first bloody beheading, a woman was hacked to death in her kitchen while one son was butchered in his sleep and another barely survived. There are times when you can watch TV all night without ever leaving the scene of a crime. Sometimes a plot can justify it but does TV risk normalising
Shetland
sitcom Sykes. Sitcoms were something else we used to do much better, but don’t get me started on that...
On (Channel 4, Sunday) American spies recruited Fiona “Feef” Symonds, a bored English civil servant, to find out whether post-war Whitehall has been “infiltrated by Communists”.
Feef has big puppy eyes and the morals of a mongrel. She’s sleeping with a married Yank and seems to have a thing for MP Hugh Fenton, newly elected in the 1945 Labour landslide. He turned down her invitation to join her swimming topless in the family pond, but then Hugh’s wet enough already. For a firebrand socialist he’s no Nye Bevan. He’s not half the orator Michael
Foot was either. And I’d wager Feef isn’t the sort of woman who’d settle for less than half a Foot.
The trouble with Traitors is you have to suspend belief completely. Historians and former MI5 agents all agree that the Americans never spied on the British government – unlike the Soviets who had Burgess and Maclean in the Foreign Office, Kim Philby at MI6, and John Cairncross in the Treasury. Does this matter?
Yes! I’m sick of TV and films taking liberties with facts. The Yanks didn’t capture the Enigma machine, Churchill never went on the London Underground, William Wallace and his rebel rabble didn’t wear kilts…and on it goes.
Historical dramas should stick to reality, otherwise they just become tiresome propaganda. Like the TV News. Channel 4 hasn’t even bothered to make the House of Commons look vaguely authentic.
(History, Tuesday) got off to a disappointing start with the words “Don’t try this at home”. Killjoys. It took me half an hour to get out of the suit of armour. The show itself involves burly Yanks bashing one another with blunt weapons. It’s like Mixed Martial Arts with the added inconvenience of being trapped in a baking hot tin can. The History Channel assures me that no one has died. Yet.
Nice to see Mary the Punk back for Dr Legg’s funeral on (BBC One, Tuesday) although it’s surprising nobody reminisced about the time good old Pat Wicks persuaded her to go on the game. Lofty was back too. Once gormless and unemployable, he now owns 15 pubs (moral: to get ahead, leave Walford).
Traitors Knight Fight EastEnders