Get a grip... where’s our promised spice?
WHAT HO, ITV? What the blazes was going on in The Singapore Grip ( ITV, Sunday)? Answers on a postcard, please, and keep it clean. We were all very much looking forward to a nice new Sunday night period drama during which I could point the planter chair towards the telly but instead you served up something rather tepid, not steamy like a tropical jungle.
Yes, some of you will have found Charles Dance’s appearance from behind a large shrub wearing only a fetching kimono as the definition of titillation but your ardour was well and truly quashed when he went and had a stroke on his birthday after uttering about seven lines.
He does do death rather well, though his latest throes didn’t match his exit from Game Of Thrones – to be fair, few things would match being slain by your son while parked on the “throne” – but barking the words “the rising sun” while pointing at a Japanese print would have given the colonials something to think about, if they hadn’t been so dozy.
My god, they were asleep. Even Jane Horrocks’s batty rubber baron’s wife heard a squeak from the Air Vice-marshall but this also fell on deaf ears.
There was too much caution in this opening episode. It began with Dance’s son Matthew waking up in a rickshaw after fire-fighting during a bomber raid. For goodness sake, show us the bombing! We’re grown-ups. Instead, we endured a very tiring plot and discussion about rubber. At one point I thought the 1937 price for rubber per ton would appear on the screen as a ticker just to enthral us more. We even had a walk around a near-empty rubber warehouse. There is no drama in rubber. My favourite character was
David Morrissey’s son, Monty.
What derring-do this Bertie Wooster-style chap got up to. At one juncture he jumped into the swimming pool, which drew a severe reprimand from his father. Quite right. No one can have fun in the colonies any more. He then booked a yogi (not as in bear) for the birthday party in an act to top anything on Britain’s Got Talent as the excitable guest ate most of a bone china cup! Spiffing entertainment. As Morrissey reported to his shocked wife later, “He pushed on – full of china!” That, alas, was the wittiest thing anyone said, but the “Carry On...” implications of someone working for the rubber industry could run and run. Surely, someone will eventually say, “I’m in rubber”.
We had three hours of the
Dennis Nilsen story in Des ( ITV, Monday
Wednesday). It was based on Brian Masters’s Killing For Company book and drew out the homosexuality of the serial killer although Nilsen himself appeared in two minds about whether he was gay or not.
That said, it was an unexpected way into a drama that also shed a light on how Nilsen, among other things, was a pathological liar and wind-up merchant – especially with anyone who didn’t want to play his game, such as the police.
Masters was played brilliantly by Jason Watkins, an actor who could probably make the EU Withdrawal Agreement entertaining if he had to. The character went on his own journey
during the drama, happy to indulge Nilsen but then realising he, too, was being drawn into the circus that this man created around himself. But of course it was former Doctor Who David Tennant who was outstanding in the lead, drawing an audience into the mind of Nilsen, a place all of us were pleased to leave behind. Au revoir to Strike ( BBC1, Sunday). If writer JK Rowling, wickedly assailed from every direction nowadays, ever writes again, we will no doubt see this engaging private detective and his future missus once more. But something should be done about the scripts. It’s annoying when things finally turn up in the last episode. Gosh, it looks like Chiswell, the victim, had a secret Stubbs above the mantelpiece. Who knew? The plot had grown like knotweed over the previous three hours.
To help us, Strike’s well-used notebook should be shown on the screen too, via the red button. It would have interesting things, like “MOT that awful Jeep” or, more encouraging, “Finally the husband is on his way. I’m in”. That said, the show is happily diverting and beats watching a repeat on Netflix. For now. He and Robin (Holliday Grainger) did share a peck, too, and were popping out for a curry that night. By the end, however, I wasn’t sure who was paying them, or why they were helping the police for nothing. Expect to see a world-weary accountant move into the office for the next series.