This Philip K Dick adaptation lacked a modern-day message
Does anyone really know what an executive producer does? I fear I don’t. Wherever useful, their names are frontloaded to promote things you might otherwise overlook. The exec you’ve heard of on Electric Dreams (Channel 4, Sunday) is
Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, who appears later on in this cluster of adaptations of Philip K Dick’s short stories, written by, directed by and starring an international mulch of all sorts. So it must be good, yes?
The Hood Maker was written by Matthew Graham, co-creator of back-to-the-future cop shows Life on
Mars and Ashes to Ashes. It paired Richard Madden (Game of Thrones) and Holliday Grainger (Strike) as Agent Ross and Honor, an odd couple of spooks in a post-technological society riven by prejudice and distrust.
On the one hand there were telepaths, known as “teeps”; on the other, everyone else, known as “normals”. Normals weren’t keen on having their minds read, and no wonder. When Honor, a teep controversially recruited by the police, bored into the mind of a suspected agitator it felt like a particularly aggressive form of psychoanalysis (“you find your mother sexually attractive” etc).
So this was a parable about surveillance and the incursions of the all-seeing state, which is never not a hot-button topic. But Philip K Dick died in 1982 so his pensées about the future are necessarily passé. This adaptation didn’t have quite enough resonant things to say about the here and now, which should always be task number two in sci-fi’s job description.
Task number one is to look the part, and this world did look properly dystopian, all dingy warehouses and glum nightscapes. There was acting to match. Grainger, her face lightly disfigured, did much convulsive staring. Paul Ritter was suitably sleazy as a senior government official paying a “teep” sex worker to read his filthy mind. Richard Mccabe, meanwhile, was a creepy lord of the underground.
The Hood Maker doubled up as a forbidden love story that hinged on trust. If the leads’ office romance didn’t entirely hold your gaze it was because it was sketched in so quickly. Dick didn’t predict a future in which slow-burning TV dramas went on for years at their own glacial rhythm.
Documentaries about injured ex-servicemen and women are now a regular staple of the schedules. The programmes always have their heart in the right place. The song, alas, remains mainly the same:
the redemptive stories tell of decent people battling to combat the loss of not only limbs but also the sense of belonging.
In Invictus: Battle for the Start
Line (BBC One, Sunday) four members of the 90-strong British team were the latest to open up about their rehabilitation. Allowing a camera in was clearly cathartic for Bernie Broad, 32 years a Grenadier Guard, who told of the dark place he’d been to entirely on his own. His wife, who had been through thick and thin herself, was shocked to hear it. “It was obviously worse than even I thought.”
This was partly a tribute to the nameless medical professionals who piece the injured back together. Scott Yarrington, an infantryman, had his sperm extracted on the operating table and is now the father of a four-year-old boy. There was a lovely close-up of his prosthetic feet in Superman socks. Jack Cummings of the bomb squad will never walk again but, upliftingly, we watched him preparing to get married and for his swimming event in the London Aquatic Centre – where he learned not to belly-flop when diving into the pool.
But physicians also need healing. The most uncommon story belonged to Michelle Partington, a military paramedic for 23 years who scooped the mangled bodies of such men as these off the battlefield. Her injuries were all psychological. Her ex-fiancé’s parting shot was “you’re too messed up in the head and nobody will want you”.
PTSD has been slow to register in the public consciousness, not to mention the Mod’s, so to hear her articulate its impact on prime-time television was genuinely useful. Next week at the games in Toronto she’ll be weightlifting. Images of her in training provided a stark visual metaphor for the deadweight of all that trauma.
There was a cameo or two from Prince Harry, distributing hugs, high fives and good cheer. What someone still needs to make is a film that asks veterans what they really thought about the mission in Afghanistan. Good luck to them all.
Electric Dreams: The Hood Maker ★★★
Invictus: Battle for the Start Line ★★★