Michael Hogan An unsentimental insight into life as a deaf teenager
‘Ihate the word ‘can’t’. I hate feeling frustrated. I like to be able to do things.” So says Lewis, a profoundly deaf 15-year-old, in Extraordinary Teens: School of Life and (Channel 4). He was about to undergo a potentially life-changing cochlear implant – although there was no guarantee of success. Would he realise his lifelong ambition and hear his mother say his name for the first time?
This intimate documentary traced an academic year at Mary Hare Boarding School in Berkshire, where deaf pupils learned not just to cope but to find their own voice, through the eyes of Lewis, its narrator.
We also followed sixth-formers Andrew and Fae. Andrew wanted to become Britain’s first deaf prime minister and the first step towards 10 Downing Street was campaigning for the post of head boy. Seemingly pompous and stuffy, he was 17 going on 40, like a prodigious speechmaker at a political party conference. However, he was self-aware enough to plead for “a second chance” with his suspicious peers.
Meanwhile, Fae was hesitantly preparing to head off to university, worried about how she’d cope without her deaf twin sister Mae. “Twin power” and a fistbump was their motivational mantra.
Leaving the “bubble” of the deaf community and facing the hearing world became a recurring theme. Sensitively shot by producer/director Camilla Arnold, this warm-hearted film was reminiscent of the Educating… series, with its blend of playground roister-doistering and inspirational moments. One of its few mis-steps was the naff punning title.
It gave a profound sense of the physical and emotional complexities of growing up deaf but never sentimentalised its subjects. Lewis was a typically sulky teen, Fae was nervously giggly, Andrew was desperate to fit in. All of them were just normal teenagers.
There were no manufactured happy endings here. Instead we left our three protagonists making new beginnings. As they headed into the future with optimism and courage, viewers will have been wishing them well.
The Tunnel: Vengeance (Sky Atlantic) rattled along in a distinctly unfestive fashion. Children were snatched, trafficked and held captive.
This Anglo-french whodunit was initially a remake of Scandi-crime favourite The Bridge, its debut series swapping the iconic Øresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark for the Channel Tunnel – a similar (albeit less visually spectacular) feat of engineering to connect neighbouring nations. The Tunnel steadily acquired a distinct identity and won its own awards, even if it never hit the heights of the Nordic noir original.
Now Karl Roebuck (Stephen Dillane) and Elise Wassermann (Clémence Poésy) were reunited for a third and final case. When a French maintenance worker was attacked by a plague of rats in the Chunnel (“like a James Herbert novel”, noted Roebuck to the nonplussed Wassermann) and three British children vanished from their Kent home, the cross-channel detective duo teamed up to investigate a link between these seemingly separate incidents. Cue Pied Piper of Hamelin references.
It raised interesting questions about the refugee crisis and the value society places on children’s lives. There were echoes of The Bridge, The Missing and Broadchurch. The creepy atmospherics relied too heavily on horror tropes – shower scenes, banging gates, squeaky wheels – while the script crowbarred in Brexit references in a bid to sound timely.
Where The Tunnel worked wasn’t in its plotting, which by definition was derivative, but in the chemistry between its leads. Like The Bridge’s Saga and Martin, this odd couple sparked off each other entertainingly. Dillane’s Brit divorcee was a little blokeish – all Barbour jackets, backslapping and banter – but also spiky and dry-witted. Poésy’s glacial Gallic singleton, who is somewhere on the Asperger’s spectrum, was brilliantly blank and accidentally amusing in her guileless honesty.
Their bond was uncomfortable but believable. It was such casting chemistry that might just keep me coming back to see how this six-part mystery unfolds.
Extraordinary Teens: School of Life and Deaf ★★★★
The Tunnel: Vengeance ★★★