More Riveria than Night Manager?
Beyond its title, BBC One’s big-hitting New Year drama Mcmafia has little to do with the scarily percipient book that Misha Glenny wrote a decade ago about organised crime’s increasing globalisation in the digital age. But that’s no criticism of Hossein Amini and James Watkins’s glitzy international crime thriller which, inspired by Glenny’s non-fiction, proved a seductive piece of storytelling in its own right.
In the opening episode, Mcmafia wore its borderlessness on its sleeve, flitting between Doha, London, Moscow and Eilat, and a variety of languages, reflecting the global lifestyle of the modern businessman – and, it would seem, the modern criminal. It never lost sight, though, of its reliably old-fashioned theme: the impossibility of escaping the past. Or your family’s past, if you happen to be Alex Godman (James Norton), the privileged, essentially English son of wealthy, London-based Russian émigrés.
Alex had never known anything other than the civilising influence of public school, business studies in the USA and the gilded life of a reputable hedge fund manager in the City. Until, that is, his dodgy Uncle Boris (David Dencik) ordered the assassination of the rival mafia kingpin Vadim Kalyagin (Merab Ninidze), who had driven the family out of Russia in the turbulent postcommunist era.
There were multiple twists and turns to the complex plot but suffice to say Alex had some big decisions to make regarding his future, and his family, by the time Uncle Boris ended up on a slab with a caviar knife in his neck. Like Michael Corleone in The
Godfather, it seemed that fate and the past had already made many of those decisions for him. But unlike that character, Alex’s father was a drunken, embittered wreck. Leaving Alex, for now at least, to make all the decisions himself.
One episode in, of eight, it is difficult to tell whether Mcmafia will scale the lustrous heights of the John le Carré adaptation The Night Manager or take a plunge into glossy melodrama like Sky One’s Riviera. Norton walks a curiously stone-faced line between handsome hollowness and charisma as the somewhat inscrutable Alex. But there’s enough grit in his acting, and intrigue in the plot, to guarantee my place on the sofa for tonight’s follow-on.
Adaptations of David Walliams’s phenomenally popular children’s books are becoming a key part of the festive television line-up. This year saw not one but two. Following Sky One’s Ratburger on Christmas Eve,
Grandpa’s Great Escape (BBC One) delivered a cosy, fun-filled tale of a boy taking on the world on behalf of his former Spitfire pilot grandfather.
Despite being surrounded by a cast of limelight-grabbing older stars, Kit Connor put in a terrific performance as Jack, a young lad struggling to come to terms with his beloved Grandpa’s (Tom Courtenay) descent into dementia. Jack was determined to help his grandfather keep his dignity, despite his family’s indifference.
Walliams’s blend of topicality, sentiment and humour has worked well ever since his debut hit The Boy in
a Dress. And it worked here even if the setting felt forced, jumping back to the Eighties via a convoluted narrative to get the timescale of having a war hero grandfather right. Still, the mechanics of the plot slipped slickly into gear thanks to Walliams’s deft comic touches. He played the dense father whose whole life revolved around traffic cones, while Samantha Spiro was the vacuous Avon lady mother whose solution to every problem was to put Grandpa in a home.
Jack’s recognition that his grandfather’s Battle of Britain glory days held the key to his happiness allowed them to keep that eventuality at bay, despite several mishaps. But an unfortunate incident involving the police soon saw Grandpa incarcerated in the dreadful Twilight Towers, an old folks’ home to rival Colditz, run by the fiendishly teutonic fraudster Miss Dandy (Jennifer Saunders).
Clearly, an escape had to be organised. And if what followed stretched credibility to the absolute limit, it did so with enormous comic zest. For all its fun, though, it felt clunky compared to the rather tighter, more contemporary adaptation of Ratburger. Grandpa’s Great Escape had
plenty of laughs but never really addressed the issue at its heart – the care of elderly relatives – in an emotionally satisfying way.