An unbelievable thriller inspired by a Bowie song
The premise of Hard Sun
(BBC One, Saturday) is that the end of the world is nigh, and we have five years left to cry in. Bowieologists may be puzzled that they didn’t just name it after the song from Ziggy Stardust, played at the climax of a pulsating opening episode. Maybe punters would mistake a show called Five Years for a threequel to Life on Mars and
Ashes to Ashes. It really isn’t. At the drama’s nub is a moral quandary: should the imminent extermination of humanity be hushed up by the deep state, or a matter of public knowledge? In one corner were MI5; in the other was the Met, in the shape of two coppers who linked the murder of a hacktivist to a top-secret flash drive predicting the arrival of the four horsemen.
The script certainly won’t die wondering. The two odd-couple detectives are both dragging an eventful stack of excess baggage. DI Elaine Renko (Agyness Deyn) has an autistic son, born in her early teens, who is now in an asylum for attempting to stab and incinerate her. DCI Charlie Hicks (Jim Sturgess) is a part-time burglar having an affair on the side with the widow of the colleague he possibly killed.
Neil Cross, the show’s creator. whose CV includes the dark and twisted Luther, exercised his ongoing compulsion to wrong-foot his audience. A body plummeted camerawards from a high rise. MI5 turned up the heat in a high-octane chase. The two leads thwacked lumps out of each other.
Deyn’s ability to fend for herself looked entirely plausible, though Hard
Sun isn’t that fussed about being believable. The very buildings had comic-strip names ripped from myth and legend: Lethe Road police station after the river of forgetfulness; Paladin News Group after Charlemagne’s Christian knights. The dialogue, likewise, was pleasantly cartoonish (“You’re looking a bit one per cent,” said Hick to a violent banker. “Why’ve you come over all strangly?”).
The atmosphere of paranoia and threat was lightened by police banter in a rainbow array of British accents. Almost everyone was scrumptiously good-looking. London was a chiaroscuro vision, Victorian terraces huddling under sky-piercing towers. This apocalyptic thriller is so moreish that – to quote Bowie – my brain hurt like a warehouse.
David Attenborough has always been a prehistory fan. In a documentary I can carbon-date to 1984, he forensically pieced together the story of the pterodactyl via its avian descendants. There was a similar piece of reverse engineering to Attenborough and the Sea Dragon (BBC One, Sunday), in which the physiology of an ichthyosaurus was elucidated by comparing it to sharks and crocs and dolphins.
But this was also the story of an actual dig. Crikey, it looks like hard work being palaeontologist Chris Moore. It took much heavy hammering on a Dorset sea cliff to liberate the slabs of limestone rock containing the sea dragon’s fossils, and then almost a year to chip away at those stones to expose, like Michelangelo with his chisel, the creature lurking within.
Every so often, Attenborough popped down to Moore’s hut in Lyme Regis for a check-up, not knowing what path the story would take. When evidence of deadly injuries were found, including decapitation, we were suddenly plunged into a prehistoric murder mystery. Attenborough turned sleuth to explore the brutal physique of the prime suspect, the sleekly terrifying temnodontosaurus.
In this detective story, you found out all sorts of unexpected things thanks to the limitless cleverness of university scientists and their amazing gizmos. Talk about niche – in Portsmouth they’ve even got a pathologist who investigates causes of death in prehistoric creatures. It was particular fun to see a vast fossil X-rayed at the Royal Veterinary College, the only place with a large enough machine for the job.
One sequence involving leatherback turtles was cost-savingly shot on the same Caribbean beach featured in
Blue Planet II. But make no mistake, Attenborough the prehistorian presenter is slightly different from the biologist who explains living species. He asked many more questions and, as he chopped open a pebble to expose a perfect ammonite fossil, gave way to schoolboyish giggles.
The nonagenarian showed his age only once. “So this was the king of the Jurassic sea?” he asked Emily Rayfield of Bristol University. “Or queen,” she replied. The At ten boroughs au ru scan be carbon-dated to the Jurassic era of gender politics.