A clichéd thriller saved by strong performances
There was a moment early in the first episode of Next of Kin, a new ITV drama, where Mona Harcourt (Archie Panjabi), a GP, was on the phone to her brother Kareem Shirani (Navin Chowdhry), a surgeon working in Lahore. Their mum was stuck in a lift again, and they both shared a joke about how she seemed to think that her getting stuck in the same lift was “all one big conspiracy and everybody’s in on it”. Off went the dramatic irony klaxon, and with good reason – because by the end of the episode the Shirani family had decent grounds to suspect they were the subject of a big conspiracy and everybody was in on it.
First though, we had a terrorist attack on London, Kareem’s abduction and murder in Pakistan, and then, when it became apparent that Kareem’s son had also disappeared (from his university in London), suspicion fell on the wider family: cue stony-faced police in forensics suits taking computers out of bedrooms and the “Send ’Em Home” mob piping up in the background.
Regrettably, Next of Kin was familiar territory. Just as the possibility of terrorist attacks on major cities has filtered into the patterns of everyday life, so it has filtered into many television dramas. A sudden wailing of sirens with cars in gridlock and smoke pluming in the distance has become an unwelcome shorthand.
In addition to the clichés, the necessities of turning a tragedy into a thriller meant that Next of Kin had to do some extreme narrative contortions, making Mona’s husband Guy (Jack Davenport) a political lobbyist who happened to be friends with the chief of police, DCI Vivien Barnes (Claire Skinner) – because if you want a high-level conspiracy you’re going to need some politicians and some police.
But if there were a few eyebrowraisers, Next of Kin also brought something new to the screen, which was a believable depiction of a large, first and second-generation immigrant family with lives in one country but roots in another. Between them, the Shirani-harcourts crossed generations, class and race, encompassing professionals, students, the fully assimilated and the newly disillusioned. You believed their plight as individuals and as a collective, thanks to strong performances and dialogue that rang true. As yet, I’m not gripped by the thriller, but there was enough in the characterisation for me to give the plot another chance.
There is an argument that what goes on behind closed doors should stay behind closed doors, and it’s an argument that rings doubly true when those closed doors belong to a hospital operating theatre. But it’s an argument that BBC Two has repudiated with gruesome gusto in Surgeons: At the Edge of Life. This new series has been given access to the operating theatres of Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, and, not to put too fine a point on it, it accesses every bloody, subcutaneous, suppurating area.
It was, suffice to say, not for the squeamish, and if you’ve got any procedure, from an ingrowing toenail upwards, planned in, oh, the next 40 years, then it was probably best avoided altogether – not everyone wants to know how the machine works, as long as it’s working. But Surgeons was absolutely riveting. If the skill of the surgeons wasn’t impressive enough – one pair performed a double mastectomy while simultaneously “building” a new pair of breasts out of fat and tissue cut from the patient’s tummy – then their individual characters kept things tripping along. (“I’m a carpenter, a plumber, a bit of an artist I suppose,” said consultant maxillofacial surgeon Tim Martin, though not, thankfully, in front of the woman he was about to replumb, rewire and sculpt).
And, of course, the stakes, as TV types like to say, could not have been higher. We were reminded on several occasions that this wasn’t just an exercise in virtuoso dexterity but a literal do-or-die situation (although, of course, in both of the operations featured the outcomes were cheery; it’s a rule of do-or-die situations on TV that you get shown much more doing than dying). Either way, Surgeons brought together the perfect balance of ability, wonderment and jeopardy that is, as it happens, the backbone of all TV talent shows. Operating rooms are not known as theatres for nothing.