Village of the Year is a sweet but misconceived series
Doubtless its intentions were good but I came away from Village of the Year (Channel 4) thinking it couldn’t have done a better job of confirming every urbanite’s prejudices regarding life in the country. Here was a competition to discover the best village in Britain, with a £10,000 prize up for grabs, that seemed determined to portray villages not as prosperous, thriving communities in themselves but as pretty, pensioner-packed day trip locations full of quirky oddballs who enjoyed nothing better than Viking re-enactments and carving stuff out of old bits of stick.
As lead presenter it had the evercharming Penelope Keith, of whom I’m as big a fan as the next man (give me a box set of The Good Life any day) but who’s never going to make me think “cutting edge”. Admittedly, her fellow presenters – craft expert Patrick Grant, garden designer Juliet Sargeant and archaeologist Alex Langlands – were more so. But they fell down spectacularly as judges by each seeming to visit only one of the four villages they were passing judgment on – and briefly at that.
The four villages in question were Charmouth in West Dorset, Redbrook in the Wye Valley, Lydford on the Devon-cornwall border and Aberdaron in Wales. Without going into detail, the commentary keywords were “pretty”, “fossils”, “thatch”, “tourists”, “tolerant”, “retired”, “traditional”, “beach” and “craft”.
All looked like nice places but not one gave a greater impression of being real than a one-day, stereotype-seeking visit by a TV crew was ever likely to produce.
OK, so it’s a daytime TV series aimed primarily at those who have nothing better to do – or watch – of an afternoon. But Village of the Year really did seem more like a bored London TV executive’s fantasy of country life than a true representation of reality. What I’d like to know is where were all the hard-working business people, technologists, luxury yacht makers, furniture manufacturers, fabric retailers, teachers, film-makers, farmers, artists and other productive, prosperous, life-loving people like the ones who populate the tiny Suffolk village that I live in?
It’s not all fetes, creaking joints and crusty craftspeople in the country, you know. They may have a veneer of sleepiness but dig deeper – as Village of the Year really should have done – and you’ll find many a British village thriving in a day-to-day, 21st-century way that went entirely unreflected in this sweet but entirely misconceived series.
It is never good when a drama that you’ve been enjoying for its apparent realism takes a turn for the absurd. I really liked the opening episode of Next of Kin (ITV) because of its strong portrayal of an integrated, middle-class British-pakistani family. Archie Panjabi did a great job as Mona Harcourt, a busy London doctor, while Jack Davenport was a welcome returnee to the screen as her polished political lobbyist husband, Guy.
They were comfortable, work harassed, and were juggling children and ageing parents. This made it all the more credible that they would be blindsided by her brother’s murder abroad, and a nephew suspected of terrorism. Sadly, all of that good work went out of the window in a second episode that seemed interested only in piling on as much convoluted conspiracy-thriller cliché as possible.
We opened with Mona’s nephew being chased through the streets of Lahore for no obvious reason. Then Mona attended a posh recital with a selection of underwritten characters – for no apparent reason other than to show she’d been followed there. Before we knew it, Mona had been duped by a senior police officer (Claire Skinner) into flying to Pakistan to ID her brother’s remains. There she suddenly came over all Jason Bourne, giving her Consulate minders the slip in order to plunge into the backstreets of Lahore when a stranger slipped a note into her hand.
Back home there was just time for Guy to be reduced to a burbling wreck by an innocuous encounter with a policeman, before we cut to Spook Central in London, where MI5’S entire satellite monitoring system was now focused on Mona, aka “the target” heading for an ambush by a “possible asset”. If that wasn’t silly enough, she was then shot by her own minders.
Absurd doesn’t quite cover it. With four more episodes to go, it’s probably too much to hope that this turns out to be a dream sequence from which Mona wakes next week, and gets on with the thoughtful drama she started out in.
Village of the Year ★★ Next of Kin ★★