This drama deserves more than three Strikes and out
With two of Robert Galbraith’s three Cormoran Strike novels now broadcast and only one left to go, time for an open letter to the person behind the pseudonym, JK Rowling: “Please, please, get on with writing some more.”
There. Because even as the second half of Strike: Career of Evil (BBC One, Sunday) came to a close, there was a niggling sensation that we are only just beginning to see what Strike (Tom Burke) and his sidekick Robin (Holliday Grainger) could be like together.
Indeed, by far the most infuriating part of last night’s concluding hour was waiting for Robin, a woman wise beyond her years, to wise up, get rid of her weedy fiancé, Matthew (Kerr Logan) and shack up with Strike. For one, he’s called Strike, and then he sleeps in an armchair, has a prosthetic leg and may even be the saviour of TV crime fiction if JK would just pull her finger out. There is no way on God’s sweet Earth that Robin can end up with anyone else.
Away from the will-they, won’t-they, which is actually a when-will-they, last night’s finale showed precisely why Strike is the best new detective series of the past five years. It’s got very little to do with the plot – our murderer turned out to have been wearing a fake beard and a hat, in the sort of reveal you might see in Scooby Doo
– though I do like the way there were occasional references to the first Strike case, Cuckoo’s Calling, in the second. Too many detective series imagine that each murder exists in a bubble, never to be mentioned or thought of again.
No, the strength of Strike lies with Strike and Robin themselves, a pairing so perfect they deserve a Hello! magazine front cover and the sobriquet Strobin. Plenty has been said about Tom Burke as the lead, but Holliday Grainger as Robin (who I’m pretty sure is basically a cipher for a young JK Rowling) is every bit as surprising. She’s a partner more than a sidekick and she’s given just as much screen time as the putative main man. Let’s just hope it’s not three strikes and they’re out.
One is not predisposed to pity the people who make television programmes, but I did feel a little sorry for the makers of Secret History: Churchill’s Secret Affair (Channel 4, Sunday). Here was a documentary based around a solitary new fact, but that fact was something of a doozy: Winston Churchill, father of the nation, devoted husband of Clemmie, had an affair sometime in the mid-thirties.
Whether or not this is the kind of barrelling bombshell that would knock your socks off probably depends on your level of interest in Churchill, but it was at least a bona fide scoop, based on a previously undiscovered audio recording from Churchill’s private secretary Jock Colville. The problem was that if you are interested in Churchill then you would have been struck down by the same bombshell nearly a week before the programme aired, because Channel 4 publicised it heavily across all good news outlets.
You can understand why – it’s hard enough to get anyone to watch anything on “old” TV channels one five when Netflix, Sky and Amazon are pumping out award-winning must-sees at a culture-busting rate. So Channel 4 needed to get people to tune in. But like the movie trailer that gives away the beginning, middle and, for good measure, the ending too, by the time Churchill’s Secret Affair was broadcast we all knew that Churchill had had an affair: it was no longer secret.
Shorn, therefore, of any shock value or newer news, the programme had to busk it. We were introduced to Churchill’s lover, Viscountess (Doris) Castlerosse, but then told that she was a “shameless social climber” who had “affairs” with practically everyone she met, including Churchill’s son Randolph and the society photographer Cecil Beaton, who was gay.
We were taken down a pop-culture cul-de-sac with repeated mentions that Lady Castlerosse is related to the supermodel Cara Delevigne – cue repeated pictures of Delevigne designed to whip up some frisson of high-society scandal that, on further reflection, signified absolutely nothing at all.
Finally, the programme imploded, with suggestions of Doris blackmailing Winston. These allegations were founded in “a well-researched biography of Doris’s husband Valentine”. What had begun with revelatory new evidence had ended up scouring through tertiary sources for significance. It was a potentially good documentary that had been fatally undermined.
Strike: Career of Evil ★★★★ Churchill’s Secret Affair ★★