Heartfelt family drama spoilt by boardroom banter
It shouldn’t come as any great surprise to discover that Abi Morgan has written another compelling, richly textured female character. Almost all of her work – for stage and screen – is built around a strong, female lead: pioneering TV producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) in The Hour; political activist Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) in Suffragette; and perhaps most memorable of all, Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) in The Iron Lady.
Morgan’s new, six-part series,
The Split (BBC One), focuses on an emotionally bruised, strung out divorce lawyer called Hannah Stern, immaculately portrayed by Nicola Walker. Hannah is a fractured mess of contradictions – ruthless and fragile; driven but exhausted – all zipped up in an expensive dress.
Walker’s performance in the opening episode was remarkably moving – especially so given how little help she got from a loose script packed with cliché and legal jargon. “She’s not officially an ex wife until the decree absolute is in,” Hannah said at one point, as she raced around the office.
Instead we had to rely on Walker’s facial expressions to give us clues about Hannah’s state of mind. Her anxious half-smiles, twitching eyes and short stabs of breath hinted at a woman on the brink.
She recently quit Defoe’s, the family law firm run by her mother (Deborah Findlay), in order to work for a rival. By way of proving how cut-throat the legal profession is, Hannah’s younger sister Nina (Annabel Scholey), who also works for Defoe’s, stole a wealthy client right from under her nose. Hannah also had a young family to juggle and a flighty-looking husband (Stephen Mangan) to keep an eye on. “I’m tired of being the one relied upon, counted on,” she confided to her mother in a rare unguarded moment.
The question, though, is whether a knockout performance can sustain a series that, on this evidence at least, looks pretty humdrum. If divorce law is to be interesting, then we need to care about the people involved. And, frankly, I didn’t care one jot about the clients in the first episode: a wealthy businessman and a man-child comedian. Which leaves us with what? Glass offices, corporate types in suits sipping coffee, and lines such as “the continued separation between my client and his son compounds a growing parental alienation”.
There is some hope, though. The key series plot point appears to be the return of Hannah’s father (Anthony Head), who walked out on the family three decades previously. The most affecting moment came when Hannah told her youngest sister Rose (Fiona Button) that she had seen their father. “Okay, Rose, you’re going to cry in a minute,” she said, touching her shoulder. “I saw Dad today.”
If the series moves away from the boardroom into more domestic waters, it could yet be very good indeed.
Poor old Rick Edwards. This is surely not what he had in mind when he pursued a career in television. During Fatberg Autopsy:
Secrets of the Sewers (Channel 4), the presenter was lowered into a drain in central London, where he waded through raw sewage, gagged a bit, and then came face to face with a fatberg. Beats working on T4, I suppose.
No, I’m being unfair. Edwards was actually great company in this bizarre documentary, which was, in essence, an hour of looking at human waste. For the uninitiated, a fatberg is a congealed lump of non-biodegradable matter, made up of things we flush down the loo or pour down the sink, such as wet wipes and cooking oil.
Some fatbergs are so big – as much as 750 metres long – that they are blocking our sewer systems, forcing water companies to employ a team of “flushers” to remove them.
I admired Edwards’s willingness to get stuck in. He knew that this was lowest-common-denominator television and embraced its comic potential. “I feel like the Howard Carter of s--t,” he said, as he took a chisel to a block of fatberg.
But for all the jokes, this film also uncovered some concerning findings. It was discovered, for example, that there are high levels of banned muscle-enhancing drugs in our waste. More worrying was the fatal bacteria, including listeria and E coli, thriving inside fatbergs. If these blokages aren’t cleared, this raw sewage could flood our homes. There is, then, plenty of information hidden inside the fatberg – you just have to follow your nose.
Edwards is unlikely to win any awards for this but he nevertheless deserves immense credit for polishing this particular turd to a pleasing shine.