Exposing the horrors of Britain’s gig economy
Drama isn’t always about plot. The BBC has made an award-winning series of films in which the title is a spoiler: Murdered By My Father, Murdered By My Boyfriend, Murdered for Being Different. Each fashions a factual story into a moving reconstruction which you watch with impending dread, knowing for certain of horrors to come.
Killed By My Debt (BBC One), while administering just as much of a gut punch, varied the theme. This was another desperate story of a young person whose life came to a senseless early end. But here the villain was not an individual acting out of malign conviction. Instead, motorcycle courier Jerome Rogers (played by Chance Perdomo) took his own life after a pair of parking fines accumulated at terrifying speed into an unpayable debt.
So the finger was pointed at something rotten in the state of society – specifically, the gig economy which offers no protection to workers, and the debt-collecting industry which preys on vulnerable targets with a relentless lack of empathy. These two were represented by human faces, each played by an actor shrewdly cast to evoke memories of previous roles: Craig Parkinson as the bailiff is familiar as the corrupt “Dot” Cotton in Line of Duty, and Tom Walker, as the courier controller, is best known as the short-fused Youtube news reporter Jonathan Pie.
But behind them was the impersonal machinery of the council and the courts, shown by director Joseph Bullman as grim gleaming basements where computerised fines and summons are impersonally generated and dispatched. Meanwhile in promo videos, debt collectors and loan sharks baited the hook with beautiful young women selling their product.
In a fine performance, Chance Perdomo evoked something of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s ability to look persecuted to his very marrow. He beautifully captured the debtor’s isolating paralysis – the breezy upbeat mask to hide the shame of debt, the dead-eyed retreat from reality.
Tahsin Guner’s meticulous script lingered on agonising what-if turning points when tragedy might have been prevented. The knockout blow was held back to the very end: footage of the real Jerome, cornered and captured on the bailiff ’s chest-cam. Originally made for BBC Three, this was a high-impact addition to the channel’s canon of awareness-raising dramas.
How gripping is Picnic at Hanging Rock (BBC One)? It feels like a period Australian version of Lost or Twin Peaks, an enigma wrapped in a mystery tucked inside a multi-part drama. The audience is sucked in but nothing is ever necessarily resolved, giving a thousand chat-room theorists something to speculate about.
This version of Joan Lindsay’s novel promised to go its own way rather than ape Peter Weir’s 1975 film, and in the second episode that direction became a little clearer. With sexuality, class, race and colonialism lobbed into the pot, this is a reboot which, though set in 1900, holds a wobbly mirror up to the here and now. Natalie Dormer’s little round mirror shades are ridiculously up to the minute, and there was a very contemporary bit of sloppiness in one of the intertitles (“The Fitzhubert’s Annual Soirée”).
For the moment, Picnic at Hanging Rock is behaving like a puzzle to be cracked. The police explored the rock in force, and then young Michael Fitzhubert (Harrison Gilbertson) dashed back to do his own sleuthing. His quest was partly in pursuit of the missing women but also, it seemed, a search for his latent heterosexuality among the crags and crannies. A scandalous attraction to the same sex also sprouted in the girls’ dorms. A mother’s letter to her daughter deplored “the fierce friendships with the weaker sex to which you are prone”.
There was yet more evidence that Mrs Appleyard’s favoured means of controlling female wilfulness was via a chilling regime of corporal punishment. The febrile atmosphere of hysteria and hallucination is certainly doing nothing to alter her low opinion of her sex. Is Appleyard College Gilead in disguise? The costumes are ravishing symbols of gender oppression, making the final reveal of bare legs commensurately shocking.
Picnic at Hanging Rock hasn’t yet swum into focus and it’s not necessarily a criticism to imagine that perhaps it never will.
Killed By My Debt ★★★★★ Picnic at Hanging Rock ★★★