A family saga more bonkers than a Jacobean drama
Last night on television Jasper Rees
Debbie Horsfield will always be remembered for resurrecting Poldark. But her back catalogue also consists of several racy dramas rooted in her native North West. Her tactic is to bung disparate characters together and watch things combust. It worked above all in Noughties series Cutting It, a smoking hot salon saga set in Manchester that ran to four series. Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Age Before Beauty (BBC One) is another salon saga, also set in Manchester. But the title points to a shift in focus. In the opening episode, Bel (Polly Walker) returned to Mirrorbel Beauty after 18 years away bringing up twins. She found it in dire straits because her vain and superficial sister Leanne (Kelly Harrison) is keener on botoxing than double-entry bookkeeping. Bel was also feeling her age, not helped by the discovery that her neglected joiner husband Wesley (Cutting It alumnus James Murray) had joined groins with hot young fitness instructor Lorelei (Madeleine Mantock).
Why Wes, already built like a brick outhouse, would need to work on his pecs is a question best left unasked because Horsfield doesn’t trade in gritty realism: her characters and situations proudly levitate a good six inches off the ground. This works if and when believable, but I confess I struggled with the plot in which cuddly Teddy (Robson Green), married to the grotesque Leanne but still carrying a torch for Bel, set a honeytrap to lure Wes into infidelity. He was assisted by a junior schemer of doubtful provenance called Dante (Amir El-masry). The plot is so bonkers that it could be Jacobean.
You can tell from their names that Horsfield’s people are colourful ciphers – no one’s called John or Debbie. She crowds her canvas with the likes of Chizzler (Struan Rodger), a lanky-haired boxing coach in a wheelchair married to septuagenarian stylist Ivy-rae (Sue Johnston) who has an eye for muscly Brazilians. There’s also a stroppy, pampered tween called Disney whose single mother worried that she was mixing with children from the estate. “Do they even know their parents?” “Do I even know mine?” retorted Disney, a little too knowingly.
It’s breathless and intense, but Age Before Beauty is about as authentic as Leanne’s bimbo eyelashes.
Stacey Dooley is the millennials’ Louis Theroux. She first participated in a documentary about exploitation in the fashion industry 10 years ago when only 21. Her natural presence in front of a camera, and disarming style of enquiry, plus of course her youth, soon found her fronting an occasional series under the umbrella title Stacey Dooley Investigates. The work of keeping youthful viewers abreast of serious ethical issues has just earned her an MBE, and promotion for her most recent film from the internet to terrestrial television.
Stacey Dooley Investigates: Second Chance Sex Offenders (BBC One) took Dooley to Florida to confront the quandary of what to do with convicted paedophiles when they are released from custody. In the UK names go on a register, but are not made known to the public. The US takes a harder line and residency restrictions are enforced, which prevent them from living near places where children congregate, such as schools and parks. The result is that sex offenders gather in tented ghettoes or remote rural settlements where their only society is one another.
The embodiment of that hard line was a lobbyist called Ron Book, whose daughter Lauren, now a state senator, was horribly abused by a nanny. Dooley astutely put it to Book that his rage was at least in part an expression of guilt at his own failure to protect his child. He didn’t have a satisfactory answer. Nor did Pat, a septuagenarian who has set himself up as a father figure helping to rehabilitate younger sex offenders. He was plausible until Dooley suggested that he’d lied to her about his own past convictions.
Not all of the film was confrontational. As ever with such films – including Theroux’s own – the meat was in the conversations with the offenders, whose desire for rehabilitation made them unreliable witnesses to their own recovery. Dooley’s getting-to-know-you manner helped put them at their ease, but it was never quite clear what her mission really was, nor what she hoping to reveal, other than that, on this most intractable of issues, America has contorted itself into a moral dead end.
Age Before Beauty ★★★ Stacey Dooley Investigates: Second Chance Sex Offenders ★★★