Bodyguard: inconsistent but ludicrously addictive
No doubt about it. For sheer, unmitigated nerveshredding action and suspense Bodyguard (BBC One) has delivered more bang for our TV licence buck than any other drama this year. And so it continued last night with another episode that delivered a genuinely heart-thumping surprise and wrong-footed viewer expectations at just about every turn.
Last week’s ending was shocking enough when, despite the best efforts of her (very) close protection officer David Budd (Richard Madden), a bomb went off during Home Secretary Julia Montague’s (Keeley Hawes) speech, leaving her life hanging in the balance.
And there it remained for much of this fourth episode while the police and security services embarked on yet another under-resourced investigation while clues were scattered in every conceivable direction as to who could be responsible.
From the outset, implausibility has threatened to undo Bodyguard: whether it was Budd’s PTSD going unnoticed, the police’s inability to identify a highly identifiable assassin or, above all, the unlikely sexual relationship between Budd and Montague. But then these are the buzz factors that have also made the series into such a conversation piece, and Jed Mercurio’s script has been fleet-footed enough to lead us away from the danger zone of total incredulity, piling on the action wherever necessary to distract us from more obvious plot holes.
He did so again here, delivering a knockout emotional punch midway through, with the news that Montague had died. It was if the world had fallen in. Where could we possibly go now that this key character, focus of so much background plotting and the drama’s core relationship, was no more?
There was only one way: back to Budd and the possibility that rather than being a security risk himself, he could be set up as a fall guy by the security services. Whether this seismic shift from a conspiracy thriller to a murkier one-man-against-thespooks drama will work remains uncertain. And some suicide-foiling shenanigans involving blank rounds in Budd’s gun and, clunkier still, Budd being called in to question the bomber he stopped in the series’ opening moments didn’t entirely convince.
But such inconsistencies haven’t yet stopped Bodyguard becoming the most ludicrously addictive drama of the year, because there’s always been something more compelling around the corner. And with two episodes still to go, that’s a lot of corners, and a lot of opportunities, for as skilled a hand as Mercurio’s to keep things racing breathlessly round.
Documentary-maker Callum Macrae’s film Massacre at
Ballymurphy (Channel 4, Saturday) delivered shocks of a more disturbing kind. It told the story of what, to most, will be a series of forgotten killings from the Troubles in Northern Ireland when 10 civilians, including a 45-year-old mother of eight, were shot dead over three days in 1971 allegedly by soldiers on a Catholic estate in Belfast. Another man died of a heart attack as a result.
The film was largely made up of interviews with family members of the victims and reconstructions of their movements at the time. Essentially, it put flesh on the long-held claim that the dead were innocent victims of indiscriminate and, in one instance, execution-style shootings by members of the Parachute Regiment sent to reinforce law and order at any price.
Compelling as the case made undoubtedly was, it was also onesided, necessarily anecdotal and, inevitably, emotive. This was understandable, given that its contributors have waited 47 years to have their say, and only recently won a campaign to get an inquest under way to examine the deaths officially for the first time. Against that, the Ministry of Defence’s only comment – that it couldn’t comment in light of the upcoming inquest – felt cold, institutional and defensive. Still, purely for the sake of balance, the film could have subjected the soldiers’ reports – and especially local media accounts – of battles raging for hours with IRA gunmen to some form of objective scrutiny rather than simply dismissing them out of hand.
Massacre at Ballymurphy certainly was a visceral reminder of just how polarising the conflict in Northern Ireland was. Almost 50 years on, the claim that members of the Parachute Regiment shot down citizens in cold blood remains deeply disturbing. So too, the suggestion that these killings, somehow, set a precedent for the even deadlier events of Bloody Sunday six months later. In the end, though, what is most shocking is that it has taken five decades for the deaths in Ballymurphy to come to wider light.
Bodyguard Massacre at Ballymurphy