Ethical quagmire made for a bold and gripping thriller
Anew Hugo Blick drama is always an event. He is the finest auteur working in British television today and uses big dramas to tell intimate stories. Both The Shadow Line and The Honourable Woman were humane, thoughtful and funny thrillers, rewarding for those prepared to pay close attention while indulging the occasional detour. The same could certainly be said of
Black Earth Rising (BBC Two), which saw Blick wading into yet more ethical quagmires: past and present relationships between Africa and the West, the workings of the International Criminal Court and the difficulties of prosecuting a man deemed a war criminal in one country and war hero in another.
The crucible of these conflicts was the mother-daughter relationship between Eve and Kate Ashby (Harriet Walter and Michaela Coel). The former was an international criminal lawyer prosecuting Simon Nyamoya (Danny Sapani), a Rwandan general-turnedmercenary who helped end the 1994 genocide but now stood accused of recruiting Congolese child soldiers and trading in blood diamonds; the latter, Eve’s adopted daughter, saved from that same genocide and understandably nonplussed at her mother’s pursuit of a national hero.
Blick the director was in complete command of his material, with striking compositions (Nyamoya striding across a border bridge to his destiny) and blackly funny juxtapositions (the pops of a tennis ball machine resembling gunshots) throughout. But he was helped by a formidable cast: Coel, defiant, intelligent, yet with damage lurking near the surface; Walter, dignified but brittle, her moral rectitude undermined by fear that her adopted daughter might find out the (as yet unspecified) truth; and John Goodman, Eve’s long-time colleague and lugubrious ally weighed down with sadness over his comatose daughter and his own illness.
It was bold to begin the series with a lecture, yet this one set the parameters of debate for the whole series, as Eve jousted with a black British student over whether the ICC was just another example of “self-righteous Western paternalism”, or an essential bastion of justice for those who might otherwise struggle to find it. It was even bolder to end with one of Blick’s characteristic narrative tangents, as a curious, tense encounter in a Congolese doctor’s surgery turned bloody. But while he rarely offers definitive answers to the philosophical questions he raises, Blick’s narratives leave few loose ends. Here, states of the mind and heart are as important as states of the nation. “You want it darker?” asked Leonard Cohen over the credits. Just wait until next week.
Bodyguard. Vanity Fair. Press. And, yes, Black Earth Rising. There’s a lot of excellent, distinctive new drama around at the moment. This creates problems for resolutely three-star affairs such as
Strangers (ITV), a conspiracy thriller which, for better or worse, feels like it could have been made any time in the last 20 years (although seeing so many subtitles on prime-time ITV was a welcome surprise).
There were many plusses: John Simm is one of the best in the business at playing everymen taking on the system. Here, his amiable, slightly wet academic Jonah Mulray arrived in Hong Kong in the wake of the death of his wife Megan (Dervla Kirwan) to discover a wall of official corruption, cover-up and the other family his wife had secreted there: world-weary husband David Chen (Anthony Wong) and anti-authoritarian activist daughter Lau (Katie Leung).
In Paul Andrew Williams, Strangers had one of the most reliable directors working in British TV drama, wringing out every drop of the Hong Kong’s queasy exoticism, its unsettling combination of swanky bars and sweaty poverty, the messy collision of Chinese authoritarianism, big business and waning British influence. The plotting was solid (the gunshot heard on Megan’s valedictory voicemail was a vintage cliffhanger), although the expositional dialogue needs polishing.
The trouble was, it felt predictable and, at eight episodes, overlong. Co-stars Emilia Fox and Tim Mcinnerny, here playing British consulate wonks, are invariably wrong ’uns unless the former is the lead. Jonah will surely bond with Lau or David in his quest for justice. Said journey will probably end in frustrated resolution. I may well be wrong – last Sunday’s Bodyguard confounded my expectations – but there’s just too much great TV around to persevere with the merely passable stuff.
Black Earth Rising ★★★★★ Strangers ★★★