A potty-mouthed brush with the law? Yes, m’lud
Defending the Guilty (BBC Two) was a confident half-hour comedy about barristers, and while TV definitely needs more confident half-hour comedies it’s less clear that it needs more barristers. Part of the problem is that the Criminal Bar has been portrayed rather well on television over the years, from Peter Moffat’s North Square to Peter Moffat’s Criminal Justice to Peter Moffat’s Silk. Moffat, you may have guessed, has got this one sewn up. He was a barrister who became an award-winning screenwriter, and as such most of what there is to say about being a barrister in modern Britain has already been very well said.
From recollection, however, Moffat has never penned a line such as “I’m going to s--t all over you like the BFG after a vindaloo,” and if you could get over the familiar setting (and the dur-brain title) Defending the Guilty did at least try a new approach. It took the scorched-earth, potty-mouthed humour of The Thick of It and swapped politics for law. Because the bar welcomes newbies with the brutal pupillage system, there was a bit of Fresh Meat in there too, as four of the young “pupils” struggled to win the one tenancy available at their Chambers while trying to find new ways to stitch each other up.
Episode one waltzed right in with assured direction from The Wrong Mans’ Jim Field Smith and the usual brilliant performance from Katherine Parkinson. She was sharp and weary in perfect measure as Caroline, a barrister lumbered with a wide-eyed pupil Will (Flowers’ Will Sharpe).
It was the wide-eyed bit that didn’t quite fit the brief: Will was also savvy and able, yet we were supposed to believe that he was aghast to find that the criminal justice system can be unfair. Caroline was forced to remind him that their job was to win. No one with a law degree, let alone anyone who had watched any of the 20 or so barrister dramas released over the past decade, would be so naive.
Still, it was easy to skip past the holes in the premise because the put-downs fizzed and the pace didn’t let up. Writer Kieron Quirke managed a mosaic of plot lines, set up both rancour and some affection between the barristers and the pupils, and put it all to bed in a crisp 30 minutes. A show about barristers may not be hugely original but, in these days of feature-length first episodes, not outstaying your welcome is an innovation in itself.
Jack Dee is so good at looking disgruntled that the “annoyed” emoji should just be a bitmap of his face. As with Richard Wilson in One Foot in the Grave, you want bad things to happen to him, not because you wish him ill but because you crave the inevitable close-up on Dee’s fagged-out face.
The problem – OK, one of the problems – with Bad Move (ITV), Dee’s sitcom with Pete Sinclair, which began a second series last night, is that Dee’s character Steve is not made unhappy enough. The set up is that Steve and his wife Nicky (Kerry Godliman) have moved from the city to the countryside. Inevitably, it turns out that the grass is not always greener, that you should be careful what you wish for and so on through the dog-eared book of tired proverbs. Even if you didn’t see the first series you can probably guess some of the plot lines it contained – the one about the Internet not working, the one about the flooding, the one about the smug neighbours and so on.
Someone must have not heard all of those jokes before because Bad Move was recommissioned, and as a result we were taken back to Steve and Nicky’s dream-that-turned-into-anightmare. Searching for the holy grail of an honest, reliable builder, Steve found one so excessively scrupulous that he reported a protected moth species he found in the loft to the local council. It was a cute reverse, but not enough to reduce Dee to the necessary level of Basil Fawlty-esque exasperation. It means that Bad Move, a sitcom part-written by Jack Dee, is wasted on Jack Dee.
Bad Move is indeed quite bad but mostly it’s just confusing: how did the same writing team who wrote Lead Balloon, a wry, eccentric tale of failure and mid-life frustration, come to pen something so lightweight and predictable? There are snapshots of what Bad Move could have been in the scenes with monosyllabic local shopkeeper Shannon (Sue Vincent rinsing every last drop) or Nicky’s father Ken (a hangdog Philip Jackson), but in the main it really does make you want to just get away from it all.