Gere keeps this totteringly ambitious drama on track
Some sights are hard to credit and one such is Richard Gere in a BBC drama. Yet here he is, swaggering in and out of limos in Motherfatherson (BBC Two). In one scene he duelled with Sarah Lancashire, our very own small-screen royal. That makes for but a degree of separation between An Officer and a Gentleman and Curly Watts.
This is the unsmiling tale of a family triangle at the apex of the mediaindustrial complex. Gere is Max Finch, a Us-born media mogul monster and key figure in British politics, who can swing elections with an eyebrow flick. Hence his meet and greet with Lancashire’s opposition leader, who, eager for his backing, claimed she could pick up on voters’ pain like some sort of tuning fork. Finch is less hot domestically. His ex-wife Kathryn (Helen Mccrory) would rather spread love in soup kitchens, while his son Caden (Billy Howle), who edits his father’s newspaper, is so frightened of his domineering father that he keeps his nostrils peppered with intoxicants.
Tom Rob Smith, whose totteringly ambitious script this is, is intrigued by lost, lonely boys. London Spy was about a nice one, The Assassination of Gianni Versace a nasty one. Caden, alone in his glassy eyrie, is a quivering void dressed by Savile Row. In a scene to make your flesh crawl, he sought the illusion of control in commanding a prostitute to play as brainless as a newborn. By the end of the first hour his own brain was being operated on after a stroke, while his bickering parents spectated from the gantry.
Is that even allowed in medical theatres? Those intending to dwell on such questions had best duck out now. To stick around you must submit to the drama’s deluxe narcissism, its footnoted flashbacks, its lordly plan to endow every word and image with symbolic freight: the skyscrapers, the surface tension in the bath, even the shortbread at 10 Downing Street which baffles Finch. Someone’s definitely paid their subs to the David Hare appreciation society.
In the margins, what feels like normal service continued with a subplot about journalists exposing corruption. This brought us our second cheesewiring in a fortnight (see also Baptiste), and featured Sinéad Cusack having much fun as a gnarled old-school reporter.
Gere and Mccrory are of course impeccable. Their ongoing task is to persuade you to believe in these speechifying icicles. I really want to buy in, but confess I don’t currently mind if Caden lives or dies.
Jokes about Essex don’t change much. My favourite is the punchline to an Alex cartoon from decades back: “Don’t shoot ’til you see the whites of their socks.” Television has cashinoed in over the years. From Gavin & Stacey to all that vajazzle in Towie, the white-socked county is the gift that keeps on giving for gags about spray-on vulgarity and shoulderpadded dodginess. White Gold (BBC Two), a sitcom about double-glazing salesmen, is the current receptacle.
The first series introduced Cachet Windows, run by scowling yobbo Tony Walsh (Nigel Lindsay) in which the wide boys on his payroll staged a hostile takeover with the help of a local crime capo. Series two finds them in charge, led by the fork-tongued Vincent Swan (Ed Westwick), who has installed the family in a très desirable home with posh neighbours who host dinner parties and consent to Cachet supplying a new conservatory. This plotline had only one outcome, but the script managed to navigate from A to B (for botch-up) with wit and snap.
Tony, meanwhile, has now set up on his own but lacks the thin veneer of polish that enables the men in suits to sell. In a promising new development he has taken on a motivational huckster called Jo (Oscar-winning film-maker Rachel Shenton) to do his dirty work. From the look of her first face-to-face with Vincent, that work may be really quite dirty.
White Gold, set in the years of the Lawson boom, is sort of Only Fools and Horses in pinstripes. It derives much of its gift for knuckle-gnawing social comedy from its association with
The Inbetweeners. Both shows share a creator in Damon Beesley, while James Buckley and Joe Thomas, two of the gormless quartet, are good value as Cachet’s other foot soldiers. Buckley plays Fitzpatrick, who has lost his wife to her female aerobics instructor (a very funny flashback). He tried trysting with Cachet’s PA Carol (Lauren O’rourke). “That just felt like nothing,” she adjudged, crushingly. For well documented reasons connected with Westwick, White Gold’s second series was delayed. It feels like something to have it back. Motherfatherson ★★★ White Gold ★★★★