Can The Bay be more than just a northern Broadchurch?
It would be harsh to say that ITV’S The Bay is almost exactly like Broadchurch. Harsh but accurate: with missing children, a pair of mismatched detectives, a body washed-up on the beach and a festering seaside setting, ITV’S new crime drama is basically Baychurch, to the point that it would be of little surprise if Olivia Colman strode in in a lank grey trouser suit and started crying.
They have at least switched the setting from the Jurassic coast to Morecambe Bay, a place that, inexplicably, crime drama has so far ignored. It’s made for it: grim and grimly beautiful with the mudflats extending forever into the grey, if you wanted a screen metaphor for darkness visible, you’d find it just west of Lancaster.
At least The Bay was like Broadchurch in several good ways, too, including the most vital component of any good TV drama – I wanted to know what happens next.
What’s happened so far is that in last night’s opener a pair of teenage twins went missing, at which point DS Lisa Armstrong (Morven Christie) was assigned as their Family Liaison Officer. Using a Family Liaison Officer brought a welcome element of family drama to proceedings (a bit like… oh, forget it). But it also required a fair old dollop of exposition, because no one knows what Family Liaison Officers do and don’t do, bar make tea and look sad at press conferences.
It doesn’t much matter what a character does, of course, if you believe and feel for them, and on this count The Bay was near faultless: the performances were excellent across the board and the family dynamics exquisitely rendered. Morven Christie carried the bulk of it and she was so good at doing steely exterior with just a touch of flawed centre that she almost swept you past the gargantuan plot sinkhole that opened up after about 20 minutes.
It turned out that the man she’d had a fling with the night before was the central figure in her entire investigation: she hadn’t known this when she had sex with him and yet for some reason she decided to keep it a secret, tamper with evidence and risk her career rather than ’fess up and take herself off the case. Perhaps it was because in a town where everyone has secrets she wanted one of her own. Well, it worked for Broadchurch…
Nearly a third of all internet traffic is hardcore porn. This is a fact that, particularly for parents of teenagers, means the metaphorical top shelf has very quickly become as accessible as the bargain bucket next to the sweeties. And with the internet’s unique capacity for normalising extremes, ruining childhoods and making everything generally worse, the hardcore grot that’s being served up has become ever harder.
How much harder? Well, one of the early scenes in Mums Make Porn
(Channel 4), sat the five selected mothers around a table and filmed their reactions as they watched the top 10 most accessed free porn clips. It was both hilarious and shocking.
“What? She has four penises in her. Or is it three. I’ve lost count,” said Emma, mere minutes after baking some fresh scones. Jane, a devout Christian who plainly shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near this documentary series, was in tears. Later in the programme one of the women vomited at what she’d seen.
The argument was that as we all agree that there’s no way of stopping the next generation from seeing porn, why not control the agenda and make an acceptable skin flick? If the problem is that children don’t understand that all of the latent (and actual) violence and misogyny is just fantasy – that sex isn’t like that – then show them what sex is like.
But how to go about it? In episode one, the mothers (for which read, the producers) decided that they needed to learn from the pros, which led to more uproarious scenes straight out of an X-rated Carry On Up the WI. In particular, Emma nipping to fetch some kitchen roll to mop up some errant effluvia was one of my comedy moments of the year.
You could make all the points Mums Make Porn made without having the mums actually make porn, of course, and there was something of a cooked-up Apprentice task about the whole set up. But it wasn’t all done for entertainment: by intercutting scenes of teenagers talking about their experience the show cleverly highlighted the reality gap between the generations. The parents’ reaction to the porn itself – it literally made them sick – showed why that gap needs to be closed.
The Bay Mums Make Porn