Last night on television Michael Hogan The only character to root for was the rampaging boar
Sun-drenched melodrama (Sky Atlantic) was making its “highly anticipated return”, so trumpeted the publicity material, splashed everywhere from the London Underground to British Airways lounges. Well, it wasn’t highly anticipated by me. The debut series in 2017 was chic but charmless. A jet-set Eurosoap about a super-rich family in the south of France, it was all superficial style and no narrative substance. Some went so far as to describe it as “Dynasty sur mer”, although it wasn’t as much camp fun as that sounds.
Bafflingly, however, it transpired to be the channel’s most successful original drama ratings-wise, with 2.3million viewers per episode. Since then, Sky’s drama output has been on the up – see recent gems Chernobyl, Save Me and Patrick Melrose – so perhaps Riviera had raised its game too? Judging by the opening doublebill, the answer was a resounding “non”. Forget the Côte d’azur, this was the Côte du Snore.
TV’S youngest widow and least convincing art curator, Georgina Clios (Julia Stiles), sashayed back into high society, fresh from stabbing her psycho stepson and tossing his corpse
into the Med. By the end of the first episode, someone else had been slain. The French Riviera must have a murder rate to rival Midsomer.
Juliet Stevenson (matriarch with a dark secret) and Poppy Delevingne (honeymooner with a dark secret) had joined the ensemble cast, channelling Kathy Bates from Misery and Gwyneth Paltrow from The Talented Mr Ripley respectively. This was a world of gold-leaf facials and stud auctions, of VIP art installations and rippling infinity pools, where flirtation meant two spoilt socialites smashing up antique vases while panting and pouting at each other. Everyone wore all-white outfits to show off their teak tans and because when you’re this minted, who cares about coffee stains?
Riviera has pretensions to be a televisual Bond film, down to its torch-song theme tune, grandiose title sequence, glamorous locations and bikini-clad femme fatales. Champagne flowed like l’eau and clichés flowed even faster. “Your father’s shoes are a mighty big pair to be stepping into,” purred an oligarch’s widow to his unworthy heir, who pretty much burst into tears and stomped off to rehab.
Every moneyed mode of transport was ticked off: supercar, superyacht, helicopter, thoroughbred horse. This wasn’t so much a compelling drama as a glossy lifestyle catalogue. One character whined, “A wild boar has decimated our olive grove”, which was the definition of #firstworldproblems.
Meanwhile, Stiles made for a curiously unengaging protagonist. Blank-faced and monotonal, she was presumably intended to be enigmatic, but instead sucked the life off the screen. Indeed, amid all the pampered beauties and stubbly playboys, it was hard to find anybody to like, let alone root for. By the end, I was willing that rampaging boar to decimate the lot.
‘Open wide and say roar.” Diverting documentary Big Animal Surgery (BBC Two) found presenter Liz Bonnin following an operation inside the jaws of a wild lion. At a big cat sanctuary in South Africa, nine-year-old male Ricci was struggling to feed due to dental issues. He had a calcium deficiency in his diet as a cub, when he was kept in Romania as a pet. I suppose it beats a hamster.
One of the world’s leading dental vets, Dr Gerhard Steenkamp, was on hand to fix the problem using an array of tailor-made tools. After all, nature can’t be red in tooth and claw if it hasn’t got any teeth. An overhead camera rig took us so close to the three-hour procedure that you could almost feel the lion’s hot breath through the screen. Root canal work was done and extractions were performed, all filmed in tense realtime as a clock counted down.
I got the impression that Steenkamp was getting irritated with Bonnin leaning over his shoulder to ask questions, but it was instructive for the viewer. Things took a dangerous turn when the patient began to come around from the anaesthetic midway through. If there’s one place you don’t want to be, it’s inside an angry lion’s mouth as it wakes up.
The impressively skilled surgical team fixed Ricci with 17 minutes to spare. New gnashers gave him a new lease of life and he was last seen happily tucking into a hunk of raw meat. With fascinating insights into the workings of this apex predator’s body, this was an enlightening hour. All Creatures Great Not Small, anyone?
Riviera ★★
Big Animal Surgery ★★★