Rob Lowe’s fish-out-ofwater drama is an odd beast
Rob Lowe has cropped up in a few strange roles in recent years, from a chain-smoking priest in Sky’s You, Me and the Apocalypse to an egomaniac actor in Fox’s The Grinder, (where he played an actor who used to play a TV lawyer who believed that a decade on a hit show qualified him to practice law). Lowe’s script in-tray appears to consist of three tiers: wacky, borderline nutso and OK, I’ll take it.
In Wild Bill, a new comedy drama on ITV, Lowe plays Bill Hickson, “America’s top metropolitan police chief ”. Bill is a cop who gets results by following his own proprietary algorithm, and on the back of his number-crunching he has been parachuted in to Boston, Lincolnshire, the Brexit capital of Britain, to try and get the murder rate down (the joke being that this Boston isn’t quite… that Boston).
Predictably, the square-jawed new broom goes down about as well as a second referendum when he arrives. Fish-out-of-water comedy duly ensues, as does the inevitable slow-but-sure acceptance of Bill by the grouchy locals. The humour varied from the gently droll to the roundly execrable, with several jokes about those funny things that Brits/americans say which
should have stayed in an end of the pier show, whence they came.
Yet Wild Bill wasn’t all vile bilge. Just when you thought it was a story wholly designed to get American film star Rob Lowe to appear on an ITV poster campaign, it would suddenly shift into a subtle exploration of how small communities are affected by bureaucracy delivered from on high. Bill, it emerged, was sent to Boston to oversee swingeing cuts. Immigration and its effects was his number one problem – while also being an unwanted immigrant himself.
Let’s not get carried away – Wild Bill wasn’t Panorama. At the very least, though, it was wild. In the final 10 minutes alone, Bill quit, came back, crashed his car, made enemies with the Polish mafia and solved a case by announcing that nobody was responsible. Then he stopped a suicide attempt on top of a wind turbine. There were more plots and sub-plots than a medieval strip farm, which means that daft as it was, if the show can work out what it’s actually about then there’s reason to stick around.
Four out of five people diagnosed with dementia lose their jobs. That’s a second trauma for lives that have already taken a hammer blow. The point of Channel 4’s The
Restaurant That Makes Mistakes was to show that people are being written off too soon. If the 14 volunteers with various types of dementia shown here could staff a high-end restaurant in Bristol, then, the argument went, they could do anything.
It was a big “if ”. Restaurants are complex workplaces that could have been expressly designed to flummox people with reduced memory, speech and sight. Many restaurants that aren’t staffed by people with dementia are still an unmitigated disaster.
There was a danger inherent in the programme itself, too: that it would make a laughing stock of the very people whose self-esteem it claimed to be bolstering. Because like it or not, a waiter who can’t write or a cook who can’t remember any orders can be made into a joke, like Monty Python’s Silly Olympics sketch.
And there was some of that in
The Restaurant that Makes Mistakes
– Roger, for example, a former Formula 1 mechanic who has Alzheimer’s, felt so anxious about his failing writing that he took an order and then quietly walked out of the front door. But it was handled with tact, and tempered with comedy at other people’s expense. David Baddiel, whose father has dementia, came in to meet the staff; they chatted to him at length and then, as he left, the camera caught one of them asking, “Who was that then?”
The travails of opening a restaurant were intercut with the stories of the staff – tragic mementoes of the people they had once been. For once, getting a celebrity involved provided real insight as well as a scattering of glitter – Baddiel, with characteristic acuity, said that with dementia “the individuality of a person doesn’t go”. That was preciously what The Restaurant That Made Mistakes made plain. By telling all of the staff members’ stories, and then giving them all a decent chunk of airtime, it treated them as individuals. If the problem for people with dementia is that they become invisible to society, this programme, gimmick or not, will at least make them be seen.
Wild Bill
The Restaurant That Makes Mistakes