This Aussie thriller is schlocky and predictable
Welcome to another series of Middleclass Women with Marble-topped Kitchen Islands.
This time it’s The Secrets She Keeps (BBC One), an Australian import that unexpectedly stars Laura Carmichael, aka Lady Edith in Downton Abbey. Carmichael spent 90 per cent of Downton looking nervily unhappy and it certainly caught a casting director’s eye, because here she plays a nervily unhappy supermarket worker going to desperate lengths to have a baby.
The kitchen island isn’t hers. It belongs to Meghan Shaughnessy (Jessica De Gouw), a blogger/social media influencer who appears to have a lovely life with her husband and two children and another baby on the way. But her husband didn’t want another child – “This is our ‘oops’ baby,” says Meghan – and it may not be his anyway, if the awkwardness between Meghan and the husband’s best friend is anything to go by.
At the supermarket, Meghan meets mousy shelf-stacker Agatha (Carmichael), who tells her that she’s pregnant too and due at the same time. But – spoiler alert – Agatha is a pathological liar wearing a fake belly. She’s become obsessed with Meghan
from afar via the latter’s online posts, and things are about to get a little like
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
Or should that be Single White
Female? Or The Stranger? The Secrets
She Keeps, based on a best-selling novel and with a title so generic it may have been assembled by a domesticthriller word generator, feels wearily familiar. Couple in comfortable surroundings have their lives upended. Woman desperate for a partner and a baby goes psycho. The book’s author is one Michael Robotham. I don’t think he’s claiming great insights into the female mind, although he did ghostwrite Geri Halliwell’s memoir.
I’ll happily ingest hours of this sort of stuff – sometimes a schlocky thriller a few notches up from Neighbours is exactly what the doctor ordered. But it’s poorly drawn: if Meghan makes a living as a ‘mumfluencer’, why do we never see her creating blog content? It fails to whip up much tension, whether it’s Aggie lurking in the bushes behind Meghan’s home or a child going missing in the supermarket. And it’s predictable: I have a pretty good idea what will happen next.
In short, it’s not very good. But might you find me blankly watching it, glass of wine in hand, after a long day in lockdown? Probably.
The Horizon strand is a mixed bag. When it tries ‘popular’ science,
it produces stinkers like The
Restaurant That Burns Off Calories and The Great British Intelligence Test. The excellent Tony Slattery documentary came under the Horizon umbrella, but wasn’t really science at all. The BBC doesn’t seem to know what to do with science when Dr Brian Cox isn’t about.
Pluto: Back from the Dead (BBC Two) was the kind of thing you used to find in the late-night Open University slot. No handsomely-paid presenter striding over glaciers or tundra or the Rocky Mountains, just a sensible voiceover (from Paterson Joseph), some facts about Pluto, and scientists explaining in simple and passionate terms why this was important. It was refreshing to watch.
This tiny planet, only discovered in 1930, remained a mystery until the New Horizons probe sent up by NASA in 2006 finally reached its destination in 2015, returning the first close-up images of Pluto’s surface. Far from being a featureless rock, it was a complex realm with ice mountains standing 4km tall, canyons and vast plains, and even a volcano, all coloured from deep red to bright white. It was, in the words of one expert, “scientifically astonishing”.
The volcano was a genuine puzzle – so unlikely that the scientists daren’t mention it at the press conference announcing their initial findings. How could there be flowing lava on an ice planet with a surface temperature of 230 degrees below zero? But space volcanologist (how’s that for a cool job title?) Dr Kelsi Singer spotted ammonia on Pluto’s surface, which lowers the melting point of water and, when combined with liquid nitrogen, turns water into a gloopy substance with the consistency of toothpaste.
Space documentaries always come down to one question: is there anyone else out there? “It’s highly likely that self-replicating metabolising entities have originated and if that’s life then the answer is, yes, there is life somewhere,” said one scientist. Not the most crowd-pleasing of answers, but more grown-up than a lot of
Horizon’s output.