At last, a Channel 5 drama series strikes gold
Two people stumble across a valuable hoard and decide to keep it for themselves rather than inform the authorities – with dangerous results. In the BBC’S Boat Story, this involved a shipment of cocaine, a severed head and a man having his tongue cut out – and that was just in the first episode. For a more agreeable viewing experience, we have Finders Keepers (Channel 5).
The treasure in this case is Anglosaxon gold, unearthed on farmland by keen detectorist Martin (Neil Morrissey). He has been methodically combing the area for six years, convinced that it was the site of a major Saxon settlement. But on the day of his find, he is not alone. He is with his son-in-law-to-be, Ashley (James Buckley from The Inbetweeners). Martin doesn’t really like Ashley, who is overconfident and annoying and essentially what Jay from
The Inbetweeners would be if he was marginally smarter. But he reluctantly agrees to this male-bonding day out at the behest of his wife and daughter.
Martin guesses that the find is worth half a million pounds and explains to Ashley that, under the law, it must be surrendered to the Crown, with any eventual reward being split with the landowner. Ashley is incredulous: “The farmer gets half for doing nothing?
And what’s the Crown got to do with it? Charlie doesn’t need any more gold, believe me. I’ve seen his coach.”
And, the thing is, Martin has money worries. His business partner has disappeared and the company is in trouble. His daughter’s wedding won’t come cheap, and nor will the care package for his disabled son. So when Ashley says he has a mate who could sell it privately, if illegally, it doesn’t take long for Martin to be sucked in.
The plot develops along familiar lines: one wrong decision leads to a whole heap of trouble. But Finders Keepers does it well. For ages now, Channel 5 has been trying to hit a decent drama standard and this definitely manages it. It is well made. Morrissey is perfectly cast as the seemingly law-abiding Martin, who actually finds it surprisingly easy to lie to everyone around him.
In comparison to Boat Story, it feels light as a feather – not surprising when the writer is Dan Sefton, who brought us The Good Karma Hospital. He injects comedy in the shape of two police constables who stumble across Martin as he tries to sell the treasure, and who are so hopeless that – in the words of a senior officer brought into the department – they “haven’t even got the stones to form an offensive Whatsapp group”.
What became of the characters in Oliver Twist? However you imagined the Artful Dodger’s life turning out, I doubt it was him becoming a celebrated surgeon in Australia. But The Artful Dodger
(Disney+) plunders Dickens’s novel for its characters before gleefully detaching them from their source.
The jumping-off point is a line from Oliver Twist in which Dodger is “booked for a passage out” after being convicted of stealing a silver snuff box. In this new imagining, Dodger (played by Thomas Brodie-sangster) begins assisting the ship’s doctor on the way to Australia, as the nimble fingers required for pickpocketing transfer rather well to surgery.
We learn this in flashback, but the main plot takes place around 15 years after the events of the novel. Dodger is famous for his surgery but not exactly respectable – he performs operations in front of a cheering crowd and tosses a coin with another doctor to see which one of them can beat the record of 43 seconds to amputate a leg. Dickens would make this amusing. The modern-day screenwriters do not.
It is shot in the now ubiquitous style for period pieces: zippy dialogue, hectic editing, a rock soundtrack. You would hope that even a 30-something Dodger would retain some of the charm so memorably exhibited by Jack Wild in Oliver! but there is none. Instead he’s just a peevish smart alec with a middle-class accent.
Fagin is here too. What, you thought Fagin was hanged? Pah, that’s just Dickens. Fagin somehow escaped the gallows and got his own passage to Australia. He’s played brilliantly by David Thewlis, thank goodness, otherwise this series would not have been worth anyone’s time.
They’ve saved the best bit for last. In the final episode (a second series is surely on the cards), who should pop up but Oliver Twist himself – or “the wet lettuce”, as Dodger and Fagin call him. In the same way that Cobra Kai made the hero of The Karate Kid into the villain, The Artful Dodger presents the adult Oliver in a wholly unflattering light. It’s funny. If only the rest of the series had been.