The well-told tale of Boris Johnson remains great TV
As perspicacious and nimble as The Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson (Channel 4) may have been, it was treading old ground. Readers of this newspaper, Tories and most Britons have, for good or ill, surely had their fill of old spaghetti head. We know that a difficult childhood and a distant father left him desperate for attention and taught him that winning was all that mattered. We know that millions of people voted for him because he didn’t look or sound like the other dullard MPS. We know that people will forgive you an awful lot if you make them laugh.
The Boris Johnson story, then, has already been well told. In part this is because Johnson was so good at writing it himself, largely on the hoof. As was made clear here his sense of theatre and his awareness of his own starring role in the production was perhaps his greatest strength. So what could a new, supposedly definitive documentary series add?
Not a lot, as it turned out, though it threw everything at it. Arcuri, Livingstone, Hancock, Corbyn, Farage, Rees-mogg and even Andrew Gimson – a TV biography asking for the thoughts of a biographer, when you could just go and read the biography – were all present and correct, telling the Johnson story from his Turkish ancestry to the overweening presence/ absence of his father, to living in Brussels and to Eton, to lying at
The Times and back to Brussels and weaving one hell of a good yarn for this newspaper. To the extent that Johnson is damaged – his father hit his beloved mother; Eton gifted him that British private school double whammy of immense self-belief coupled with withering insecurity – the programme showed where the damage was done.
It tried to zhuzh things up, doing that thing modern documentaries do where they show the interviewees before the cameras roll, adjusting their hair and picking their nose (a note to anyone about to be interviewed – read the release form). The voiceover talked about past events in the present tense (“the fate of the Johnsons changes in 1973”), another recent refashioning that is supposed to give a sense of real-time excitement.
But all in all it was great viewing because Johnson, simply, is good telly. Time and again here we saw that it is TV moments that have made him. The performance is well-honed and irresistible; it has taken him to the very top. With a schtick that good, who cares if we’ve seen it all before?
The Marlow Murder Club (Drama), a crime drama from Robert Thorogood, the creator of Death in Paradise, is built to sell. To broadcasters and viewers in other countries it offers a setting of bucolic Britishness (Marlow), a series of brutal murders slapped on top of that setting (see also Midsomer), lengthy episodes so buyers get their money’s worth and precisely the sort of unlikely amateur sleuthing team that has made Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series a publishing sensation.
For all that, if you like your whodunits slow-cooked then The Marlow Murder Club may be for you. Everyone needs comfort food from time to time and this was a bangers and mash of a detective show. Samantha Bond played retired archaeologist Judith Potts, who lived in a fabulous house by the river and did crosswords until such time as her next-door neighbour was murdered. She heard the gunshot as she happened to be swimming naked in the river at the time, and so began a tale of kook and whimsy that was somehow completely beyond Buckinghamshire police to even notice.
Judith teamed up with vicar’s wife Becks (Cara Horgan) and local dogwalker Suzie (Jo Martin), and they soon forged an unlikely – yet somehow completely inevitable – friendship as amateur sleuths, racing against time to stop a serial killer who had something to do with the art market.
I say race. One of the hallmarks of Death in Paradise is just how slowly everything happens. The Marlow Murder Club took the same pacing and didn’t run with it, unspooling plot at a soporific rate, creating about as much tension as a wet rag.
This again I suspect is deliberate – in a TV climate where most crime drama is hard and dark, mirroring American and Scandinavian imports, the best way for a British drama to stand out in the global marketplace is to be soft and light. Many people do want cuppa-tea TV, where they can leave on a nice-looking show while they pop off for a brew, come back in five minutes and be assured they won’t have missed much. In this guise, The Marlow Murder Club ticked every box. But if you want something that grips, look elsewhere.
The Rise and Fall of Boris Johnson ★★★★
The Marlow Murder Club ★★