Servants in the money in new Upstairs Downstairs
THE SYNDICATE BBC1, 9pm
THE Syndicate is back for a third series, and at first it seems writer Kay Mellor, creator of Band Of Gold and Fat Friends, has ditched her typically more workingclass settings for Downton Abbey territory.
However, it is not hard to see why the idea of creating a money drama around a modern-day setting where the downstairs staff are struggling, but the upstairs aristos are saddled with debt, might have appealed to the writer.
Here is a story about new money (Americans), old money (posh people with little of it) and new, new money (Lottery winners). Naturally, secrets are revealed, and there’s a dark drama involved.
Here Mellor has created a fabulous mish-mash of Upstairs Downstairs drama with a Cluedo-like whodunnit that will have you suspecting almost everyone from the evil stepson to the gardener.
At the heart of it, as always, is the way wealth affects relationships. As Mellor has put it herself: “It’s a delicious situation for a dramatist, comparing the lives of the haves and have-nots. Our theme tune is All Or Nothing, which is quite apt because some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouth, while others find it difficult to get to the end of the week. It’s a great twist – the people who had nothing now have something and the people who had everything now have nothing.”
Meanwhile, the casting is priceless. Brideshead Revisited star Anthony Andrews is the ageing Lord Hazelwood, who has had a stroke and seems to inhabit his role as dying breed so well that one feels for the poor old guy on the brink of bankruptcy and deceived by his family.
The brilliant Elizabeth Berrington is the distraught mum whose daughter goes missing, while Melanie Hill is the cook struggling to produce a grand meal for seven on a pittance and working a 16-hour shift. Richard Rankin, love interest from The Crimson Fields, returns to play another emotionally clammed-up Scot.
But it’s Lenny Henry as the gardener with Asperger’s and an obsession with the pattern in the Mercury Millions numbers who steals the show as he bumbles around, constantly on the verge of confusion or panic, and not really that interested in money at all.