ROGER LEWIS
As Evelyn Waugh’s Agatha Runcible would have put it, television at present is simply too spirit-crushing and sickmaking. Take Paula. Lots of atmospheric bangs, crashes, rattles and knockings; spooky cupboards and cellars, fairgrounds and dolls’ houses. One knew immediately when that cute spaniel appeared, it would be slaughtered. As every character was psychologically damaged, it was hard to work out whom to root for.
The police were certainly not on top form. A man was stabbed in the neck with a bottle and his body chucked off a cliff, but the constabulary didn’t seem to find anything suspicious in any of that. Or then there was the aptly-named
Broken, where everyone is in bits and Sean Bean, as the troubled priest, tried to hand out succour where he can. I’d hoped he’d cheer himself up by having a steamy affair with Anna Friel, who has given me the horn for years. Instead, Sean spent ages talking to a suicidal gambler, a schizoid teen, a bereaved single mother and a homophobe. I thought that the scene where Anna Friel kept her dead mother upstairs, so as to carry on claiming the old girl’s pension, was fundamentally a comic notion but, instead, social services were very cross. There was too much going on in
Fearless. Wrongful imprisonment, a paedo photographer, coerced confessions, doctored evidence, Syrian refugees, terrorists, sinister foreign spies, adoption issues, CIA and MI6 cover-ups
and black ops, sex parties, shenanigans on a top secret airbase, sleazy politicians, and Jack Shepherd dying of cancer with tubes up his nose. Michael Gambon tottered in and out, being inscrutable, but mainly he looked baffled. ‘These are some scary people,’ Helen Mccrory, the out-in-front lawyer, was told. ‘Do you really want to take them on?’ Of course she did – this was prime-time ITV.
At least The Loch found room for the great John Sessions, who is incapable of not giving his lines a comic spin. Otherwise here was a drama about body parts – a body dangling under the greenish-yellow water of Loch Ness, a body in the back of a van, a body at the foot of a cliff – a different cliff from the cliff in Paula. We saw bits of brain, heart, bone and also the corpse of a wolf. The comatose body of a teenage boy was displayed – when he woke up, his mother knocked him out again with an injection. In the first episode, we were informed that a community is ‘a bunch of people drawn together by lies’. That epigram is only true in thrillers and whodunits. The archetype is Dame Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library.
For a few laughs, there was Theresa vs Boris, a documentary about the Conservative Party leadership election, which interspersed interviews with dramatic reconstruction. The tensions and animosities, laid bare after Brexit, were hard to take seriously when Boris was played by an actor in a Jimmy Savile wig, Theresa May was portrayed as a man in drag, and Andrea Leadsom resembled the late Marti Caine. Nevertheless, the programme contained the funniest
line of 2017: ‘Do you know how long it took to warm up Amber Rudd?’
Like the Queen of Naples in Proust, to Lady Lucan rank and breeding mean more than bad behaviour. In Lord Lucan: My Husband, the Truth, the woman who very nearly had her brains bashed in by the noble earl in Belgravia was almost forgiving, remembering Lord Lucan as ‘a fine figure of a man’.
Nevertheless, a wastrel who lost £8,000 a night gambling, he wasn’t nice at any stage, beating her on the bottom when she complained of depression and organising a ‘sustained campaign of undermining me in every way he could’.
Lucan’s mistake was to assume his pretty, fluffy, blonde spouse was weak and compliant. As this programme showed, she is an imperious, tough old bird, who, for reasons not divulged, has not spoken to her children for thirty-five years. Yet she seemed proud of this.
‘All my relationships are cold,’ she asserted. I found her fascinating. She gave me the horn.