Television Roger Lewis
What I liked best about Mcmafia, which was not about Scottish gangsters but Russian ones, were the His and Hers matching wicker laundry baskets in the bedroom set.
I’ve asked my pal Claire Van Kampen, Juliet Rylance’s mother, to find out where I can buy such choice items. They’d go nicely in one or other of my numerous homes. As for the drama itself, I got fed up with characters who did nothing except shout and embrace and stab each other with caviar spoons.
The chief problem was that the drama was overloaded with psychopaths – there were no good people to root for; only crooked bankers, corrupt cops, alcoholics, white-slave traders, and a preposterous, gay Israeli called Semiyon Kleiman whose silly wheedling voice was that of the irritating meerkat in the insurance advertisement.
The series was topographically profligate, like a luggage advertisement in the pages of Condé Nast – Prague, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Istanbul, the Riviera, posh districts of London. The crimes, when they were committed, were invisible – lots of typing at a keyboard, moving money about. You can even rob heroin bundles in Bombay and steal an entire ship by remote control, apparently. No wonder James Norton, as the hero, was a big slab of nothingness. He had little to do except peep at his smartphone and sip bottled water in the businessclass lounge.
At eight episodes, there was too much time to fill. With Kiri, four episodes was irritatingly insufficient. It needed at least thirty minutes more, at the finish, to resolve even the basic plot points. All about the abduction and murder of a sweet, little black girl in Bristol, the drama saw Sarah Lancashire give a richly angry performance as the bulky, dishevelled social worker, perhaps over-reliant on her hip flask, whose common sense clashed with managers who used phrases such as ‘pushing the envelope’ and ‘ticking boxes’. I’d welcome a second series – Lia Williams, Wallis Windsor in The Crown, is getting to be a favourite of mine for sour, high-strung nastiness.
Another one that interspersed a slow pace with intermittent bursts of violence was Next of Kin, where the authorities were a bit blithe about putting innocent family members in mortal danger if it meant a terrorist plot could be thwarted. The authorities, indeed, characterised by Claire Skinner being severe in mannish clothes, fumbled every move. Bodies piled up and hospital beds were filled, yet no apology or explanation was forthcoming – the ‘bigger picture’ is what counts, whatever that is. Lost among the story, which descended to Jack Davenport throwing punches, was surely a more interesting one altogether about how impressionable teenagers are radicalised. As with Nazism in the Twenties and Thirties, Islamic extremism today promises the susceptible the Earth.
Herefordshire, we were told in A Vicar’s Life, is the Church of England’s most rural diocese – 1,600 square miles, containing 2,500 farms and hundreds of picturesque places of worship few attend, save old ladies who bake cakes, do the flower arrangements and run the raffle and tombola.
I lived thereabouts for twenty years, and a quarter of that time was spent trying to sell up and move away. Though gorgeous, with its apple orchards and bright green meadows, Herefordshire is not on the way to anywhere. No motorways nearby. No railways since Beeching ripped them up. No whitecollar jobs. Too far from London to appeal to wealthier weekenders, who seldom venture farther than the Cotswolds. The only official celebrity is Sir Roy Strong, though Crossroads’ Noele Gordon is buried in Ross-on-wye.
The place drove me nearly mad with boredom – there was nobody to talk
to and nothing to do except drink more heavily than a Russian mafioso and attend lectures on planting out winter pansies. The vicars in this delightful series, therefore, have their work cut out saving their parishioners from such fates, and as usual, when faced with modern vicars, I wanted to throttle them for their informality. One of the ones here jettisoned ‘Dearly beloved’ in favour of ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’. He referred to God as ‘the gaffer’ and marriage was ‘what you are buying into’.
It’s no mystery that the Church no longer commands respect when, as in Herefordshire, the traditional liturgy has gone, the lovely Regency vicarages with wrought-iron balconies have been sold off, choirs disbanded, and electronic keyboards and prats with flutes have replaced the thundering organs.
I did, however, warm to Father Matthew, the roly-poly Friar Tuck, who lifted up his cassock and dodged across a road to pray with a down-and-out on a traffic roundabout. Unusually, he was not a buffoon but a genuinely good man.