Dancing or hiding, those cats were fast as lightning
Steve Mcqueen’s latest is upbeat and uplifting and the dancing makes you nostalgic for the socially- undistanced life writes Aidan Smith
One of the hardest things to get right on TV is a house party. They’re often stilted affairs with not enough good- looking people who are either standing around in drab clothes or dancing badly to rubbish music.
But the house party in Lovers Rock ( BBC1) is fantastic. On a graph it would sit just about the furthest distance possible from Abigail’s Party, which of course was meant to look stilted. It’s true that Lovers Rock is the only party, that nothing else happens, but what a swell party this is.
Did someone mention Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby? They don’t get onto the hi- fi. Did someone mention hi- fi? A monster sound- system, each speaker as big a cow, is lugged into the venue and you think the walls of the house will surely burst.
We’re in Ladbroke Grove as film- maker Steve Mcqueen continues his anthology series about London’s West Indian community and the year is 1980. The women are cooking up goat curry in pots nearly the size of the speakers and the reggae boys are in charge of the decks.
Various characters slink into the house and the garden where the sofas have been relocated or queue for the loo on the stairs and almost get themselves some proper profile. There are Martha and Patty who’ve come on the bus and are dead excited about the night ahead although they seem to be interlopers as far as some of the other girls are concerned.
But when the DJ plays Kung Fu Fighting everyone just dances. The formation karate- chops look loads of fun and as Carl Douglas put it in the song: “Those cats are fast as lightning.”
This is one of three set- pieces in a bold film with so little story. The others are based round Silly Games by Janet
Kay - polyester trousers rubbing against crimplene dresses and almost causing an inferno - and a reggae thumper which seems certain to start a fight but doesn’t.
Not that Lovers Rock doesn’t have dark moments, including the beginnings of a sexual assault and monkey noises directed at partygoers straying too far from the house. But the vibe is upbeat and uplifting. The dancing makes you nostalgic for the socially- undistanced life. Martha, in the pre- mobile phone age, promising to the boy she’s just met to be in a call- box at the appointed hour to arrange a first date reminds you how hard lovers had to work.
Back when Kung Fu Fighting was storming up the charts, plane hijacking was all the rage. Every week at my school, there was a ritual for the last to board the bus to request of the driver: “Take this plane to Cuba.”
In the fabulous documentary The Hijacker Who
Vanished ( BBC4), old US pilots recall being dramatically rerouted to Havana, always by Cuban nationals looking to get home because no scheduled flights landed there, and this was invariably a “fun thing” toasted with champagne and cigars, Cuban of course.
But “DB Cooper” was different. In 1971 he passed a note to a stewardess demanding $ 200,000 ransom, otherwise he would detonate a bomb in his suitcase. Having picked up the cash in Seattle he parachuted from the plane as it flew on, never to be seen again.
What a corking story. And what a procession of suspects of whom the claim could be lodged, Spartacuslike: “I’m DB Cooper!” There was Marla Cooper’s rascally favourite uncle who after a thanksgiving turkey shoot was overheard blurting: “We did it. We hijacked the plane. We’re rich.” There was Babs Dayton, formerly Robert, the first sex- change candidate in Washington State. There was Duane Weber who staked his bid with his dying words, though his daughter Jo could only properly recall the great revelation when prompted by a fellow skulking in her hallway billed as her “memory man”.
It’s like something out of Twin Peaks, remarks docmaker John Dower. “Well”, smiles Marla, “folks do say to me I look like the dead girl in that show.” But how would a movie version end? Stranger- than- fiction, wayout- weirder than David Lynch, this remains America’s only unsolved air piracy. In depression- hit Seattle, DB cheered up locals with his Robin Hood- type audacity. “The slinkiest cat alive,” says one. Not counting the cats in Lovers Rock, of course.
Scandi- noir used to dominate our wintry Saturday nights when we’d try to guess the killer’s identity and where the sexual tension would lead while simultaneously sourcing copies of the sleek furnishings. Iceland’s contribution to the genre, The Val
halla Murders ( BBC4), may be late in arriving, but everything’s in its right place. Glacial detective - check. Chaotic home life - check. Possibility of one character ( the tec’s sidekick) being on the autistic spectrum - check. Grisly murders - check. Something it’s got over the others, though: Reykjavik.
So far, the city’s the star. It’s a whiteout on the streets while snowy peaks loom in the background - Disneyesque in appearance but episode two tells us they house terrible secrets. With what seems like only three and a half minutes of daylight the cops are always using torches as they scour dark, woods and creepy buildings that you and I would run a mile from.
There's a lot of drink swilling around in this town but crimebuster Kata ( Nina Dogg Filippusdottir) must keep a clear head to deal with an irritating ex- husband, wayward son, being overlooked for promotion and having help from Norway foisted onto the investigation.