Eilis O’Hanlon on TV
Light relief amid the gloom of morose murder-mysteries
Does the world need another bleak Scandi noir?
MAN IN ROOM 301 BBC Four, Saturday, 9pm McDONALD & DODDS UTV, Sunday, 8pm STORYVILLE BBC Four, Monday, 10pm DRAWERS OFF
Channel Four, daily, 5.30pm
What possessed BBC Four’s schedulers some years ago to decide that the best way to unwind at the weekend would be to watch morose Scandinavians kill equally morose Scandinavians, thus giving even more morose Scandinavian detectives something to investigate between musing on the ultimate meaninglessness of existence?
Whatever it was, viewers have been grateful ever since.
The latest is Finnish drama
Man in Room 301. The premise is intriguing. Two-year-old Tommi was killed on a family holiday to Greece 12 years ago. A young boy who lived locally was blamed.
Now the family has gone back to the same place for another holiday, and the dead boy’s grandfather, who’s been receiving menacing anonymous messages back home, becomes convinced that the man they meet there is the now grown-up killer.
So far, so chilling. Sadly, it’s glacially slow, and the narrative is needlessly confusing, jumping about between past and present for no other reason, it seems, than to drag out the revelations.
It’s expected that these dramas will be dark. How could they not be? They’re about murder, grief, revenge, madness, family dysfunction. But Man In Room 301 almost seems to have set out to make its Scandi noir predecessors look positively jolly.
Hardly anyone smiles, or says anything that doesn’t sound like a cry for help. The light is steely and grim. Maybe the Finns are just too morose for weekends?
It was a relief to turn to the first
of three new episodes of McDonald & Dodds, now back for a second season after last year’s debut. The idea of the mismatched cop duo may be a cliche, but
Tala Gouveia, as the ambitious, young, metropolitan Detective Chief Inspector McDonald, and Jason Watkins, as the unglamorous plodder Detective Sergeant Dodds, are content to trust the formula as they solve gentle, feature-length mysteries in the style of Morse or Midsomer Murders.
In this episode, five friends went up in a hot air balloon, but only four came back down alive. Accident or murder? Obviously the latter, or there’d be no story.
When it’s revealed that the five friends were played by Martin (EastEnders) Kemp, Patsy (Emmerdale and Holby City) Kensit, Rupert (Sherlock) Graves, Cathy (Mona Lisa) Tyson, and some bloke who once starred in Channel 5’s ill-fated soap Family Affairs, it will come as no surprise to know that the victim was the least famous one. The poor man barely survived the credits.
Playing nicely with the stars’ own pasts, the four survivors were once feted back in the 1980s as the “creme de la creme of cool, hip London”, while the dead man was a part-time taxi driver who owned a £900,000 apartment in the luxury development where the others all lived. If your first thought was blackmail, it’s safe to say that you weren’t alone.
McDonald & Dodds doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but it’s enjoyably, reassuringly old-fashioned, not to mention refreshingly free of overt political messaging. It’s a rarity these days.
There was some nice English West Country scenery to look at — including multiple shots of Bath’s Royal Crescent, last seen ubiquitously in the Netflix comedy drama Bridgerton — as well as comedian Rob Brydon doing an amusing turn as an air accident investigator. What more do you want on a lazy Sunday evening?
The latest in BBC Four’s documentary film series Storyville looked at what happened to Colonel Gaddafi’s money after the Libyan leader’s death in 2011. The Hunt For Gaddafi’s Billions followed one shipment of $12.5bn which was flown out to South Africa 10 months before the dictator was killed in the Arab Spring uprising. The money promptly went missing, much of it seemingly held by the ruling ANC party.
The new Libyan government offered a 10pc reward for anyone who could get the money back, prompting a real-life treasure hunt involving a cast of characters who wouldn’t be out of place in Goodfellas — including arms dealers, intelligence agents, and high-ranking politicians.
One of the sources spoken to by the two Dutch journalists who made the film was gunned down by Serbian hitmen shortly after granting them an interview. His assassins were also murdered soon after. The story dragged a bit, but it trained a pitiless searchlight on how the lure of big money corrupts everyone it touches.
By complete contrast, Drawers Off is the new offering from the people who brought you Come Dine With Me. It basically combines the worst bits of Channel Four’s voyeuristic game show Naked Attraction and Sky Art’s soporific Portrait Artist of the Year, as five amateur artists take turns on successive days to get their kit off and be painted by the others, with a cash prize for the winner.
Considering the many hurdles over which a show has to leap before making it on to TV, with endless executives to satisfy and boxes to fill, it really is astonishing this one cleared them all. What’s even more remarkable is it’s being shown in a late afternoon slot, meaning it has to abide by a strict PG rating, thus sacrificing its one Unique Selling Point, namely the prospect of nudity. Comedian Jenny Eclair does her best to spice things up with some Carry On-style saucy banter, but even her heart doesn’t seem to be in it.
In an ideal world, it would last for one season, and then be quietly binned and wiped from the CVs of everyone involved. The state of the world being what it is these days, it’ll probably win a Bafta.