Bono’s girl is a star, with or without this bunkum
The Luminaries BBC1, Sunday/Monday Perry Mason Sky Atlantic, Monday Talking Heads BBC1, Tuesday
TWO strangers, Anna and Emery, meet on the deck of a ship as it nears New Zealand. It is 1866, and both are starting new lives – she escaping something in her past, he hoping to make his fortune in the Otago Gold Rush. Later, we are told that something passed between them in that moment, a startling chemistry based on the fact that they are astral twins, sharing the same birthday.
Well, you could have fooled me, because their encounter was as pedestrian, literally, as two people accidentally bumping into each other in the street and making small talk to hide their embarrassment.
Nonetheless, they agree to meet later that day and Emery scribbles down his hotel address on a piece of paper. Soon after arriving, Anna’s handbag is stolen and she gives chase, getting back all but her purse thanks to the intervention of an older woman, Lydia. Anna asks Lydia to tell her the name of the hotel, because she cannot read, but Lydia lies and sends her to the wrong address.
Why? Well, she runs a fortune telling emporium that really is the front for a brothel, and in Anna she sees a rich seam of gold of a different kind. Indeed, it is she, and not the thief, who now has the purse, in order to keep Anna dependent on her for a living.
This all was plodding along rather nicely until – catastrophe – the dreaded flash forward intervened. With no warning, Anna was in prison, accused of murdering Lydia’s husband. By episode two, she was experiencing events that had happened in Emery’s life as if they were her own, and she also could read, presumably because he could, and they have established a bond on a sort of telepathic plain.
Well, that’s my theory anyway, but I’m not sure I’ll get to see it proven, because while the BBC’s
The Luminaries showed great promise it is a very run-of-the-mill series that could be about the California Gold Rush, the Australian Gold Rush, the Klondike Gold Rush, or just about any old gold rush you care to mention. Every stereotypical box was ticked – prostitution, agitation between European and Asian arrivals, double-crossing, and the exploitation of the native inhabitants – and while stereotypes exist for a reason, that’s not necessarily justification for making a drama we’ve seen a million times before.
The good news is that, as Anna, Eve Hewson, the daughter of someone famous though that has nothing to do with her own independent talent, is genuinely luminous, while
Eva Green as Lydia brings a lovely blend of charm and guile. Nonetheless, the slow pace and all the chronological hopping back and forth are supremely annoying and, like all moody dramas nowadays, the whole thing was so darkly lit, it often was hard to tell what was going on. All in all, a major disappointment.
Speaking of dark, well, where to start with the BBC’s Talking Heads?
These monologues, written in the late Eighties and Nineties by Alan
Bennett, are justifiably celebrated vignettes of oddly off-kilter lives in England. The first was a remake of A Lady Of Letters with Imelda Staunton in the role originally played by Patricia (Hyacinth Bucket) Routledge. Staunton managed to make the piece her own, playing a busybody whose endless letter writing to complain about the non-existent sins of neighbours she watches from behind twitching curtains eventually sees her in prison. There, it turns out her real problem was loneliness and she thrives in a supportive environment.
To maintain social distancing, the Beeb has filmed on idle EastEnders sets, so Staunton sat alone in Dot Cotton’s living room. When we moved on to the Carters’ kitchen in the Queen Vic, it was to meet Sarah Lancashire as Gwen, 46 years old and, as the title had it, An Ordinary Woman.
In this newly written piece, she started talking fondly about her 15year-old son and my initial thought was that he had taken his own life. But no. It turned out that Gwen actually had romantic feelings for her own boy – she had fallen in love with her son. Now of course that is utterly taboo and in other hands it could have been exploitative, but Bennett is far too smart a writer to let that happen. Lancashire too has been on our screens for so long, from Coronation Street to Happy
Valley and beyond, that we trust her, and what followed was a quietly devastating monologue about the disintegration of trust, and it honestly left me scarcely drawing a breath throughout.
I’ve thought about it a lot since, and realise how deep-rooted sexism can be, because Lancashire’s performance was so outstanding and heartbreaking, I immediately felt sympathetic towards Gwen. But what of the boy on the receiving end of this unwanted and frankly perverse lust? Would I have been as sympathetic if it was a middle-aged man falling in love with his 15-year-old daughter? Not a chance. At 84, Bennett is as provocative as ever. He sees the light and the darkness, and cloaks it all in the language of the mundane. When Gwen, in the anguish of describing a life on the verge of collapse, recalled her daughter coming home early from school, she was considerate enough to share the reason – ‘asbestos in the art room’ – and I burst out laughing. It broke the tension and set up the finale, and that is the hallmark of a drama genius.
Talking of remakes, Perry Mason is back but played very differently by Matthew Rhys than by Raymond Burr, for those old enough to remember. Here he’s a hustler operating on the seamier fringes of 1930s Los Angeles, making a living blackmailing studios into buying compromising photos of their biggest stars. It has the same noir-ish air as Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown, and it shows great promise, but it too suffers from the common malaise. For heaven’s sake, folks – buy a few lights for your studios.