If UTV keeps being this good, I might forgive it for Ridley
The Walk-In UTV, Monday ★★★★★ Paxman: Putting Up With Parkinson’s UTV, Tuesday ★★★★★
UTV drama The Walk-In, which may be the most un-UTV drama ever as it’s so astonishingly brave, is based on true events and takes an unflinching look at the far-right in Britain. Given the option, I’d prefer not to look at the far-right in any country. Even when Louis Theroux hangs out with neoNazis and white supremacists – let’s call them what they are – I want to switch off. I’m happy to live in blissful ignorance.
But this is written by Jeff Pope, who has made his name in factual drama (Little Boy Blue, Appropriate Adult, See No Evil: The Moors Murders), stars that powerhouse of a little fella, Stephen Graham, and therefore has to deserve our time. It is stressful, and it is frightening, and it is violent, yet it’s also compelling, even if, at the same time, you are praying for it to be over.
The first episode (of five) begins with the 2015 machete attack on a Sikh dentist in a supermarket in Wales and ends with the 2016 murder of Jo Cox, the British MP, though we hardly see anything. The screen cuts to black and we just hear: ‘Britain first!’ It’s brave, but also respectful and restrained.
There are two main characters. One is Matthew Collins (Graham), a one-time organiser for the National Front who has switched sides – as the series continues I’m assuming we’ll understand why – and now works as an activist with the anti-racist campaign group Hope Not Hate.
He is trying to find someone to infiltrate the newish group National Action, an extremist organisation (that will eventually be proscribed as a terrorist group).
They seem to have it in particularly for Jews, who are ‘sub-human parasites’ and ‘vermin’. And the trouble with Hitler? He showed too much mercy. As a Jewish person myself, I try not to mix with antisemites, and now I understand why: it makes my blood run cold.
The other character is Robbie Mullen (Andrew Ellis), whom we first meet in Bradford. Here he’s fixing a burglar alarm, but the Muslim man who owns the house won’t let him in as he shares it with his daughters, and Robbie is unmarried. ‘It’s all right for his mob to groom white girls,’ his workmate tells him. But it’s Robbie who will be groomed by National Action. He’s single, aimless, friendless and lacks any sense of belonging – perfect fodder. His father died of cancer and his new friends tell him that Jews have the cure for cancer but kept it to themselves. I just want to say, for the record: we haven’t.
The first episode is quite a slow burn as all the pieces are put into play and we see the effect Collins’s work has on his family. Graham is, of course, flawless and utterly convincing, while the second episode (I’ve watched ahead) is fasterpaced and more of a thriller. Will Robbie become Collins’s ‘walk-in’ and inform on the group? Will a plot to kill another MP be averted? It’s menacingly gripping, and I suppose I’m in. Even though I wish I was out.
‘Old age,’ Bette Davis once memorably opined, ‘ain’t no place for sissies’. I couldn’t help but think of that while watching Paxman: Putting Up With Parkinson’s. Why it’s a UTV show and not a BBC one, given that Paxman is a BBC person, I can’t say. I can only say this was also brave, and if UTV carries on like this I might one day even forgive it for Ridley. (Oh God, the jazz piano.)
About 18 months ago Paxman fell flat on his ‘hooter’ in the street – ‘and it’s quite a hooter’ – while
walking his dog. He thought that’s all it was, a fall, but at the hospital a doctor told him he’d seen him hosting University Challenge and thought he might have Parkinson’s, a disease that leads to a more frozen facial expression known as Parkinson’s mask. The diagnosis was confirmed and, as he says at the outset, he doesn’t want sympathy and ‘won’t blub’, but he does want to be open about it, learn more about the condition and somehow come to terms with it. ‘I did get very depressed… but now I take a lot more medication.’
He meets other patients, a woman who can identify Parkinson’s by smell, a neurologist who dissects a brain – apparently it looks like cauliflower, cuts like cheese – and Sharon Osbourne, because her husband Ozzy also has the condition. ‘When I look at my husband, my heart breaks,’ she tells Paxman, ‘but what you go through is worse.’
Not comforting, but he isn’t seeking comfort. Or at least not consciously. He attends a ballet class specifically for Parkinson’s patients – ‘I thought it would be embarrassing… and it was’ – and also joins a bowls club. ‘I always thought bowls was for old people,’ he says. ‘Jeremy, we are old,’ he’s told.
The most painful moment comes when he tells his physio, ‘I am beaten and dejected… you tell me it’s not all doom and gloom but it is all doom and gloom’.
It is an extremely moving, affecting hour. Just don’t ever tell
him that.