I really hope this young offender mends his ways
BBC1, Friday BBC1, Sunday RTÉ One, Sunday
The Young Offenders The Responder Keys To My Life
It is four years since the last series of The Young Offenders, and a lot has happened since. If you remember the film that set it all off, Jock (Chris Walley) and Conor (Alex Murphy) cycled off to West Cork to find a sack of cocaine. They did locate it, but the bag ripped, and they spilled the drug along every boreen from Kinsale to Kilbarry.
As the first episode opened, cocaine was involved again. Jock naively believed a Spanish man he met online that all the duo needed to do to get a free holiday in Colombia was bring home two heavy winter coats, which were, of course, also stuffed with cocaine, and which ripped in the airport.
Jock was detained and imprisoned for eight years, Conor escaped back to Ireland, but was caught on arrival, and sentenced to three years. And that’s the last we saw of Jock, so the new series by right should be called The Young Offender, singular, because I’ve seen the second episode, and he’s not in that either.
The show suffers from the lack of that dynamic, but there are compensations. Linda, the love of Conor’s life, didn’t hang around and now is engaged to his schooldays arch nemesis, Gavin Madigan. Linda’s parents, Orla and school headmaster Barry, have split up, and Barry has gone slightly mad.
The equally mad Billy Murphy has decided to be Conor’s new best friend, but when he suggests a call to Linda’s house, it all goes horribly wrong, and Conor is back in prison for another short spell.
I’ve no idea why this annoyed me but, of the two, I always rooted for Conor to turn out well, if only for the sake of his long-suffering mother Máiréad, who also has married Garda Sergeant Healy while Conor was in prison. There is a hope in next week’s second outing that he is trying to get his life together, but he even cheats at that too, leaving you wondering if, between the laughs, the real tragedy that often visits this show is that there is to be no redemption for him at all, and that would be a great pity.
It’s hard to see how there will be any redemption either for Chris Carson, the Liverpool policeman played by Martin Freeman in The Responder. Carson lives on the fringes of the rules. When we met him in series one, his marriage was in trouble. Now, it has ended, and his wife is threatening to move to London and take their daughter with her. Desperately, Chris says he will soon be moving from night duty to days, but it is a lie – so when his crooked former partner asks him to do something illegal in return for his change of shift request, you just know everything is going to go even more downhill.
Things are so bad that in order to pay for his daughter’s First Communion dress, Chris steals money from his father’s biscuit tin, but here there is a sense the old man had it coming. An abusive and distant father, his relationships all are strained, and a scene in which Freeman confronts him, is a masterclass in acting not just by the star, but by Bernard Hill as the old man too; he sadly died last Sunday just as the first episode was due to air.
Watching Chris’s world unravel would not be nearly as compelling if Freeman was not in the role. He is an extraordinary actor, and every tiny muscle twitch on his face speaks of tremendous inner turmoil. Add in ancillary characters who also are trapped in spirals of crime and you have a series you can’t look away from. It is television of the highest quality.
On a much gentler note, RTÉ’s Keys To My Life is a lovely series, as Brendan Courtney brings celebrities back to the homes they lived in when they were younger. Nothing is sugar-coated, because earlier in the series, Eilish O’Carroll revisited one home where domestic violence was part of her daily life.
This week, it was the turn of author Paul Howard, who went back to his home in Ballybrack, the Dublin suburb in which I too grew up. The Howard home clearly was a very happy one, but life can take you places you never expected. Sadly, Paul’s mother died of cancer in her 50s, and his brother a couple of years ago, with mental health and addiction issues.
The two hadn’t seen each other for around six years, and there was a palpable sense of loss on Howard’s part, because the past informs so much of our present, and when a piece of it dies, part of us dies too. Courtney is the perfect host, warm and empathetic, to channel the memories, good and bad. Conor, and Chris, could benefit greatly from an hour in his company.