Emotions on the record
IF YOU expected LOVE, LIES & RECORDS (BBC1) to be a cheeky northern drama set in a record shop then last night was either a relief or a let-down. Your TV critic, dreading some Nick Hornby-style Mancunian melodrama about blokes and their massive album collections, was pleasantly surprised to discover it is about the other kind of records.
The Leeds Births, Marriages and Deaths Office might seem an unlikely setting for a drama and as it began we had our doubts.
Senior registrar Kate (Ashley Jensen) was juggling PE kits and groceries en route to the job, where she was hit by a hurricane of administrative hurdles.
Could they organise an RJL for this afternoon, whatever an RJL was? Why were the keys to the strongroom not on the hook? It improved, though, as Kate’s promotion to superintendent registrar was announced, leaving the nose of stuffy older colleague Judy (Rebecca Front), as out of joint as a birth certificate in the deaths folder.
Armed with a CCTV tape from the night of the office Christmas party, Judy made it clear to Kate that she was going to bring her down. Kate, being one of the two people featured on the tape, had a lot on her plate.
In the meantime, she managed to marry a bloke to his fiancée hours after said fiancée had given birth, and hours before she died of cancer, investigate a possible case of sham marriages, probe her teenage daughter’s perturbing online activities and comfort a colleague whose wife had thrown him out.
All in a day’s work, apparently, although you might not have imagined a registrar’s work bearing quite such a resemblance to Cagney and Lacey.
It’s certainly got a lot going on, what with Kate’s detective husband, Rob (Adrian Bower) also investigating a body in the canal, Kate’s one-night stand with colleague Rick (Kenny Doughty) threatening to bring everything crashing down and her other colleague James (Mark Stanley) deciding to start living as a woman.
It’s neither quite your standard ensemble drama, nor quite a thriller. In fact you’d be hard pressed to know where to file it. But filing isn’t everything, as they clearly know at that register office.
Talking of unlikely jobs to make TV shows about, BRITISH WORKERS WANTED (C4) was filmed in a small employment agency in Bognor Regis. Since the EU borders opened, proprietors Sarah and Gaynor had seasons of plenty, filling the low-skilled gigs on their books with a stream of cheap Eastern European workers.
Things were getting tougher as Brexit loomed and migrant workers started leaving. This documentary couldn’t decide what its purpose was, veering between a kind of reality sitcom and crude propaganda.
Sarah and Gaynor hired a chap called Michael to draw more young, British-born workers to their books, although it was hard to believe two savvy businesswomen would ever have thought that worthwhile.
In the same way as people frequent pubs for the booze not the beermats, people sign up to agencies because of the work and not at all because of the staff. The local workforce, it must be said, were not signing up but it was unfair to explain that by painting them as a bunch of workshy idlers.
How could anyone think labelling humans as lazy or hard-working depending on what country they came from isn’t just crass and nasty?