Will it improvewithage?
SENSITIVE SKIN has one of the best opening scenes I’ve seen in years. Joanna Lumley, as 61- year- old Davina Jackson, is in a doctor’s surgery, waiting to collect a fresh supply of HRT pills.
The doctor ( Ian Kelly), out of shot, is spelling out the many risks of taking HRT, which she has been on for ten years. He ends with listing various cancers.
When he has finished, she gives a little shrug. ‘ But on the plus side…?’
‘It keeps you looking young,’ says the doctor.
‘ Well,’ she says, ‘ why rock the boat? Can I have three months’?’
Fade to black.
Great, I thought. A real comedy about ageing, with one of our best comic actresses at the helm.
It was bound to be subtle and witty with a hint of melancholy. After all, the author is Hugo Blick, who brought us the sublime Marion And Geoff. Great. How wrong I was, and how disappointed.
Nothing that followed was half as amusing, well- observed, or wellplayed as that opening scene. Indeed it was often impossible to work out what Blick thought he was trying to do.
There is nothing wrong with the idea. Contentment in the evening of one’s life is notoriously elusive.
Too many intelligent and forwardthinking couples, who have taken good care of their health, their finances and their general lifestyle, discover that when they get to the age when they should be enjoying the fruits of their efforts — or at least reckon they should be — life has an annoying habit of turning round and biting them in the leg.
Davina and her writer husband Al ( Denis Lawson) have got everything a 60- something couple could possible wish for: good looks, a successful downshift from a family home to an urban chic flat in the East End and enough money to buy the little luxuries they could never quite afford before. Such as a V-reg Roller. But are they happy? When Davina asks Al that question, he replies with characteristic glibness, ‘Oh, yes. Sure. I mean, I love living in a maximum security prison. Who wouldn’t?’
All she can think about at that moment is whether he likes her hair.
She’s bored to tears in an art gallery. His idea of a fun morning is to sit in the reading room of the local library laughing at the bad reviews given to a rival writer who once dared to slag him off in print.
FURTHER gloom is heaped upon them by their 33- year- old son, Orlando, for whom nothing is going right. He resents his name, the loss of his family home, and the fact that his broody girlfriend dumped him when she discovered he had a low sperm count.
His only consolation is his dog, William, which he offloads onto his parents with all its bad — urinary, largely — habits.
The outcome of all this was a series of scenes in which nothing much happened, followed by more scenes in which nothing much happened again. Certainly not jokes. Nothing much hung together. Plot lines were launched but not pursued. Bizarre episodes were jammed in haphazardly, like bits of a jigsaw puzzle that don’t fit, but are made to do so anyway.
The most bizarre was when a man dressed like an entertainer on a Caribbean cruise liner ( Freddie ‘ Parrot- Face’ Davies, no less) appeared outside the window, announced himself as Davina’s Frustration and proceeded to have a long conversation with her about . . . well . . . her frustrations.
Another oddity was that, while Miss Lumley gave a convincingly naturalistic performance, Al spoke in long, laboured sentences.
Hugo Blick is an enormously talented man, but by appointing himself writer, producer and director, even he might have been asking too much of his talents. A quiet word in the ear from an astute colleague would not have gone amiss. Still, it’s early days — for us, if not for Davina and Al.
DOC MARTIN’S wrinkly patients in Portwenn have more practical problems to deal with — if not, in some cases, a lot more bizarre.
Danny Steel ( Tristan Sturrock) had good reason to argue with grumpy Dr Martin Ellingham (Martin Clunes) over the deteriorating mental state of his mother (Margaret Tyzack). When the doctor asked her his two standard questions for testing cognitive impairment, she not only answered both correctly, but with unexpected acuity. ( He was understandably impressed when she declared that World War II had begun in 1919, as a result of the Treaty of Versailles.)
However, he had to admit there is a difference between idiosyncrasy and wading into the sea to get to the Post Office.
In fact, all she was suffering from was severe dehydration, because of not drinking water at night for fear of wetting her bed and being sent to the local care home. In the event, she liked the place so much, she decided to stay.
The non- stop cuts, bruises and burns suffered by fisherman Eddie Rix ( Gerard Horan) had an explanation that not even Doc Martin could have guessed at.
Of all the inhabitants of this chocolate box of a Cornish village, none has odder symptoms than the doctor himself.
Never mind not being able to stand the sight of blood, what normal man would break off from a passionate kiss with the love of his life, Louise ( Caroline Catz), to inquire about her dental hygiene?