This pretentious drivel tells us more about the Beeb than China
Three minutes was all it took, three minutes of bleeps and blarps and strobing lights, before I was prepared to thoroughly dislike One Child (BBC2).
This three-part mystery drama, about a British student fighting to save the brother she’s never met from Death row, is part of BBC2’s Chinese season.
Most of the programming has been earnestly educational, such as robert Peston’s analysis of the country’s economic system in The Great Chinese Crash?, or Kate humble and the hairy Bikers celebrating Chinese New Year.
That’s all well and good, highly improving and all that. But One Child promised to be something more, with suspense and a story — television you could watch without feeling that you ought to be sitting up straighter.
Instead, it grated from the beginning. The opening sequence was set in a Western-style nightclub north of hong Kong, where a slimy-suited playboy was stuffing his nose with drugs and slugging back whisky.
That went on, with no dialogue and a constant electronic cacophony, for an eternity before the picture went blurry and the playboy was booted out by bouncers for groping a dancing girl.
This wasn’t just bad, it was formulaic. every other TV drama starts in a nightclub at the moment. Vinyl, the hBO series dreamed up by Mick Jagger and directed by Martin Scorsese, opened on Mon- day with drug-fuelled excess at a dingy club. London Spy, the thriller starring Ben Whishaw last year, did much the same thing.
The subtext seems to be that, if we were dangerously interesting people living life to the limit, we’d be at a nightclub instead of flopped on the sofa in front of the box.
But I draw a different conclusion, more of a kneejerk reaction: anyone daft enough to think that’s a good way to spend an evening deserves everything they get and has automatically forfeited all sympathy.
One Child went out of its way to keep being irritating. The picture was cropped in ‘ letterbox format’, like an old Panavision movie — stretched across the screen with strips of black above and below.
That’s sheer pretension, a statement by director John Alexander that he’d rather be making art-house cinema.
The story was spelled out in text messages and emails, with the camera panning over each line of type. There might as well have been a ball bouncing along the words.
None of this masked how improbable the story was. Katie Leung played Mei, a 21-year- old astrophysics student in London, contacted by a journalist in China who claims her birth mother needs her help: Mei must fly to Guangzhou and persuade the authorities not to execute her brother.
Mei had no idea this brother existed: like many girl babies, she was given up for adoption to a Western couple at two weeks old, under the Chinese policy that allowed mothers to keep only one child. She jets off, bamboozling her adoptive parents with a couple of half-truths, and doesn’t discuss her plans with anyone else.
how could she? Mei doesn’t have friends, as she’s just a cardboard cut- out, invented to let BBC2 educate us some more about China.
The 100 (e4), beginning its third series, is completely the opposite: it pretends to be a dystopian fantasy about young pioneers reclaiming the earth after a nuclear holocaust, but really it’s a high-school drama about a bunch of teenage friends.
They do all the things American adolescents yearn to do — getting drunk at parties, cramming into a car and singing along to the radio, worrying about their sexuality, being the centre of attention.
They also get to fire crossbows and fight mutant bandits, but there’s been a nuclear war, so school rules have to be relaxed.
Those mutants are a nuisance, but the real enemy is anyone over 30. It’s no different from the sci-fi of yesteryear, The Tomorrow People or Logan’s run, except the sets are made using computer graphics instead of plywood.
Mostly, it looks and sounds like a video game. But at least there’s no nightclub.