Are London’s cops really sadists - or is this another BBC stitch-up?
Colossal. simply outstanding, possibly the greatest TV show I have ever watched — a brutal dissection of corrupt policing and racial division, where betrayal is the key to saving countless lives.
sadly, I’m not talking about Informer ( BBC1), but its big brother, The Wire, a ten-year- old U.s. cable serial starring British actors Idris Elba and Dominic West, as well as Clarke Peters and scores more. Gigantic, sprawling, often incomprehensible, The Wire is telly’s War and Peace.
Informer tries to tackle the same territory, but lacks all its ambition and subtlety. What we’re left with is a charmless story about twisted, soulless coppers perverting london’s sweet-natured immigrant community.
Nabhaan Rizwan plays Raza, a rascally young fella-me-lad who loves his mum and dad, works hard and looks out for his swotty little brother. Everyone adores Raza.
But because of a slight mishap with some Class a drugs in a nightclub, the sort of misunderstanding that could happen to anyone, nasty policeman Gabe (Paddy Considine) decides to force Raza to infiltrate a terrorist cell and inform on the bombmakers.
To make sure Raza complies, police rookie Holly (Bel Powley) threatens to deport his lovely mum, while Gabe plays God, strolling into an immigration centre and letting Raza pick and choose which deportees are allowed to stay in the UK.
Gabe and his colleagues are devious, ruthless sadists, drunk on power and morally incontinent. Raza and his kindly family don’t stand a chance against this institutionalised evil.
Honestly, if you didn’t know better, you’d almost think the Beeb had some sort of bleeding-heart bias.
The Wire was famous for its pyrotechnic language, so dense with street slang that some scenes were undecipherable even with subtitles. That’s a masterstroke, because viewers obsessed for days, trying to work out what they’d seen.
Informer is likewise larded with slang, but half is the fake Jamaican adopted by boy bands — police are ‘feds’, for instance — while the rest, words like ‘snout’ and ‘grass’, has apparently been lifted from Ronnie Barker’s Porridge. It’s a naffing liberty, Mr Mackay.
The only reason to keep watching is Considine, who tries everything he can to make his character work . . . including a variety of classic crime drama accents, from gruff sweeney to scouse Z Cars. Now I want to see him go all avuncular, like Dixon of Dock Green.
If Informer is merely an inept imitation, There She Goes (BBC4) is utterly original.
David Tennant and Jessica Hynes play simon and Emily, parents struggling to care for their nine-year- old daughter, Rosie, who can’t talk and has a severe learning disability.
Rosie hurls herself to the ground and screams, lunges into the road, smashes up her room, bites and claws when touched, refuses to eat — all the impossible traits of a child with what social workers helpfully call ‘challenging behaviour’.
My own younger son, now 22, was very like Rosie, who is played with uncanny realism by the astonishing Miley locke.
so many scenes rang true, especially when Rosie wrecked a bedroom wall, just to distract her dad so she could achieve her real aim — to nip downstairs and pour a litre of milk over her head.
There she Goes neatly scotches the misconception that parents of disabled children are naturalborn saints, and highlights how older siblings inevitably miss out while the family’s little monster hogs all the attention.
It’s constructed like a sitcom, but there are no laughs, unless a human wrecking ball counts as slapstick. I daren’t let my boy see this . . . he’ll get ideas.