Serious drama? Richard Gere’s TV foray is Dynasty with belly laughs
When hollywood stars stoop to do telly, it can’t just be any old thing. You don’t see Meryl Streep on eastenders. They expect special treatment, like nicole Kidman with the delicious Big Little Lies (Meryl herself has joined the cast for season two this year).
But sometimes special treatment turns toxic: Carey Mulligan got landed with the prestigious but awful thriller Collateral, while Toni Collette’s Wanderlust was hideous.
Richard Gere’s first major foray into TV, MotherFatherSon (BBC2), is in a different league of terrible. It looks glossily smooth but the title alone betrays that this is pretentious claptrap. What you couldn’t guess till you watch is how belly-laugh bad the dialogue is.
helen McCrory is Kathryn, the mother of the title, divorced from media mogul Gere, who takes their son Caden (a witless newspaper editor) to lunch and starts to reminisce about his childhood.
She remembers how he ran away on the beach, ‘and when I found you, you were on the sands ... holding a dying seal’.
I honked with laughter. Scriptwriter Tom Rob Smith has obviously never had a seaside holiday in his life. But it got better: Kathryn recalls how her darling boy sang to the stricken marine mammal, and she serenades him with the song in the restaurant — a sad Irish folk air, naturally, just the sort of thing any little boy would choose.
‘I was so proud of you,’ she weeps. I was weeping too, but for the wrong reasons.
Gere, whose workaholic billionaire looks surprisingly tanned and relaxed for a man with an evil global empire to run, patently believes he is making Great And Serious Television. Actually, he’s in a big-budget family soap with atrocious dialogue, and we all know the official name for that: Dynasty.
Let’s not even think about that peculiar sex scene, with Caden standing there full frontal like a national Service recruit required to cough twice for the Army medic.
Tom Rob Smith, who inflicted the Bond-and-bondage drama London Spy on us in 2015, writes erotica about as convincingly as Jilly Cooper does sci-fi.
After Caden overdoses on cocaine, he’s dashed in for brain surgery, where doctors saw off the top of his skull in an operating theatre that features a giant glass viewing gallery. You don’t get those on 24 hours In A&e, but I suppose the super-rich like to watch their loved ones being dissected.
Gere rushes in, sees his ex-wife, gazes down at his son’s exposed brain and says, ‘he’ll survive — because he was born fighting.’
Dynasty’s Blake Carrington would have been proud to deliver a line like that.
high drama on a miniature scale was the focus of Big Trouble In Model Britain (BBC4), which sent James May and his magnifying glass to discover why hornby and Airfix have suffered dire financial difficulties.
I lost all sympathy with the company’s woes at the start when the bosses explained that the manufacturing of their double- O gauge railways and 1/ 72nd scale aircraft was now done in China.
If I want to build a hawker hurricane replica, I’ll choose one that creates jobs in Britain, thanks.
The modellers were entertaining characters, though. Retired local government officer Jim, who spent hundreds of hours building and painting a U.S. navy hellcat from World War II, had 17 boxes of unmade kits in his garage — many more than he’d ever have time to complete.
There’s an acronym to describe this problem, Jim revealed: SABLe. It stands for Stash Acquired Beyond Life expectancy. That’s the human condition, in miniature.