Is this a serial killer thriller, soap or farce? Do make your mind up!
WRITER Paul Abbott claims he could have dreamed up ‘thousands’ of plots f or his scabrous comedy drama set on a Manchester slum estate, Shameless.
But sometimes it can be disastrous to have too many ideas, especially if the ruthless editorial instinct to pare them down to the very few best is lacking.
His latest series, No Offence (C4), set in an inner-city police station ruled by an eccentric detective inspector (Joanna Scanlan), was overwhelmed by Abbott’s indiscriminate creativity. the pilot episode didn’t know whether it wanted to be a serial killer thriller, a foul- mouthed farce, a sleuthing procedural or a soap opera.
each scene seemed to come from a different show — one minute it was copying robson Green’s A touch Of Cloth, mocking police dramas, and the next it was as old-fashioned and melodramatic as the Bill. Five minutes later, it was attempting half-heartedly to be as innovative as the Scandi-chiller the Bridge.
Viewers simply didn’t know what they were supposed to be watching. Were we meant to be perched on the edge of our seats, or rolling about on them in laughter?
that’s the type of mistake committed by first-time screenwriters who can’t make up their mind what they’re doing. Abbott ought to be far too experienced to blunder into such an error.
After half an hour, a conventional plot was starting to emerge: a sex attacker was kidnapping young women with Down’s syndrome in Manchester and dumping their bodies in a river. it’s a frightening concept that could make compelling TV. But it simply doesn’t work if the detectives are larking about like fifth-formers, cramming into cubicles in the ladies’ loo for secret conflabs, or cheering themselves up by visiting the mortuary to snigger at the corpses.
As a comic actress, Scanlan is an unstoppable force. But only half her scenes were meant to be funny. We’ll never accept her as a committed crimefighter, if she might break off at any moment to do something unspeakable with a breath-freshening spray.
She wasn’t the only implausible character. Paul ritter played Miller, a Sherlock- style forensics expert who spoke in a stream of morbid one-liners.
ritter was wonderful as the fake Scots padre in Mapp And Lucia, and he’s running away with BBC2’s new spy period drama, the Game, in which he’s the effeminate backstabber living with his mother. But he doesn’t have a chance of making Miller look threedimensional: all he could do was play for laughs and hope for the best.
Cherry Healey and Gregg Wallace were trying desperately to wring laughs out of a visit to an industrial bakery, on Inside The Factory: How Our Favourite Foods Are Made (BBC2). Cherry’s technique was to repeat statistics with a gasp and an incredulous wobble: ‘6,000 tons a week?!?!’ she squeaked, as she counted up the amount of flour that went through the silos. ‘No way, 60,000 loaves of bread?!?!’
She was banking on the hope that if she sounded sufficiently staggered, we would be appropriately amazed. Cherry might just as well have been querying how long it took this documentary to drag by: ‘60 minutes in an hour?!?! You’re-kidding-seriously?!?!’
On the factory floor, Gregg was shouting non- stop like a man doing a bad Michael Caine impression, and tottering with laughter at information that wasn’t even slightly funny.
‘You work all night?’ he yelled at one worker. ‘Ha-ha-ha! You’re a vampire!’ Gregg became even more delirious as he charged round the factory floor, goggling in rapt fascination at the loaf-wrapper. ‘that’s mad!’ he kept exclaiming. ‘that’s nuts! Weirder and weirder!’
What else was he expecting to see in a food plant that mass-produces bread? the foreman looked at him nervously, as if wondering whether he should fetch a strait-jacket.
While Gregg was weeping with excitement in a laboratory which stored strains of yeast, Cherry was still blowing her mind on statistics.
Did we realise that Birmingham is the food wastage capital of Britain, a city which throws away 24 million slices of bread every day? Could we believe that a loaf goes stale six times faster in the fridge than at room temperature?
incredible! Unbelievable! Utterly inane!