Unmissable? No, The Fall was the biggest bagful of grot on the telly
Thursday night was rubbish night, and that doesn’t just mean it was your turn to put the bins out. The biggest load of landfill was on the telly, strewn across all four main channels at 9pm.
Never mind the bogus hunted on C4, or greengrocer Chris Bavin’s bellyache about processed food in The Truth about . . . Meat on BBC1.
Easily the most useless and revolting bagful of grot was The Fall (BBC2), which returned for a third series with a four-minute recap of the story so far. That’s a warning sign at the outset — this show thinks it is Very Important Viewing, unmissable drama, televisual literature.
The fact is it’s very missable indeed. any viewer who couldn’t remember the last series in 2014 wouldn’t have a clue why anyone should care about these boring characters with their heavy breathing and lingering silences.
Jamie dornan is the rapist Paul spector, who got himself shot by a terrorist to provide a cliffhanger for the previous series.
When we rejoined him, he was still lying on the woodland floor, soaked in blood but with his beard impeccably trimmed.
Gillian anderson, as throaty dsI stella Gibson, was cradling his body, with her hair perfectly blow-waved. Then we cut to spector’s unconscious mind, which was apparently driving in a fast car with cool blues guitar wailing.
That sums this show up: scratch the superficial surface and underneath there’s a thin, tacky layer of veneer.
dornan spent most of the episode on a hospital operating table having his spleen removed. at least that means there shouldn’t be so many broody, shirtless moments where the sex killer gazes at his six-pack abs in a smoky mirror before strangling another woman.
With his stubble and his muscles artfully smeared with blood, dornan lay there like a discarded action Man. That’s unfair, of course — action Man has a broader acting range.
stella couldn’t tear herself from his side. In the ambulance she hovered over him, biting her lip and repressing her carnal urges, while the paramedics worked round her. she barely noticed the pints of gore he had leaked over her, until spector’s daughter stared at her in the hospital — just one of the utterly tasteless moments that this show revels in.
There were allusions to the murder tableaux that spector staged so obsessively, which were echoed in the hospital’s emergency room.
his convulsing body lay on the blood-drenched sheets, with a surgical knife beside his head. When the operation was over, the theatre looked like a slasher movie.
No surgeon in his right mind would leave his knife on a patient’s pillow, of course. and the idea the surgery team would head for the canteen, leaving intestines and clothing over the floor, is ridiculous.
all the characters talk in panting, broken voices. stella sounds like a sighing bird, weak and pathetic, and much of her dialogue was pathetic, too. Meeting a colleague who’d been shot in the arm, she stared at his sling and asked, ‘What did the doctors say . . . about your arm?’
What else would they have been worried about — his tonsils?
Indira Varma as detective Nina suresh in Paranoid (ITV) doesn’t sigh and pant. she does something even more irritating, a wheedling little girl’s voice. ‘We could go to jail if we conceal stuff,’ she lisped like Violet Elizabeth Bott.
Paranoid could be the most unconvincing police drama ever made. The detectives are behaving like children, having mad, melodramatic quarrels and setting up a secret society to investigate the murder behind their boss’s back.
They’re getting help from an unknown informant they call the Ghost detective. This is more scooby doo than a grown-up crime show.
But there’s a glimmer of hope. When writer Bill Gallagher forgets his characters are coppers, he’s much more convincing. One scene at a birthday party did crackle, as Polly Walker decided to see how many lies she could tell her son’s girlfriend in 60 seconds.
More of that, and less of the baby talk, and Paranoid might make Thursday nights bearable.