Births, deaths, sex tapes! Here’s a registrar who really does see it all
Racing drivers lead a quiet life. Oil riggers, special agents and t est pilots are all as tranquil as maiden aunts in retirement, compared to the manic existence of a town hall registrar.
Births, marriages and death: all human life is here. and judging by the pell-mell melodrama of the breathlessly full- on drama Love, Lies & Records (BBc1), it’s all happening at once.
ashley Jensen stars as council employee Kate, who can juggle more life- changing crises in one morning than most people have to face in a decade.
For a start, she’s about to be promoted to fill both top jobs in her office — over the head of her current boss, the magnificently bitter Judy (Rebecca Front).
But at a meeting to proclaim her elevation, her pony-tailed colleague James stumbles to his feet and drops a bigger bombshell: he’s transgender. and as of next Monday, he’ll be wearing women’s clothes . . . just so everyone knows.
The announcement was not strictly necessary. His colleagues are bound to notice when he wears a floral frock. Square-jawed dadof-two James isn’t, shall we say, conventionally feminine. Even his long hair is blokeish — he looks like a shy wrestler in a suit.
There was no time for Kate to ponder this, because she had to dash to a hospice for the wedding of a woman with hours to live, who had given birth two days earlier.
and then there was the spate of fake marriages in an immigration swindle, and the case of the burglar who turned out to be Kate’s stepson . . . but not before she had almost sparked an armed siege by dialling 999 and threatening to shoot the intruder.
it was turning out to be quite a busy day, even before Judy revealed her X- r ated ccTV t apes of Kate and a colleague, having athletic sex in a storeroom at the christmas party.
This frenzy of preposterous subplots would be uncontrollable in t he hands of a writer l ess experienced than Kay Mellor – creator of shows including in The club and The Syndicate. She has never done anything quite this frantically complex before, but every scene was under control.
We didn’t get time to learn much about Kate’s stroppy teenagers, but doubtless that will happen over the next f i ve deliriously addictive episodes. and you’ll wait a long time to see such a shameless tearjerker as the wedding between the cancerstricken bride and the devoted groom, with both their new baby and t he shadow of death watching from the front row.
The shadow of death was centre- stage as Piers Morgan attempted to extract the truth from one of america’s most notorious murderers in documentary Serial Killer (iTV).
Mark Riebe is serving life in a Florida prison for the cowardly abduction of Donna callahan, a pregnant grocery store assistant. He strangled her in the back of his brother’s car.
Riebe has tormented the families of a dozen other missing women since he was jailed in 1997, confessing to their murders and then retracting.
He evidently thrives on the attention, and it could be argued that this TV interview nourished his twisted sense of power and control.
But the questions were clinical and ruthlessly unsympathetic, exposing Riebe as a liar and a feeble thug of subnormal intelligence, who feared and despised women. He wanted to seem clever: Morgan exposed him as utterly pathetic. ‘You don’t think it’s hard for me?’ Riebe whined.
it was his victims and their families who emerged with dignity. Riebe revealed what a small and worthless creature he is.