Brilliant, sinister suburban satire that is twistier than a corkscrew
MORE tea, vicar? When I settle in, on a rainy night in a few months, to binge-watch Inside Man (BBC1) for a second time, I intend to count how many times the awfully nice vicar Harry boils up a brew.
It’s one of the many ways this morbidly clever crime comedy toys with its central characters. Harry (David Tennant) is quite certain he is a nice guy to the bone, because every visitor gets a cuppa almost before they are through the door.
Even as he prepared to lie through his teeth to the detectives who came to question him about his verger’s suicide, Harry was offering them tea: ‘I’ve just boiled the kettle anyway.’
Writer Steven Moffat is tricking us the same way about his death row sleuth, Jefferson Grieff, played by Stanley Tucci. The condemned man makes no attempt to hide his guilt, stating repeatedly that he murdered his wife.
But he says that he loved her, and we were starting to believe that there must be some terrible misunderstanding . . . until he admits that he also decapitated her. It’s hard to cut off a spouse’s head by accident, well-meaning or not.
Inside Man is twisted in every sense. The criss-crossing stories have more sharp turns than a corkscrew. And the murder plots are so sinister, they go beyond mundane evil and become a dark satire on suburban life.
The effect is like watching layers of wallpaper being stripped away in an old house, a new pattern being revealed every few minutes.
All the cast are wonderful, but Tennant is especially enjoyable as the clergyman with a saviour complex, rushing headlong into hell — but determined to have a nice breakfast in the garden with his wife first.
All week I’ve been trying to think who Dolly Wells reminds me of — she’s the diffident but resourceful maths tutor held captive in the vicar’s cellar. Now I’ve got it. In her face, her voice and her perpetual air of resigned disappointment, she’s like Penelope Wilton as the long-suffering wife of Richard Briers in Ever Decreasing Circles.
Could the lovely Mr Briers have played a God-bothering murderer? Oh yes, he’d have relished it.
The violence in The Walk-In (ITV) is far less imaginative, and much uglier. Stephen Graham plays reformed National Front activist Matthew Collins as an aggressive peacenik. Condemned as a traitor by his one-time comrades on the ultra-Right, he lives in a constant state of alert, expecting a firebomb through the letterbox.
When his alcoholic neighbour Bob staggers into him, Collins reacts as though he’s under attack. It takes him a couple of heartbeats to remember most people aren’t out to kill him. ‘Peace and love, Bob,’ he mutters. Collins’s wife Alison is fed up with moving to another rented house in another town, every time their address is published on an extremist website.
She and the children don’t deserve to be hounded, but it’s hard to have a great deal of sympathy for Collins, now a leading activist for the Hope Not Hate campaign group.
With far too many scenes of mobs waving placards, the first hour of The Walk-In stirred up emotions with cheap violence while pretending to moralise.
More distasteful still was the decision to show the moments leading up to the murder of MP Jo Cox in 2016 — and even to recreate the sounds of her death, over a black screen.
No decent person needs a lecture on how vile and deplorable her killing was.
It would have been celebrated by a few miserable troglodytes of course, but depicting them as a macho club for loners is disturbing and unwise.