Cold sea but colder hearts in far North
THE BBC provided the perfect antidote to last week’s Indian summer – a polar plunge (again) into the Arctic Circle. After The Terror in which Kevin from Motherland was the world’s most unlikely ship’s surgeon, we now have The North Water (BBC Two, Friday) and actor Jack O’connell’s drug-addled ship’s doctor from the days of the Raj.
This terrifyingly gruesomevictorian tale is about a whaling ship stacked to the gunnels with miscreants and downright criminals but may also be on a doomed mission thanks to Stephen Graham’s dodgy captain and his insurance policy. As such, it has the makings of a taut thriller – if we can stand the gore fest that appears to be playing out before our startled eyes. Brace yourself.
As with The Terror, there’s a first-rate cast on hand, this time with Hollywood’s Colin Farrell, Stephen Graham and Tom Courtenay, whose shipowner character could fill a book entitled, “Things You Don’t Hear In Polite Society Anymore”.
But it’s deeds more than words that inspire Farrell’s incredibly violent whaler, Henry Drax, who’s up there with other jaw-dropping TV thugs such as Ray Donovan,tony Soprano, or our very own Brummie brutes,tommy and
Arthur Shelby.what a dinner party line-up!
With Drax, the beard helps to disguise a disturbing face of unmitigated blood lust – and that’s only while he’s trying to get a drink from a plucky barman in Hull. Give this guy a snifter, I thought, or that bottle you’re holding, barman, is going to be devoted to a very different purpose.
Well-lubricated, Drax then set about spoiling someone else’s evening for good, pursuing him down a dark alley with the man’s newly-acquired lady friend (they could do with a spot of LED lighting in Hull) before bopping him on the head with a handy house brick while the rest of us looked on horrified.
But far more gruesome images were to come.after a night of shame in Lerwick
(it happens apparently), Drax took to the young seal population in the Arctic. Even the druggy surgeon was drafted in.
Now, I know it’s fiction but many will be shocked by a man clubbing seals on prime-time television. No, you don’t see anything incredibly graphic, but you do imagine it.they shoot them, too, just for good measure.
We then saw Drax, and the doctor, skinning each seal and dragging their hauls back to ship. Perhaps this whaling ship deserves to be at the bottom of the sea, 20,000 leagues should do it but I don’t expect that will be enough to kill Drax. Moby
Dick could be summoned with some tantalising whale music piped across
this incredible tundra. Like Tom
Hardy’s uncompromising James Delaney in Taboo, there may be more to this runaway monster than is immediately apparent (difficult childhood?), but it is strangely compelling. Unusually, the man most feared in any punch-up, Stephen Graham, is keeping his powder dry.
Speaking of TV’S most violent, they were popping up like mushrooms on the box last week. Silent Witness (BBC One, Monday & Tuesday) had a brace of bad boys in a prison where one inmate was found frozen to death in a kitchen chiller. Just what I thought: too subtle for one of the lags – but no spoilers here. Forensics expert Emilia Fox,
meanwhile, was reunited with the “campus killer”, a multiple murderer who could probably stare down Drax in a stand-off. He was up to all sorts of bad things (his mother even wanted him to stay in prison) in a story which again was almost too violent, to the point of looking for the off-button.
We had two all-in brawls along with the dangling of a prison officer over a railing before launching him on a 30ft drop on to his back.the prison was actually marked for closure because it was so badly run by Kevin Doyle (last seen in Downton Abbey).
My only positive thought during this grim, unrelenting four hours was that maybe it’s part of a BBC re-engineering programme to dissuade young people from committing crimes and possibly ending up in a nick like this.
I always feel Silentwitness is 20 minutes too long.they could have lost this creepy line from a student at Emilia’s first lecture: “I read your paper on asphyxiation: It took my breath away.” A serial killer in the making?
Finally, I know it’s hot but does every male contestant in the
new reality show Ready To Mingle (ITV2, Monday) need to lose his shirt so quickly? Spare a thought for the dad bod. Otherwise, this promising Love Island pretender was highly watchable, not least for heavily-pregnant host Katherine Ryan who gasped when seeing one chap: “My waters just broke!” And this
one had his shirt on…