A gripping heart to heart with TV’s odd couple
‘It’s not Trumpton,” huffed DS Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) in last week’s episode of
Broadchurch (ITV). “I don’t know everybody in town.” Perhaps not, but the series has always made a point of exploring the damaging effects of intimacy. While Miller and her superior, D I Alec Hardy (David Tennant), could never be partners in anything other than a professional sense, their bond has endured despite extraordinary strain. The demands of their final case, though, look likely to severely test this odd-couple friendship.
“It’s easy being you, Miller,” said Hardy last night, grumbling about his responsibility as a senior officer to a working single mother whose estranged husband was an unconvicted murderer and whose son had been suspended from school for sharing online pornography. I wouldn’t be surprised if the big climactic twist saw Miller dashing her infuriating partner’s brains out. Snap judgments have proven the undoing of many of Broadchurch’s residents.
Anchoring the whole thing once again was the extraordinary Julie Hesmondhalgh as rape victim Trish Winterman. No histrionics here, just constant tension, fear and anguish, whether telling her daughter the appalling news or abruptly terminating her police video interview when it strayed into troubling territory. Trish’s recent sexual history appears complicated, although the writing so far suggests no lazy inferences will be drawn from that. Certainly, Trish is no saintly victim, but she is an all-too human survivor of an unspeakable crime.
While the story addressed her trauma head-on, the whodunit element ticked away enticingly and the suspects mounted up. There was Trish’s chummy but shifty ex, Ian (Charlie Higson), who refused a DNA test; cabbie Clive Lucas (Sebastian Armesto) and his tale of a broken radio; moody mechanic Jim Attwood (Mark Bazeley); and loner Ed Burnett (Lenny Henry), who had an inside track on the investigation courtesy of his by-the-book daughter, DC Katie Harford (Georgina Campbell).
The incorporation of familiar faces, with the exception of Beth Latimer (Jodie Whittaker) as Trish’s support worker, still felt awkward. The plight of newspaper editor Maggie Radcliffe (Carolyn Pickles) felt superfluous to the story, even if the point being made about the decline of local print media was an important one in a wider sense. That aside, after the chaotic bloat of series two, there’s a clarity and care to the narrative that makes me rather regret its imminent demise.
In April 1789, Captain Bligh of the
HMS Bounty was cut loose on the Pacific with 18 of his men. There had been a mutiny. Over six weeks, they navigated 4,000 miles of ocean in a wooden boat before making land at Timor. “Now,” announced the sonorous voiceover for Mutiny (Channel 4), “for the first time, nine men are following the same route in an identical boat, facing the same conditions.” In setting up the five-part series, such portentous claptrap underlined its innate pointlessness. Thankfully, Mutiny was also great, sadistically entertaining fun.
This, despite being an intriguing idea, was hampered by uncertain execution. Quartermaster Rishi insisted that this wasn’t a holiday. So what, then, was it? Not a history documentary, although there were reconstructions and quotes from Bligh; nor is it quite a Bear Grylls-style survival show, because their route is predetermined. It’s closest to reality TV, except with tasks constant and gruelling, and without diary room or indeed any privacy; both loo breaks and hushed confessions to camera were witnessed and overheard by shipmates.
Certainly, the participants settled very quickly into familiar tropes. SAS:
Who Dares Wins veteran Ant Middleton was the firm-but-fair skipper; ship’s surgeon Luke, the one with inappropriate fears (in his case, sharks and sunburn); and helmsman Chris, the hate figure (“don’t speak to me like I’m a kid… don’t tell me not to be me… my job title is sailor/adventurer”). This sailor/adventurer, having ignored warnings about diving off rocks into choppy waters, duly sustained a cut that became infected. After the obligatory falling out, reconciliation was as essential as it was inevitable.
As the waves broiled and the rations dwindled, the perils seemed real enough; one of the crew even acquired “trench-hand”, giving his flesh the sort of pallor redolent of a zombie from a 1970s Hammer horror. Indeed, once
Mutiny has settled on what it wants to be – and tonight’s second episode will be pivotal here – we could have a ghoulish treat on our hands. Broadchurch ★★★★ Mutiny ★★★