Why I am giving up on this ludicrous potboiler
I’d been enjoying the Williams brothers’ potboiler-ish thriller (ITV). Admittedly, the torrid storyline and the manipulative insistence on introducing shock-horror twists into the plot at regular intervals sorely tested credibility in the two previous episodes. But it was a story that seemed rooted at least in contemporary, real-life concerns (as opposed to the brothers’ wilfully bonkers Rellik over on BBC One). More importantly, the theme on which everything turned – the ambiguity that can hang over date-rape allegations – was dramatised effectively.
Thus far, that ambiguity had remained suspensefully intact. Pushing us first one way, then the other in terms of whom to believe – needy, emotionally unstable English teacher Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt) or handsome upstanding surgeon Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd) – as each new development unfolded. So it was in this episode, too, as Bristol head teacher Dennis Walters (Peter Davison) turned up to make good on last week’s cliffhanger ending, by revealing that Laura did indeed have “form” making allegations of this kind.
She had destroyed his teaching career, he said, by accusing him of sexual harassment.
Unfortunately, Davison played his part with such enthusiastically seedy aplomb, that though Andrew and the two police detectives appeared to swallow his story wholesale, it was obvious to any viewer with a brain cell that he would be shown up to be a creep. So it proved. And that was the beginning of an unravelling process that by episode’s end had revealed in vivid detail the full truth of the case.
As that was the only thing keeping me watching, this key revelation – that Andrew had deliberately drugged and raped Laura – coming just half way through the six-part series, somehow seemed like a massive cheat.
Of course, it remains to be seen where the story will go for the next three weeks, but I doubt I’ll be watching. The plot had already taken a number of turns for the preposterous, the most ludicrous of which involved Laura convincing Andrew to cover up for one of her pupils by lying to the girl’s father about the fact she’d taken an abortion pill. Thereby putting his reputation and future as a doctor in her hands, wouldn’t you think?
Even a potboiler has to be believable at some level. If this were a book, I’d have been tempted to sling it in the bin.
The great thing about W1A (BBC Two), John Morton’s parody of life at the not-so-beating heart of Broadcasting House, is that it can appeal to both lovers and haters of the BBC in equal measure. The former can sit back and giggle and see it as the tongue-in-cheek love letter to the foibles of a great national institution. While the latter can take it literally, harrumph loudly, and cite it as yet another reason for objecting to the licence fee.
In the second episode last night, the BBC’S put-upon head of values, Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), was once again heading up the swarm of variously pointless and useless department heads wrestling with the publicity fallout of having crossdressing football pundit Ryan Chelford (Ben Batt) on Match of the Day. Of course, this being the cradle of the liberal elite, the issue was not that Chelford was a cross-dresser, but that he’d proved to be the world’s most boring pundit. So the next move was to find a safe place for him elsewhere “in the BBC family” in order to avoid drawing accusations of discrimination.
The situation wasn’t helped by Chelford having just signed Siobhan Sharpe (the brilliant Jessica Hynes) as his agent, a woman who not only sees the BBC’S future as being a kind of user-led adjunct to Youtube, but a gender fluid one at that. Or that a visiting deputation the “Department of Culture, Media and, for some reason, Sport” was sitting in on the meeting.
The mix of physical, visual and, above all, verbal slapstick was as pin-sharp as ever. Skilfully choreographed by a uniformly superb cast who perhaps enjoy the acidtipped silliness all the more for having experienced it first hand themselves. Of course it’s all terribly selfreferential and self-indulgent but that is the point.
In the end, W1A is a celebration, in the tradition of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, of the way in which, in so many institutions, language is the weapon of choice for giving the appearance of progress while also ensuring that nothing of any substance ever actually happens.