How Kiri has morphed into an unmissable whodunit
The most surprising twist in (Channel 4) was that the action morphed into a whodunit in the second episode. The opener had appeared clear cut: this seemed to be a piece focused on the fallout faced by Bristol social worker Miriam (Sarah Lancashire), after the death of nineyear-old Kiri – a black girl fostered by a white couple – in her care. Miriam’s decision to allow an unsupervised visit between Kiri and her Nigerian grandfather and his wife had led to the child being abducted by her unstable, biological father, before her body was later found in the woods. It was gripping television.
In part two, writer Jack Thorne tore up the certainties he’d established in episode one. It had been impossible not to empathise with Lancashire’s Miriam – at least for non-bristolians untroubled by her quirky attempt at a Bristol accent. This was a brilliant portrayal of a well-meaning woman trying to navigate sensitive issues around race and adoption, while coping with a flatulent rescue dog and a dying mother. Wasn’t it? But what Miriam’s regular swigs from her hip flask? Surely that would affect her competence? In this episode, after being assaulted in a shopping precinct and informed that she might be struck off, Miriam gave an impassioned defence of her actions to the reporters camped outside her door, which provided the episode’s most dramatic moment.
As for Kiri’s father, who had arrived in a gold BMW playing grime music, loud, and had been introduced to us as a violent ex-con – how did that fit with the articulate young man dealing with serious daddy issues we encountered when Kiri’s grandfather tracked him down to a thriving brothel in London? Thorne, it seemed, wanted us to put empathy to one side and attend to any preconceptions. Listening to Stormzy does not a killer make. And, maybe, as much as we like Miriam, she was still negligent.
That left just one preconception to deal with, because, this being Channel 4, wasn’t it inevitable that the apparently nice middle-class family, who had fostered Kiri and wanted to adopt her, would start to move into the frame for her murder?
Don’t get me wrong. Thorne, who wrote last year’s Bafta-winning National Treasure is a brilliant dramatist, and Kiri is already unmissable. He has an ear for naturalistic dialogue, there’s a depth of characterisation across the board here, and the performances have been exceptional. But this drama is at its very best when it’s hardest to take sides: the argument about Kiri’s funeral between her Christian grandfather and her atheist foster mother is a superb case in point.
The prospect of a murder charge appeared out of the blue in episode three of Girlfriends (ITV), when Phyllis Logan’s Linda found herself being questioned about the death of her husband Micky, who had apparently disappeared into the blue in episode one, after returning to his cruise cabin sozzled.
Of course, unless writer Kay Mellor had set up that original scene with sleight of hand, the audience knew that Phyllis had arrived innocently at the cabin to find Micky’s fags marking the spot where he had been taking the air before losing his life on the ocean waves. But it took a bit of detective work from Linda’s lifelong friends Sue (Miranda Richardson) and Gail (Zoe Wanamaker) to extricate her from the accusation that she had pushed him overboard in a jealous rage because of an affair with Paula Wilcox’s Carole.
This was fairly soapy stuff – so much so that I haven’t given up hope of Micky turning up alive. But the clearest crime so far has been Wanamaker’s Northern accent, which has been ’ard to tek at times. That aside, this is a serious assemblage of acting talent. All three of these brilliant actresses are bringing out every drop of humour and pathos in Mellor’s scripts, even if the writer who created Band of Gold and Playing the Field is not quite the dramatist she was. Mellor is banging the drum pretty hard for Sue, a newly replaced features editor, played by Richardson with a delicious hauteur, who expressed outrage at Linda’s incarceration: “She’s a women of a certain age – we don’t do cells.”
Sue is waging war against her ex-husband and boss (Anthony Head) over being moved aside because of her insistence on featuring older women in his bridal magazine – “Not all brides are young women nowadays, and they’re not all women either!” she erupted. She’s right, of course, but Mellor is so clearly on the side of her protagonists that it pushes the drama towards the partisan.