A peach of an assassin drama that fizzes with intensity
What’s going on at the BBC drama department? The month has yielded an avalanche of shows it would be unwise to miss: between episodes of Bodyguard, Trust, Wanderlust and Black Earth Rising, no one’s got time to talk about them at the watercooler.
The good and/or bad news is you must add another title to your packed viewing schedule. Killing Eve
(BBC One, Saturday) is an absolute peach. And unlike all of the above, it was generated by a woman. With style and verve, Phoebe Waller-bridge has adapted Luke Jennings’ Codename Villanelle novellas about the codependent joust between a spook and an assassin. Those who know the originals can advise how much crackle is down to Jennings (who also takes a scriptwriting credit) and how much snap is injected by the creator of Fleabag.
Whatever, it’s a treat. As the glamourpuss killer Villanelle, Jodie Comer makes for a hot, cold psychopath who swans around Europe, nonchalantly leaving bodies in her wake. She revealed her chilly hand in the sly opening scene when a little Viennese girl wouldn’t smile back her; she got her revenge by niftily upending her ice cream. Later, in Tuscany, another child paid a much higher price.
Grey’s Anatomy’s Sandra Oh as her huntress Eve Polastri has just as much fun. She is the cause of a pun in the title: this Eve is killingly funny as a desk-bound box-ticker who can’t resist chasing her hunches. Her brief encounter with her nemesis in a hospital rest room promised further flushes of dramatic intensity.
Further down the roster actors familiar for one style perform in quite another: David Haig is a world-weary sad sack as Eve’s boss Bill, and Fiona Shaw is cool and withholding as senior spook Carolyn. And what a joy to see the sad-eyed, sweet-smiling Kim Bodnia, much missed after he was written out of The Bridge, as Konstantin, the avuncular figure who commissions Villanelle’s crimes.
Killing Eve looks fabulous in the manner of a glossy cartoon bloodbath, while the multilingual dialogue fizzes and sizzles. And blissfully each episode is only 45 minutes. Please can BBC Drama now cool it for a bit? It has successfully reminded us Netflix is not the only game in town. But some of us also need our sleep.
King Arthur’s Britain: The Truth Unearthed (BBC Two, Sunday) was a bit of a misnomer. There was no King Arthur, according to the programme which bore his name. His heroic legend was conjured up by cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth six centuries later. Fake news pure and simple. So whose Britain was it anyway?
We’re in the dark about the Dark Ages when not a lot got written down. But it turns out the land is an open book to those who speak the language. We met one such person here, a dogged archaeologist called Dominic Powlesland, who has been reading a legible patch of Yorkshire for 40 years. His conclusion: not much fighting happened in this era of supposedly violent conflict between the Britons and the Saxons, who didn’t so much invade eastern England as slip over and discreetly integrate.
Meanwhile, over in Arthur’s alleged redoubt on the westerly island of Tintagel, a dig turned up lovely tableware from the far end of the Med. But the table in question can’t have been round as all of the unearthed huts were all rectangles, and small.
There were more archaeologists in this story than a lady in a lake could shake a sword at. They had names like Scutt and Gossip, and spoke with lucid calm as they rewrote history.
The presenter was Professor Alice Roberts, whose own job description includes osteoarchaeologist, physical anthropologist and palaeopathologist. She also has a gorgeous loamy Bristolian accent. If only the grammar of television didn’t require her to present all these findings as her own. “I think I’ve found something more interesting than Arthur, etc…” And there was perhaps no need to position Arthurian legend as a Hollywood action movie, or Excalibur as a weapon of mass destruction. The cheap, repetitive animations didn’t help here.
But the film composted a wealth of research into a diligent hour of sleuthing. A tale unfolded of Britain split right down the middle, blessed with frictionless immigration and peaceable trade with the continent over the water. Does this sound familiar?