Admirably frank look at the pressures of being the best
What price success? Is winning always worth it? The Edge (BBC Two), an excellent film about the England cricket team, asked the question. The players answered with admirable frankness. Between 2009 and 2013, this squad rose from abject failure to number one team in the world and Ashes victory under the guidance of Andy Flower. They were sporting heroes and they were doing a job they loved: travelling the world on tour with their best mates, as Graeme Swann cheerfully put it.
The first half of Barney Douglas’s film (which was previously released in cinemas and available on Amazon) recalled the team’s rise. It was given a cinematic treatment, which worked well even if sometimes Douglas got a bit carried away – Jonathan Trott walking in slow motion through a sun-dappled field suggested the director had watched Russell Crowe in Gladiator too many times. The script, voiced by Toby Jones, had an Eddie Butler-esque dramatic flourish: “So began a sweat-soaked, tear-fuelled, life-changing climb…” With the Ashes, “What began in 1882 as a rebel howl against colonial masters became a raging fire poured into a three-inch urn.” Contrast that with the players’ straight-talking: “Right, lads, we’re not all that good actually so let’s stop pretending we are.”
Flower did not achieve the transformation with a few kind words of encouragement. Some of the funniest moments in the film involved the players’ reaction to the uncompromising Zimbabwean and his training methods. “I didn’t really know him from a bar of soap, to be honest, but we were having this chat and he punched me!” recalled Tim Bresnan. At one point, Flower packed them off to a training camp run by EX-SAS men, which did not appeal to Monty Panesar. “I could see genuine hatred in his eyes,” grinned Flower.
They got to the top but the pressure told, and not just for Kevin Pietersen, whose troubles were the most well-documented at the time. Panesar’s anxiety led him to gorge from hotel room service menus. Trott came close to blacking out when walking off the field, feeling nothing but a banging going on in his head. These candid admissions were welcome, because they open up a much-needed conversation about mental health in elite sport. When, in 2013, David Warner described Trott post-match as “weak”, it felt like outdated machismo.
The first episode of A Suitable Boy (BBC One) drew various gripes. India was too rose-tinted, the characters’ accents too clipped, Andrew Davies’s adaptation too shallow. All of these things are true to an extent, but they get a pass from me. It’s a Sunday night confection designed to look as luscious as possible, made for an international audience. I doubt that many men in Regency England strode out of lakes looking dreamy in a wet shirt, but that didn’t stop us falling for Davies’s Pride and Prejudice.
Would a boy and a girl kiss on a first date in 1950s India, as Lata and Kabir did here, a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy at that? Haven’t a clue. But it was all terribly innocent. Things don’t get much steamier than that; the sex scenes don’t really have any sex in them. Either Davies is calming down in his old age, or he is being mindful of the social and cultural mores.
One kiss was all it took for Lata and Kabir (Tanya Maniktala and Danesh Razvi) to fall in love, but when Lata’s busybody mother got wind of it she was taken away to Calcutta in disgrace. Across town, Maan (Ishaan Khattar) was also being banished, after bringing shame on his family by having an affair with Saeeda Bai (Tabu), the local courtesan many years his senior. Family honour, parental pressure and scandalised society are familiar themes in period dramas.
Lata is a delightful character, a sweet but spirited Elizabeth Bennet. But Maan’s story holds much more interest. Khattar and Tabu appear to be acting on a more soulful plane than the rest of the cast, particularly those appearing in the slightly hammy cocktail party scenes.
This was not an action-packed episode, more of a scene-setter: laying out the political backdrop to the novel, as Maan’s father tries to abolish the laws of feudal land ownership, and introducing a new suitor for Lata in the form of Amit Chatterjee, a feted writer who has embarked on “the great Indian novel of our times”. Which was rather a nice in-joke.
The Edge ★★★★
A Suitable Boy ★★★★