A candid account of a son’s desperate need for answers
What possesses a man to cross an ocean alone, in a tiny boat, not just once but many times? Peter Bird said simply: “Because it’s what I do.” For his son, Louis, that answer was not enough. Lost at Sea: My Dad’s Last Journey (Channel 4) was the story of a heroic adventurer and a little boy who grew up without a father. In 1983, Peter Bird became the first person to row the Pacific Ocean single-handed, on a voyage of 6,000 miles and nearly 300 days. But he did not stop there. He was determined to cross the Pacific in the opposite direction, from Russia to the United States of America. He died on his fourth attempt, in 1996; his boat was found but his body was not.
Louis was just four at the time. The loss had left him with conflicting feelings: pride in his father’s achievements, but also bewilderment and anger. Why had Bird continued on such a dangerous path after becoming a father? How could he leave behind a partner and child?
This personal and candid documentary followed Louis on a journey to understand his father’s motivations. He was helped by a trove of footage both from news reports of the time and from Bird’s personal video diaries, the last of these found on his abandoned boat. Bird was an unusual fellow, hugely sociable yet able to withstand months with only himself for company. There was something wonderful about the old film of him setting off on his voyages, in jeans and a sweater, with the casual air of a man going for an evening stroll.
But Bird’s youthful adventures, as his son pointed out, tipped over into obsession. Louis listened for the first time to a tape that his father had made for him. “This tape is for you to play while I’m away so you won’t forget me,” Bird said. “One of the questions that you will ask will be, ‘Why are you going, Daddy? I don’t want you to go.’ And the idea is to be the first to do something.” It was an emotional moment. Afterwards a distraught Louis said: “Who cares about f---ing records?” But he was comforted to watch a last video, in which Bird spoke of how much he missed his little boy.
In an attempt to get inside his father’s head, Louis completed his own ocean crossing – a brave undertaking for a young man with a fear of water. I hope it gave him some peace.
The first series of Criminal (Netflix) was a novelty: a drama set almost entirely in a police interrogation room. Everyone raved about it, but that had a lot to do with the fact that the first episode starred David Tennant and, as we’ve just seen in Des, he’s very good under caution.
Now the show is back with four more self-contained episodes. The casting of the suspects is top notch, including Sharon Horgan and Sophie Okonedo. But it is hard not to be distracted and irritated by everything going on around them.
Katherine Kelly, last seen as a highly unlikeable detective in Liar, does the same thing here except with a sleeker bob and a viscose blouse. The effect is such that I began rooting for the suspects who had the misfortune to face her across the table. Thankfully her colleagues, played by Rochenda Sandall, Shubham Saraf and Lee Ingleby, are better company.
It is the kind of show that makes policing look stupidly easy – suspects buckling and confessing to the crime in the space of 45 minutes. The acting, though, makes the episodes worth watching. Kit Harington is the standout as an arrogant estate agent accused of raping a woman who works for him, and loudly protesting his innocence. Horgan plays the joker as a mother who has taken it upon herself to entrap and expose paedophiles. Kunal Nayyar (The Big Bang Theory) is a convicted killer, and Okonedo is the partner of a convicted killer, and the less you know about their stories before going into the episodes, the better.
Treat each episode as a Play for Today and you will find things to appreciate. The clever little tricks played by the team to elicit a confession are fun: padding out a file to make it seem heavy and packed with evidence when it’s thrown down on the table, for example.
But this is no Line of Duty and the whole thing has an air of unreality. The surroundings have that oddly non-specific look that is the mark of a Netflix drama made for a global audience. The observation room has weird red light and the interrogation suite looks like the private dining room of a London design hotel. Any foreign viewer who watches this then ends up in an actual British police station will be desperately disappointed.
Lost at Sea: My Dad’s Last Journey ★★★★
Criminal ★★★