This dreary, overcooked nonsense is a waste of an hour
‘Iwish it was before again,” said Connie, the angsty anti-hero of Too Close (ITV), “before I was skinned, boned and filleted.” I wish it was before again, too. Before I had to watch an hour of this dreary, overcooked nonsense. Too Close, which continues tonight and tomorrow, takes the blueprint of US drama The Sinner
– an unlikely suspect commits a terrible crime, they and we don’t know why, only one heroic cop believes there’s more to it than meets the eye – but makes one crucial mistake. Where in The Sinner you could not believe the protagonist had done it and you rooted for them to find extenuating circumstances, here you longed for Connie to receive a 30-year stretch, just to stop her wittering on.
A pity, because on paper Too Close is a winner. A chichi middle-class mother-of-two, inexplicably, drives her car off a bridge and into a deep river, with two young girls, one her daughter, in the back seat. She cannot remember a single thing about the incident. A forensic psychologist is sent to ascertain whether the amnesia is real and whether the woman can be tried for two counts of attempted murder. A subtle battle of wits begins between the two women.
Did I say subtle? My apologies. Despite the presence of two superb actors – Denise Gough plays Connie; Emily Watson is Dr Emma Robertson – Too Close is a slog. When Connie and Emma first come face to face, it is the patient who psychoanalyses the doctor (yawn), picking her life apart, correctly surmising she has a dull husband, a passionless sex life and an enormous kitchen island (no prizes there, Connie, it’s an ITV thriller – everyone has an enormous kitchen island).
Connie is probably supposed to be enigmatic, but she is just plain annoying, spouting A-level philosophy about the meaninglessness of life and occasionally dropping in things such as “I like c--k, Dr Robertson”, with an “oh sorry, did I shock you?” eyebrow raise. Gough is a terrific actor, but Connie is a bore. It doesn’t help that Connie’s bruises from the crash make her look like an extra from a horror film, occasionally giving you the feeling that Emma is trying to psychoanalyse a zombie.
The one truly effective scene had Connie laughing adorably at a photo of her daughter, bloodied and in intensive care. “It’s just a game,” she tells Emma and, for a second, we saw a glimpse of the depth of her suffering.
Greta Thunberg doesn’t want you to listen to her, not any more. “People listen when I talk,” she said in Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World (BBC One), “but I don’t want that. I want you to listen to the science.” Thunberg has her head screwed on and what the first episode of this series showed, without doubt, is that she does not enjoy the limelight. Her crusade to get governments across the world to take climate change seriously is not about personal adulation or fame. In fact, there were moments here where she seemed to be hating everything about it.
Thunberg is right about climate change. She is wrong, however, to suggest that people should stop listening to her and to start listening to the scientists. It’s too late for that. People in Los Angeles, Berlin and London don’t flood out onto the streets to hear speeches made by scientists. Camera crews don’t follow university researchers around, desperate for an insight into their lives. This series is not called Climate Change: A Year to Change the World.
In 2019-20, Thunberg, who is now 18, took a year out from school to spread the gospel. The cameras followed her over the months, watching as she embarked on an epic road trip across North America with her father, Svante, before sailing back across the Atlantic to attend a climate change conference in Madrid. She visited forests in Canada decimated by pests (thanks to rising temperatures) and a once mighty glacier that is being rapidly reduced to an ice cube (there was almost a lump in the throat when a scientist admitted: “we’re not bringing this glacier back”).
But, of course, this was, through no fault of her own, about Greta. And the most affecting moments came not when highlighting how CO2 emissions have devastated the natural world, but when we heard from Svante, the anxious father who has had to allow his vulnerable, autistic teenage daughter to take on the world. “If she’d been a footballer or a ballet dancer, I’d have supported her,” he said, with a grain of sadness. “But if this is what she wants to do, so be it.” Whether the Thunbergs like it or not, the world still wants to listen to Greta.
Too Close ★★
Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World ★★★