Farrell makes Moby Dick seem like Captain Pugwash
Meet Henry Drax. To The Wire’s Marlo Stanfield, Deadwood’s Al Swearengen and Trevor Morgan from Eastenders you can now add a new entry to television’s line-up of violent, amoral, scary-eyed bogeymen. In the opening episode of The North Water (BBC Two, series available on the iplayer), a dirty bomb of a five-part drama about a 19thcentury Yorkshire whaler on a voyage up through the pack ice of Canada’s Lancaster Sound, Drax (Colin Farrell) is the harpooner whose dead eye is deemed to be compensation for his cruel heart. We meet him first in the dark on the shoreside at Hull, his presence signalled only by the sound of some carnal rutting. It sounds like an animal because that’s what Drax is.
As it happens, Drax having rough sex with a prostitute is about the nicest thing he does to another organism in the whole of The North Water. This is tough television set in tough times. There are overtones of Moby Dick, of course, but Drax makes Captain Ahab look like Captain Pugwash. In the hands of Farrell, Drax is the devil. His presence, like the shark in Jaws, looms large over scenes he’s not even in.
Set against Drax’s raging id we have Jack O’connell’s living limbic system Patrick Sumner. He is a surgeon of morals whose laudanum addiction points to past trauma. Their protracted duel is distinctly Hobbesian – Sumner maintains in argument that there must be more to man than just animal urges; Drax counters that argument by killing people whenever the mood takes him.
As if taking its lead from Farrell’s strident, physical performance, the show is a bit like a boxing match – there’s art in there, skill and beauty to admire, but at times it is just brutal. The slaughter of animals, the bald facts of the hunt as shown in episode one and two, are repulsive. Seals are shot, clubbed, and skinned. Whales are carved up like honeydew melon.
The mission is destined to fail from the moment the shipping tycoon Baxter (Tom Courtenay) informs his phlegmatic skipper, Captain Brownlee (Stephen Graham), that this is not in fact a whale hunt but an insurance job. Brownlee is to scupper the ship and hotfoot it back on another of Baxter’s ships that’s waiting nearby.
The North Water is superb television with just a few caveats – one, it’s not Benidorm. Relentless cruelty doesn’t have to be gratuitous, and at times here the suffering reaches a mystical beauty all its own – but it is nonetheless relentless. You’ll find it hard, however, not to be swept away. Benji Wilson
These are high times for fans of Shaun Evans. On Sunday nights he is now on two channels simultaneously. Over on BBC One, in Vigil, the poor man is stuck on board a submarine with a hysterical Suranne Jones. And on ITV he makes his return as Morse in Endeavour, which is a superior product.
At the end of the last series, Morse’s new love, Violetta, took a bullet for him in Venice. Shades of Bond and Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. This new series, then, is the Quantum of Solace follow-up: our hero hates the world and is numbing his misery with alcohol. When we first saw him, he was staring into the bottom of a pint glass. Next morning, he has to haul himself to work when a bomb goes off at the university, taking a life.
Period detective dramas are ten-a-penny but Endeavour is a class apart. The acting, the character studies, the set design – it all adds up to an immensely satisfying whole. And there is the added layer of knowing that what happens to Morse here will shape the Morse of the later, John Thaw years.
The plot of this episode was fine, but not a vintage example. The conundrum was finding out how that bomb was linked to a threat against Jack Swift (Julian Moore-cook), a star player at Cowley Town, and where sectarianism fit into any of it. It was sufficiently knotty to keep us guessing until the end, but the football theme was a bit light for a drama that is at its best when it strays into darkness.
For viewers on woke alert, there was an early alarm bell: was the death threat against Swift on account of his colour? But we never heard of that again, thank goodness. We did, though, get an unexpected dose of Eamonn Andrews and his big red book, when Swift got the This Is Your Life treatment.
Just as Kevin Whately’s Lewis felt like so much more than a supporting player in Inspector Morse, Roger Allam as Fred Thursday is such an integral part of what makes Endeavour sing that it couldn’t go on without him. Joan (Sara Vickers) is back for series eight, but I think we can predict that the course of true love for Joan and Morse will not run smooth. Anita Singh
The North Water ★★★★ Endeavour ★★★★