It’s ingenious television – but a little tiresome too
Inside No 9 (BBC Two) is the TV show that dares to be clever. It’s certainly earned the right to aim high – six series of self-contained, halfhour Tales of the Unexpected-style plays have yielded some of the best TV of the last decade. What’s more, in an age ruled by big budget dystopian sci-fi or men on horses with swords, Inside No 9 remains wonderfully idiosyncratic. There’s nothing else like it.
The danger is always that something this clever gets too clever, particularly six and a bit series in, when it’s already worked its way through so many setups and conceits. When you’ve had riffs on Commedia dell’arte, near-silent episodes, composites of CCTV footage in a call centre and a protracted homage to Macbeth, continued attempts to innovate won’t always hit the mark.
Nine Lives Kat wasn’t a total misfire, but it never quite caught fire either. Sophie Okonedo played Kat, a hardboiled detective stuck in a time loop. When we joined her she was neck-deep in a tough case – a child abduction – and pouring vodka on her Coco Pops. But then she woke up. It was all a dream.
Or was it? Because just when it looked like we were in Memento or Groundhog Day territory, writers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith pulled the rug once more: Kat was actually a character in one of the crime novels of Ezra Jones (Pemberton), and not a very good one either. With the boozing, the menagerie of inner demons and one of those I’m-losing-it walls of Post-it notes and photo-fits in a downtrodden flat, she was a walking cliché. What was actually happening in
Nine Lives Kat was that Ezra was about to consign her to his desk drawer as a character not worth pursuing. But Kat didn’t want to be put to bed.
What followed was a sort of metatextual battle royale as Kat fought with her author in a bid to remain his lead character. The minute he wrote her out altogether, his own son was abducted. And then there was another twist – Ezra himself turned out to be a figment in another crime author’s imagination, and a cliché to boot.
These concentric circles of fiction and meta-fiction were both ingenious and, ultimately, a little tiresome. It’s pointless to say that it felt contrived because Inside No 9 is meant to be a contrivance. It’s just that at its best, the working and concepts behind each episode are perfectly balanced with the characters and the story. This episode was like a concept car – fizzing with so many ideas that it could never really work. But I’m still glad they tried.
Only a cynical old stick could fail to be moved by DNA Family
Secrets (BBC Two). And as a paid up cynical old stick, I have to say I was looking forward to not being moved. Here was, at least on the face of it, a classic example of nakedly manipulative television, precisiontooled to yank on your heart-strings.
Reader, I blubbed like a baby. Every one of the show’s three searches for parentage and identity knocked me for six. But, in my role as critic as opposed to human being, let’s get the show’s obvious faults out the way. Firstly, using DNA to examine – we might as well say it – “who you think you are” is in no way watertight. DNA Family Secrets admitted as much, saying that a DNA test is only as useful as the database it’s tested against. The database, meaning people who have themselves been tested, currently comprises 30 million people worldwide, or half a percent of the world’s population. (Fun fact: DNA testing is illegal in France, apparently).
So you’re still looking for needles in haystacks. That all three of this episode’s subjects – Richard (52), on a life-long mission to discover the identity of his father; Janet (62), on the search for a half sister she thinks she once heard her late father talking about at a dinner party when she was nine; Glen (47), desperate to learn about his ancestry as a black man who’s never felt he is among “his people” living in leafy Oxfordshire – found answers on the database is something close to a miracle. A made-for-tv miracle.
Then there are the thorny ethical issues underlying a programme that, in digging into people’s parentage, can at times veer close to Jeremy Kyle territory. The delightful Richard, for example, discovered that his long-lost dad was alive and well. But the weepy rapprochement that TV demands never took place. What happened there? Some family secrets, one suspects, are secret for a reason.
Still, these are all valid points that should be understood to have come from a man who spent an hour grinning from ear to ear when he wasn’t fetching fresh hankies. Presenter Stacey Dooley is perfect as the shoulder to cry on, the selection of subjects is spot on, and the money shots – when a long-lost this or that first meets their new family member – always deliver, at least when they happen. It might be contrived but you’d have to be a cynical old stick not to enjoy it.