Vicky Mcclure does her best in this lukewarm potboiler
There is a moment of unintended comedy in the fifth, penultimate episode of Insomnia (Paramount+). A woman caring for her bedridden mother produces a paperback and starts to read aloud. It’s a Barbara Cartland. “They’re all the same,” moans the mother, who wishes for nothing but death.
Not all psychological thrillers on TV are the same. But they tend to rely on a menu of tropes. The uh-oh visuals, the oo-er audio, the humongous house, the unsuspected villain going round the twist. As for the dialogue, it drives plot rather than reveals character and, as often as not, you’re left with a Jenga stack of tottering implausibilities.
Insomnia is adapted by Sarah Pinborough from her own novel about two now-adult sisters who have grown up in care after their mother went off the rails, madly repeating numerical sequences.
The insomniac is younger sister Emma (Vicky Mcclure), a do-gooding lawyer married to the very vanilla Robert (Tom Cullen). They have a cute if troubled little son and a classically stroppy teenage daughter. Emma, who has never told her family that her mother is still alive and in a psychiatric unit, starts to be haunted by nightmares from her childhood, and worry that she is cursed with bad blood, just as her free-spirited arty sister, Phoebe (Leanne
Best), wanders back from abroad.
Emma’s rural house and garden are mystifyingly huge, enabling plenty of spooky somnambulism, though none of her night visions will prove as disturbing as the very opening image of the mentally disturbed mother (Corinna Marlowe) thwacking her own head against hard surfaces.
In 2021, Pinborough adapted her novel Behind Her Eyes for Netflix. That this is with Paramount+ means it should fetch up on Channel 5 eventually, the natural home of the potboiler. UK terrestrials might insist on another couple of rounds of script development to make everything, including those baffling numerical sequences, add up.
The plot contains a couple of promising strands – a combustible legal case, a highly inappropriate affair – that go for nothing, plus a shameless coincidence which ushers in the key character of Caroline (Lyndsey Marshal). She’s the one reading Cartland to her mother. The three excellent main performances are stronger than the writing: like good sculptors Mcclure, Best and Marshal use their skill to carve depths into shallow matter. Jasper Rees
‘Im getting Shakespearean vibes,” says one of the estate agents in Buying London (Netflix) as she arrives at a new property. Sure.
Nothing says Shakespeare like a £15million new-build with a velvetwalled cinema room.
Buying London is one of those “constructed reality” shows which would like you to think it’s a fly-onthe-wall documentary, but mainly consists of phoney conversations, confected drama and lip filler. It is a copy of the wildly popular, La-based
Selling Sunset, but it owes as much to
The Only Way is Essex – superficially fun, but ultimately soulless and artificial.
The subject is an estate agency focused on the luxury property market: Mayfair, Belgravia, the Home Counties. We’re in the land of new money. Everyone in the team seems to drive a supercar and dress for a Dubai bottomless brunch even when they’re in Weybridge.
The show has a cast of characters – well, they’re real people, but not for nothing does the series boast three “story producers”. Agency boss Daniel Daggers is the likeable one, who can at least laugh at himself as he comes out with lines like: “There is no ‘I’ in team but there is one ‘I’ in super-prime and that is me.” Rasa gives off Bond villain vibes as she narrows her eyes at her “rival”, a glossy South African named Lauren.
Discretion is not high on the agenda. “I’ve got a very, very big property in Holland Park. The Beckhams are four doors up.” “Simon Cowell – I literally think you can see his house from here.” “Fun little fact: Salma Hayek used to live in this house. The walk-in wardrobe wasn’t quite enough for her clothes so she had extra wardrobes built downstairs.”
The series is essentially a marketing exercise for the company and the properties and the people involved. You wonder how many of these houses the team actually sell, because the production has such an air of unreality. It’s post-truth television. The people on screen aren’t reciting a script, they’ve just learned – through prolonged exposure to “scripted reality” shows – to actually speak like this. They know what is required of them. The whole thing plays out like one long Instagram reel. Anita Singh
Insomnia ★★ Buying London ★★