Brilliant lawyers? I wouldn’t trust them with my goldfish!
The Split BBC1, Monday ★★★★★ (spoiler warning)
House Of Maxwell B BC2, Monday ★★★★★
The Split is a series I have tried to love, and keep trying to love, but I always fail, and now I think we’ll have to break up for good. I just hope it’s not too acrimonious. This drama about a family of female divorce lawyers has it all on paper.
It’s written by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, River, The Hour) and stars Nicola Walker, whom I would follow to the ends of the Earth. It has the glossy escapism, with its silky blouses and designer handbags and doublefronted London houses with kitchens so mahoosive that one even comes with a ladder. (Really.)
But mostly I feel I should love it because its four main characters are older women who are modern and independent. But if they’re so modern and independent, I am always asking myself, why do they spend 98.4 per cent of their time (on average) fretting about, and talking about, men? It makes me want to gather them in that mahoosive kitchen (with the ladder) and bang all their heads together.
This is the third and final series, and one thing I’ve never been able to quite get over is how can these women, who are made out to be smart, actually be so careless and stupid? Their personal lives are all a mess. They make one bad decision after another. Forget complicated legal matters, I don’t think I’d even trust any of them to look after my goldfish, Bubbles, while I’m on holiday.
And the script is beset with deep-sounding yet bogus insights. Ruth (Deborah Findlay), the matriarch, now has a podcast and says to her listeners: ‘If marriage is the conquest and divorce is the inquest, can there ever be a good divorce?’ Maybe I’m the stupid one here. It’s highly possible. But I don’t understand what that means.
Elsewhere, Ruth’s oldest daughter, Hannah (Walker), is trying for a ‘good divorce’ from Nathan (Stephen Mangan) after having that affair last season with an old flame. It was hard to buy, that affair. Just another bad decision, I suppose. She is now ambivalent about the divorce, as shown by the way she takes off her wedding ring, looks upset, puts it back on. The series is quite heavyhanded in this way.
And it bears no relation to how people actually talk and behave. I’m not saying dramas have to be true to life but you’d hope they would be true to an approximation of it.
Nathan now has a girlfriend, whom Hannah doesn’t know about until he brings her to a dinner with friends. Ouch. The girlfriend, Kate, immediately launches into an attack on divorced women being selfish and messing up their children. Who would say that, in front of their new boyfriend’s soon to be ex-wife? Who? And why didn’t anyone around the table flinch?
Meanwhile, Nina (Annabel Scholey), the middle sister, is having an affair with the husband of a gay partner at the firm, which is very professional, while last series she had an affair with a client’s husband, which is also very professional. (Does Noble Hale Defoe even have an HR department?) As for the youngest, Rose (Fiona Button), she is still fixated on having a baby with James who, at the end of this episode, is squashed by a bus. A lucky escape, I couldn’t help thinking.
The documentary about Robert Maxwell, House Of Maxwell, mostly covered welltrodden ground, particularly if you have read John Preston’s excellent book Fall: The Mystery Of Robert Maxwell. However, there is the ‘miaow’ business, as overheard by a secretary. Ghislaine would call. ‘Miaow,’ she’d say to her father over the phone. ‘Miaow, miaow,’ he’d say back. And this could go on for ages, with the number of ‘miaows’ escalating. Totally weird. And creepy.
Plus, he bugged all his executives’ phones, and these recordings have never been publicly played before. Voiced by actors here, we heard them panicking about his whereabouts as the business stood on the brink of collapse. (After his death at sea in 1991 it was, of course, revealed that he’d stolen £460 million from the Mirror Group’s pension assets.) These conversations, however, weren’t especially revealing. ‘Where is he?’ ‘I don’t know!’ ‘We’re f***ed!’
But it’s such a compelling story that it didn’t much matter that little was new, or even that it jumped around in time somewhat haphazardly. Maxwell was so egotistical that he even had his own film crew, so there’s plenty of footage.
Here he is in conversation with the (very) authorised writer of his biography offering the following advice: ‘Why don’t you quote Goldman Sachs saying, “If only more businessmen could be like Robert Maxwell?” ’
There were plenty of riveting moments – his 65th birthday party! – and one moving moment when, during the making of a documentary, he wept at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. (His parents and siblings had been wiped out by the Holocaust.) But were the tears real? Didn’t the director have to send him back because the first time he talked about his family he was too ‘emotionless’? Like so much to do with Maxwell – did he jump, was he pushed, an accident? – I guess we’ll never know.