So tense I kept hitting pause. And yes, that is a good thing
Black Bird Apple TV+ Freddie Flintoff’s Field Of Dreams Tuesday, BBC1
Ican’t really say what first drew me to Black Bird. The various synopses indicated it would be everything I would most hate: male violence, dead girls, prisons, drugs. But it’s July, when television is beset by sport, and it’s slim pickings otherwise, so I thought I’d give it one episode and then say it’s everything I most hate, and I hated it, job done.
Good plan, except I couldn’t stop at just the one episode because it’s terrific and truly special. It’s intelligent, tremendously performed, wholly gripping, and also features the last performance in a TV show from Ray Liotta, who died in May. He is amazing, thankfully.
The premise may sound far-fetched but is, remarkably and incredibly, based on a true story. Taron Egerton plays James ‘Jimmy’ Keene, the son of a cop (Liotta). Jimmy has just been jailed for ten years for drug and arms offences when the FBI put the following proposition to him: transfer to a highsecurity prison for hardened criminals who are possibly insane in order to help us nail down a suspected serial killer, Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser). Gain his trust, find out where he buried his victims, and your sentence will be entirely commuted.
Keene is a cocky, smug fella at the outset, but he has charm and charisma and smarts, which is why the FBI chooses him. He initially scoffs at the offer, but then his father, whom he worships, suffers a stroke and he realises that unless he is freed soon, he may never spend time with him again.
Liotta is such a powerhouse here that in one scene he only has to sit outside the prison – on this occasion his character is not allowed to see his son – in his car and say nothing. But everything he is feeling – guilt, sorrow, anger, pain – is in his eyes. It’s miraculous, really.
This takes its time but is cleverly slow, rather than drearily slow like, say, The Undeclared War. (Have you stuck with that?) It is multi-stranded. We flash back to Keene’s back story, and Hall’s (oh God) while, contemporaneously, we follow the investigation into Hall being led by the FBI agent (Sepideh Moafi) and a detective (Greg Kinnear).
Both believe he has murdered several missing girls whose bodies haven’t been found, as well as one he didn’t have time to bury. Hall had been arrested multiple times, and even confessed to some of the crimes, but the police dismissed him as ‘weird but harmless’ and ‘a serial confessor’ who admits to crimes just for the attention.
Hall has mutton-chop sideburns, a chilling high-pitched voice, an even more chilling high-pitched laugh, and is childlike one moment, abhorrent the next. Hauser captures all that. Every performance is astounding, including Egerton, who has to act every emotion that lies between swagger and being scared to death, and nails it every time.
The meat of the series is the Keene and Hall relationship, which is pure cat and mouse. One moment Jimmy seems to be making progress – ‘You look at me, Jimmy, and not through me like most people,’ Hall tells him – and the next Hall has closed down again. Jimmy has to suck up whatever Hall tells him, and most of it is stomach-turning. This – and here’s what makes it so intelligent – changes Jimmy, who is forced to confront his own misogyny. Two episodes are playing weekly but I’ve watched ahead, and the final, sixth episode is so suspenseful that it took me several hours to get through because the tension was so great I kept having to press pause. Is that a recommendation? In my book, yes.
Ever since Jamie’s Kitchen (2002), when Jamie Oliver took 15 disadvantaged and unenthusiastic young kids and tried to turn them into chefs, there have been similar programmes, and the latest is Freddie Flintoff’s Field Of Dreams. Here, Flintoff returns to his home town, Preston, to start a new cricket team with teens from a working-class estate. The kids have never played cricket because, as one says, ‘it’s a posh sport and it’s boring’. As we’re informed that three-quarters of the current England team are privately educated, they do have a point. That it’s posh, not that it’s boring. Even though it plainly is.
It hits the familiar beats. Will the kids turn up? Will they ever stop larking about? Will Sean find cricket as meaningful as drinking vodka in the park? Will they wear whites without complaint? (No.) All the kids are aged 15 to 18, which makes them rather old. To be good at a sport, wouldn’t you need to start younger than that?
Still, there are some glorious moments, as when one kid looks up Flintoff on his phone: ‘Flintoff, MBE. What’s an MBE? International cricketer… never heard of him. He’s been married to Rachael since 2005… let’s Google her – she’s stunning, fair play to him.’
The first episode (of three) ended with the team’s first match, which was chaotic, but I am invested, if only because I always am with these shows. Also, Freddie, who comes from a working-class background himself, and did break the norm, is wonderfully sincere. Who knows, I might even get cricket by the end. But, please, don’t bet on that.