Planely insane! But with thrills and spills like this, who cares?
Red Eye Sunday, ITV1 ★★★★★ Meet The Richardsons ★★★★★
Red Eye is one of those thrillers that presents the viewer with a stark choice. You could set your mood to sceptical, cultivate a haughty sneer and keep thinking – or, indeed, yelling – ‘Well that would never happen for a start.’ Alternatively, you could remember that the main purpose of a thriller is to thrill and sit back and enjoy the relentlessness/shamelessness with which this six-part serial keeps the excitement coming.
The great crime novelist Raymond Chandler once wisely advised: ‘When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun’ – and in Red Eye the number of men, doors and guns is rivalled only by the number of fights and chases. Or possibly the number of frying pans and fires the goodies find themselves moving between.
The characters are a largely familiar lot: among them an obviously innocent man being obviously framed, a cop first seen blasting away in a shooting gallery in glasses and earmuffs, an oily fixer at the heart of government, and, of course, a dead woman.
The last of these was Shen, whose corpse was found in an abandoned car crashed by Dr Matthew Nolan (Richard Armitage) while at a conference in Beijing. Except that, as we knew from scene one, she wasn’t in the car when he crashed it, having first been drugged in a club.
But this didn’t prevent him from being arrested when he returned to London. Or from being sent straight back for questioning in China, with whom the UK government was keen to preserve good relations. To this end, the authorities also agreed that three other British doctors who’d been at the conference would be flown back too, as witnesses of a somewhat vague kind. The plane then filled up with passengers and crew, many of whom appeared to be engaged in a fierce competition as to who could look the most sinister.
Escorting Nolan was DC Hana Li (Jing Lusi), a Hong-Kong-born London policewoman, initially sure that he was guilty, despite his many protestations that someone was out to get him. But that was before he donated his vegan meal – the only one on board – to a fellow passenger who expired minutes after eating it. Li’s suspicions that things might not be entirely as they seemed were further compounded when the witnesses started to die.
At times this did feel a bit Airplane!, with the captain reassuring those passengers left alive that there was nothing to worry about. Luckily, they were a fairly unflappable bunch, lightly dozing while the bodies piled up and a menacing figure in a hoodie stalked murderously up and down the aisles.
But, as it turned out, at this stage, Red Eye was barely clearing its throat before the real mayhem set in – not all of it at 35,000ft. Back in London, men, doors and guns were also a big feature as the security services stared up at giant computer screens, asked each other ‘Does the PM know?’ and tried to work out what on earth was going on.
Not, in their defence, that it was easy. As a rule, anybody who appeared to be on the side of right wasn’t, and vice versa. For a while it seemed this might be because Red Eye would end up being a highclass conspiracy drama about today’s uncertain world. But only for a while – until it became clear that the continuing commitment to admittedly daft but effective thrills would never be replaced by anything resembling a thoughtful examination of the current geopolitical situation.
By the end, even those of us who opt to go with the flow and enjoy the programme’s wild ride will perhaps have started to struggle. Or at least worked hard to hold our nerve as the implausibilities mount (together with the apparent suggestion that a UK-China alliance would be no bad thing). Nonetheless, I think I’ll stick to my guns and say that not often since the glory days of 24 has a show provided so much mad exhilaration – and with such a straight face to boot.
Now in its fifth series, Meet The Richardsons has always been an awkward watch. Yet until Monday’s episode, the awkwardness has felt deliberate. A fictionalised version of the marriage of the comedians Jon Richardson and Lucy Beaumont, co-written by her with Tim Reid (creator of Peter Kay’s Car Share), the programme depicts the couple as rivalrous, bickering and sometimes just plain sick of each other. Which, I must confess, I’ve taken in the past as proof of how strong their real marriage must be. Only last week, for example, it seemed straightforwardly funny that Richardson could speak lines – written by Beaumont, remember – such as: ‘I’m small in every way you can measure a man: emotionally, physically, spiritually. I’m a small, bitter, angry little troll.’
But that was before they announced their divorce. Now everything is a lot more charged. (Think Agnetha in Abba’s The Winner Takes It All singing lyrics written by her ex-husband Bjorn about how broken their recent divorce has left her.)
Monday’s instalment still contained elements of pure – or, given that the show is quite rude, impure – sitcom. Even so, it was hard not to arrow in on the stuff about the couple’s soon-to-be-over marriage, and to squirm. In short, without anything about the show itself having changed, Meet The Richardsons has suddenly gone from jolly to bleak.