Television Roger Lewis
I’M AFRAID to leave the house. If television drama is to be believed, there’s a serial killer lurking in every town and village – and I live in Rochester, which is replete with spooky alleys and misty corners. But switch on the box and there’ll be forensic teams in white paper suits and blue plastic gloves probing skeletons in cellars. Offices are filled with purposeful people writing in felt pen on whiteboards – I understand blackboards were abolished as politically incorrect. ‘It’s not right. We’ve missed something,’ they say to each other. When someone has an original or intelligent thought, their burly boss will say, ‘It’s clouding your judgement, the guilt.’
Nevertheless, three great actresses have been coming my way. Anne-marie Duff, a thing of skin and bones in From
Darkness, played a former policewoman hiding from her demons on a remote Scottish island. Sixteen years ago she was involved with a case about disappearing prostitutes – but nobody much cared, so she left the Force to bake biscuits with a bearded man called Norrie. During a new building scheme, however, in Manchester, or anyway somewhere unpleasant, corpses have been turning up in the rubble. Another bearded man, this one boorish and with a whispery voice, a semi-disgraced Detective Chief Inspector, is sent to flush out AnneMarie and pick her brains. ‘He’s killing again. This time, stop him.’
Is Anne-marie incredibly ugly or incredibly beautiful? The latter certainly, but the lighting was often unkind, with lots of moody shots of reflections in mirrors and rainy windows. What dynamism this actress has, though, her personality tensile and vibrating.
I also much admired Nicola Walker, soft and sad, in Unforgotten. More bodies in basements. More morgues. More ugly outskirts of nasty towns. (Southend was glimpsed.) More urban and psychological dereliction. More cops putting debating points to each other, such as: ‘Is a crime less serious because it was committed long ago, no matter
More bodies in basements. More morgues. More ugly outskirts of nasty towns
how far back?’ Answer: if there is not much else going on aside from rounding up comedians from the Seventies, let’s use up some tax payers’ resources on ‘cold’ and ‘historical’ cases.
There was a vast cast: Trevor Eve, Tom Courtenay, Bernard Hill, Peter Egan, Hannah Gordon, among others. I fully expected Michael Ripper, Sam Kydd and Percy Herbert to come on. Frances Tomelty, whom not many people may know was once married to Sting, was impressive as a melodramatically grieving Irish mother. At the last minute the director probably decided against putting her in a rocking chair. Gemma Jones did that ever-popular turn, the nice wife going doolally with the Alzheimer’s. With half a dozen episodes, the series could be incredibly leisurely about investigating everybody’s past, the murky lies and deceptions. But is there any single one of us who’d like to stand accountable for how we were or what we may have said or done or felt forty years ago?
Next to Anne-marie and Nicola Walker ( who has such warmth and tenderness – I may be falling love ), my third babe is Suranne Jones in Doctor Foster. This was the one about a professional woman unravelling when she discovers that her husband is a total sleazeball who has purloined her savings for a dodgy business scheme and who is sleeping with a teenager – and has been doing so for two years. All her friends knew – none had wanted to bring it up.
Sheer soap opera, of course – but Suranne, as a woman registering the moral squalor of everyone she trusted, was magnificent in the way she was refusing to be frail and helpless. Here we had a portrait of pride and despair, with an unsparing threat of primitive violence. We were tantalised as to how much of her derangement was a calculation. It’s how any of us might behave when betrayed, going as mad as Hamlet.
Two mistakes. Key to the plot, the sleazeball husband forges Suranne’s signature on a re-mortgage document. Such legal papers have to be signed in the presence of an independent witness, however, who also appends their own signature, name, address and occupation. Secondly, said sleazeball, nicely portrayed by Bertie Carvel, at last thoroughly exposed and humiliated, was last seen ‘moving to London’ – but how can a bankrupt with zero prospects possibly survive there?