Television
At first, the shuffled time-schemes in
The Cry seemed ingenious and integral, giving us a sense of foreboding, of breakdown, shock, hysteria and memory slips. By the end, however, the format was simply muddled and meaningless.
Here was a very straightforward story, inspired, I suspect, to some extent, by the Madeleine Mccann tragedy, dolled up to seem complex. A baby had been snatched – the hunt was on. The parents did it, or at least the father did it, and the drama got to be about control and cover-up, with elements of that classic old psychological shocker Gaslight.
It was interesting to see the agonisingly cute Jenna Coleman (her pointy nose oughtn’t to work but does) play someone other than Queen Victoria. Except she still played Queen Victoria. The actress can never set aside her immense self-possession and lovely dignity.
Her partner here was no Tom Hughes, however. Instead of Prince Albert, she was saddled with Ewen Leslie, a whining Australian in a beard, who at opportune moments prompted her with creepy lines like, ‘Do you think you might cry?’
We knew he was a monster from the outset, when his response to Jenna’s postnatal depression and exhaustion (‘I’m at the end of my tether right now’) was to put in earplugs, turn away and wrap himself in a blanket.
‘The world needs to see your pain,’ he suggested, with eerie composure, before
a press conference. I knew that the long scene of the terrible long-haul flight from Glasgow to Melbourne would be the key. The baby screamed non-stop, the passengers tutted with irritation and, basically, four-month-old Noah, having driven his parents to distraction, was given a dose of medicine to shut him up – and he was shut up permanently.
The mystery solved with three episodes still to go, we had lots of moody shots of the Australian bush, with forensic teams digging and delving, and frantic scenes set in those scruffy, small towns, with over-lit mini-markets, that are always sinister. There was a subplot about Ewen’s fighting an ex-wife for custody of a teenage daughter. At the finish, we were back in Scotland, and Coleman, having finally worked out that Leslie was culpable, drove the car into a loch.
If I was transfixed by Return to T S Eliotland, it wasn’t because I was interested to hear that Eliot was ‘strange and unsettling’ and that he wrote poetry evoking the ‘frontiers of consciousness’.
What truly fascinated me was A N Wilson, the presenter, who undulated across a snowy ploughed field, wearing a beret and thinking so hard about T S Eliot that I feared he’d fall over.
I salute Wilson, the most brilliant literary personality of the past halfcentury – novels, biographies, essays, cultural and historical works. He is a remarkable blend of mischief and erudition – so why they don’t give him his own chat shows, game shows and
cookery shows I’ll never know. A knighthood is also overdue. A N is the thinking man’s Darcey Bussell.
The Getty family chronicles, Trust, gave Donald Sutherland the opportunity to play a vampire, slithering about the gloomy, shadowy, sour Sutton Place, near Guildford. Danny Boyle clearly loved filming the sequences where moles were gassed and a black swan was run over by a funereal limousine – we saw plenty of squashed blood and intestines. Sutherland’s J Paul Getty, full of rage and emotional cruelty, made mistresses and children compete for his attention. He hated his family – ‘my feckless legacy’ – and he hated his wealth, which piled up and was not there to be spent.
‘Oil is everything,’ he said, with messianic greed.
Sutherland, with his pouting, sullen lips, was like a cadaverous Casanova – the role he once played for Fellini. Furious about waning virility, so mean he rinsed his own socks rather than buy a washing machine, and generally getting absolutely no pleasure from life, Getty was suddenly forced to confront the existence of Harris Dickinson, who played his blond, barefoot and carefree grandson, who embodied everything he himself was not – young, sunlit, feckless, uncalculating, beautiful.
We then launched into the familiar kidnap story (murder, suicide, insanity), filmed as recently as last year in All the Money in the World – where Christopher Plummer, Captain von Trapp himself, replaced the in-thedoghouse Kevin Spacey as the satanic Getty. What a role Getty would have been for Laurence Olivier.