Television
All too often, television dramas start getting preposterous about halfway through, as if the oxygen of creative inspiration has been used up. They begin arrestingly enough, as
Baptiste did, with body parts on a shingle beach, and initially I am keen to continue tuning in each week. But then something daft occurs (eg, Baptiste discovering that he is the father of the alcoholic Dutch police superintendent’s neurotic son) and, around about episodes three or four, I find I’ve switched off for good. I can see nothing ahead, save writers and producers panicking to fill up the vast space they’ve been allotted, chucking in chase scenes, conversations in police morgues, and gory close-ups of a severed head in Tom Hollander’s fridge.
It was the usual story – missing sex-workers, Romanian gangsters, Jessica Raine looking like a young Theresa May – but it was only momentarily interesting watching Tom Hollander knocking himself out to give the show a bit of energy. In fact, Tom was brilliant, much better than Tchéky Karyo, as the titular character, who limped, looked bewildered, talked with a Clouseau accent and has made a full recovery from the terminal brain cancer he endured throughout The Missing. All he needed to complete the ensemble was a parrot on his shoulder.
Running around Amsterdam, searching for his drug-addicted niece, concerned, persistent, exhausted, Tom had all our sympathies. Then, in a neat plot twist, it was revealed he was not who he’d said he was – and he became the angry little villain, never catching anyone’s eye. But in a further narrative reversal, Tom had our sympathies again, when he was no more than a grieving dad, and was perhaps all along the Romanians’ chief victim.
Quite what went on after that, I have no inkling – I was too busy watching Rex Harrison on Talking Pictures. For all I know, the full six hours was a dream sequence and Tom woke up in Laugharne playing Dylan Thomas. Actually, he did play Dylan Thomas on location in Laugharne. My son Oscar was his ‘personal assistant’, and had to go and buy the actor a Hoover. He gave Oscar his credit card, which was declined. This would have made a funnier programme than the usual ones that get commissioned.
Traitors, about post-war Communist infiltration in the British establishment, though it attempted to create a mood of paranoia, with lots of dowdy office sets and grim bedrooms populated by men in hats and mackintoshes drinking whisky, quickly lost all tension and became a vast list of everything you can think of: staged suicides, secret radios, the Beveridge Report, the Bretton Woods Agreement, political agitators, women’s rights in the civil service (you wouldn’t want a married girl as your secretary – they always have to leave early ‘to put their husband’s supper on’), Labour politicians ‘taking orders from Moscow, whether they know it or not’, Gilbert and Sullivan societies and lesbianism. There was far too much going on, including
death in the desert by snake bite.
Keeley Hawes is one of those attractive-looking actresses who thinks that, to be taken seriously, she has to be plain – her character (the mole, as it happens) told the sassy posh lass, Emma Appleton, exactly that – that a woman ought not to be looked at for the wrong reasons, otherwise she’s liable to end up being taken advantage of. Stephen Campbell Moore gave Keeley a kiss after Ruddigore rehearsals – so the KGB chucked him down the stairs. I don’t know whether that proved Keeley’s argument, but the spectre arose of Kim Philby as the chief architect of everyone’s doom.
There’s altogether too much architecture in Cold Feet, which has ended its millionth series. I can quite picture the makers, during pre-production, drawing their story arcs in coloured marker-pens on whiteboards, ensuring the old pals, buddies, muckers and lovers in the cast reconfigure more or less algebraically. It simply infuriated me, also, the way the programme toyed with the raw and the real, and then retreats into sentimentality, sprinkling everything with sugar, especially cancer storylines.
The great Robert Bathurst is so much superior to any of this – the emotion and vitality behind his fixed grins; the agony in his eyes – as his ex-wife, Hermione Norris, paired off with James Nesbitt. Then it was back to the cancer musical.
Was there ever a more greedy title than 100 Vaginas, shown on Channel 4? It gave me the willies.