Television Roger Lewis
Keen always for a further squeeze of the lemon, producers make films and programmes about the fledgling versions of established characters: young Indiana Jones, young Sherlock Holmes … even young Scooby-doo, in series called A Pup Named Scooby-doo.
The young Morse is followed in Endeavour. In First of the Summer Wine, the young Compo, Clegg and Seymour were as tiresome as their elderly selves. I wouldn’t mind seeing the young and bashful Basil and Sybil Fawlty, before marital happiness curdled. (What was it that first drew them together?) Or a young Captain Mainwaring, smarting and class-conscious at the provincial bank.
What we do have is Young Wallander, which seems to be unfolding in a parallel universe: I couldn’t work out where it fitted in chronologically. The mobile phones, cars and Malmö street scenes were very up to date, yet a younger incarnation of the Kenneth Branagh Wallander should have been at large, surely, in the Scandinavia of the seventies. How confusing, especially as Adam Pålsson was very pretty, lolled about half-naked on the bed or towelled himself dry in the communal showers at the police station – and, man and boy, Kenneth Branagh was never what might be called male crumpet.
As usual, the story involved Yugoslav gunrunners, racist murders, corporate bad deeds and fatal stabbings that weren’t fatal. I think I’d have preferred watching a young George Dixon of Dock Green instead, especially as older viewers like me will never forget Victor Maddern having difficulty with the line ‘It’s down at Dock Green nick.’ This was delivered as ‘It’s down at Dock Green dick,’ before Maddern corrected himself and said, ‘It’s down at Dick Green dock.’ Sometimes I believe I’ll die laughing.
There was a Young James Herriot series, too, back in 2011, about the vet’s experiences as a Glasgow student. It never quite took off, not like the original BBC shows, when, between 1978 and 1990, a Saturday night wasn’t a Saturday night without Christopher Timothy sticking his arm up a cow’s bottom. Channel 5, which suddenly seems a proper channel, has now splurged on a remake, complete with the piano cascades on the soundtrack.
With improved production values, the green of the Yorkshire Dales is greener than ever before and the Yorkshire towns have more cobbles than seems feasible, like an idyllic railway poster, while the Yorkshiremen in the pubs and farmyards are so crafty and taciturn they reminded me of extras in horror films who always fall silent when strangers appear.
Nicholas Ralph is workmanlike as Herriot, Callum Woodhouse terrible (and utterly unlike the sweet Peter Davison) as a churlish Tristan Farnon, the black sheep, but as usual the series is dominated by Siegfried Farnon, a character who is a gift to actors who go in for overacting. Anthony Hopkins, to no surprise, played him in a feature film, as did Colin Blakely.
No one will forget Robert Hardy, however, who in 90 episodes was perfectly ridiculous, shouting, running in and out of rooms, losing his temper, whispering and talking quickly, then very slowly – all to suggest what a fascinatingly eccentric cove Siegfried must surely be, as well as a tiresome show-off.
This time, it is Samuel West, who now resembles his dad when he was Edward VII, and Siegfried has become a repressed
and sleek homosexual, his clothes slightly too dandyish – I haven’t seen polished boots like that since the Third Reich. No wonder Nigel Havers, as a curmudgeonly general, eyed him up warily and backed away. Diana Rigg, God rest her, was the old bag with the spoilt dog, Tricki Woo. My vote still goes to Margaretta Scott, who as Mrs Pumphrey was dotty without being mannered.
David Tennant has always been a chippy, snappish actor, surliness never far off, his Scottish accent lending itself to sneering. So he was ideal as Dennis Nilsen, the whining and self-regarding serial killer, in Des. Hoping to see the special-effects team in action, with severed heads in the Baby Belling, chopped up limbs down the drains – what fun could have been had, devising such props – I was sorely disappointed. Apart from the way the cast smoked non-stop, nothing nasty was shown, unless you include Brian Masters’s horrible pastel shirts and matching ties. Nor was there anything by way of plot or suspense, as Nilsen confessed instantly.
There was still a lot of talk – hours of it. As a television drama, where it belonged was on radio.