Oh joy... yet another drama that leaves us all in the dark
The Control Room
BBC1, Sunday to Tuesday HHHHH Better Things
BBC2, Sunday HHHHH
ITV, Channel 5 and Channel 4 all love a stripped-through-the-week thriller, most of which involve a suspension of disbelief so massive it’s probably visible from space. As the BBC churns them out less often, I thought The Control Room would be a superior, more satisfying product, but can I just point out one of the things that drives me crazy about these shows (aside from the flashbacks to a traumatic childhood, which we can now assume are a given?). It’s that the subject matter is often dark, the interiors are always dark, even if it’s daylight outside. On top of the massive suspension of disbelief, do I have to be constantly peering into the gloom?
This starred Iain De Caestecker as Gabriel, a 999 call handler working in an ambulance control room in Glasgow that is perpetually dark even though it’s daylight outside. I don’t know why their union isn’t onto it. They might as well be working down a mine. Anyway, he gets a call from a hysterical woman who says she’s just killed a man. With the police alerted he tries to keep her on the line. It turns out she knows him. ‘Is that you, Gabo?’ she asks before hanging up.
This was an intriguing and original premise, which I had hoped would spin off into a twohander. A taut, constrained cat-and-mouse enacted over the phone while the police listened in, maybe. But instead, it spun off into such frantic plotting that I felt rather sorry for De Caestecker.
Aside from having to play a character who fails to make the credible decision on every occasion, the poor fella spent three episodes running, hiding, sliding down hills, reeling from some new information and running some more while in a constant state of dampeyed anguish. And those flashbacks to his traumatic childhood, they never let up, did they? Actually, I say he spent all his time running but that’s not entirely true. In the third episode it was like the director (Amy Neil) suddenly discovered slo-mo so threw in a bit of that, for no good reason whatsoever.
As we discovered at the outset of episode one – so it can’t be considered a spoiler – the caller is Samantha (Joanna Vanderham). She and Gabriel were childhood friends who, in the flashbacks, were shown tentatively lacing their fingers, but only about 768 times. They hadn’t seen each other since they were ten years old, but yet she recognised Gabriel’s adult voice over the phone? Didn’t that set off alarm bells for him?
But, most disappointingly, in an overwrought tale that took us from one dark room to another, and into the world of organised crime, there was no character development. You’d think, for example, that Samantha and Gabriel might have asked each other what their lives had been like in the intervening two decades, but neither showed any curiosity at all.
Written by Nick Leather, this was confusingly convoluted, with too many implausibilities to list, but here are a few just to show willing. Would you communicate secret information over an in-house messaging system? Would someone know when to call your mobile so that someone else answered it?
And now, can I point out another thing that drives me crazy about these shows? The music. Tense music employed sparingly to heighten suspense? Great, fine. But blasted throughout, as it was in this instance? A character couldn’t drink a sip of tea without the piano rising to a crescendo, or a cello sawing threateningly. But mostly I hate the dark rooms. We don’t need it to be dark, literally.
Why hadn’t I heard about Better Things until now? I should be sacked, and if I were I would go quietly. I had to be alerted to it by a friend, who isn’t paid to know what’s on television and therefore doesn’t have to hang their head in shame, as I do. It’s a great discovery, but I’ve come to it last today because it isn’t new. There is a new series that’s just started but it’s series five. However, you can go back to the beginning, as I have done, as all series are available on iPlayer.
In a nutshell, this is an American comedy drama created by Louis C.K. and Pamela Adlon, who also stars. She plays Sam, an actress in LA raising three daughters on her own. It is funny, wry, sad, sometimes brutal, always believable, and incredibly relatable, right down to how you and I react when the smoke alarm beeps for new batteries (‘No, no, no, no, no…’). I especially enjoyed her visit to a plastic surgeon to see about a facelift. ‘Don’t make me look shiny or like a potato,’ she tells the surgeon. ‘Don’t make me look like a wet potato…’ And you know what? People after facelifts often do look like wet potatoes.
It is also incredibly on the money about parenting, unlike, say, Breeders (Sky), which, to my mind, is about an angry man always shouting, and not about parenting at all. Anyway, it’s terrific, and some episodes are only 20 minutes long, and there are 52 of them. So fill your boots.