The Night Manager

Freely adapted from prolific spy scribe Le Carre's 1993 novel, this quickly gets going - and gripping - but is every bit as far-fetched as a Bond movie.  Ex-army officer Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is a night manager at the swanky Nefertiti hotel in uptown Cairo.  During the Arab Spring, the beautiful mistress of a dodgy local playboy entrusts him with a document implicating famous businessman/philanthropist Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) in arming terrorists.  When he leaks it to Simon Ogilvy (Russell Tovey) at the British Consulate, the consequences for them both are shattering.

This has all the right ingredients: glamorous locations, a good-looking cast, subterfuge, violence, sex, good vs. bad and so on.  It's engrossing in the same way as a well-put-together, handsomely mounted Hollywood movie.  The slight glitch for an English audience is the self-same cast.  Hiddleston is a great hero, but an unlikely night manager, while we kept expecting Laurie to reprise his goggle-eyed Regency Prince from 'Blackadder' and Tovey to be the cheeky chappie he usually plays.  Horribly unfair to the actors, who turn in top-class performances, along with Olivia Colman as gutsy intelligence agent and mum-to-be Angela Burr, and several other staple Brits besides.

Escapist and a good ad for the intelligence services if you are reckless.  It isn't after all the governments who wield the power and pose the threat these days.  Businessmen are rather less exposed.

The Town

Very unlike usual ITV output, i.e. we'll keep watching.  Sounds like a surreal version of JK Rowling's 'Casual Vacancy', and so far in a subtle and intriguing key.  More anon....

Best of Men and Bert & Dickie

  



Bert and Dickie plus oars

Ludwig and Wynn plus hospital equipment







Comparisons are inevitable.  Two 90-minute Beeb dramas about the last time London hosted the games, sorry - The Games, one focused on the Olympics double sculls and one on the birth of the Paralympics at Stoke Mandeville hospital.  In tone, not much else differed, since they were both solidly-scripted and well cast biopics, essentially.  Which isn't to say that we quite managed to forget Mr Smith tripping round the universe in the tardis, nor Mr Brydon tripping round the UK with Mr Coogan.  That this didn't detract from viewing pleasure was thanks to the other cast members, particularly Sam Hoare, Douglas Hodge and Anastasia Hille in 'Bert and Dickie' and Eddie Marsan and George MacKay in 'Best of Men'.

Of the two, though, the latter, shown last night *, had the bigger story to tell, with German-Jewish refugee Ludwig Guttmann pioneering a change in medical attitudes towards patients with spinal injuries in WWII.  Guttmann, as played by Eddie Marsan, is one of the lesser-known heroes of the 20th Century, a man who kept his principles while his country abandoned them, and relocated to a country fighting for freedom (even if rubber bedpans were just as scarce).  The journeys of his patients as they regained their independence, courage and zest for life were perhaps no more unpredictable than that of Bushnell and Burnell as they battled to form a team and win gold, but both were well told and positive, both for aspiring Olympian and Paralympian superstars and mere mortals who play and watch sport... on TV.

* coincidentally within two days of the death of Lord Alf Morris, whose campaign for disability legislation changed the lives of millions. 

One Night

One Night is a new 4-parter on BBC1.  It's being shown over 4 nights, at the impossibly late start time of 10.35pm (for a school night), so before we'd seen any episodes we wondered whether the BBC was trying to bury it.  There are no details on IMDB, for example....

Against these expectations, it's actually really good.

The show follows the events of one night, with each episode following a different protagonist (like... 'Titanic'!).  It's set in London in an area where Lakemead, a large council estate, borders on some large, expensive, owner-occupied houses.  The first episode followed Ted (Douglas Hodge) who lives in one of the houses and got into a confrontation with some of the kids from the estate.  As the episode progressed to his barbeque dinner party the tone became slightly awkward - more Mike Leigh than Spike Lee - but overall it was a very convincing and well-acted drama.

The escalation of events was very plausible; in fact the only real TWNH was that the police would still have come quickly even if someone tried to cancel a 999 call: this is standard procedure, in case intimidation has taken place.

The big shame of this show is that it's on so late.  Maybe Danny Cohen just didn't like it  - perhaps it was commissioned before he became head of BBC1? - or maybe it tails off in later episodes.  We'll see.