Thirteen

A dishevelled-looking young woman runs along a suburban street and into a phone box.  She says she is Ivy Moxam, kidnapped from the street thirteen years ago as a thirteen-year-old girl and missing ever since.

Aired originally on BBC3, the youth-oriented channel that has recently moved online, this taps into today's bogeyman, namely the patient, organised and utterly deranged keeper of girls in cellars.  Similar ground was covered in the 2010 novel 'Room' which is now a film too.  This takes a decent stab at portraying the unimaginable post-nightmare readjustment, with Ivy (Jodie Comer) displaying bewilderment, relief and sorrow while trying to come to terms with what has happened to her.

The enormous impact of her emergence after such a long absence on her family and friends is also made apparent, and convincingly played, but the show is really Jodie Comer's as the girl who has lost her anonymity along with everything else.  The writing pays attention to detail, with Ivy more than a one-dimensional victim - she has a believable manipulative streak, contradictions in her behaviour and story and a possible case of Stockholm syndrome.  Her sister's doubt of her identity is quickly ruled out by DNA, but this doesn't lessen the mystery of what has happened to her, how it has changed her or indeed her personality before her disappearance (she was playing truant on the day she was abducted).  The identity of her captor is quickly established, but he is on the run, and apparently worked at Ivy's school.  A timely reminder that the sensational stories in the news are far from ending with a reunion.

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.

Breathless

So this is Britain's answer to 'Mad Men'?  In that case we really are a fifth-rate, insignificant island off the corner of Europe.  Dan and I are not among those who think that MM is the best thing ever to have hit the screens, but it's pretty darned good, mostly, and in comparison to this it's searingly brilliant.  Lest anyone be confused here, this has only a kitsch title sequence and coiffed hair in common with Draper and co.  In every other sense, this is more akin to that pinnacle of UK prime-time, 'The Royal': smarmy surgeons, doe-eyed nurses, neurotic wives and a Best of the 60s soundtrack.  The saucy doctor's sideline in illegal abortions feels borrowed from 'Call the Midwife', and the presence of Davenport, Little, Parish and Glen merely reminds you how good they can be elsewhere.

It doesn't score highly on the factual front either.  Nurses in the 1960s weren't allowed out of hospital grounds in uniform, but 'Breathless' has them kitted out at home and in public.  Is this a budget restriction or lazy research?  It may seem a small point, but it's easy enough to ask any veteran nurse and we need look no further for one of the causes of those 'inexplicable' infections on the wards.

If Britain had an answer to the Madison Avenue antics of Sterling Cooper (Draper Pryce...) it was shaping up to be 'The Hour'.  If this goes on beyond one series, we'll be Breathless... with indignation.

Kidnap & Ransom

Dominic King is a hostage negotiator, and apparently one of the best, if not the best, but strangely his cases seem to go horribly wrong.  Back for a second series, we begin with Dominic (Trevor Eve) warily heaving a sack over the side of a boat into a lake.  A body?  Money?  A full explanation of the script?  Flashback two weeks to a tour bus in India which happens to drive headlong into fleeing hostage-takers with an injured hostage.  Cue the usual mix of fear, brutality, resistance and blundering police, along with scenes of King's estranged wife and colleagues in the UK.  One of the latter has a daughter on the bus.


Involving enough to keep viewers for the second episode, although three, like the first series, is stretching it.  Kidnap is one thing, but hostage-taking has such a high-risk, no-return reputation that it's as much of an endurance test for the viewers as for the poor hostages.  Doesn't it always  have a bloody ending?

Case Histories

We're liking, with reservations.  Familiar territory, but characters and situations have an original slant that betrays their literary origins (no bad thing - Ali).  Also has good cast (like Jason Isaacs - Ali).  More after more....

We continue to like.  Has a nice slightly offbeat tone.  Small quibble: Brodie has the best eyesight in the world.  Unlike most men, who don’t even notice earrings when they are talking face-to-face with a woman, Brodie can see them from some considerable distance and a fair height.  Wow.  Oh and surely even a lonely, drunken actress in a terrible play wouldn’t sleep with slob Richard Moat over Brodie?  Second story, based on second book, managed to carry on Brodie’s personal life in a way that broadened his role as totty and made us care when his ex-wife took his daughter to New Zealand.  Awww.

Third and final story was a good finale and we'd watch another series, if based on the Atkinson novels.  'Quirky' is an over-used and much-maligned word but this is distinguished from the average cop show by wit and imagination.  Gwyneth Keyworth, so good in 'Royal Wedding', has real presence, and came across here like Shirley Henderson's younger sister (casting call, anybody?).  We're no experts, but Amanda Abbington had a consistent accent AND the luck to be torn between Patterson Joseph and Jason Isaacs.  Sorry, this isn't a review at all - Ali's fault - so we'll stop at saying it was a fun watch, intelligently written and well acted, and so much better than formulaic procedurals.