The Village

Peter Moffat gave us 'Criminal Justice' (good) and 'Silk' (formulaic soap set in well-trodden ground of legal chambers) so our approach to this was neutral.  Episode one of six - or possibly forty-two, if successful - introduces Bert now, as a very old man, reminiscing about his life in a Derbyshire village.  In 1914 he's a boy of twelve with a violent alcoholic father (John Simm) and a downtrodden mother (Maxine Peake), an older brother about to go to war and his first crush on a suffragist rector's daughter who's just arrived in the village.

'Downton Abbey' it's not, to dispel any notions of 'BBC's answer to...', but it's also not shaping up to be a British version of the German classic, 'Heimat'.  Life in the village is grim for young Bert.  When not getting bullied at home he's getting literally rapped over the knuckles at school, for being left-handed.  His older brother Joe fares little better in his job at the Big House, where he has every class-difference stereotype hurled at his amiable head.  Moffat seems to suffer from the same inability to write convincing upper-class characters as afflicts Mike Leigh.  There is a dinner-table discussion of women's rights that is reminiscent of Poliakoff at his recent worst.  Martha, the new arrival in the village, seems to be everything to everyone, and Bert spies on her in a village bath house which provides a handy gossiping ground for the women.  (Were they only allowed an hour in it per week?  Otherwise, their convergence must be due to female intuition.)

The village goes to war at the end of the episode, so let's hope it continues to not be the BBC's answer to 'Downton Abbey' in war cliches, at least....

A Mother's Son

What do you do if your son's schoolmate is found killed and you find a pair of stained trainers under his bed?  Assume he's the killer while saying nothing at all about it, according to the latest offering from ITV.  Only in soapland are things this absurd.  "Did you do the washing?" asks mum Rosie (Hermione Norris) in a knowing way, before scouring the web and buying hydrogen peroxide to see if it fizzed when in contact with the suspect trainers.  The boy, Jamie (Alexander Arnold) has been acting strangely, moping about, possibly peeping at his mum's boyfriend's daughter Jess (Antonia Clarke) in the shower and downloading dodgy videos onto his laptop.  And there we were thinking that was typical behaviour for a teenage boy....

It's hard not to think that a top calibre cast (Martin Clunes as Rosie's boyfriend Ben and Jake Davies as his son Rob add to the good work here) could do so much more with a script centred around how a family copes with juvenile violence and criminality than they can with a ridiculously drawn-out 'did he/didn't he' scenario.

Mum eventually confides in her ex-husband, Jamie's natural father David (Paul McGann), but not before we'd shouted ourselves hoarse: "Just ASK him, you daft woman!"  Ex-hubby asks why she hasn't mentioned it to their son.  She says he's too fragile after the divorce to handle being suspected.  Because, obviously, the only way to broach the subject would be to say: "Did you kill that girl?!"  No wonder DC Upton (Nicola Walker) and the victim's mother Kay (Annabelle Apsion) look dazed and confused.