The Great Fire

Forget what you learned at school.  A bit of plague and Pudding Lane were rather dull anyway, weren't they?  No, ITV have given this particular history lesson a 21st Century make-over.  The baker is hunky Andrew Buchan, married to a comely wench (Rose Leslie) and unwittingly involved in intrigue at the highest levels.  In 1666 this of-course means randy Merry Monarch Charles II (William Houston), his secretly Papist brother James and, err, Charles Dance in full sinister mode and a terrible wig.  Joining him in the hirsute syrup stakes is Daniel Mays as lusty Samuel Pepys, who proves his acting chops with a convincing performance away from his usual Cockney chappies.  Nonetheless, a scene where he plays posh opposite Andrew Buchan playing Cockney, with rather less success, is bizarre.

The Fire itself gets going about 40 minutes into episode 1, which gives rise to a rather unlikely Hollywood action movie sequence where Buchan rescues his daughters from their burning bakery.  Here again things depart from school history, or for that matter fire awareness courses, since the Great Fire is the Slowest Fire Ever To Get Going.  Even our overstuffed sofas can cause fatal conflagrations in a couple of minutes, but the incendiary bundle of naked flame, straw and timber smoulders away and kindles into the sort of flames seen in gas fire ads.

While the fire is thinking about getting going, the drama plods along in soap-like fashion.  Charles has his eye on fresh young meat; a Catholic skulks about the court with a knife and the sort of sly glances that would in reality have caused his head to be parted from his torso in a flash; baker Farriner pleads with Pepys to help him out of debt; Mrs. Pepys overcomes her lack of children by learning to dance.... etc.  With no spoilers necessary in any direction, we can only hope it whips up the pace before viewers start wishing the fire had been even greater, or perhaps hadn't started at all and left the characters all to succumb to the Black Death.

The Thirteenth Tale

The novel may have been a bestseller in 2006, but we'd neither of us heard of it, so we waited in vain for a haunting, or something even vaguely creepy to happen, but this was very much a cosy-slipper affair - familiar gothic/psychological thriller territory - and not much more than an ok way to spend 90 minutes of post-Christmas torpor.

Olivia Colman reprises her blunt, out of her depth role, here as biographer Margaret Lea, who visits ailing writer Vida Winter (Vanessa Redgrave with startling Titian tresses) in her country pile to hear the titular 13th tale.  This turns out to involve another country pile nearby, the crumbling Angelfield, sibling incest, insanity, suicide, murder and red-haired twin girls who reminded us disturbingly of those in 'The Shining'.  Perhaps the novel is more artfully constructed, but the television adaptation could have been the result of throwing du Maurier, the Brontes, Collins et al into a pot and seeing what was cooked up.  Yes, it was written by Christopher Hampton, but... he remains best known for something he adapted over 25 years ago.  1950s Yorkshire, we suspect, was unlikely to be a place of total isolation for these characters for years on end.  Who'd have thought that 'Heartbeat' could compare favourably in the reality stakes?  Margaret has previously written a biography of the Brontes, but doesn't seem to recognise Yorkshire, unless Hampton couldn't think of a subtler way to signpost the Moors to us.

The twist in the tale is not particularly satisfying, and instead throws up more questions, like a 'Midsomer Murders' story in overdrive, and the wholly unnecessary hint of romance for Margaret with the doctor (Steven Mackintosh) at the end just brings the whole thing down to the level of chick-lit with a kink.  Bit of a waste of a talented cast.  Speaking of which, we're hoping Emily Beecham gets to play someone sane and Tom Goodman-Hill someone other than a faithless rotter in the near future, for their sakes.

Lightfields

Remember Marchlands, the ITV chiller set in 3 timeframes?  Well here's Lightfields, the ITV chiller set in 3 timeframes.  It's not a sequel, it's a follow-up, in the sense that 'Lewis' is a follow-up to 'Morse', which means the house is different and so are the characters but the basic setup is the same: someone dies horribly and comes back as a ghost to haunt two later groups of inhabitants.

This one has not-so-innocent teenager Lucy (Antonia Clarke) in 1944 having an affair with Dwight, the only American airman for miles (Neil Jackson).  He's the spookiest thing in it, coaxing women to take walks with him and turning up behind trees and in barns, always alone.  Unfortunately she's thumbing her nose at her new friend Eve, who met him first, and two local lads who fancied their chances.  There may be trouble ahead... which is confirmed when Vivien (Lucy Cohu, freed from her 'Ripper Street' corsets) and daughter Clare (Karla Crome, so good in 'Murder') move into Lightfields in 1975 and hear a girl laughing, see doors opening and - you get the picture.  At the end of the episode she turns up in the bedroom of the 2012 family home of Danny Webb and Sophie Thompson.  We didn't catch their names as the modern segment has had little else to offer in the way of thrills or interest so far.  The old man was around in 1944 (as Pip, Lucy's younger brother), but wistful looks and rolling eyeballs yield little in the way of thrills.

Everything is pretty well signalled.  1944 has cardigans and swing tunes, 1975 has volvos, pigtails and a disco (but no dungarees, a definite improvement on 'Marchlands') and 2012 has, well, let's just say a dreary familiarity.  Will we be watching episodes 2 - 5?  Oh probably.  Suckers for doors opening by unseen hands and cracked dusty mirrors in barns, we are!

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.