The Ark

So, you live with your large, grown family who have terrible table manners but otherwise rub along pretty happily together.  One day, while sitting and contemplating your strangely arid farm, God's messenger, in the form of Ashley Walters, plops down beside you and tells you God is fed up with the greed, selfishness and violence of human beings and is going to send a flood to drown them all.  Understandable enough, you reckon, if a bit drastic, but then comes the killer: you alone can save mankind!  All you have to do is build an enormous wooden structure, waterproof it and persuade as many people as you can to join you, and drag in some animals that will come your way.  The phrase "easier said than done" could have been coined for poor Noah (David Threlfall), previously considered a devout, strict but kindly old eccentric.  It goes without saying that Mrs. Noah, Emmie (the estimable Joanne Whalley) and the offspring don't exactly jump at the idea of hard labour and ridicule for building an ark in the sunny desert.

This is a nice re-telling, emphasizing the human aspects of the story - the sons' longing for independence; the wife's despairing, "Please tell me you've miscalculated the size?!" - if a little oddly paced.  Thirty minutes into a ninety-minute production before God's instructions arrived meant little time for the actual flood, which was, as CGI effects go, pretty underwhelming. Forty days and forty nights took little more than forty seconds of rather muddled images of water walls.  For bibliophiles, too, it may have been puzzling, since Canaan (Nico Mirallegro) is here Noah's son who strays off the righteous path through no fault of his dad's.  Ah well.  The core message of, umm, keeping faith despite all, comes through, and the acting was nicely understated for a biblical epic.  It made a nice change from Easter-centric crucifixion tales and yes, apparently rainbows are a reminder of man's covenant with God, not leprechauns and pots of gold, and the two are not the same....

The Secrets

One of BBC1's half-hour-each-weeknight dramas, all on the Secrets theme and quite starry.  This first episode has Olivia Colman reluctant to help her mother Alison Steadman commit suicide.  Hard to know what to say since this may not be representative of the whole series, but this was very depressing for a Sunday night.  The obvious counterpoint of Olivia Colman's pregnancy (death and birth, the cycle of life, yes?) and the incidental humour of Alison Steadman's smoking a joint didn't relieve the bleakness much, and the legal arguments were largely sidelined.  Yet surely it was the legal status of assisted suicide which made this a secret at all?  What made this watchable were the performances of the three leads, understated to such a degree we wondered if the dialogue was improvised.  If the rest of the acting is of this calibre, the remaining episodes will be worth watching.

Truckers

One of those stalwart series the Beeb does so well, 'Truckers' takes a dash of 'Clocking Off' and a pinch of 'Common as Muck' (by the same writer, William Ivory) and with a reasonable script and good actors, makes a Thursday night worth fiddling with the recorder/box/iPlayer to catch.  It's not going to be among the annals of the greatest TV series of all time, but on ITV at the same time is 'Breathless'.  Need we say more? 

True Love

'Mad Men' is the honourable exception to our Sky avoidance.  Or more accurately, it's the only thing non-terrestrial and non-freeview that we bother to tune in for or tape.  Hence the recent silence, since it's the only channel featuring anything that hasn't been shown 58 times already.  With the summer lull upon us, the schedules are full of cheap stuff, like dud Jubilee coverage and Olympics promos.  We were hoping for a pleasant diversion in bite-sized chunks, set in the faded, tawdry splendour of Margate.  The trailer promised much, not least a starry cast, and on this at least it's delivered.

Admittedly, we are only one down with four still to go, but on the strength of the first story, featuring David Tennant, Joanne Froggatt and Vicky McClure, it's going to be a struggle.  Hurrah for scriptwriters.  Hurrah for Mike Leigh for coaxing decent dialogue via workshopping and improvisation.  Either would have been welcome here, but instead we got actors with rabbit-in-headlights expressions, obviously uncomfortable at being given banal storylines and having to come up with lines on the spot.  Needless to say, they conveyed love by saying "I love you" and "I love you too", and on unexpectedly bumping into an old acquaintance they say, "Well this is..." and "Yeah, yeah, it's...yeah."  It was like watching well-known actors appearing in something like TOWIE.  What's worse, the advance publicity suggests that the next four episodes will be essentially the same story (person either bereft or in relationship fancies alternative) with slightly tweaked scenarios.  Sad to say, but there were also some likely TWNH moments: would Serena really fly over from Canada to look up old flame Nick, rather than attempting, initially, to find and friend him on Facebook?  Would Nick be so hung up on her that he jumps straight into an affair that he hides from his wife but no-one else?  Would said wife be so quick to forgive him?

Good on the actors for being game, and all that, and good old Margate for being a better backdrop than most would credit, but slight stories and even slighter lines make an extremely underwhelming watch.

Inside Men... Again *spoilers*

Was it only us who felt let down by the ending after enjoying every gripping minute?


The performances by Steven Mackintosh, Nicola Walker, Kierston Wareing, Ashley Walters and Warren Brown alone were worth the licence fee, and it could and should provide a masterclass in how to structure a serialised drama.  It just seemed like they didn't know what to do with the titular Inside Men at the end.  Would Chris forgive the man who admits he would have killed him, letting him give him a lift home?  Are Marcus and Gina meant to 'fess all, except their willing involvement, to the police and get away with a few hundred thousand?  And John, whose transition from mouse to lion wasn't ever quite true, gives up his freedom and the money?

Top Boy (spoilers)

OK, first things first: it’s not ‘The Wire’, though they have similarities.  For a start it’s a four-hour drama not a sixty-odd-hour one, so it’s tightly focused on drugs gangs rather than branching out into the cops, local industry, the schools and the media.  There are moments in ‘Top Boy’ that aren’t great, usually because their tone echoes directly ‘The Wire’ or even ‘In Bruges’ (Leon IS Cutty, Ra’Nell IS Michael and as for the sheared fingers....).  This also doesn’t baulk the conventions, such as the beloved dog earmarked for death from its first appearance, nor the temptation to make its anti-hero sympathetic.

So, with that out of the way, all that’s left to say is that we liked it.  Ronan Bennett’s recent offering ‘Hidden’ pales in comparison.  Thankfully, neither the real worlds of high crime from Westminster nor low crime from Hackney are overly familiar, but the difference in realism between Top Boy’s characters and Hidden’s equates to that between Pixar and Noggin the Nog.  Here, Bennett makes no attempt to untangle the lives of Dushane, Sully et al, just to show how life is, what choices exist and what they mean for youth on an inner-city estate.  So the ending brought the drugs deal and several lives to a close, without any neat tying up.

Referring to lack of on-the-ground knowledge by us, we'll qualify the TWNH to a TWProbably NH, but would Raikes be a lone and unprotected operator?  How did Dushane keep finding cash for deals when he had his 'food' stolen twice?  Minor quibbles, since we probably missed the explanation as mumbled by characters while running, selling or shooting.

Must also say that Brian Eno's score was a rare example of a soundtrack that enhanced rather than distracted from, or was superfluous to, the visuals.  Television aimed at intelligent viewers is in short supply and we’re grateful to Channel 4!