The Frankenstein Chronicles

A similar concept to the current retake on 'Jekyll', this is a chase around after the jolly scientist who stitches body parts together and reanimates them, only shown later and, rather bafflingly, on ITV Encore.  More names than you can shake a stick at here, with Sean Bean playing decent, syphilitic river cop John Marlott, who senses that something other than macabre needlework is going on.  The course of his investigation leads him to body-dealing hospital porter Pritty (Charlie Creed-Miles), his big boss Peel (Tom Ward, here exchanging his pathologist's apron with Samuel West), patrician politicians (Elliot Cowan and Ed Stoppard) and even authors William Blake (Steven Berkoff) and Frankenstein's own creator Mary Shelley (Anna Maxwell-Martin).  Oh and let's not forget the magnificent carcass of a pig that he throws into the Thames to test the tides.

This was quite fun and focused less on the gore and shocks of 'Jekyll' than the lacks and longings that would lead someone in early Industrial England to create a composite creature out of dead children.  Marlott has his own Big Sadness that he carries around with him and that we know will be exacerbated by both his mercury pills and his determination to find the truth behind the strange goings-on.  Bean is likeable in the lead role, almost a worn-down, less celebrated version of his Sharpe character grown older.  Why Encore, though, when an ITV audience would enjoy this in a 9pm slot?

The Peaky Blinders *spoilers*

Well spotted that the smooth-looking Cillian Murphy doesn't feature in the above line-up.  This 'based on true events' series follows on from the gangs-are-sexy ethos that inspired 'Gangs of New York' in the cinema and more recently 'Ripper Street' on TV.  Well, they do say the police is the biggest national gang in any country....

The first problem is the accent.  To viewers who are Brummies, the actors make a decent stab at best, and at worst, stabbing would probably be less painful.  To non-Brummie viewers, it's almost incomprehensible and sounds like they're taking the p***.

Then, what is this trend for interpreting late 19th and early 20th Century England in terms of the Wild West?  Lawless elements and beleaguered policeman who cross the line are hardly the same as frontier towns under threat from bounty hunters and Indians.  So, twanging guitars and a modern thumping beat for good measure seem out of place.  The streets are suitably filthy, but the inhabitants have a neat dividing line between the extras, who are also filthy, and the main characters - Peakies, police and pretty young women - who are smart and clean.  There's also something in the hairstyles and clothes that is more 2013 than 1919.  Yes, we know it's a drama, but it seems patronizing, or cowardly, or perhaps just lazy, to assume that the audience wants something that places a drama set in 1919 firmly in the here-and-now.

The other thing that makes this contemporary is its inclusion of Chinese and Italian communities, and a black preacher.  They were about in Birmingham to be sure (as the Irish characters say) but whether they are all relevant to the plot or just window dressing is anyone's guess.

Nonetheless, this first episode sets the scene nicely enough.  WWI veteran Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) has ambitions for his family and his gang while senior copper Sam Neill arrives in the city determined to stop them in their tracks.  Strong roles for women, with Helen McCrory a brilliant-as-steel matriarch Aunt Polly, but the wilful Ada (Sophie Rundle) and especially the undercover cop Grace Burgess (Annabelle Wallis), who is set up as a love interest for Tommy in the corniest way possible, seem like characters from a modern soap rather than the inter-war midlands.   Oh and Andy Nyman is a convincing younger Churchill and deserves a mention for his one scene.

Overall, handsomely mounted and enough of interest to keep watching, but suspect this is style over substance.

Shirley

Ber-limey!  La Shirl always comes across as fun and warm in her appearances, almost as though she's cocking a snook at the whole business of personas, image and stardom, while playing along.  If this biopic is to be believed, she was, as a young woman, a fame-obsessed diva who spoke as she sang ("I want a yacht!  I'm going to eat nothing but caviar!")  Maybe Shelagh Stevenson wanted to reflect the stagey aspects of Ms Bassey, but it swamped any feeling of truth about the biopic.


Ruth Negga gives an amazing, assured performance, nicely complemented by Lesley Sharp as her down-to-earth mother in Tiger Bay/Splot, and Charlie Creed Miles as her manager, but the curtain came down in the 60s, onstage, singing 'This is My Life'.  Where was the rest?  What was the point?

Injustice

*Spoilers*

Do barristers' clients turn up post-trial with a bottle of fizz and a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink, ta mate for getting me off when I’m guilty as sin?”  Somehow I doubt it.  And aren’t both sides meant to declare witnesses and evidence before the trial?  Plus it’s a little tired to borrow a narrative trick from a road safety advert.  At least Emma in ‘Edge of Darkness’ had something useful to say when she took to haunting her dad.  Even things he didn’t know, bless her.  The hint of twee that makes ‘Foyle’s War’ such a guilty pleasure seems to appear in all of Horowitz’s work and it translates badly to a tale of modern lowlifes who murder, abuse, bully, exploit and lie their way through the story, and they’re just the ones apparently on this side of the law.  It’s not exactly a whodunit: flashbacks from the very first episode, plus the helpful dead boy, tell viewers that barrister Travers murdered an ex-client who had the temerity to be guilty as charged and that his old friend Newall killed a girl half his age in a hotel room.  The main problem is that stronger threads are needed to pull viewers through five solid nights.  As the final credits appeared, there had been no character development and the plots had fallen strangely flat.

Travers, we are meant to believe, is embarked upon a career defending clients and then murdering them if they pretend to be innocent.  We suspect this would be a very short-lived career, since even the likes of DS Wenborn and DC Taylor would be able to link a string of victims who had all been defended by Travers.  Wenborn, at least, was already on his tail after the first murder, and even prepared to do Very Bad Things to secure a conviction.  Luckily for Travers, Wenborn was a thoroughly rotten sod who got shoved downstairs by his abused wife and, as always happens on TV, broke his neck.  That Wenborn’s own career had lasted so long is surprising.  We’re told that he was a lovely, kind man before joining the force, so didn’t anyone spot that he was becoming a tv cliché and kick him out of the door with a payoff?

Mrs Travers, meanwhile, is full of angst about living in Suffolk (can’t blame her), exploiting the sensitive, talented teenaged tearaway – despite his having pleaded successfully for her to publish his novel – and suddenly in the final episode realising that her husband isn’t sufficiently detached from his clients to be professional, i.e. not kill them.  While she looks to be on the verge of tears in every scene, none of this bothers her too much: they return to London, the writing prodigy hangs himself before finishing his novel, thereby removing any dilemma, and she’s satisfied that even if hubby is a killer, at least he’s enjoying his job again.

Nastiest of all, and Travers’ victim number two, is Newall, who works for a dodgy company, abandoned his first wife and child and is having an affair with a Kate Middleton look-alike.  None of this makes him nastier than your average TV nasty (especially as they’ve added the sympathy vote that Travers stole Mrs Travers from Newall at university) so they’ve thrown in paedophilia too, which takes him beyond the pale.  It’s a gratuitous subject to include, since Newall could just as easily have strangled his lover and set up an alternative motive and alibi because he enjoyed sadism.

Are Nick Dunning and Andrew Tiernan ever going to play anything but sneering villains again?  They must be tired of seeing themselves in reaction shots when they get their comeuppance from the heroes and heroines.  Dunning, as Forbes-Watson, was a particularly dim barrister who didn’t see the obvious flaws in his case for the prosecution, but he was still probably more true to life than William ‘I believe all my clients’ Travers.  Tiernan’s was a throwaway part, but he was in good company with Imogen Stubbs, Susannah Doyle and Lisa Diveney who had very little to do and not much airtime to do it in.  Ironically, Tiernan would have had a stronger part had the boy-writer (who had named Tiernan's character Bankes to the police) not committed suicide, as he would then have had a revenge to plot....

Overall it felt like an extended episode of ‘Murder in Mind’, another Horowitz effort from some years ago: unafraid of cliché, issues of the day shoehorned in and plots turning on slightly tenuous links (Would the prison guard really have threatened the boy for crying in the night?  Yes, they have to be tough, but it must have made a nice change from getting shouted at, or worse.  Travers works out that Newall is guilty because his partner says he is left-handed, which prompts him to look at a supposedly random figure he can’t see on CCTV throwing something in the river.  Errr...?)

And most confusingly of all, two actors from 'The Shadow Line' turned up, one of whom seemingly as the same character.  They may call it work, I call it... injustice.