You'd expect ordinary lies in a second-hand car showroom along the lines of "Never been in an accident, mate," or "only one careful owner and two thousand on the clock"; not "my wife's just died" when she is at home with a mild outbreak of irritable bowel syndrome. Salesman Marty's rather extra-ordinary whopper is, it's hinted, the tip of the iceberg among his colleagues' lurking secrets, but it's his story that features in the first of six 'Clocking Off' style episodes. When his mid-life low leads him to drinking, late or no-shows for work and rows with his wife he is given a final warning. The next day - running late again - he phones in and finds himself telling his colleague that he has just become a widower.
If you can get over this wholly unlikely scenario, and the fact that he relies on his sulking wife to wake him up in the morning when he has a working alarm, then this is an entertaining hour. You know he's going to get found out, even he knows he's going to get found out, but it plays out well enough. Jason Manford (Mark Addy's younger sibling, surely) is a real find and conveys the agony of a decent man who finds himself in a downward spiral of his own making. He's ably supported by a great cast, notably Rebecca Callard as lonely do-gooder Grace, and things move from comic to serious as bumpily as Marty's own journey through his crisis.
Whether this is anywhere near as good as 'Clocking Off', or Brocklehurst's own recent 'The Driver' is still in the balance. (The author also wrote 'Exile', which turned out to be a bit less than the sum of its parts.) There are clear storylines shaping up here about a broken marriage, a missing partner, drug couriering and old family secrets, and they will need a sure hand. So far, we're sticking with the characters, but needless to say, we wouldn't buy a second-hand car from any of them.
So, first up, with *spoilers* and a little later than planned:
‘Exile’
We had to like lots of things about this: likeable main cast, good pacing and all helped by scheduling over consecutive nights. Even those of us with lives could watch without too much head-scratching about what had happened so far. But...
1. The 'we'll send it to the newspaper and it'll all come out' ending. Would they publish? Even discounting Metzler getting a superinjunction, it was an unsolicited manuscript, based on the evidence of a now-dead low-life and an illegally recorded conversation (that didn't really get a confession). Plus couldn’t Metzler spike the story, assuming the paper did take it seriously?
2. Is it really likely Tom would have left Tulse at his request, to come back the next night? Does Tom never watch any telly, in which the person with info always then dies? This is almost as popular as the 'I'm about to kill you but I'll waste time telling you why so they can rescue you' scenario (which will almost certainly be alluded to again on this blog very soon) and the “Stop! You can’t go in there!” line (which happily appeared in ‘Exile’).
3. It’s official: Tom’s lover’s husband is such a good bloke that he forgives Tom for sleeping with his wife and thereby ending his marriage, all in a matter of days. Was there any real point in this affair at all, other than to show that Tom wasn’t a total sh*t and is amazingly irresistible to women?
4. Absuses did happen, and there were cover-ups, but two weirdos together raping women to the point where there were multiple pregnancies would have been investigated by more than just one lone journalist. Who told him? There must have been people who knew, and a nurse working there would have heard more than just rumours. So, would Metzler have had Tulse's contact details on his pc at work?
5. Respite care would be difficult to arrange at such short notice. Why not say Sam was in hospital for a day or two as they'd had to sedate him or he'd fallen over?
6. So there you are listening to one of your old cassette tapes, as you do, when suddenly you hear your dad talking about a conspiracy. I'm sure we've all been there. Lets leave the likelihood of journo dad being careful with his material and say it's a coincidence of Hardy-esque proportions that the very tape you pick would just happen to be the one.
