Capital

Capital is BBC 1's 3-part dramatisation of John Lanchester's credit-crunch novel, set in an affluent Clapham (South London) street.  The crux of the book, and the serialisation, is that many different aspects of life can exist in a single street, from wealthy bankers to cornershop owners, from Eastern European builders to African traffic wardens - though the latter works in the street rather than lives there.

A problem with all books like this is that they are prone to using well-worn stereotypes - see also Amanda Craig's Hearts & Minds, and Sebastian Faulks' A Week in December - and this is even more likely to happen on the screen because you don't have the depth of a book, or the luxury of descriptive narrative.  On screen, the story unfolds with residents receiving postcards, sometimes photographs of themselves going about their business, with the ominous statement, "We want what you have".  What they all have, of-course, from the banker to elderly Petunia (Gemma Jones) who moved in as a bride forty years ago, is prime London real estate where prices are rising virtually by the day.  The likes of Petunia, who moved into an unimposing terrace, would no longer be able to afford to move here.

Capital has been updated from 2008 to 2015, because essentially nothing has changed in banking and property prices, which removes the need to try to do 2008 details, but instead concentrate on the story.  The other major change is the omission of the African footballer character and his dad - apparently some of the dad's lines have been given to other characters.

We enjoyed it more than we thought we would.  Performances are generally very good, although we disagreed about the casting of Toby Jones as the banker.  For Dan he was well cast against type (very different from Lance in The Detectorists, for example) and believable as a brainy but essentially lucky and over-privileged banker.  It's nowhere near as good as 'Marvellous', Jones's last work with Peter Bowker, but it's good.  The banker going broke story has been done lots of times before - for example Sherman McCoy explaining why he's going broke on £2m a year in the 1980s in 'Bonfire of the Vanities', but we liked Jones performance.

We need a great 'house prices' drama, and we need a great 'London as a melting pot' drama, and this was neither, but it's well written and well directed, so we'll stick with it to the end.

Unforgotten

A bit like a longer, more-involved 'Waking the Dead'... and featuring two of its stars (Trevor Eve and Claire Goose), this begins with the discovery of a skeleton by builders and follows the investigation by dogged cop DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and her glum DS, Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) into the fate and identity of the remains.  Simultaneously, we are shown the lives of some families who, as becomes apparent in the last scene, are in some way linked to the murdered man.

It's gripping.  Walker and Bhaskar are a genuis pairing, and both are watchable in just about anything.  The supporting cast are stellar - Bernard Hill, Gemma Jones and Tom Courtenay to name three - and you sense an all-too-human tragedy lurking in the past and waiting to be dug up with the victim's body.

Any drawbacks?  Cases in real life do turn on amazing luck and tiny clues, but this is sailing close to the TWNH wind in the connections made so far.  (They could identify the car from a key found nearby; it only had one owner; it has survived since 1965; there was a bag in the boot!; there's a dated diary in the bag!; the ink is rendered legible by a forensic process! etc.)  We're hoping that with the names of the other characters being foiund within it, no further coincidences need happen.  Please.

Marvellous

Marvellous was...  Marvellous.  Inspired by a Guardian article from 2010, Peter Bowker has written a very engaging, very inspiring biopic of 'living legend' Neil Baldwin, a man who refused to let his learning difficulties hold him back, and has lived life to the full.

Now in his 70s, the film mainly looks at the time in the 1980s when he played an active role in Stoke City FC, working as kit man having introduced himself to new manager Lou Macari, who comes over as a real saint, and offering his services.  Over this period it looks at Neil's relationship with his mother, and her attempts to get him to be more independent, his relationship with the church (he has a very powerful faith, and is a lay preacher), and his role at Keele University, who recently gave him an honourary degree.

On paper this seems like a very unlikely recipe for a TV drama, let alone a good TV drama, but that is what this was.  Neil's positive outlook on life, and his likeability gets him through all manner of challenges.  Somehow Bowker managed to strike a balance between heartwarming pathos and real humour, and Toby Jones' performance was perfect as someone who clearly has learning difficulties, but accepts them and moves forward.  At one point he says 'If you meet people who don't like you, then just meet other people who do like you'.  The whole cast was note perfect, but we should praise Gemma Jones (no relation) as Neil's mother Mary, and Tony Curran as Macari.

The production was interspersed with songs from a ukulele orchestra and choir, and also featured Neil himself, Lou Macari, and other 'real people' appearing to comment on the action, but this never distracted from the piece.

Like Neil's own story, Marvellous was an incredibly unlikely success, but a real success it was, possibly the best one-off TV film we've seen for the past few years.  It only got 1.5m viewers, but the critical reaction seems to have been uniformly positive, so let's hope for a quick repeat in a better slot.

Lucan

Lucky Lord Lucan won over £20,000 in one night at the tables in Le Touquet, in the days when you could easily buy a couple of 3-bed semis for that sum.  Had he also been Logical Lord Lucan he would have walked away and never entered any place of gambling again.  He was, however, a gambling addict, a bored husband and, by Jeff Pope's account (based on John Pearson's book 'The Gamblers') a bit of a waste of space.  In short, if you think the British aristocracy are, or even were, a bunch of loveable eccentrics, or bores a la 'Downton Abbey', then you won't enjoy ITV's dramatization of this case, arguably of Britain's most famous missing criminal.

John Bingham, Earl Lucan (Rory Kinnear, superb) is a deeply unhappy 'professional gambler' who spends his time at the tables of John Aspinall's Clermont Club in Berkeley Square.  To most of us under 50, Aspinall is synonymous with zoo-keeping, which is ironic considering his belief in animal instincts and his wilful interpretation of Darwinian theory.  Here played by a cast-against-type Christopher Eccleston, his chief assets in life are his easy-seeming charm and his hosting abilities, which he uses to lure the scion of England's landed families into gambling away their inheritances.  Along with his waning wealth, Lucan is tired of his marriage to Veronica (Catherine McCormack, whom we don't see enough of these days) but determined not to lose custody of his children.  Unfortunately for him, he confides in Aspers, who advises using any means necessary to get what he wants.  When Lucan's original plan to accuse his wife of insanity backfires, his pathetic self-pity turns to anger for which the children's nanny, Sandra Rivett (Leanne Best) will ultimately pay.

Lady Lucan and the children are very much alive (and unsurprisingly did not collaborate in the making of the drama) but Lucan's disappearance after that November night in 1974 has made him into an enigma.  Unproven sightings are many and varied, as are claims that he is definitely dead, and next week's conclusion to this re-telling may not convince us either way, but this is a very watchable, well-cast and acted production.  It's a shame that the subject matter leaves a sour taste in the mouth.  No doubt the idea wasn't to glamorise people who were only extraordinary for their (largely unearned) wealth and possibly their viciousness, but there's no satisfaction in realising that who and not what you know is still the way things work, and that there is still a sense of entitlement from those at the top, with a widening gap between them and those at the bottom.

The Lady Vanishes... In the Flesh...

... and reappears as a zombie?  Now that might be a drama worth watching.  Have to be honest, this lady vanished long before the ending, and never even made it to the start of 'In the Flesh'.

The BBC remake/update claims to have been based closely on the book, 'The Wheel Spins' rather than Hitchcock's film version, so why keep the film's title if not to (falsely) lure fans of the film?  Pedantic gripes aside, this was a perfectly watchable, serviceable escapist drama which was apparently bumped from the Christmas schedules.  Maybe there were legal reasons, but any others were sheer madness since this is perfect post-pud entertainment.  Having it as a stand-alone in the March Sunday evening slot cruelly exposes the pointlessness of either a remake of the film or another adaptation of the novel.

The central premise is a tad confused (so they all lied conveniently for different reasons?) and rather distractingly every single character was a 'face'.  Is it us or is Tom Hughes the new Jonathan Rhys-Myers?  This is not a compliment.  If he is a better actor, he needs to appear in something worthwhile, fast.

And one look at the photo from 'In the Flesh' explains why neither of us sat down with a cushion and a cuppa to watch it.  BBC3 may have turned up something classy in 'Being Human' but there's just something about zombies....  It is a prejudice on our part, we admit, so maybe in the middle of the night, feeling a bit like the undead, we will take the leap.  Meanwhile there are zombies of the everyday variety all around, as anyone who commutes will tell you.

Thirteen Steps Down

We'd like to say TWNH - that a disturbed young man would never become obsessed by JR Christie to the point where he believes himself haunted and kills a (rather rude) woman which bodes ill for the other object of his obsession, a young model.  We can't of-course pin a TWNH here, however absurd-sounding.  What's less likely is that a young man would have a Cliff Richard record waiting on his stereo, but madness provides any and every excuse on TV.

Ruth Rendell, queen of the 90s murder-mystery and psychodrama, has here penned another nasty and sordid tale of people on the margins who need help but get sex and murder instead.  The problem with adapting her novels into 100-minute teleplays is that she treads a fine line between a familiar world and a fantasy one, even before dead serial killers put in an appearance.  Her anti-hero is called Mix Cellini (Luke Treadaway) and he has a job fixing gym machines that allows him complete autonomy and sex with bored housewives.  He lives in a big, creepy old house with a waspish landlady (Geraldine James) who happens to have had a close brush with Christie in her youth.  Then there's his crush on a supermodel who happens to live nearby, and a girl who sleeps with him on a first date after he's spoken admiringly of a man who killed and then raped a series of women.  Not impossible, then, but unlikely taken altogether, and far more convincing with the time and care of good prose - a slow immersion in a fictional world rather than a hasty onscreen dunking.

So, will Mix kill Nerissa (Elarica Gallacher) before his landlady and her formidable friends (Gemma Jones and Anna Calder-Marshall) find out what he's up to?  It's watchable, but not one of Rendell's best.