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.

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?

The Shadow Line reminds me of...

It's time for another post on The Shadow Line.  As the series has progressed a few things have become clear:

- It's too long, and has too many characters.  It would have been better as a shorter, less convoluted story.

- It's hard to follow, and it seems to take pride in this.

- There are still lots of TWNHs - for example a shop is turned into a fireball, and the two men inside walk away.  Hmmm

- It's not as good as Psychoville 2, also showing on BBC 2.

Psychoville 2 is also a story with lots of characters.  There's a mysterious man who goes around killing off the main characters.  There's a woman who has a terminal illness, and her companion (her son in this case) is very upset by this.  There are some mysterious powers at work.  There are some gruesome killings (Oscar Lomax's hanging, for example)  There is a shop that isn't what it seems (Hoyti Toyti, which turns out to have a cellar full of Nazi artifacts).  However Psychoville manages to hold it together much more successfully, and isn't nearly as confusing.

I think maybe someone at the BBC was laughing to themselves when they they scheduled Psychoville 2 straight after The Shadow Line!

Scott and Bailey

AKA Cagney and Lacey: UK

This was always going to be a prime-time cop show and not quality original drama, so we've no business posting about it, but dammit we like Lesley Sharp and all she's had to do so far in 'The Shadow Line' is look unhealthily thin and baffled.  (Mrs Bede may have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but she's probably also confused by the overblown plot.)

Last night's opener was pretty much as expected: case which coincidentally mirrored Cagney's, sorry, Bailey's muddled private life which she thus has insight enough to solve.  Hurrah!  Clunky, but harmless.  The main TWNH, though, is that we are expected to believe that our competent cop has been seeing someone for two years without realising he was married with kids and lived, when not in his bachelor pad, in a posh family home.  Villains had better hope that Scott is on leave or off sick, so they can get away with it.

OK, the last episode has now aired, and Ali stuck with this one.  Undeniably there were some good scenes and sharp dialogue.  With a bit more thought about developing peripheral characters, i.e. all the men in the series, and as much care given to the weekly crime(s) as to the soapy personal lives of the leads, it could be great.  Suranne Jones and Lesley Sharp make good screen buddies, if you can get over the former being, in the words of her boss, “one of the best young detectives I’ve ever seen” while falling for Mr Rotten twice (Rupert Graves, the current go-to for nasty cads).  Said Mr Rotten – who must have an equally daft wife – tried to have Bailey killed in order to save his career, so he was obviously (a) Evil Incarnate and (b) taking more of a risk having her murdered than trusting her not to talk?

You also have to get over Scott, supposedly the more stable of the pair, preaching to Bailey about being a dupe and then putting her husband in the same position by continuing an affair with a colleague.  This is after she’s made a miraculous recovery from being stabbed by her dead friend’s brother last week.  A couple of months were meant to have gone by, admittedly, but as always in telly-land, there were no physical reminders at all.  She’s human, yes, and she nearly died, and her erstwhile lover is leaving town but... wouldn’t she either leave her hubby or make a go of her marriage?

Having kept their MIT jobs by the proverbial skin of their teeth, the end of the series brought everything pretty much back to where it was at the start, so in the next series they can behave like this one never happened....

The Shadow Line

‘The Shadow Line’ (spoilers)

Unfair to review before reaching the end, so this is a work in progress.

Generally speaking, we have no problem with slow.  If you tune into a thriller, it can hit its ground running or take all the time it needs to ratchet up the tension.  It’s when it takes more time than it needs, and way more time than it should, that there’s a problem.  Even the pre-credit sequence of the first episode was too darned long, to the point of being boring, and by the end of that episode our impressions were that ‘Shadow Line’ loved itself, deeply and solemnly, and at the expense of anything like a convincing performance from the usually-good Rafe Spall.  It tried its best to confuse, but as the closing credits appeared, you knew you were dealing with a quarrelling criminal gang, complete with psycho scion (the aforementioned Spall, the victim’s nephew) and a cop with a past that he (in)conveniently can’t remember.  We’ve been here before, just a few times.

13th May.  Episode two has a tense chase at the end.  Nothing like it for obliterating the dull 50 minutes building up to it.  For us, it wasn’t quite that good, partly because every ten seconds it looked like Andy, our AWOL driver, had to get caught by one of the people chasing him, and then suddenly there he was again, way out in front, with not a tree root or heart attack to beleaguer his pursuers.    The other reason is that, like extreme pain, the sheer self-indulgence of the various interview/interrogation scenes preceding it was hard to forget.  And lest we neglect them, the intimidated partner and mother of our AWOL driver, knowing at least something about what he’d been involved in, cheerily open the door to two strange men, one after the other.  TWNH.  Oh and the seriously sinister drug baron/criminal overlord who is owed money by the gang says he has been waiting for it for two years.  Most patient drug baron/criminal overlord ever?  Lucky gang!  He also agrees to Bede’s so-surefire-it’s-never-been-done-before plan after 5 minutes.  Lucky, lucky gang!

20th May.  Episode Three was an improvement.  Rafe stopped chewing the carpet (only so much twist'n'pile an actor can take?) and there was less of the staged set-piece feel of the previous hours.  We are prepared to follow in the increasing hope that there is a decent payoff at the end of the series.

That said, trained cop Gabriel wipes his bloody paws on the crime scene.  Presumably this will have repercussions for him later, but it was a pretty clumsy device.  And Harvey, lately a crime lord, has but one mourner at his funeral - mad Rafe.  The cops were so excited when mourner # 2 turned up they took endless pictures.  They'd obviously been hoping for a Krays-style underworld bash.  Even his 'lieutenant' (do they all watch 'The Wire' in the way that mobsters watch 'The Godfather'?) failed to show up.  Is it an offence?  The two main twists revealed were intriguing, except that the Gatehouse one threw up a nice TWNH: since our AWOL driver knew he had in fact killed his boss, and the killer knew he knew, would he choose to trust this man over the boss's family and the cops?

And please, Mr Blick, give the wives something to do other than attract sympathy for their husbands!

27th May.  We have a division.  Dan likes it more than Ali.  As divisions go, this is not unusual and not serious.

What Ali dislikes is that, more than halfway through the series, the main characters are all people she’d take serious detours to avoid, be they criminals, cops or journalists.  This isn’t only because they are inherently unsympathetic, but because they all speak as though they were in an o.t.t. send-up of a noir thriller.  “It’s so much p*ss in the wind,” snarls a top cop, “and I’m beginning to feel the spray”.

Dan says he takes Ali’s points (except the pompous dialogue, which he hadn’t noticed and now can’t remember) but he still likes it, despite the TWNH (or at least the TWBUTH - Unlikely To Happen) ending.  Do young, ambitious London journos live deep in the countryside?  It felt like a scenic way of killing him, and also an unreliable one.  The professional killer chose a method which might injure him too and not kill the target.  That's if he managed to time the thing so that they'd both be on the same stretch of empty road at the same time.  Note to self....

3^rd June.  I (Ali) must be a masochist.  I can’t stop watching even though it frustrates me.  Somewhere in here is, just possibly, a really good story, but it’s drained of all life by the ponderous dialogue, lovingly-framed shots and over-emotive music.  It takes itself so seriously I want to laugh, and I’m feeling more manipulated than ever.

Last week’s episode ended with a splattered journalist.  He wasn’t very nice, but doesn’t anyone wonder how he died?  The police were preoccupied with snapping at each other about a dead colleague and how to cover their tracks.  This week’s episode ended with a splattered gangster.  He wasn’t very nice either, but will the police take note?  The killing scene was spliced with those of other characters staring moodily, while an ironically crooning song played.  A little homage to ‘Sopranos’/’Mad Men’?  Sadly the likes of ‘Casualty’ got there first – and I’m deliberately ignoring Mr Coppola here.

In-between, we had this week’s big TWNH: an explosion where a shop was blown to bits but the two men inside it survived with minor cuts and bruises.  Having been about to kill each other, they growl a bit and part ways.  Then there was not so much a TWNH as an OHoT (Only Happens on TV) moment, with Bede starting an affair with Glickman’s girlfriend as soon as they meet.  Lonely criminal meets scared gangster’s moll = obvious affair, on TV.  Will there be a point to this?  Will one of them end up splattered at the end of episode 6?

I’m grateful he’s trying, really I am, and hands up I’ve no direct experience, but do CEOs of drug networks really stride around in sinister hats, commit their own murders and operate state-of-the-art surveillance equipment?  Are they all called things like ‘Glickman’, ‘Bede’ and ‘Gatehouse’?  (I know the average cop is not called ‘Gabriel’ or ‘Honey’)  And why is there always an androgynous juvenile sleeping with a seedy middle-aged gangster?

10^th June.  Praise be, not one but two female characters who actually had something to do in last night’s episode.  One of them was Petra, who committed murder (and attempted murder), true, but hey it beats the boring old ‘love interest’ role.  The other was Gabriel’s ex-mistress, whose grief helped her find some compassion, which hasn’t been very much on display anywhere in the programme so far.

Special mention for Nicholas Jones, a lovely actor who gets to spend all his time coiling ropes on docksides when not growling at unwanted visitors.

Things are now playing nicely like a Jacobean tragedy, except that the revenge motive isn’t clear.  Gripping, if even less rooted in the world as anyone knows it.  And no, police didn’t seem that interested in last week’s end-of-episode death either.  This week they’ve got Glickman, Petra and Gabriel’s illegitimate child, so they’ll have a grand job ignoring all three, plus Gatehouse’s near-miss.  We watch with interest to see if Gabriel finally gets the picture before the bullet kills him.

17th June.  All over in overblown style.  We think it would have been better if it hadn't screamed in every possible way - dialogue, acting, visuals, music - that it was so very serious, and important, and tragic.  Both Rafe Spall and Freddie Fox appeared in this week's 'Miss Marple' and managed to give more convincing performances in (what should be) a campier show.  Yes, we felt for Gabriel, the once-possibly-bad-but-now-struggling-to-be-good cop, as he realised that even Honey had lied to him and worked for Gatehouse.  We even felt for Bede, for whom letting go of his suicidal wife meant letting go of his own life.  But...

Are we meant to believe in major drug operations being masterminded by bent cops for decades?  Masterminded by one department, being investigated by another, some of whom are also, shall we say, walking the Shadow Line?  Somehow the suicide of our skipper friend the ex-Commander didn't ring true either: he'd given a helpful run-down of events to Gabriel, justifying everything he'd done (it was all for our pensions, don't you know), and surely if Gatehouse had wanted him dead, he'd have been splattered all over his deck long ago, so why kill himself?  And what became of the customs guy Beatty and the cop Foley, last seen as Beatty's punch bag?  The scene had one of the series' few moments of intentional humour when they both stopped the violence to flash their ID cards at a passing patrol car.  Even the familiar upbeat ending of a birth was clouded with predictions of doom by the late Gabriel's boss in a scene redolent of the drowning cat in episode two; both should have been terrifying, but ended up being a bit silly.  "We always look after our own," snarls the Commander as he salutes the newborn in front of his nonplussed mother.  Someone should have told him that (a) Gabriel was no longer one of theirs, even if he ever had been, (b) babies are a bit young to recruit and (c) this wasn't 'Rosemary's Baby' nor 'The Omen'.

We know this has its fans, and maybe we should thank the telly-watching gods that original dramas are made at all, but it could have been much better and it's a shame it isn't.  Mostly it feels like a film student's idea of what a classy thriller should be, with the elements to include ticked off one-by-one: violent murders, warehouses, sex, ailing wives, suitcases of money, guns, bent cops, foreign dealers, at least one psycho, characters speaking cryptic lines etc.  In all, it doesn't add up to much more than the sum of its borrowed parts.  Does Mr Blick understand his plot?  It's a kindness to say he doesn't, because otherwise he just didn't do his job in communicating it very well.  Were we the only lost viewers, we would keep quiet and enrol on a course, but we seem to be two of many.  Perhaps, as Foley says, the only way to get through it is to know nothing?  What have we got for seven hours of our lives, other than being very wary of hatted strangers at the front door?