Life in Squares

We are probably not the best judges of this 3-part offering from BBC2, since Dan is reluctant to watch anything that neither makes him laugh nor worry in any way and Ali tends to feel suicidal even thinking about Virginia Woolf.  But we tried.

'Life in Squares' is a biopic about the bohemian lives of the so-called Bloomsbury Set, a  group of early 20th Century artists and writers whose illustrious members included the above-mentioned author of 'Orlando' et al (here played by Lydia Leonard), her sister Vanessa Bell (Phoebe Fox) and husband Clive (Sam Hoare), Lytton Strachey (Ed Birch), John Maynard Keynes (Edmund Kinglsey) and EM Forster.  No doubt they were a lively lot, but this managed to be mannered and turgid despite the numerous sex scenes with various combinations of lovers.  Part of the problem, we suppose, is that it represents a fast set from a much slower age.  What would have shocked and/or excited their contemporaries in pre-WWI England is mundane a century later, and other than a rather staid aunt (Eleanor Bron) there is no real context to show what the friends were rebelling against.  Corsets and marriage were the rather heavy-handed symbols of conformity that the Stephen sisters rejected, at least in part, and the script was hampered by references to everyone by name and their relationship to everyone else, so that we wouldn't confuse two men with, for example, similar moustaches.

By the end of the hour we left the Bells exploring an open marriage and the promiscuous Duncan Grant (James Norton) switching his affections from Strachey to Keynes, strangely interspersed with a scene of the older set (still painting and chatting in a garden) in the 1930s.  It painted a picture of gilded and indulgent types who daubed everything in sight in lurid colours, yet still managed to be miserable.  We think assertions that this will cause a flood of tourists in Bloomsbury a la Poldark in Cornwall are premature.

The Last Weekend

It's something of a handicap when your main characters are MAMCBs - middle-aged, middle-class bores.  OK, Ollie and Daisy are upper-middle (Rupert PJ and Genevieve O'Reilly) and Ian and Em (Shaun Evans and Claire Keelan) are teachers who drive a battered little car and are less RP, but it's a minor distinction.  This is basically a midlife crisis-cum-keeping up with the Jones's drama, and the 'psychological thriller' element seems so far to be wholly down to two immature and fairly unpleasant men who pretend they are friends.

Ian narrates straight to camera from long after the events of the August Bank Holiday, and is untrustworthy from the start.  Unreliable narrators can be a treat, but there's a fine line: too obviously unreliable from the start and you lose the audience.  Ian comes across as a scally in an anorak, who fantasises about his 'friend's wife before sleeping with his own wife.  Em is in fact the only vaguely sympathetic character so far, but even she has been saddled with the tired old cliche of desperately wanting a baby.  We're watching to see who ends up in the coffin, hoping it might possibly be all the main cast.

Silk

Best described as 'solid'.  One of those not-great-not-terrible legal dramas with a better cast than it deserves.  Really don't understand the praise this has garnered, although the second series which finishes tonight has been better than the first.  The omission of the irritating pupils was a good move, ditto the single-career-woman-in-mid-life-pregnancy story.


More moral dilemmas with slightly less predictable turnouts and this would be a cut above.  And perhaps less of the insufferable Clive's bedroom antics.

Whitechapel

As cop shows go, this is about as absurd as it gets.  It's a sort of television version of those old true-crime weeklies for obsessives.  Each case DI Chandler investigates with his burly and nerdy sidekicks turns out to be deranged copy-cat killers, who just happen to fixate on notorious crimes and criminals of the past.  So far we've had Jack the Ripper and the Krays.  Now we have the early 19th Century Ratcliff Highway murders.  It would be shorter to list the 'That Would Happens' than the TWNH moments, but the tone is most curious thing, veering between serious and rather bloody killing and tongue-in-cheek humour.  Could we take it seriously if we tried?

Trashy, pulpy, guilty-pleasure fun, but any serious devotee of cop shows should hook up with Sarah Lund, and anyone with a yen for murdered linen drapers should try crime's Grand Dame, PD James' book 'The Maul and the Pear Tree'.

Spooks *spoilers*

We try, but we haven’t the time or the stamina to watch everything, nor to stick to things that no longer surprise and/or please.  Ali was the last to leave, in this case, but she didn’t even see out Adam’s tenure, so this was a trip down memory lane purely for the love of the blog.

‘Spooks’ began in the wake of 9/11 as an exciting, plot-driven series for a whole new, paranoid world.  MI5 had never looked so good nor had it had so many eager recruits.  The writing was strong, the humour was weak, and the latter was what wore us out.  Just how many hours of po-faced tension can one stand?  Browsing the internet for a crash course in what we’d missed, we’ve sort of plugged the gaps: Ros, Jo, Lucas and the ever-rising star Ruth.  Harry still frowning on proceedings.  All set for the last ever series.


Deja vu is a double-edged sword.  Harry!  Ruth!  Offices with acres of glass and screens!  We could go on.  In fact, we can't resist it: Russians!  CIA chiefs!  Fat-cat diplomats!  Lines like, "Now is the time to make our move"!  Explosions!  And all in the first twenty minutes.  It's like eating a tub of what used to be your favourite ice-cream and remembering that you stopped eating it because the last time it made you sick.


Which isn't to deny that what 'Spooks' does, it does well.  It's well-paced, slick and involving.  The rest of the cast could be anyone.  Simon Russell Beale (forever Powell's Widmerpool), Lara Pulver, Max Brown et al have taken up the mantles of Robert Glenister, Tim McInnerny, Keeley Hawes, Hermione Norris, Matthew Macfadyen, David Oyelowo, Rupert Penry Jones and Richard Armitage.  The list reads like several seasons of impressive rep casts at Stratford, playing the same parts.  After nine previous series, there would have to be bona fide vampires and aliens to surprise the audience, so finality is probably a good move.  (As an irregular viewer, Ali was still able to predict Erin's motherhood and Harry's fatherhood.)


Meanwhile... Harry goes into a library - not just any old library, an old-fashioned romantic one (the London Library?).  He's followed by at least two people and he knows it.  He pulls a folded note from the spine of a book.  The ragged handwriting reads, "We have to meet.  Tourmaline is in danger.  Sharecropper."  It's the sort of spy caper to have you wriggling on your cushions and chewing the wasabi popcorn.  And never mind those elegant little Bond shooters, these guns are huge.   What's not to love?