War and Peace

Even a six-hour adaptation isn't going to do justice to Tolstoy's doorstopper.  It is, after all, the sort of book you could take to a desert island and still be ploughing through when the rescue ship hove into view.  Nonetheless the Beeb have gamely taken it on, and crammed in every Brit actor of note they can find, with American star Paul Dano as Pierre.  Rather confusingly, this includes a couple of the cast of 'Dickensian'.  So for the next five weeks we'll have to extrapolate Stephen Rea's Inspector Bucket from a devious Russian aristocrat and Tuppence Middleton's innocent Amelia Havisham from said Russian aristocrat's shallow daughter, though she looks rather more like Messalina than Helene here.

It's visually gorgeous (though we're not sure about one-shoulder dresses in a high society salon), and is shaping up to be perfect Sunday-night escapism.  Purist fans of the novel should probably steer clear though.

Good Cop

This new BBC1 prime-time four-parter had what is now standard lurid trailer treatment, with quick cuts of violence, anger, despair and love.  We tend to watch things despite trailers these days, not because of them, since similar ad offerings can result in anything from great (Line of Duty) to unwatchable (we'll be circumspect) tv.

The good cop of the title is John Paul Rocksavage (Warren Brown), who looks after his dad but once upon a time wasn't a great boyfriend to Cass (Aisling Loftus).  It opens with his having literal blood on his hands and in possession of a gun, and we then revisit his last eighteen hours.  Unsurprisingly he's had the Mother of all bad days.  By the closing credits, his partner and a lowlife called Noel Finch (the currently ubiquitous Stephen Graham) are both dead and he faces a three-way cat and mouse game with vicious criminals and DCI Costello (Mark Womack).

Gripping yes, but within the bounds of TWH?  We're not so sure.  The villains in question - sneering, brutal and downright nasty, so no grey areas here - appear being rowdy and offensive to a waitress in a restaurant, and then causing a disturbance in a rundown house complete with prostitutes.  Their motivation for ambushing and beating a policeman to death isn't clear, and as a criminal you would surely have one?  These are not teenagers high on drugs, and anyone more sober or experienced would be unlikely to target a uniformed officer, knowing that the penalty would be severe.  Then there are the coincidences: Rocksavage's three encounters with Finch and co. and his finding the bereaved mother he'd been called to earlier at the hospital in a city the size of Liverpool are just a little far-fetched.  Maybe there's some murky design going on here, and this one episode is good enough to keep the viewer watching until all is made clear, but hopefully there will be no more unlikely scenarios.  Wouldn't the scene of crime be manned day and night, for example?  It enables a crucial plot point and there's a throwaway line later about there 'not being a spare uniform' to secure the scene, but it felt like a TWNH nevertheless.

We hope the remainder of the series entertains, and asks pertinent questions about the nature of justice today, either of which requires believable characters in believable situations.

Public Enemies - spoilers

Paula Radnor probably doesn’t win ‘Probation Officer of the Year’.  Having let one of her clients go AWOL, then given him a second chance and thereby allowed him to murder someone, she’s now given a second chance to newly-released, volatile Eddie, convicted of murdering his girlfriend ten years previously.  Quite why she was reinstated at all isn’t clear, unless “you can’t be with them 24/7” is any sort of an accepted justification.  Anna Friel does harried and emotional quite well (‘Without You’) but Daniel Mays steals the acting honours as Eddie, believably portraying the transition from euphoria at being freed to vulnerability and hurt as he comes to terms with the damage a lost decade has done to him and to those around him.  You could argue that Mr Mays is typecast – he must have played every nuance of Cockney/Essex/Thames Estuary Geezer by now – but he’s also very good at it.

The plot twist at the end of episode one takes us in a new and not entirely welcome direction: Eddie claims he’s innocent.  Does Paula believe him?  Do we?  There have been a couple of hints that it could be one of his former friends (would a GP have on his list the father of the victim as well as the murderer, who happens to be an old friend?).  It will keep us watching, but we would have done that anyway, and we would have rooted for Eddie in trying to make a go of his life in the shadow of the crime he committed and the punishment he received.  Too soon to say, but here’s hoping Tony Marchant hasn’t opted out of a tough choice in order to avoid controversy.

***

We are sad to say that Episode Two has strayed far into TWNH territory.  It was fine not to focus on the murder if the drama was about what happens to an ex-prisoner.  Having turned it into a did-he-or-didn’t-he story, the holes become too big to ignore.  Marchant keeps the audience guessing about who the murderer is, pointing first at one friend and then another, but it’s unclear why the police investigation at the time didn’t uncover the girl’s promiscuity, or any DNA evidence pointing to anyone else.  All we’ve been told is that she was strangled, which is usually a pretty hands-on process?

It may seem churlish to fault a drama which is (a) original and (b) features fine performances but there were several forced, false moments in last night’s hour: would Paula really back Eddie into a corner by forcing him out of a job?  Don’t they run anger management courses in the early evenings, at lunchtimes or weekends?  (We assume some people with anger issues hold down jobs.  In fact – no offence to colleagues - we know they do.)  Why didn’t she just send him straight back to prison, in that case?  The scene which culminates in him losing control in the hostel was also contrived – she just happened to be there when he listed all the ways in which she made him angry?  And wouldn’t the inevitable outcome of his rage both at the hostel and against Doctor Somers (Joe Armstrong) result in his going back inside?  Paula’s attempts to uncover a sound basis for her instinctive belief in him, by talking to his trial solicitor, Trevor Brotherton (Nicholas Gleaves), and to the murderer she’d previously left free to murder again, were unconvincing.  Nothing in the solicitor’s words or demeanour led us to think that he believed Eddie innocent, and surely she knew better than to believe Eddie just because Philip Pointer (Glen Davies) looked nasty?

Eddie’s relationship with Jayd (Aisling Loftus) was better, and believable, even if the bumper car and seaside scenes were unoriginal.

We are hoping that the final episode won’t reveal some absurd denouement, but the central plot is now very much more about innocence or guilt than it is about what life is or can be like for someone who has served their sentence for a serious crime.  Anna Friel has resumed major aspects of her role in the recent ITV drama ‘Without You’, running around trying to prove someone’s innocence without succumbing to the doubts of everyone around her.  Same tears, same face shapes....  Wouldn’t this have been better as a story of the parallel struggles and diverging lives of two ex-cons assuming, as the producers seem to, that a relatively simple story isn’t enough?

**

The classic cliche wasn't even avoided, a too-close relationship between probation officer and released prisoner.  Not a great advert for the probation service in general.  Get their expert view at http://probationmatters.blogspot.com/2012/01/public-enemies.html  Not only is it highly unlikely that Eddie would have been released to the same area but, we think, it's equally unlikely that his friends, sister and victim's family would have remained there for the last decade, with all their bad memories.

So after all the red herrings, it was the dad.  "Can't help you, son," he says to Eddie, "I have to believe it's you."  Obviously bonkers.  That just leaves Eddie with a serious anger management problem and a shifty bunch of friends.  Oh and his probation officer who's in love with him.  Nobody mention Jayd, whoever she was, or poor Will (Barnaby Kay), but hey, he didn't manage his anger either, did he?