The Great Fire

Forget what you learned at school.  A bit of plague and Pudding Lane were rather dull anyway, weren't they?  No, ITV have given this particular history lesson a 21st Century make-over.  The baker is hunky Andrew Buchan, married to a comely wench (Rose Leslie) and unwittingly involved in intrigue at the highest levels.  In 1666 this of-course means randy Merry Monarch Charles II (William Houston), his secretly Papist brother James and, err, Charles Dance in full sinister mode and a terrible wig.  Joining him in the hirsute syrup stakes is Daniel Mays as lusty Samuel Pepys, who proves his acting chops with a convincing performance away from his usual Cockney chappies.  Nonetheless, a scene where he plays posh opposite Andrew Buchan playing Cockney, with rather less success, is bizarre.

The Fire itself gets going about 40 minutes into episode 1, which gives rise to a rather unlikely Hollywood action movie sequence where Buchan rescues his daughters from their burning bakery.  Here again things depart from school history, or for that matter fire awareness courses, since the Great Fire is the Slowest Fire Ever To Get Going.  Even our overstuffed sofas can cause fatal conflagrations in a couple of minutes, but the incendiary bundle of naked flame, straw and timber smoulders away and kindles into the sort of flames seen in gas fire ads.

While the fire is thinking about getting going, the drama plods along in soap-like fashion.  Charles has his eye on fresh young meat; a Catholic skulks about the court with a knife and the sort of sly glances that would in reality have caused his head to be parted from his torso in a flash; baker Farriner pleads with Pepys to help him out of debt; Mrs. Pepys overcomes her lack of children by learning to dance.... etc.  With no spoilers necessary in any direction, we can only hope it whips up the pace before viewers start wishing the fire had been even greater, or perhaps hadn't started at all and left the characters all to succumb to the Black Death.

The Honourable Woman

We weren't all that crazy about Blick's previous dramatic outing in 2011, 'The Shadow Line'.  It was one of those intriguing but flawed pieces we wanted to like but....  'The Honourable Woman' has been trumpeted as this year's serious BAFTA contender with a stellar cast including Hollywood's Maggie Gyllenhaal and a storyline encompassing the unending conflict in the middle-east.

So far, this is a huge improvement on its predecessor, which was willfully opaque and overblown.  Not that this is the kind of drama you can snooze through, by any means, and nor does it deal with smaller themes.  Ms. Gyllenhaal plays Nessa Stein, who with her brother Ephraim (Andrew Buchan) directs the legacy of her rich Israeli father, who was killed in front of them when they were children, 29 years previously.  Nessa makes an enemy of a friend when she awards a communications contract for Palestine to a Palestinian.  Unknown to her, the recipient is already dead, having been murdered by killers who made it look like suicide.  Newly created a cross-party peer, Baroness Stein of Tilbury has secrets.  She tells us little more in her voice-over, but we're introduced at a steady pace to her bodyguard, her PA, her brother's family and a Foreign Office operative who knows her secret (Eve Best, from 'Shadow Line').  Another hangover from the other series is slightly rumpled, slightly sinister Stephen Rea as an about-to-be-retired spy who is drawn into the suspicious death, and who will no doubt have to call on his embittered ex (Lindsay Duncan) in the process.  Then there's the Israeli woman who helps Ephraim with his family, and has a past with Nessa in the Gaza Strip.  Whatever happened 8 years ago is catching up to the Steins by the end of the hour, leading Nessa to a tense, nighttime run through Hyde Park with unforeseen consequences.

Part one of eight and we'll keep watching.  Maggie Gyllenhaal is wonderful as Nessa, with a flawless English accent and a performance of poise and gravitas as the self-possessed, super-rich but damaged businesswoman.  A sense of doom hangs around her, evidenced by protests that dog her even to a musical evening and a hounding by a radio presenter.  There's also the poignant music, which is currently balancing between adding atmosphere and instructing the audience that hey, this is tragic stuff, but is in danger of veering towards the latter.  Whatever the secrets are, Blick will no doubt unfold them in unexpected, cleverly-measured ways, and with the superb cast and the script thankfully understated, we're hoping this will be the rich experience it promises to be.

Broadchurch

Another murder-mystery-thriller?  Yep.  This one at least doesn't throw up a gallery of weirdo suspects, like its opposite number on the BBC, and it appears to be moving faster, although it has eight episodes so there's plenty of opportunity to drop the pace.

Hope not, it's a great cast and the inevitable secrets that bubble up are at least not signposted in a size even the short-sighted can easily see.  Nonetheless, at the risk of being descended on by a posse of Tennant fans, we have to say that he didn't really look convincing in the police appeal at the end of the episode.  He doesn't look like any detective we've seen speaking on the television news, and he certainly didn't sound like one, promising the killer that they would be caught no matter what.  That's what's known as setting yourself up to fail, and even an archetypal PC Plod would surely avoid that old chestnut.

Garrow's Law - series 3

The obvious opener is a call to 'Downton' fans to look no further for their Sunday-night costume drama fix.  Thankfully, 'Garrow's Law' is a very different beast.  Tony Marchant is one of our heroes.  Great idea to take a real legal reformer and make a wigs’n’all Sunday-night drama out of it.  The result is watchable, entertaining and intelligently scripted.  Without knowing it was Mr Marchant, though, we would never have guessed that he penned any of it.  It’s solid, without the dash and power of earlier work such as ‘Holding On’.

Ali loves the Georgians, and is outrageously fond of Mr Southouse, but even she can’t avoid keeping a mental tally of market scenes with livestock and baskets, a tsssk of irritation at the very clean nature of the London streets and the eternal opposition of Silvester in the courtroom as though he were the only other brief in the city.  Marchant has admitted conflating real cases, not all of which Garrow was personally involved with, to fit a structure of one-hour episodes.  Like Channel 4’s ‘City of Vice’, it features a mixture of 18^th Century curios – molly-houses and the like – and modern-day preoccupations such as the treatment of sodomy and women’s rights.  So into series 3....

Like ‘Frasier’, it suffers from the unfulfilled longing of earlier series being, umm, fulfilled.  At least we weren’t shown Niles and Daphne having soft-focus, low-light sex.  Not that Mr Buchan and Ms Marshal are unattractive, but we had guessed that Garrow and ‘Lady Sarah’ would be loved-up and loving it by now.  This brings us to another tangle of dramatising a person rather than a fictional character.  Garrow did live in nonconnubial content and eventual marriage with Sarah, who had had a son apparently by Viscount (Arthur) Hill.  However, she had not been married to Hill and was simply Sarah Dore.  The classic romantic triangle was never as fraught as portrayed and in terms of 18^th Century sensibilities the real and the fictional situations would be quite different.

Tonight’s opener otherwise dealt with madness, always dubious in a defence case then as now, and particularly so when the accused shot at the same King George whose madness inspired at least one great play, albeit over two hundred years later.  Garrow begins in adversity, as far from being knighted and celebrated as ever, and as usual is brought to his senses by his solicitor Mr Southouse.  The gallery of villains, from the gluttonous judge to the politically-minded lords, are all present and correct.  They all pale when Rupert Graves appears as Arthur, chewing the scenery as Sarah’s ex and Garrow’s arch-enemy.  The real Arthur’s bones must be rattling in the grave.