Accused - spoilers!

This was the first episode in the second series of the 'Accused' strand.  We weren't too impressed by the first series: it was one of the reasons we started this site.  There were too many cases where characters did illogical things - the 'that would never happen' moments that we hate.

This was far better than most of the earlier episodes.  The story concerned Simon, a slightly wimpy teacher, who only really became himself when dressed as Tracie Tremarco.  As Tracie he met Tony, an outwardly geezerish bloke, who was a very repressed gay man.  Both of the leading actors were terrific - Sean Bean was brilliant as both the sharp-tongued Tracie and the English teacher Simon, and Stephen Graham was also very good as the slightly unsure Tony.  Sean Bean has to be up for a BAFTA for his role.  Not to denigrate his achievements in 'Sharpe' and 'Game of Thrones' to name but two, but this is such a departure from those characters and yet after a minute or two we were rooting for Simon/Tracie.  It's probably the best performance he's ever given.

However we did have a few issues with the story.

• Was it likely that Tracie would get dolled up to go out and sit in a confrontational boozer, given that there were gay clubs in the town?  If (s)he wanted to find a nominally straight man, wouldn't she be better off on the internet?

• Was it likely that Tony wouldn't recognise Tracie as Simon when they were in the same pub, given they'd slept together?  Albeit while drunk, as far as Simon was concerned.

• Was it possible that the judge would let Simon appear as Tracie in court (& who bought the new clothes?  The ones he'd been wearing when arrested would have been ruined.)

We don't know enough to comment on Tracy's 'gentleman caller' romantic life, but that seemed a bit TWNH too.

Overall though, we forgave these bits because the performances and the characters were so good.  

One final point about the format.  There are two similar single drama threads on the BBC, this and The Street.  This could probably have worked in both (and in fact Stephen Graham had been a reluctant boyfriend in The Street last year).  Let's hope that they don't give us stories that have a murder shoe-horned in, to make it into the 'Accused' slot.

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.

The Hollow Crown

The Extremely Light Crown would be a more fitting title.  From the way it's picked up one-handed, rolled around and generally bandied about, it must be made of sprayed aluminium.  Great for the actors, but not so wonderful for the kings, we would think, especially not Richard, whose girlish vanity undid him in the first of these Shakespearean history play adaptations.

We've seen them all before, but are not scholars of the texts, so the fact that they've been chopped up and about for the screen didn't bother us in the way it might, conceivably, to purists.  To us, they were outstanding.  The visuals were gorgeous, from lighting and costume to the choice of interior and exterior locations (though wouldn't the castles have been a bit less bare?).  Actors must have been fighting each other as fiercely as they do onscreen to be cast.  Accusations that the BBC is behind the times can be quashed here and now: yes, this is what they do best, but they have taken this seriously enough to trounce their own previous productions of these plays.  They are as freed from the stage as it's possible for Shakespeare to be, and the text rings out as clearly as the lyrical, metred lines allow.

Fabulous.

Blackout - spoilers

In the first of a three-part drama, Daniel Demoys (Christopher Eccleston) is an alcoholic, sex-addicted councillor of an unnamed city where it's always raining.  City Hall is some vast monolithic nightmare.  His daughter dances at a school performance with smudge-dark eyes and they live in a house that even Dracula might want to brighten up a bit.  You'd be forgiven for thinking this was Gotham City and that Eccleston might be wavering between donning a bat mask or a too-large painted grin.

He meets a businessman in a dark alley, at night, in the eternal rain, and it's obvious he's bent as the proverbial nine-bob.  They argue, there's violence.  Cut to Daniel waking up to find out his wife has reached the end of her patience, his kids are frightened of him and the businessman he fought with is comatose in a hospital.  He goes to his estranged sisters, who happens to be a solicitor, for help.  She's a crusader, but even she doesn't want to know what her brother's been up to.  Until, that is, he takes a bullet for a young black man who's her client, and a witness in a controversial trial.  She enlists a political fixer who pushes Daniel to stand for the mayoral elections.  Daniel says no, no again, then yes, warning his potential voters that he's a bad boy.  As if to prove it, the comatose businessman dies, leaving a daughter who thinks Daniel is a hero for his very public act of good.  The loose thread who could undo him, however, is really the prostitute he'd had in the back of a downmarket bar, who witnessed the fight with the businessman and was caught on cctv running away.  She has an ex still obsessed with her who has a career as... you've guessed it, a cop.

Could turn out to be wonderful, but probably won't.  (What's the betting that the prostitute gets killed and it could be Daniel or the ex?)  Nonetheless, we'll be tuning in for the second episode, for the performances if nothing else.  Olivia Cooke as Daniel's teenaged daughter is particularly affecting.  It's just a shame that they have to make a fairly TWNH storyline even less believable by having Daniel recover from a serious shooting in no time flat, to the point where he's wandering around the hospital - in ITU of all places - lying on his injured side and allowing his wife to lean on his injured shoulder.  Maybe he is a superhero/supervillain after all.

Line of Duty

Having made no effort to catch Jed Mercurio’s previous antiseptic offerings ‘Bodies’ and ‘Cardiac Arrest’, we came to this with only the hope of something less self-conscious than ‘The Shadow Line’ and less run-of-the-mill than almost every other cop show.

The first of five episodes set up some nice ambiguities.  If none of the characters are hugely sympathetic, so far, then they’re not outright bad-guy villains either, just people making choices according to circumstance.  Wonderful Lennie James is DCI Tony Gates, whose soaring crime clear-up rate brings him under suspicion of cherry-picking easy-win cases.  DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston), whose moral compass points so truly to north he probably can’t sit down, is assigned to Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) to investigate.  DC Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) meanwhile has succeeded in joining Gates’s team undercover.  Whether guilty or innocent of the above, Gates is compromised: he has a wife (Kate Ashfield) and children, as well as a mistress (Gina McKee) who has dragged him into covering up her involvement in a hit-and-run that may have been deliberate.

Nothing to dislike so far.  (Neil Morrissey as a sleazy cop may just be inspired casting.)  The style is background to the script and action, for once, and it’s a promising premise to look at the system of modern policing as something that allows or even encourages foul play.

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.

Mad Men Series 5 - some spoilers

Mad Men - five series down, two to go.  Instead of reviewing storylines, we thought it was probably easier to see how each of the characters had developed over the course of this series.  

Don - As the lynchpin of the show Don has had a good series.  Free from Betty, he's been reasonably happy with - aka faithful to - Megan, and it's all been pretty much believable.  The only negatives are the occasional visions, which seem to be out of sync with the more-or-less natural tone of the rest of the show.  Less of those please!

Roger - Also a good series.  As a functioning alcoholic (with seemingly everlasting finances) we can buy him experimenting with LSD and realising his latest marriage was a leap in the dark that hasn't worked out.

Bert - Bert hasn't appeared much, but he's also been true to his character.   He told Don to 'get back to work' after lots of Megan distractions, and in fact he'd have done that earlier.

Lane - The series has a habit of making the male characters sleazy if it doesn't know what to do with them.  (See below!)  This series we got Sleazy Lane at the beginning, but then better storylines developed.  Halfway through we felt sorry for Jared Harris, arguably the best actor in the show, getting such a poor deal, but he had some great scenes later on.  RIP.

Pete - Sleazy Pete! Pete is a great character, and very believable as a young, thrusting ad man, but the show doesn't really know what do do with him outside work.  Hence Sleazy Pete.

Peggy - Finally she got another job.  As with Pete, they really don't know what to do with Peggy outside (& maybe inside) the office.  Ali has had a gripe with this since MM began.  Why should the nominally go-ahead character have such uninspiring stories?  Because most of the writers are male and don't know what to do with her, or understand her?  Could Peggy either go or have some kind of proper, full series story arc?

Megan - It (kind of) came good in the end, but Megan has the potential to turn into another Betty dramatically, in that she'll drag the show down whenever she appears.

Joan - We wondered midway through, but Joan ended up with the sort of full series story arc that Peggy needs.  She also arguably had the best single episode story too (the pitch) and we'd put money on her becoming an even more important character in the remaining series.

Fabulous cast, strong and intelligent writing.  Bring on Series 6!