Mrs. Biggs

Britain in 1957 was so unutterably grim that dowdy bullion office worker Charmian Powell (Sheridan Smith) falls for cheeky chappy Ronnie Biggs (Daniel Mays) after a brief encounter on a train.  She learns he's a convicted criminal, works as a carpenter and lives with another woman, but still agrees to steal from her employer and run away with him.  He hits her, but still she stays.  Her dad is a bully and a bore, but the words 'frying pan' and 'fire' spring to mind.

The performances are as good as expected and the writing by Jeff Pope is competent enough but... an 80-minute episode slipped by before we even got to the so-called Great Train Robbery, and there are another four episodes, presumably of 50 minutes, to go.  We already know what happened, but do we care?  They weren't Robin Hoods, just thieves; not folk heroes, just criminals.  The drama doesn't appear to have anything interesting to say, probably because there's nothing more to be said.

A Mother's Son

What do you do if your son's schoolmate is found killed and you find a pair of stained trainers under his bed?  Assume he's the killer while saying nothing at all about it, according to the latest offering from ITV.  Only in soapland are things this absurd.  "Did you do the washing?" asks mum Rosie (Hermione Norris) in a knowing way, before scouring the web and buying hydrogen peroxide to see if it fizzed when in contact with the suspect trainers.  The boy, Jamie (Alexander Arnold) has been acting strangely, moping about, possibly peeping at his mum's boyfriend's daughter Jess (Antonia Clarke) in the shower and downloading dodgy videos onto his laptop.  And there we were thinking that was typical behaviour for a teenage boy....

It's hard not to think that a top calibre cast (Martin Clunes as Rosie's boyfriend Ben and Jake Davies as his son Rob add to the good work here) could do so much more with a script centred around how a family copes with juvenile violence and criminality than they can with a ridiculously drawn-out 'did he/didn't he' scenario.

Mum eventually confides in her ex-husband, Jamie's natural father David (Paul McGann), but not before we'd shouted ourselves hoarse: "Just ASK him, you daft woman!"  Ex-hubby asks why she hasn't mentioned it to their son.  She says he's too fragile after the divorce to handle being suspected.  Because, obviously, the only way to broach the subject would be to say: "Did you kill that girl?!"  No wonder DC Upton (Nicola Walker) and the victim's mother Kay (Annabelle Apsion) look dazed and confused.

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.

Murder

Good things can come in small packages.  The formulaic procedural may suffer from being squashed into an hour or less, but this was taut, spare and intense.  No cops deliberating over paper-cupped coffee and donuts; no question of suicide or accidental death and no strangers lurking in the shadows.  Instead, two suspects, one of whom is the victim's sister, and a mere handful of others involved in the case, talk directly to camera from Day 1 to Day 115 of a murder inquiry and trial, and finally we are taken back to Day 0.

There are enough revelations about the characters and events in question to make this something like viewing the heavily-edited highlights of police interviews and court proceedings.  Lines and images are repeated to almost poetic effect.  The sad truth is something the viewer is privileged to learn while the jury, the police and the public are not.  So, far from being a TWNH, it's very much like real cases, where the truth evades and only ambiguities, complex emotions and chaotic lives remain.

Joe Dempsie and Karla Crome should be headed for BAFTAs.  Could we not only see more of them, but also more of these risk-taking dramas please?  BBC2 clearly considered it a risk; with no established names to promote it they puffed it as '... from the director of 'The Killing''.  No disrespect to Birger Larsen, whose work on both this and the Danish series is wonderful, but Robert Jones's script and all the performances were good enough to stand out without a peg.  We'd watch something of this standard with only untried talent attached: isn't that what commissioners are paid for?

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.

Parade's End

Ford Madox Ford's is a big tome and deserves a five-hour adaptation, with a good script and the best actors.  This is about as good on all counts as money can buy, and echoes the successful adaptation of Waugh's 'Sword of Honour', similarly about a decent man in an unhappy marriage who goes to war.

The only TWNH was that a member of the audience would fall asleep, but we're sorry to say that one of us did.  Why?  Well the sex was boring, as Sylvia (Rebecca Hall redefines 'shallow' in a great performance) would say.  The unpardonable lapse, though, was during a set-piece scene of a lunch.  It looked beautiful, and featured wonderful actors delivering witty lines impeccably, but overall it was underwhelming and slightly self-conscious.  No doubt things will improve when we reach the Great War (unlike 'Downton Abbey', but this is in a different league altogether) and it isn't as though it lacks pace, but the episode was concerned only with repressive, class-ridden pre-WWI society and felt very much like a light drawing-room comedy.  All the better to contrast with the grim conflict approaching and the post-war disillusion, but that is where the episodic structure reveals its flaws.

Those with more patience and energy, and fans of drawing-room comedies, will enjoy it all.

Best of Men and Bert & Dickie

  



Bert and Dickie plus oars

Ludwig and Wynn plus hospital equipment







Comparisons are inevitable.  Two 90-minute Beeb dramas about the last time London hosted the games, sorry - The Games, one focused on the Olympics double sculls and one on the birth of the Paralympics at Stoke Mandeville hospital.  In tone, not much else differed, since they were both solidly-scripted and well cast biopics, essentially.  Which isn't to say that we quite managed to forget Mr Smith tripping round the universe in the tardis, nor Mr Brydon tripping round the UK with Mr Coogan.  That this didn't detract from viewing pleasure was thanks to the other cast members, particularly Sam Hoare, Douglas Hodge and Anastasia Hille in 'Bert and Dickie' and Eddie Marsan and George MacKay in 'Best of Men'.

Of the two, though, the latter, shown last night *, had the bigger story to tell, with German-Jewish refugee Ludwig Guttmann pioneering a change in medical attitudes towards patients with spinal injuries in WWII.  Guttmann, as played by Eddie Marsan, is one of the lesser-known heroes of the 20th Century, a man who kept his principles while his country abandoned them, and relocated to a country fighting for freedom (even if rubber bedpans were just as scarce).  The journeys of his patients as they regained their independence, courage and zest for life were perhaps no more unpredictable than that of Bushnell and Burnell as they battled to form a team and win gold, but both were well told and positive, both for aspiring Olympian and Paralympian superstars and mere mortals who play and watch sport... on TV.

* coincidentally within two days of the death of Lord Alf Morris, whose campaign for disability legislation changed the lives of millions.