Prisoners' Wives

First Footballers and now 'Prisoners' Wives', not to mention 'Mistresses', are the subject of TV dramas.  Women are the focus, but it seems strange in the 21st Century that we haven't been treated to 'Policewomen's Husbands'.


Gender commentary aside, this started with Steve (Jonas Armstrong) telling his young, pregnant wife Gemma (Emma Rigby) that he was her 'dream ticket'.  Predictably, it was all of thirty seconds before armed officers burst in, arrested Steve and turned Gemma's dream into a nightmare.


We were taken into prison as a visitor, with Gemma, and the sense of degradation and humiliation at having scans and body searches was palpable.  Less successful is the character of Gemma herself, whose naivety and ignorance of her husband's life fits the 1950s more than the 2010s.  It doesn't seem to occur to her, for a good while, to ask who the victim was and why the police had charged Steve with murder.  She also seems to have no family or friends of her own, just a creepy and socially inept boss.


In stark contrast is Polly Walker's Francesca, wife to drug-dealer Paul (Iain Glen, villain par excellence).  She's knowing, proud and handy with a stopcock.  A red-hot wife and a Tiger Mother, she's already gone some way to yanking Gemma into the real world, after the heavily-pregnant young woman has hauled herself through the window of her mother-in-law's caravan and discovered the gun her husband swore he didn't own.  Why do criminals always keep weapons, money or drugs in biscuit tins on top of cupboards?


Worth sticking with to see the relationships develop between the women, and presumably deteriorate with their partners in prison.  Plea to production companies everywhere: strong drama is quite good enough to do without the signposting songs, which can safely be left to the likes of 'Holby City'.  Ta.

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'.

We'll Take Manhattan

David who?  Jean who?  For anyone who draws a blank whenever the Sixties are mentioned, Swinging or otherwise, this features a few introductory lines.  Apparently, the NYC shoot of the Shrimp by Bailey in 1962 began youth culture and broke down class barriers.  Err... really?  What about young Harry Webb crooning about being a Young One in 1959?  As far as we know, he wasn't titled at the time.

Well, we can forgive them overstating the case, since without some trumpeting you might wonder what material there was to fill a 90-minute drama.  You might wonder that anyway.  A piece featuring icons is always hamstrung by the obvious, namely the familiar features being unfamiliarly rendered by actors who are often known for other roles.  Thus Amy Pond - oops! - Karen Gillan, imitates the luminous Jean Shrimpton by staring a lot and wearing her headscarves well.  Nice legs, as they say, shame about the face, which though pretty, is not similar to Ms Shrimpton's.  Aneurin Barnard as Bailey sports a full-on, cheeky-chappy oik persona.  Maybe the real Bailey was/is such a character (he and Jean Shrimpton are said to have been consulted), but he comes across here as a young Arthur Daley.

The best performance, and probably the most thankless role, has Helen McCrory as Lady Rendlesham.  According to this, she's so conservative and stuck in the past, it's a wonder she's managed to keep Vogue going at all.  We get no sense of why, in a rapidly-changing world, something like fashion, which would typically drive such change, would be so against trying something new.

Biopics can work, a recent example being the Morecambe and Wise one, 'Eric and Ernie', but it had a good script by Victoria Wood and fine performances, particularly from a little-known Daniel Rigby.  BBC4 has hit on a formula for dramatizing 20th Century people and events, but with something so visual as its subject, Barnard's Mockney, Gillan's bland, rather vacant good looks and a clumsily on-the-nose script distract fatally from the sheer ebullience and style of the original Bailey and Shrimpton collaboration.  For once, all the interesting stuff was going on in front of the camera (the romance being of most interest to the couple themselves) and so the best way of appreciating the shots and their impact is just to look.

Jean Shrimpton in New York, 1962, by David Bailey

*Happy to donate for this shot.  Dolls' Hospital, Shelter or Save the Children.

Birdsong

We have to begin by saying that it isn't Dan's kind of thing and Ali wasn't mad about the novel, nor does Mr. Redmayne look like an obvious choice for Stephen Wraysford.


The first half was a beautifully shot 90 minutes, and effectively contrasted the hell of the trenches with the more exquisite hell of a clandestine love affair before the war.  It didn't do it in an original way, however, and the whole thing was soooo slooooow.  The two narrative hooks of what happened to the romance and does Wraysford survive the trenches are barely enough to keep a tired viewer awake.  There are lots of lingering, longing looks between the two leads and enough softly mournful piano music to signpost tragedy more clearly than the blasted intestines of a dying soldier.  The central love story doesn't come to life, however, either through singular characters or dialogue.


Visually handsome and fans of Faulks's novel will probably love it.  Anyone who loves a weepie with a bit of war thrown in, and not the other way around, will probably love it too, and if it prompts them to pick up the book, well... it's a better read than your average Mills&Boon.  It's just  that for the rest of us it's a bit dull.

W.E.

No, it's not on TV, so no need for panic.  This isn't about to become a film blog, but it's rare that two films on simultaneous release receive such polar-opposite reviews.  We speak of-course of 'The Artist' and 'W.E.'


The former is sublime and deserving of its praise.  Crafted with love and intelligence, it plays with the medium of film and the dubious morality behind Hollywood's dream factory.  It's rare that a film really tries something different and pulls it off with crowd-pleasing aplomb.


So, does 'W.E.' equally deserve the derision it has received from the critics?  To date we haven't seen a single favourable review (Mr Bamigboye in the Daily Mail was more of a sales pitch), so we went with low expectations.  We've seen 'Cassandra's Dream' so we know what a bad film looks like and that's an apt jumping off point.  Would this have attracted such bad notices if the director had been A.N.Other?  Well no... but probably because it wouldn't have been made.  Reading the reviews could make you feel sorry for Madonna, but with her funds, connections and history, it's unlikely she cares much about the negative critical reception.


To start with the positives: Andrea Riseborough is just fine as Wallis, in fact fabulous.  She gets the best deal, screenwise, although it's an undeniable shame that her performance in a better vehicle may well have earned her serious award nominations.  The remainder of the cast are solid in support, and all credit to the casting directors in providing one of the film's saving graces.  It also looks beautiful.  Madonna's background in masterminding several of her own pop videos serves her well in this respect, but just as the film highlights her abilities in wallpaper porn, it also shows up her obsession with appearances and the superficial.


So, what's wrong with it?

• The modern-day storyline set in New York.  It's just weak, doesn't add anything in its supposed parallel to the W.E. thread and is wildly implausible.  Wally is clearly neurotic, her husband is almost a pantomime villain (modelled on Mr. Ritchie, perchance?) and as for the Russian security-guard-cum-intellectual with his spacious apartment, expensive watch and grand-piano-playing abilities... they're "a dime a dozen"?  Come on!  Sotheby's  also apparently have the worst security of any auction house in history.
• The dialogue.    Lots of exposition along the "Welcome to the first day of the auction of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's estate here at Sotheby's" and "but he's my brother!" lines.  The rest was either trite, pretentious or just plain dull.
• Wallis and Edward.  Theirs may be a larger-than-life tale of the 20th Century, able to be pored over from many angles, but it has already been the subject of countless dramas, documentaries, books etc. and they make regular cameo appearances in works about that time ('Any Human Heart' being a recent case in point).  In addition, there just isn't the material to sustain a two-hour film, which is where TV costume dramas have won out.  The minutiae of the relationship translate to a small screen far more convincingly than they do to a bigger picture experience, obviating the need for the uninteresting modern storyline.  The other sticking point about the pair is their unsavoury reputations.  Even Wallis's biographers don't seem to like her much, despite thinking her chic and rather formidable.  This film continually dismisses or downplays the Nazi angle and depicts the late Queen Mother in a particularly nasty light (nothing new, we admit).  Tellingly, what's also omitted is Wallis's well-documented viciousness towards her, nicknaming her 'Cookie' and so on.  Here, she's portrayed only as the victim of the royal family's snobbish rejection of her.  We could go on in the same vein but here is a woman who needs a revisionist history no more or less than the QM, and like her is unable to comment on her own behalf.
• The talked-about Sex Pistols dance sequence.  Just plain odd.  (It didn't work for Sophia Coppola either, Madge, if that's any consolation.)  Like the whole Wally strand, it added sod all, and that goes double for the inclusion of Mohammed Al Fayed.  Are the modern rich, famous and powerful so insecure that they must draw comparisons to the glamorous - if 'pretty vacant' - dead?

So, yes it's their money and they can do what they want with it, and who is anyone to say that anyone else shouldn't branch out and try to create something new?  But... it's galling as ever that clout opens the doors that remain closed to talent.  Worst film ever?  No, but critics can rest easy that they are taken at their word: there were three other people in the cinema with us.

Sherlock *spoilers*

We're wondering whether the BBC had the jitters about this series, or whether Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat had them about the BBC.  Despite the success of series one, series two has featured three key stories, as though they wanted to make all their favourites in case it either wasn't recommissioned, or Benedict Cumberbatch or Martin Freeman moved on.  They can go back and do the other stories - as with Conan Doyle, he didn't stay dead after the Falls - but they're making it hard for themselves to keep up the pace and tension.

We liked the reworking of 'Baskerville' particularly.  It had that sense of gothic paranoia that ran through all the original stories, while elegantly using the paraphernalia of modern life to update both setting and relevance.  Overall, though, the series feels like it was made it for teens, with that breathlesss, over-the-top sense of... 'Dr Who'?  We can't help but wonder if it isn't another facet of dumbing down.  Not that the scripts themselves are crude or witless, or that it is necessarily a bad thing to pander to arrested development in some sense - who wants to grow old anyway? - but the England of Conan Doyle's formidable hero was very different to one in which every third household has single occupancy and Playstation games are among the favourite pastimes for adults in their 40s.  The modern Sherlock, in the current film as well as on the Beeb, is undeniably fun, but at the expense of something quite sinister and adult that marked the original.

Call the Midwife

We've not read Jennifer Worth's memoirs on which the series is based.  No doubt they're an absorbing social document of a specific time and place (late 1950s, London's East End).  As dramatised by the BBC, think 'Casualty' meets 'Casualty 1900', bumps into 'The Royal', takes a detour through 'District Nurse' and ends up being very close neighbours with all manner of heartwarming post-war grubby England tales.

Is that unfair?  Maybe after one episode it's too early to judge, and the performances and production values are all they should be, but... it's all so familiar: the young newcomer, years of tradition, the agonies and ecstasies of childbirth, the nostalgic look back at a bygone age and even the carefully chosen soundtrack.  Granted, it has been made for the 8pm Sunday slot and it doesn't shirk from showing the less salubrious side of life.  So far it's so-so, but for emotional impact and a recreation of the 1950s without the childbirth, see 'Vera Drake'.