Dylan Thomas: a poet in New York

Tom Hollander is a genius.  He bears no more than a passing resemblance to poet Dylan Thomas, and to most viewers is more familiar in a dog collar as 'Rev', but within fifteen minutes is utterly convincing and, more, sympathetic as the gifted, spoiled, self-pitying alcoholic.  This takes his Big Apple trip in 1953 which proves to be his last, and interweaves just enough of his prime moments in life to give a real sense of the intense feelings that drove him to sublime heights of verse and terrible lows at the bottom of several bottles.  When it comes to drink and women, he just can't seem to help himself, and his fame and charm give him abundant access to both, much to the anger of his wife in Laugharne, Caitlin, and his mistress in New York.  This recreates early '50s NY on probably a fraction of 'Mad Men's budget and while some of the accents stray eastwards of the Atlantic and even of Wales, this remains a beguiling 80 minutes, and a fitting tribute to a flawed, fabulously gifted man who died at only 39.

From There to Here

Daniel (Philip Glenister) tries to reconcile his wayward brother Robbo (Steven Mackintosh) with their dad Samuel (Bernard Hill) over a drink in a central Mancunian pub.  Unfortunately for him, the truce fails and they are sitting feet away from the IRA bomb on the day it exploded in 1996.  Nobody dies, of-course, but it proves a catalyst in all their lives.  Before the end of the episode (one of three) Sam has had a stroke, Robbo has come up with not one but two insane plans to clear his debt and Daniel has begun an affair with the pub cleaner, whom he rescued from the wreckage.

This has nice moments but is mostly either predictable or unbelievable.  The use of northern staples the Stone Roses and the Smiths on the soundtrack is lazy and responsible Daniel's sudden need to escape from his close (adoptive) family into the arms of a stranger just doesn't ring true.  So far, this is largely a waste of a good cast, in-particularly Steven Mackintosh, who turns in an ill-advised imitation of the drug dealer in 'Withnail & I'.  If you like Madchester, and these are typical residents, you may like it a little less after watching this.

Quirke

John Banville's crime series hero could have been written for the lugubrious features of Gabriel Byrne.  We're in familiar territory, but noir with a capital N and handsomely mounted.  50s Dublin and 50s Boston probably never looked this good but who cares when it's 90 minutes of pure escapism and Byrne's craggy features?

Quirke is a man of mystery and lots of alcohol.  In common with his fellow crime protagonists he has no discernible first name, comes from shady origins and has suffered loss and loneliness.  He has enough of the Marlowesque about him to enliven proceedings, however, and this first of three feature-length tales starts very close to home, with Quirke's complicated family.  He finds his adoptive brother in his path lab late one night, forging a death certificate of a young woman, and this leads to a chain of violence and disclosure of old family secrets involving hidden identities and the brutal treatment of young, pregnant women.  From these basic ingredients, Banville's story weaves a mesmerising spell.  If the next two are as good as this, Quirke must be here to stay.

The Duchess of Malfi

As a piece of televised theatre this works far better than it ought to, considering the production is filmed in the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe in candlelight.  Gemma Arterton's Duchess perhaps lacks the gravitas of previous incumbents of the role, but is as young and vivacious as her character was written and the humour in the earlier acts is to the fore.

Webster's play is one of the best Jacobean revenge tragedies - which means one of the bloodiest - and encompasses passion, incest, madness and murderous violence.  The language is easier than Shakespeare for a 21st Century audience to understand and the theme of women's oppression as valid now as it was then.  Described as 'a theatrical event', it brings the play alive for a far wider audience than could cram into the theatre on the South Bank, and will no doubt be a good secondary experience of theatre for pupils stuyding for GCSEs and A-Levels.  Is it as good an experience as being in a theatre and seeing it live?  No, and could never be, but it's a brave attempt to recreate the original conditions for the audience, and has made us want to visit the Playhouse.

Hinterland

Airing in the 'foreign drama' slot at 9pm on BBC4 is new bilingual Welsh crime drama 'Hinterland'.  It seems we're so hungry for vicarious crimes which are always solved (if not prosecuted) that we want endless variations; your techs can be Roman, Victorian or mid-20th Century; based in Glasgow, Connemara, Shetland or now... Aberystwyth.  This latest offering has the same sea'n'sky scenery, lowering clouds and sleazy seafronts that lend tales of gore some dramatic background, and it also has brooding lead Richard Harrington as Menzies, posted somewhat unwillingly, it's hinted, to an unexciting beat which quickly proves him wrong, yielding a tale of old tragedies and fresh killings.

It's certainly moody and atmospheric, but like many in the genre, the plotline seems to come second.  Our hero leaps around Devil's Bridge in the pouring rain chasing after a corpse, happening to spot a tiny necklace and crucifix pendant (what else) on a rocky ledge.  In the rain?  He must have x-ray vision and amazing grips on his shoes (we have been, we have slipped, and we stuck to the paths).  His team's investigation - oh yes and there's a nerdy junior, two squabbling women and a remote boss, while we're on the subject: a hardly unfamiliar combination - leads to a failing hotel which was once a children's home.  The top floor hasn't yet been renovated, and probably never will be, but while it may be empty and eerie, how likely is it that there would be case files, furniture, toys and even old cine-film of the former occupants?  This echoes a recent episode of 'Endeavour' which was also gloriously spooky, but had an unlikely attic of a girl's school still stuffed full of family relics from a century earlier.

The terrible revelations in the news over recent years about institutional abuse in children's care homes has inspired a number of crime dramas, to the point where it's already becoming a cliche, and while this was a sad tale, there were early clues to the culprit, who had a baby nobody saw or heard and a neat home.  There was also a schizophrenic old woman who had run the children's home in a sadistic manner (all in the name of Almighty G) but loved at least one boy as a son.

Not bad but not brilliant either.

Happy Valley

The title is an ironic nickname for a northern town where things are anything but.  Cop Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) leads the kind of life that lesser mortals would have ended swiftly with whatever came to hand.  Now her work life threatens to butt head-on with her personal life and things are looking bleaker than ever.

Sally Wainwright's recent 'Last Tango in Halifax' was a critical and ratings success, with astute scripts and performances from a collegiate and superior cast.  Gentle humour sprinkled a strong tale of rekindled love and family relationships that was sometimes very dark indeed, but the overall light and shade, affecting characters viewers cared about, made it a watch-or-record must.  Therein lies the first difference from her new series.  Sarah Lancashire plays hangdog so well she can darken any room in which she appears on screen, which is quite an ask for a whole hour.  Here, she even looks joyless while having furtive sex with her ex-husband (Derek Riddell).

The other main claimant on our sympathies is Kevin Weatherill (Steve Pemberton) as a basically decent everyman whose moment of explosive anger lands him in deep, very dark waters.  There's a problem for us with Kevin, though, because his anger is directed at his boss Gallagher (George Costigan) for not giving him a payrise... to pay for his kids to go to public school.  He has a disabled wife, so maybe we should praise him for his honesty when he could have played on sympathy for her, but it's hard to feel for someone who plans to extort money via kidnapping an only child, just so his offspring can avoid a state education.   It's not the moral grey areas that are the main problem - they're what made 'Breaking Bad' so compelling after all - but the uneven tone.  There's something whimsical about Kevin, and about Catherine when she spills her life story to a stoned teenager on a housing estate (who may be about to unwittingly set himself on fire) but a story involving rape, suicide, kidnapping, drug deals and delinquency sits oddly with this kind of humour.

It's probably too early to judge the Valley, and it may settle into its stride as it moves forward.  This was very much a set-up episode where the main action happened in the last fifteen minutes.  We'll stick around for next week's, which needs nonetheless to offer more than this one has promised.

Prey

Cop Marcus Farrow (John Simm) is on the run, wrongly accused of killing his estranged wife Abi and younger son Max.  We’re back in well-trodden man-on-run territory here with all the TWNHs usual to the genre.  It starts off promisingly enough, with Simm regaining consciousness having landed upside-down in a road accident and escaping custody.  Flash back to 3 days earlier, and he and Heather Peace are very good as the parted couple feeling their way through post-relationship arrangements with very different feelings.  Reliable Craig Parkinson also turns up as Sean Devlin, an (initially) sympathetic fellow cop and friend of Marcus.  When Marcus turns up at his family home to find Abi stabbed and dying, however, things spiral out of control in more ways than one.

First, we are expected to believe that Marcus, a trained policeman, fails to call an ambulance for his fatally-wounded wife, having left his mobile phone in the car.  He later blames shock, which presumably also blocks out his memory of having a landline.  Shock must also account for his lack of concern for his two young sons, since he staggers to a ditch at the bottom of the garden and wallows in it, rather than wondering whether his children are ok and whether his wife’s killer might still be in the house.

Then there is the unsympathetic cop Reinhardt (Rosie Cavaliero), stalking her ex-partner’s new family and immediately hostile to Marcus when he is brought into the station.  Forget sympathy for a colleague, or questioning him as a witness first and foremost; forget good-cop, bad-cop even, since Benedict Wong as her colleague remains largely silent; no, Reinhardt is frozen-faced and interrogates Marcus as though he is the culprit, because there was no sign of a break-in and he was covered in blood.  The fact that he had keys to the house, that the victim could have let in the killer and that he tried to save his bleeding wife and so was obviously bloodied don’t seem to figure in Reinhardt’s logic.  She informs Marcus that his younger son was also found dead in the house, but that his elder son is safe with grandparents, but no explanation is given beyond this and no questions are asked.

This leads us to the escape, and more disbelief as a trained driver transporting prisoners is distracted by the ruckus between Marcus and another man in custody and manages to cause a spectacular crash.  Having escaped, with a biro embedded in his shoulder (no, we don’t believe it would be strong enough either), Marcus embarks on a fairly woolly quest to find the man he thinks is responsible for the killings (an informant on an old case who made an unsubtle threat to his family in a pub).  Hereby hangs another TWNH, since the prisoner in the van and another man in the above-mentioned pub have already heard of Marcus as ‘that cop who killed his own kid’.  So the crime was committed, he was arrested, charged and escaped and the case made the papers all in a couple of days?  And if so, why is he able to run around in his local area undetected, with his ‘disguise’ consisting of a stolen hoodie?  (The latter was stolen from a washing line, so his turning green and muscular when angry wasn’t out of the question either.)

Finally, when in the house of the suspected killer, he tries to call his surviving son, who believes he killed his mother, and then his boss, who doesn’t seem to have spoken up for his previous good character at all.  Who should arrive at this unlikely location but Sean, attempting to destroy the floppy disks which are evidence of the crime he and Marcus were originally investigating?  Cue a fight, in which the injured, slight-framed Marcus overcomes gangly Sean and escapes to fight another two episodes. ‘Line of Duty’ this isn’t, not least because unless they’re going into fugue-state territory, we know Marcus isn’t guilty, and while the former had some implausibles, this is simply absurd.