Yahoo Finance The week in TV: It's a Sin; Finding Alice; The Bay; The Investigation; Back – review
It’s a Sin (Channel 4) | All 4
Finding Alice (ITV) | ITV Hub
The Bay (ITV) | ITV Hub
The Investigation (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Back (Channel 4) | All 4
It’s a Sin arrived complete with ready-made culture row, creator Russell T Davies having done a little stoking by saying he’d like gay men to be played by gay actors. Cue huffing in predictable quarters, chiefly along these lines: would Hannibal Lecter need to then be played by a convicted cannibal? An argument I normally like to consign to the category “technically valid, but you might want to grow up a bit and have a wee word with yourselves”. And to let this particular tower of babble overshadow any of the subsequent creation would indeed be a sin.
It is, on the evidence of the first episode (of five), mainly a joyous, gleeful, rambunctious watch, shot through with historical experience and period perfection, even if Manchester’s Clampdown Records is, last time I looked, rather far from Savile Row. So Ritchie, Roscoe, Welsh Colin and Glaswegian Gloria, all, to a greater or far lesser extent, flamboyant and fleeing homes mired in stultifying early 80s orthodoxy and shame, congregate in a generally happy, wild London flat and generally wild, happy London pubs on the cusp of love in the time of Aids.
“That cold came back.” Only weeks later, Henry Coltrane (a sadly too brief Neil Patrick Harris) is dead, the Kaposi’s sarcoma blighting his thin, handsome features. This captures the utter confusion shown not just by government and medicine in the face of the virus once known as Grid. Gay men themselves were perpetuating their right to party in the light of growing evidence.
Kim Wall's killer remained unnamed, a remarkable and bold innovation
Davies depicts with wisdom how so many, shunned and “othered” for most of their lives, might have chosen to adopt a defiant mood towards yet another orthodoxy, that of scientific reason. Lydia West as Jill Baxter, the group’s one gal pal, does a phenomenal job of educating, slowly, with love. And newcomer Callum Scott Howells as Welsh Colin – is he the author’s own persona? – has not only the uncanny looks of a young Steve Coogan, but on this outing every stitch of the same talent. I know it’s only mid-January, but this is the best, life-stuffed watch so far this year.
In different hands, Finding Alice would already have been written off as a disastrous mess, a salmagundi of competing tones, tasteful monochrome clashing with lurid yellow plaid. Is it an out and out black comedy or a gently wry treatise on grief? A soapy class clash even? A psychological whodunnit, with witty takes?
It says much for ITV’s trust in, and willingness to run with, the team of Keeley Hawes and writers Simon Nye and Roger Goldby (The Durrells) that right up until broadcast it defied categorisation, and it’s very possible they still don’t know what kind of beast they have on their hands. The better news is that it is eminently, moreishly watchable. That is chiefly thanks to the quality of the acting – Hawes, of course, but also the likes of Kenneth Cranham, Sharon Rooney, Gemma Jones and Rhashan Stone.
The story is simple enough, baldly written. Family moves into dream home, hubby falls down stairs first night, widow finds welter of dodgy dealings and morals in his wake. But, my, it goes on so many meanders – grief counselling as pick-up joint, DNA theft, the peculiarities of inheritance tax, who has the rights to a dead man’s frozen sperm – it shouldn’t all at all work, but somehow almost does.
And it is also a beast looking for a second home: I’ve never seen six episodes of a supposed one-off that ended so hangingly, if that’s a word, with Hawes getting prepped with soft music and a cold turkey baster. Viewers praying for pat conclusions abandon hope now. (Incidentally, I can’t think of any better screen hubby for Joanna Lumley than Nigel Havers, were it not to be Roger Allam.)
The second series of The Bay arrived apparently untroubled by the critical apathy that greeted the first of these Broadchurch homages/rip-offs. And despite a page or two of notes, I’m afraid I can’t really remember anything about it. It’s set in Morecambe and stars Morven Christie again, this time as a now demoted family liaison officer, who nevertheless seems to have been urged to lead a nationwide CID hunt for the killer of Stephen Tompkinson. Who himself, after having spent the first 10 minutes trying to light a barbecue without matches, might have finally found some and wisely used them to set fire to the script.
A short decade or so after they taught us how to “do” detective drama, might the Scandinavians now be teaching us how better to do true crime? I was thoroughly impressed by The Investigation, all six parts of which aired if you so chose last night. At the stoic determination of Danish police, shocked by the murder in 2017 of journalist Kim Wall on a homemade submarine, but mainly at the programme’s tacit pact not to elevate the killer to any kind of status at all.
In fact he remained unnamed even as the final episode faded to quiet black. A remarkable and bold innovation, and I reckon it worked. Rather than airbrushing his acts from history – for that heinous killing did happen, as all those so very involved must know – it had just been decided to ignore his name. How much better an approach than so often elsewhere, where “true crime” re-examinations, no matter how sympathetically intentioned, can nevertheless lead to a warped kind of elevation for the named bogeyman.
Series two starts with our Stephen emerging from rehab with feet too soft after months of backless slippers
As a result, the focus was on the (award-winning) victim, and her sage and appreciative Swedish parents, Joachim and Ingrid. Crucially, it made the story not one whit less gripping. Episode four, in particular, with Danish frogmen scouring the chill immensity of the Køge Bay (south-west of the famous Øresund bridge) against laughable odds, having to calculate salinity, drift, temperature and wind, with cadaver dogs that can smell gases bubbling up from a seabed. It took the exhausted teams about a month, the body parts having been scattered to the winds, and is heart-in-mouth stuff. Heroes all.
A triumphant return for Back after way too indecently long an absence. We left, in October 2017, Stephen (David Mitchell) being driven not that gently loco by cool, usurping cuckoo-in-the-nest Andrew (Robert Webb). Series two starts with our Stephen emerging from rehab with feet too soft after months of backless slippers and a pride at having outfoxed the wibbly non-talk of therapists to emerge “cured”, as if there were anything ever damaged about him other than Andrew’s gaslighting.
This plays hugely successfully to the Peep Show team’s incipient characteristics – Mitchell’s spitty, witty paranoia and vulnerability; Webb’s charming and insouciant squirrelliness – but now set among a Cotswoldy melange of couldabeens, do-gooders and ne’er-do-wells. David Mitchell gets most of the best lines and the chance to indulge in some lovely pedantry , but a close second is Uncle Geoff (Geoff McGivern), here holding court in the John Barleycorn pub – run in the interim by Andrew with immense competence and flair, naturally – on the best time in his life. “Recovering from heart surgery. Ten days off, in bed, and a catheter up your rees-mogg so you didn’t even have to get up for a piss. That’s living, all right. Can’t wait for the hospice.”
