You can usually judge how awful a police drama is going to be by how convoluted its plot is. The more labyrinthine, the less likely there are to be characters who act as though they might be drawn, even distantly, from real life. And if a very rich person suddenly appears halfway through, it is almost always a giveaway as to whodunnit. It was them.
Don’t take my word for it. As the actress Sophie Turner put it recently, bad guys used to always have a Russian accent, then they had to be Arabs and now “it’s just rich people. It’s much better, much less racist.” So there you are — thank you ever so much for that sagacity, Sophie.
The new series of After the Flood (ITV1) ticks all the boxes, then, with a plot so serpentine and complicated one is tempted to give up halfway through, take the dog for a walk and contemplate one’s own existence. Trouble is, my dog recently died, so I was stuck with Sophie Rundle looking cross, pensive or put upon as PC Joanna Marshall.
Someone has been killed on the moors. Someone else is painting red crosses on the doors of certain houses in town (perhaps identifying the people who can act as opposed to those who can’t). Meanwhile, Jo is working with her estranged husband to nail the bent copper DS Phil Mackie.
Also, there’s some fly-tipping and angry farmers. Oh, and a rich white woman is overseeing the burning of the heather on the grouse moors and acting disdainfully towards young, bright-eyed, environmental protesters who, of course, have truth and justice on their side. I guess that’s a spoiler, sorry if it is.
It is all utterly preposterous, takes itself far too seriously and is devoid of humour. Yet it’s saved by the creation of a genuinely menacing and convincing villain in Mackie, played with a sinister charm by Nicholas Gleaves.
He is just about the only character who is not overacting — but then there’s a nice cameo by Philip Glenister, whom I would happily watch reading out my death certificate. Which is why, for the moment at least, I’m sticking with it. I’ll bet there’s some cahoots between Mackie and the rich woman. And I would bet further that somewhere down the line Jo gets back with her hubby but will still look cross or pensive, probably even when they’re at it.
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I watched the Storyville documentary The Librarians (BBC4) because the marque delivered last year’s best documentary, Mr Nobody Against Putin, a rather wonderful hand-held exposure of incipient fascism in a school in a godforsaken Russian town. That was an exemplary slice of film-making — and so is this, in its way … the wrong way.
It concerned the fight of very liberal librarians in Texas to oppose the removal of books from the school libraries that dealt with LGBTQIA+ issues and racism, by the Republican governor and the conservative school boards. I am not wildly in favour of banning books, but this doc took as an article of faith that the librarians were absolutely right and the majority of Texans and the politicians utterly wrong.
Scant attention was paid to the perfectly cogent arguments from the right: instead, we had people with nose rings whining and shots of Nazis burning books in the 1930s. Here’s the thing. If perhaps there were one or two books for kids that explained that having doubts about your sexuality was all part of growing up and shouldn’t lead to puberty blockers and surgery, or that racism wasn’t wholly responsible for economic inequality in the USA, then perhaps the librarians might have had a point. Let a thousand flowers bloom! But there aren’t many books like that: they are effectively burnt before they are even published. Instead the shelves are lined with LGBTQIA+ and critical race theory propaganda.
The film began with a quote from Ray Bradbury, the author of Fahrenheit 451, about book burning — and it’s a shame Bradbury died before the film was made, because he ended up further to the right than a fish knife and would have given those librarians short shrift. Anyway, if you only allow one view of a certain issue to be considered “appropriate”, then don’t be surprised if your political opponents turn nasty. To my mind preemptive book banning is as bad as retroactive book banning, perhaps worse.
Hey, how about this — four rugged, tough and really hench ex-servicemen team up to take part in an unimaginably gruelling 500km race across the frozen wastes and forests of Swedish Lapland. Sounds like a good idea for a programme — and so it was.
Except that Arctic Adventure: Ultimate Survival (C4) wasn’t satisfied with that. Instead this was all about men coming to terms with a toxic masculinity that prevents them from articulating their very real feelings. Oh, Lord. For all that, it was a compelling drama as the ex-SAS dude Jason “Foxy” Fox led his mates hauling 45kg sleds up, up towards the North Pole.
Jason “Foxy” Fox leads the way in Arctic Adventure: Ultimate Survival
CHANNEL 4
“Doing hard stuff is good,” one of them said. “It forces you to be vulnerable.” Yep mate, I feel the same way every time I put the bins out. Later the four decided not to bother sleeping any more as, ragged, swearing and freezing, they staggered towards the next checkpoint, toxic masculinity remaining marvellously intact.
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David Baddiel is apparently a cat person. He adores them, considering them “absurdly beautiful”, even the very ugly ones. I am not a cat person — I consider them insinuating, sexually deviant, murderous of our wildlife and basically pets for people who can’t be arsed to keep a pet. But still, Baddiel — always a likeable presenter, laconic, humorous, kindly — made a good case for his favourite animals in the second episode of David Baddiel: Cat Man (C4), although I could have done without him jabbering with his showbiz mates Wossy, Ricky and Frank Skinner.
The star of the show was a fantastically hideous creature called Wilfred who was, Baddiel accepted, “cute in a challenging way”. Gumby TV again, another one of those undemanding shows that doesn’t tell you very much, especially for people like me in late middle age. But, of course, cat lovers will have adored it.
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