Sheridan Smith! Everyone’s favourite actor, doing her mascara in the morning. Well, pretty much my favourite actor anyway – after her performances as Lisa Lynch, and Cilla, and Mrs Biggs. Now she’s in Black Work (ITV, Sunday).
An admirably quickly put together drama about the Rachel Dolezal affair, and the mascara is the final touch to a longer, more controversial process? You (I) wish. When that does happen though, I think Smith would make an excellent Dolezal, with both the acting talent and the parentage for it. No, here she’s a copper, PC Jo Gillespie, in an unspecified Yorkshire city. Domestically, she’s just about still married to Ryan, another police officer, who is … oh, sadly, dead. He’s been shot through the chest at a disused warehouse (where else?).
It turns out Jo hardly knew him. He wasn’t going up to London every week to train CID officers, or even playing football when he said he was; he has been undercover for three years, on the case of a gang of seriously bad dudes. That – undercover police work – is the Black Work of the title. He was also bugging his own wife – not as in annoying her a bit, but covertly recording Jo, in the car. So he knew about the affair she wasn’t quite having, with another policeman. They certainly like to stick together, keep it in the family, these coppers.
You would think, given his line of work, that Ryan would have hidden the CDs of the bugged recordings in a better place than the airing cupboard, where his little girl Melly can – and does – find them. It’s not just the CDs, there’s a camera too, looking out, for us at home, so we can see any time anyone opens it up. It’s an odd trick, a variation of the camera in the fridge; who do these directors think we – the viewers – are? Towels? Ham?
There are a few things that don’t ring quite true about Black Work. Jo being expected to keep Ryan’s murder from the kids (try to act like your husband, their dad, hasn’t just been killed will you love, it’ll help with the investigation); the way the content of the CDs is made public (noooo, don’t put it on the living room hi-fi so the whole family can listen to mum’s imminent infidelity … oops, too late); the entire police force going to the pub, at lunch time; the way the local newspaper operates (very unjournalistically).
Of course drama is allowed a little licence, and it would matter less if it – the drama – was brilliant. It’s not, though. It’s certainly not bad either. As a thriller, it’s pacy, tight and intriguing; I’ll be tuning in next weekend because I want to know what Jo uncovers, now that she has taken on the job of finding out what happened to her husband herself (and I want to know who else opens the airing cupboard door, obviously).
What it isn’t, though, is Line of Duty, which has raised the bar for British cop drama. It doesn’t have that stomach-cramping tension. Nor is it also an examination of a complex workplace, full of very real, three-dimensional characters. This is less intelligent, less interesting, more ITV. And even Sheridan Smith can’t help that. She’s good – of course she is, she’s Sheridan Smith, she could breathe humanity into a stick. But she’s only as good as what she’s got to work with, and this isn’t going to be one of those OMG did-you-see performances. The next Bafta will have to wait, until Black Face maybe … or not.
And so to the Baftas of roofed garden structures: Amazing Spaces Shed of the Year (Channel 4, Sunday). Starting with the “normal shed” category. Boo, boring, if I wanted normal I’d go out to my own … Oh, but actually not so boring. Because the first “normal shed” has a train set in it; more like an entire rail network in fact, with accompanying cities, countryside, infrastructure, population etc. Then, my favourite, the “shedservatory”, which slides apart, giving the powerful telescope inside an uninterrupted view of the night sky (is Buckinghamshire really dark enough though?). Then – still in the normal category – there’s a cinema shed, and Cormac in his floating shed. There are two Cormacs in the show, interestingly: it’s a very popular name among “sheddies”.
If these are normal then I don’t know what it makes mine (Flymo, secateurs, string, inflatable girlfriend … No! Joking! It’s a Qualcast!). It’s all making me feel very dull anyway. Also relatively sane. And a teeny bit patriotic – there’s something very British about this lunacy.
