Quarry (Sky Atlantic). It’s not festive, it’s not fun, but it is very good. And, at the end of a brutal year, there’s at least something timely about the story of a disillusioned Vietnam vet returning home to discover just how much more shit life can get.
Mac Conway (Logan Marshall-Green) returns from his second tour to his home in 1972 Memphis – recreated with as much loving attention to the grimy period detail as Mad Men brought to the sharp, shiny stuff – with his friend and fellow marine Arthur (The Wire’s Jamie Hector). They soon find that they are unemployable because of their alleged involvement with a My Lai-style massacre, whereupon a genial thug known as the Broker – played by Peter Mullan – steps in to offer them new careers as hired killers. Mac resists, but is drawn in when Arthur accepts and asks him to act as backup on his first hit. Things get a lot worse, and quickly, and we are soon marching down the Via Dolorosa as – now responsible for Arthur’s debt to the broker, maddened to the point of murder by his wife Joni’s infidelity – Mac’s options start to shut down.
Quarry is not fabulously original, perhaps. The inwardly wounded, conscience-stricken (how rightly or wrongly we do not yet know – the truth about the massacre is presumably to be revealed to us over the next eight weeks) veteran is a stock figure. The moral ambiguity (and the amount of time it takes for things to get going) is Breaking Bad. The meditative aspect and willingness to follow through and linger on the consequences of the bursts of violence are pure Rectify. The regional flavour and faint squalor touching everything is very True Detective – as is the threat that can be faintly detected on the horizon that everyone will shortly start to take themselves a bit too seriously and the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own cod-philosophy and drawling earnestness. The rest is Justified (two of its writers created and wrote this show), with a touch of Banshee (with which it shares a director).
I suspect that we could, in time – unless Quarry begins to plumb a bit more character depth – begin to long for a touch more of Banshee’s unapologetic grand guignolery, but for now it is, as I say, very good. The wonderful Herbert leaves us too soon, but Marshall-Green is a compelling anti-hero whose inarticulate suffering is palpable. And there isn’t a weak link in the supporting cast, from Joni (Jodi Balfour), to the man who looks to be his future partner in crime, Buddy (Damon Herriman – fresh from appearing in Justified as Dewey Crowe).
Plus, I looked ahead at episode two and I can report that there are at least two jokes – mordant, bleak, but proper jokes – coming, so, even if it is hovering on the horizon, we have at least another week before the True Detective threat is realised.
Because jokes – jokes is what we need, always. So, thank you, ITV, for giving us the two-part special Les Dawson Forever (ITV3), charting the rise of a bricklayer’s son from a two-up, two-down in Collyhurst, Manchester, to a household name at a time when being a household name, children, really took something. In Les’s case, the kind of immaculate, curmudgeonly comedy that lives down the ages.
If, children, again, you have never seen him, I cannot do justice to the man, because I have only the paltry resource of the written word at my disposal. If you are old enough to remember the glory days (Sez Les, The Les Dawson Show, Blankety Blank), add your fondest memories of the great man’s wearied face gazing out, more in sorrow than in anger, at the audience – poor, benighted fools, who had come searching after laughter – and enjoy this handful of classics, aired in all their glory last night.
“My wife’s run off with the man next door. I do miss him.”
On living with his mother-in-law for the first six months of his married life: “I only fell out with her three times. Morning, noon and night.”
“Have you had the shish kebabs?” “Ever since we arrived.”
“How’s your Bert?” “Compared to what?”
Those last two were an exchange between the bosom-hoickers of legend, Cissie and Ada, of course. Roy Barraclough (Cissie), who first met Dawson when he was asked to replace an actor who couldn’t cope with the comedian’s ad libbing, remembered how his comedy partner used to try and make him corpse with the names he chose for other characters – “Samantha Louise ... Ada Bernice”. Barraclough fought back with confectionary. “I used to offer him a Polperro fig wafer.”
He does miss him.
