Shamed (Channel 4) is your last moment of non-Christmassy telly, the final bulwark against the tide of yuletide offerings already streaming in, flooding the schedules without surcease from tomorrow until the end of the year.
Since it is the season of goodwill, and since Shamed’s success as a viewing experience depends on the gradual revelation of the drama’s driving force, let me set out my customarily brief warning in full: THIS IS A REVIEW. IT CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS FROM WHICH THERE IS NO COMING BACK. DO NOT READ ON UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN THIS PROGRAMME. GO ABOUT YOUR DAY AS IF THIS ENTIRE PAGE DOES NOT EXIST. THANK YOU.
OK. So, Shamed’s opening scenes are impossible to resist. One moment twentysomething Nathan Bowyar (Nick Blood) is a happy, selfie-taking, fiancee-adoring, wedding-planning bloke heading out for his stag do; the next he wakes up locked in a basement with another twentysomething man, Mani Yalla (Ryan McKen). They do not, they feel, know each other.
It is eventually revealed to us, and them, that they are acquainted. Ten years ago, Nathan was a holiday rep who – what is the word? Cajoled, coerced, suborned, something else? – an insensibly drunk 17-year-old named Sarah into going down on a queue of men, video footage of which found its way on to the internet and duly sent “Tenerife Girl” viral. Now, Sarah (Faye Marsay) has kidnapped them and is making her revenge.
After this promising start, the rest of the drama is a dying fall, with the actors working hard (and Marsay giving a particularly fine performance) to flesh out a slightly thin script. It is never clear why Mani has been picked as a fellow inmate (apart from giving Nathan someone to bounce off – the Wilson basketball to Nathan’s Tom Hanks); the tension fails to build; the issues arising from events clearly drawn from many real-life instances whose survivors do not need me to list them here are barely explored; and Nathan is vouchsafed an unsatisfyingly small amount of enlightenment (Mani none at all). Also, how the men are supposed to earn their release echoes the Black Mirror episode The National Anthem so closely that the shadow of that series – which lurks over the whole thing – finally swallows it whole. What could have been a shatteringly timely piece resonating with the zeitgeist was instead a bit of a damp squib.
Let us turn with a sigh of relief and delight equalled only by a woman taking off her bra and sinking into the sofa at the end of a hard day to The Repair Shop at Christmas (BBC Two).
I don’t know how I missed the preceding 15 episodes of its run. It is so perfectly tailored to my tastes that I had a momentary panic that I had forgotten I had become a BBC exec and commissioned it. Anyway. It is a programme about a team of craftsmen and women (don’t make me call them craftspeople – it is CHRISTMAS) who work to restore family treasures. It is enough to make you weep in an ordinary week. The Christmas episode involved music box expert Stephen Kember restoring a Polyphon that had been silent for decades; a painting damaged by a boy playing Star Wars being brought in by him 30 years later to have it mended by conservator Lucia Scalisi for his recently widowed mother; and a loved-to-tatters doll – Betty – who was given to 82-year-old Patricia as a Christmas present by the family who took her in as a four-year-old evacuee. “They made such a fuss of me. She’s the only thing I’ve ever kept.”
Kember soon has the Polyphon playing Hark! The Herald Angels Sing as beautifully as ever. The sisters who brought it in listen as the sound of their childhood fills the air. Light and life are brought back to the son’s painting, and maybe a little to his mother, too. And Patricia gets Betty back. “Her face is identical!” she says, as the years telescope and vanish. Her own changes slightly when she sees the new cloth limbs under Betty’s old dress. “Did you … try and keep as much original as you could?” she asks hesitantly. They put all of the parts of Betty that they couldn’t use again in a pouch sewn into her tummy, the experts explain gently, “so every bit of her is still there”. It is the kindest thing I have ever seen. I was sobbing long before the secret Santa scarf at the end. I can’t describe that to you with only the paltry resource of the written word at my disposal. You will have to watch it. Christmas starts here.
