Back to Corfu then, for The Durrells. Gerry has adopted a pair of flamingos to add to his menagerie. They look like a very pale and lanky British couple on the first day of their hot holiday. Get some lager in you, and then fall asleep in the sunshine.
Actually they should get some shellfish in them, shouldn’t they, if they want to go pink? That is what Gerry is doing: studying the effect a flamingo’s diet has on the pinkness of its feathers.
Larry is on to novel number three, although the writing career is not going well. He trips over one of Gerry’s animals – the dog – and injures his leg. Margo has dumped her boyfriend, Zoltan, because everyone begged her. Mrs Durrell, too, has given up on love and is considering taking up the harp instead. Or the cello. Something large and dependable, but most definitely with strings attached.
Oh dear, apart from the animal husbandry, has Corfu circa 1930-something become Not Love Island? No. Leslie has three girlfriends on the go as he tries to make up for all the times he had no girlfriends.
This – Leslie’s polyamory – is the main source of comedy in the episode. Of course Mrs D – and the others – can’t help interfering. And it all goes disastrously, hilariously wrong, so that in the end the three girlfriends – Daphne, Tsanta and Dionisia – all come to tea on Sunday and it becomes one of those farces where people (girlfriends) have to be kept apart while someone else (boyfriend Leslie) has to attend to them and be in three different bits of the house at the same time.
He fails, of course, and they meet. Poor Leslie ends up with no girlfriends once more. Meanwhile, Aunt Hermione turns up again, Margo gets into soap sculpture and family friend Florence fails to bond with her baby. There’s some gentle cultural misunderstanding, a little light word play: Adonis/a Dennis, paupers/porpoise, that kind of thing, and Mrs D threatens to put the pelican into a pie. Like a pecan pie with added eli in the filling … Apologies, the gentle wordplay is contagious.
All a little tame, maybe. Certainly The Durrells is not demanding, but nor does it have pretensions of profundity. It is soap sculpture, but rather better than Margot’s – quality soap. You might not even recognise it as soap. Jolly performances, too. I still find it hard to believe that Mrs D is played by the same person as DI Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty: I guess that is what is known as range, and acting, at which Keeley Hawes is bloody marvellous. On the whole, The Durrells is easy, sunny and nostalgic, and rolls along charmingly.
For something gloomier and grittier, here’s 13 Commandments (Channel 4, then All4), which begins with the horrible and gruesomely graphic murder of a young Muslim woman in Aalst, East Flanders. Yes Belgium. It’s the new Scandinavia, have you not heard? Belgian noir: crime drama, not dark chocolate.
It was an “honour” killing, the woman was pregnant by the wrong person, and an uncle comes over from Turkey to slit her throat. But that’s just the catalyst for a serial criminal to start on a righteous crime spree, based on the Commandments as delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai. First off, the Turkish uncle is set on fire in a car park with: “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me” scrawled on the wall. Well, given the purpose of his visit, I don’t mind too much what happens to him, to be honest.
So it’s kind of like the movie Seven (a connection it does at least acknowledge), in Flemish, with subtitles. Not the most original of premises then, but the two cops investigating – Peter (Dirk Van Dijck) and Vicky (Marie Vinck) are interesting, if again not unprecedented. An unlikely pairing, tricky pasts/home lives, health issues (physical and mental), unconventional methods, all that. There’s also a comedy doofus cop for some relief from all the grimness.
But hang on, 13 Commandments, you say? It’s been a while since I looked, but weren’t there just 10? That is different. I guess we are going to get some more. Perhaps there will be an extra tablet thrown in? Thou shalt not be constrained by the Decalogue.
