When I am president of the world, every television drama will have Anthony Andrews suaving around a Queen Anne drawing room in a handful of key scenes before the credits roll. Life is simply better that way.
He is currently doing so particularly valiantly in the third series of Kay Mellor’s The Syndicate (BBC1), which began last night. He plays Lord Hazelwood, owner of Hazelwood Manor, who has had a stroke and amassed £6.5m worth of debt but remains the epitome of gentlemanly grace. He has a dead wife and son and a second wife who is an ebbsolute cow, played with marvellous brittleness by Alice Krige.
Downstairs, the overworked staff are playing the lottery in the hope of escape. In this opening episode they scramble to prepare dinner for Lord and Lady H and some visiting Americans, which comprises a small exposition salad (the Americans haven’t been here for three and a half years! It is hoped that the earl and earl-wife can screw some money out of them somehow! There used to be 30 staff and now there are only five because times are hard for all!), a thin characterisation consommé (cleaner Dawn is a grafter, having a late baby with her salt-of-the-earth husband Andy! Her daughter Amy is a stroppy teenage madam who is embarrassed by the baby and plans to be a model in London! Godfrey the gardener is A Bit Simple, chooses everyone’s lottery numbers according to mathematical formulae that probably wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of a Lucasian professor and loves Amy! Goodhearted Groom and Nice Other Girl Who is Not Stroppy Amy are goodheartedly drawn to each other!), hearty northern cliche pie for main and a sliver of a plot for pudding (Amy goes missing. Only her mother really cares, and even that might change when she finds out that instead of doing the flowers, her daughter was doing the earl’s weedy stepson Spencer).
In short, this series will do nicely for the first six weeks of summer. A fraction of the wit and wisdom of something like Ordinary Lies but a fraction of the stress, too. Sit back, turn your brain off and relax, basking in its warm and undemanding rays.
Beware, thereafter, plunging too quickly into An Hour to Save Your Life (BBC2), a second outing for the series that tracks various people through the so-called golden hour after a trauma occurs and in which medical intervention is most likely to make the difference between life and death.
It is an hour, for the viewer, of beautifully controlled chaos. Concise recollections, from the medical staff involved, make sense of the blood and activity at the scene. The fear, the adrenaline and the high emotion are evoked by odd phrases that escape the carefully patrolled bounds of sense and reason and strike the ear and heart. “Suddenly,” says Adrian, the man who had his hand on cyclist Janina’s crushed aorta after they had to crack open her chest at the roadside, “I realised this was unbelievable.” “There are abdominal contents in her chest,” says her surgeon later. He mends her aorta and removes the clamp that has replaced Adrian. “Are we intact? Are we intact?”
Meanwhile, a boy in a quiet suburban street is hit by a car. His leg is broken and he has gone blind. He is airlifted to hospital where they set his leg and diagnose a base skull fracture. Another aorta, belonging to a 61-year-old man in Yorkshire, ruptures without warning. “Jesus,” mutters his doctor, very quietly, when he sees the ultrasound that reveals his patient is minutes from death. Another doctor replaces the torn stretch of artery with a fabric tube. “It’s advanced plumbing,” he explains. “Keep the bowel out of the way,” he tells his assistant. Every plumber needs a mate.
Like 24 Hours in A&E, this is a wonderfully constructed piece of compressed drama, which manages to convey information without sacrificing feeling, preserve tension and manipulate suspense without lessening participants’ dignity. Both science and the humanity that animates it are given their due.
Man and boy returned, little the worse for wear, to their lives. Janina spent three days in intensive care, and her family were able to come from Germany to be with her, but, in the end, she couldn’t survive her injuries. “When we saw how Dr Simon worked,” said her mother, “how much hope he put into his work – I can only say thank you.” “It really, really helped to have another three days with her,” said Janina’s husband. “To spend time with her.” Golden hours.
