Picnic at Hanging Rock (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Keeping Faith (BBC One) | iPlayer
Sharp Objects (Sky Atlantic) | sky.com
The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Croatia v England (ITV) | itv.com
Three truly intriguing female-led mysteries arriving in one week might be some kind of a record, and, of the three, Picnic at Hanging Rock has to lead by a crooked nod and a deeply sinister wink. Not least because it came to the book’s author, Joan Lindsay, in a dream in the mid-1960s: a near-perfectly formed tale of four demure Australian gals suddenly gone missing in a gnarly breathing wilderness at the turn of the century before last. Lindsay awoke before being vouchsafed the answer to the disappearance: her book, and Peter Weir’s classic 1975 film, famously fail to indulge in pat conclusions. Any conclusions, really.
Fans have hence had long years to speculate: some kind of indigenous Australian/earth-mother forfeit or revenge? A forlorn sinkhole? Weird karma punishing young rich flighty entitlement, or a coming-of-age metaphor? I truly hope we don’t get any revelations in this six-parter, and the frisson of unanswerability can continue for decades more. This might not seem that high a recommendation – would you watch a Scandi-noir knowing the whodunnit was ever left hanging? – but this adaptation I feel sure will grip and will hold.
Natalie Dormer plays a stormer. As the school’s matriarch, a widow with shadowy secrets, reinventions in her past, she bestrides and terrifies all, with those tiny sunglasses, which were sinister long before John Lennon. The girls – there are frissons of lesbianism, and there will be more than frissons – are haughty and vulnerable and sublime. Their billowy white dresses, which must be the very devil to clean (were they really sported among the red earth of the outback, in Victoria, in 1900? Let’s stop with that: I don’t want it to turn into Nitpick at Hanging Rock), contrast most ethereally with the mud, the snakes, the toxins, like a willowy impressionist parasol fallen to the swampy clutches of Hieronymous Bosch, and all set to that low-level didgeridoo sound-murk which sets up slow tremors deep in the gut. In truth, the Scandi comparisons are far from invalid: a dank air of menace, from the humans as from the nature, pervades throughout, though here humid rather than chill. Dreamy, unsolvable, tantalising and rather wonderful.
The opener of Keeping Faith, which earlier in the year had record iPlayer downloads when shown just on Welsh channel S4C, is somewhat misleading. Eve Myles, as Faith Howells, a new mother just returned to her work as a solicitor in her husband’s family business – buttons pop off in court, she’s juggling children and hair and affidavits and bills throughout – is only mildly perturbed when her reliable/unexciting husband goes missing one day. By the time the digital bedside clock switches from Wednesday to Thursday, the mood has clicked over from domestic, soft-concerned, to a rat’s nest of suspicions and worries, and it will only get worse, ie better.
It gripped Wales throughout its eight-part run, and I can surely see why. A toothsome plot, indeed: but what gives it its life force is Eve Myles, in surely a (deserved) breakout role to rival that of Suranne Jones in Doctor Foster: Myles is equally at ease gassing drunkenly with Cardiff mates, bouncing babbies, and grittily uncovering tracks. “Everyone keeps saying he was a good man. But what if he wasn’t? What if he was a complete bastard?” This reportedly led throughout Wales to a run on canary-yellow raincoats, Faith’s investigative drape of choice: after episode two the tension hardly lets up, and nor will I. Apart from anything else, it reveals the double edges behind every “close-knit community”, yeuch: you can leave your doors open and your kids with neighbours, fine, but also be dobbed in by other nosier neighbours for having once or twice slept off a hangover in the spare room, sparking wildfire Chinese-whispers about a marriage on the rocks.
I wasn’t as gobsmacked initially as I was told I was meant to be by Sharp Objects, the latest outing for director Jean-Marc Vallée of Big Little Lies fame – perhaps because I was less in love with BLL than everyone told me I should have been – but by the end of the first was utterly won over. Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn likes to write about difficult, borderline unlikable female anti-heroes, and the sublime Amy Adams, as Camille Preaker, is a salmagundi of spoilt self-pitying wee girl, feisty drunk, haunted self-harmer, and few but Adams could ever pull off that mix. She’s a hack sent reluctantly back to her home town. She really doesn’t want to go back to Wind Gap, Missouri, or its borderline rednecks, or its missing girls; and she really doesn’t want to go back to her mother Adora, with her amaretto sours, and her capacity for world-denial to the point of fantasy, of bitter lunacy: 60 or so years ago the role would have had Bette Davis’s name stamped upon it. It’s bleak, vodka-fuelled, and I suspect it might become magnificent in its study of small-town denials, and how they fester only to erupt, decades later, like the blackest of buboes.
I make few apologies for coming back to The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan; though I know my colleague Barbara Ellen was generally enchanted last week. This latest outing, to the second of Romesh’s unlikely holiday destinations, Ethiopia, raised the bar. He doesn’t try, at all, to amuse: but amuse he does – arguing with his producers, being sarcastic with his guides, in a way little seen since Keith Floyd – and also elucidates: the 80s famine ran for just three years, most current Ethiopians were not born, yet still feel the world defines them by bloody Live Aid. But this was special, too, for the fact that, only one night after it aired, a peace deal was signed, joyously, to end the insanely bitter 20-year border war with Eritrea. So: Romesh as global peace magician? Next stop Jordan? Bound to have more luck than Mr Blair, and, also, I know who I’d rather travel with.
Piers Morgan, misreading the public mood as so often (one might imagine he’s doing it cynically! One might imagine he’s bidding in his own mind to become the most gee-whiz professional controversialist either side of the Atlantic!), took on the stance of a Grinch on Good Morning Britain the morning after England v Croatia. “I’m not sure it was bad luck. Heroes? Not for me. You don’t win the World Cup with hearts. You win it with goals.”
Sadly, technically, he was right: he (and Southgate) were right to frown on the H-word and talk of universal knighthoods in a week when indefatigable divers had risked their lives, even died. Weirder, over on the hagiographic BBC Breakfast (wall-to-wall big-sky hero stuff… dignity… heads held high), Sally Nugent, who normally talks such sense, was doing something of a reverse-ferret on England’s gilded youths. The problem lay, she said, in Croatia’s unfair advantage: “dogged… experienced… wily old players”. The country is the same age – 27 – as Kieran Trippier. Its population is just over 4 million.
In the end, the English fans in Russia – “fantastic city! Clean… friendly… love it!” – again said it best, dumping the “coming home” moron-bawl to belt out, at the end, a song that could have been written for Wednesday night. “But don’t look back in anger. At least not today.”
