Carry on Brussels (C4) | All 4
A Very English Scandal (BBC One) | iPlayer
24 Hours in Police Custody (C4) | All 4
Humans (C4) | All 4
Among Nigel Farage’s many traits, one has been his capacity, even amid all the sly dissembling and slithery fearmongering, for sudden bursts of appalling, appealing, refreshing honesty. It almost endears him even to his legions of detractors. So it was little surprise to hear him, at the start of a nakedly revealing three-parter on the EU, saying of that institution: “In some ways I’m going to miss it. I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun doing this… it’s been terrific!” And there you have it: Brexit has been a game, a joke, a dream. Fine. Can we wake up now?
Carry on Brussels was arguably too jokey a title for a programme looking, essentially, at Brexit since the vote, as it affects seven immensely disparate British MEPs. As the cameras – which have been filming there since spring 2017 – rolled on, however, it became clear that it might be horribly apt. I came as close as I ever will to accepting Farage’s argument that the Brussels experiment is one huge, mismanaged shudder of dysfunctionality.
There was the crazed, pointless monthly decamping to Strasbourg, where poor Emily Stewart, assistant to staunch Remainer Seb Dance (Lab), only had access to a Bulgarian keyboard (no question mark key: she had to cut and paste from random emails). At a less trivial level, the dreadful dance that passionate, tearful Mr Dance had to go through, a dark ballet of compromise between the insanities and inanities of far right and far left in the sprawl of Europe, to pass any bill, even – perhaps especially – one that satisfies precisely no one.
If Brussels/Strasbourg were out-dysfunctioned by any one institution, that would be Ukip. Gerard Batten, the party’s Brexit spokesman, was one dour, angry antihero; press officer and Derryman Hermann Kelly another, though the two could have been on opposite sides. Kelly was battling to explain to Batten how his 120-page Brexit plan was not only unprintable (they didn’t have the budget) but, basically, really boring. It is something of a marvel, in hindsight, how Ukip, ever riven by infighting, actually managed to scare the Tories into that referendum; one that is actually removing from Europe, lest we forget, the third-largest representative nation. Meanwhile, Nigel chortles on. If you watch one thing about Brexit this sixmonth – and let’s face it, most of us run bawling for the hills at the overlong near-nightly reports about incremental twitches – do watch this series.
Jeremy Thorpe – for younger voters, and for older centrists who are still “blocking”, as I believe the Americans say, he was once the charismatic leader of the Liberal party, with a good chance at PM – would have had conniptions at Brexit. At his height, would have made effortlessly stylish, witty rejoinders in the house. One of the little tragedies unearthed by A Very English Scandal is the loss of a fearless and fearsome orator, who took on various causes – anti-hanging, pro-immigration, pro-Europe – very much not shared by his constituents.
There is little doubt this three-part series will win awards. And, screenwritten by Russell T Davies from John Preston’s fine book, directed by Stephen Frears, and featuring an utterly captivating Hugh Grant as Thorpe, it will deserve them, mostly: Grant, in particular, brings a lugubrious playfulness that still haunts. Even his windmilling arms (something of a trademark for Grant, as is his sudden gauche grin) are given new gravitas, coming as they do with real power, real threat – and real snobbery.
If I had doubts about the opener, it was in terms of tone. There is no doubt that much of the real story bordered on farce, not least the dog-shootery. But this first episode bordered not on the farce of little tragedies but the farce of (at times, dare I say it) Ray Cooney. It’s still splendid, it’s still hugfully witty, and gives very much the sense of the times, but I almost find myself hoping it’s less… fun from now on. After all, we’re still talking about the persecution, to blackmail, and often to suicide, of gay men in just-about-recent memory; and fragile mental health; and how much powerful men think they can get away with. I wonder whether the team behind this will conclude that Norman Scott was a poor, exploited soul or a lazy charlatan who steadfastly ruined, over a decade, a politician with the potential of a colossus. L’affaire Thorpe has long been viewed by the establishment with a certain ribald hilarity – Auberon Waugh’s take was famously “Jeremy, Jeremy, bang, bang, woof, woof” – but times, do they not, change?
Bizarrely, given that this was a true (and awful) story, there was also an element of high farce to this week’s 24 Hours in Police Custody, an ever-enthralling slice of watchability.
Dean Robinson, taken in for the murder of his partner, Sharon Fade, accepted his arrest almost with a tut and annoyed shrug. He gassed away with the Bedfordshire police about his flexibility as a runner: if they wanted a DNA sample, he tried to joke, given that his fingernails were terribly short, he could give them a sample of his toenails. “I could bite them off for you.”
His entire air was appallingly misjudged – Sharon had just been found on waste ground, her throat cut with a broken bottle – but the police, studiously, stoically, declined to leap to judgment. Rightly so. What emerged was the sad tale of a Walter Mitty man coupled with a fragile, suicidal, abusive, alcoholic woman. Dean, for all his braggadocio, was in the end a poor soul trying to care for a quite hopelessly lost cause. I was left suffused with admiration, for the police’s even-handedness and for the programme makers’ astonishing access, and almost broken by the thought of the desperation that must have led Sharon to slash her own neck with a jaggy bottle.
Humans, back for a third series, has never exactly shied from parallels, but this week’s metaphors could not have been clearer had they been DayGlo’d on a Brexit bus. “We have an emergency… a large number of green-eyes are gaining access to the country by sea.” The Brits are working out a strategy for dealing with the rebellious “synths”. “Some other countries have outlawed the lot. At the other end of the spectrum, the Swedes are trialling integration.” I get it: s’all about immigration, otherness, innit?
Having said that, after a ropey, confusing second series, we’re now seemingly back on track, with the government dithering between hardcore and harder-core, and angry Ukip yokels even attacking the safe (orange-eyed) servant synths. And we now have Mark Bonnar as a cool and groovy behavioural psychiatrist, and we still have Gemma Chan, and all is well.
