Damilola, Our Loved Boy (BBC1) | iPlayer
Deep Water (BBC4) | iPlayer
Close to the Enemy (BBC2) | iPlayer
Planet Earth II (BBC1) | iPlayer
Interrupting a rare week of otherwise just splendid ginger-peachy bobby-dazzler good news for all, there arrived a drama of elegant organisation and unimaginable heartache to remind us what a nasty little world we occasionally live in. I had thought Damilola, Our Loved Boy slightly too chocolate-box a title, but in the end it couldn’t really have been bettered. This was not about Damilola Taylor’s death, at least not all about it; rather, the focus, for the first half at least, was on the impossibly cheerful, trusting soul that was 10-year-old Dami, and his relationships with his family. His father, Richard, rather strict even by middle-class Nigerian standards; his truculent older brother Babatunde, sister Gbemi, living with a particularly severe form of epilepsy; his mother Gloria demonstrating dignified yet unconditional mother-love as all the best mothers do.
Tunde and Gbemi, born in this country, have British passports; not so Dami, but he pleads to be allowed by his father to travel to the UK, young Gbemi having to travel there for specialist treatment not available in Lagos. “Why do you want to go to Great Britain?” scolds his protective father. “Because it’s Great Britain” grins back Dami, with unimpeachable logic yet irrepressible naivety.
The next scenes are affecting in their contrast; all the more so since we know what is, unconscionably, to come. The high big suns and hot big colours of Nigeria are replaced by a grim wash of grey clouds, a sky as cheerful as the inside of an eggbox and the greasily unlovely streets of Peckham. Damilola is undaunted: all, in the 10-year-old’s world, is exciting, different, new, and he skips everywhere. Makes friends easily, excels at football, fits in everywhere with his unassailable grin. Mother Gloriae is more daunted, battling wearily with housing officials, struggling home bag-laden from markets with the ever-present Peckham rainy twilight and sound of sirens to take another strict phone call from Richard, still back in Kenya, unable to escape his government job.
All too soon, of course, those sirens are from the north Peckham estate, and for Dami. Stabbed with a broken bottle, bled out his last cradled in the arms of a random builder who had followed the blood-trail up godforsaken pebble-dashed concrete stairs.
It wasn’t about race, but grotty theft, and Levi David Addai’s fine script eschews any attempt to attach blame to Britain, to racism, to Peckham. The most sneeringly unhelpful housing officer, and later the squirrelly defence barrister for the four youths eventually charged, are both black.
He leaves the blaming to the mouth of Richard, who sets about it with gusto. In his bottomless heartbreak, he blames Peckham, and parenting, and various systems, and in particular he blames Gloria, for having bought Dami a particularly shiny silver coat, and Tunde, for somehow falling down on brotherly duties. One scene especially hard to watch was Tunde on the hospital payphone, feeding the news to his father with cold coins and hot snot tears. Richard ends the call not, as I was longing for, with a devastated “Thank you, son, for telling me” but with a devastating silence, and by hanging up.
Richard flies across to scattergun blame, but he is eventually redeemed and reconciled, and finally able to celebrate Tunde’s graduation with love and apologies. The real Richard Taylor, now an OBE and still running the Damilola Taylor Trust, was heavily consulted about this drama, and doesn’t make it all easy on himself. He comes across, in a towering performance by Babou Ceesay, as difficult, domineering, arrogant, proscriptive, yet will have invited many to ask serious, possibly rewarding, questions about the balances between fatherhood, discipline and love. I had begun to watch this with trepidation, knowing how it must finish; in the end, I wished it had gone on longer, being not about death but about humanity; Richard went on to work with exactly the kind of youngsters who had killed Damilola.
If there’s a lesson, even oblique, to be taken from its airing in such a momentous week, I think it comes via official messages to the president-elect. “[We] and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, sexual orientation or political views. I offer [Mr Trump] close cooperation on the basis of these values.” Might have been Nicola Sturgeon; in fact it was Angela Merkel. In lumpy contrast, here’s Mrs May. “Britain and the United States have an enduring and special relationship based on the values of freedom, democracy and enterprise.” Bleh. I think I know which displayed the greater humanity.
There was a surprisingly toothsome Australian offering on BBC4’s now quasi-official “Saturday 9pm foreign noirish troubled-cop/serial killer” strand. Admittedly, Yael Stone as detective Tori Lustigman in Deep Water isn’t that troubled, though forced to be a) beautiful, and b) live on Bondi beach. But the subject matter is deeply unsettling, as in fact are the environs of Bondi: the (true) hate-murders of up to 80 gay men in the 70s and 80s around Sydney. As one raddled ex-cop whom Tori consults reflects, with typically Aussie snowflake sensitivity, “poofter-bashing was a sport back then. A blood sport.”
It’s all rather well observed, and acted, and gripping; it grips even without snow tyres. In terms of dramas about resurrected cold cases turning out to have been botched 30 years previously by corrupt cops – now almost a genre – it surfs above many.
Not so the strangely limp Close to the Enemy. I had wanted to like this new seven-part Stephen Poliakoff offering, and it promised much: 1946, the battle to wrench secrets from German scientists as the cold war warmed up, a crazed creepy London hotel. Yet the script, so far, lets it down: way too many handy-dandy expositions along the lines of “whoever wins the jet engine wins whatever war comes next, so we have to make sure we get it before the Russians or the Americans.” Jim Sturgess plays the MI6 hero Callum Ferguson – Scottish, surely? – with style and panache, yet a manner of lazy demi-Yank RP drawl unheard ever in this happy breed, even in old war films, even – especially – from Scots. What, exactly, was that accent, and what might it have been attempting to convey under the shuddering weight of Poliakoff’s leaden script and direction? Might give it another go, just because of the mood of the hotel and the presence of Alfred Molina. Yet the combination of underacting and overacting is frankly bizarre.
Most terrifying sight of the week was – I won’t go for the easy joke – those bloody racer snakes going for newborn iguanas in the Galápagos. The first instalment in BBC1’s six-part Planet Earth II was undoubtedly a masterpiece, a panoply of the best wildlife filming ever, and when I say ever I mean possibly for the next 500 years, or until animals learn to talk, but I just don’t remember it being quite so visceral. I was simultaneously standing and applauding and running to the loo to retch. A nice trick if you can manage it. Which I didn’t.
• This article was amended on 16 November 2016 to correct the name of Damilola Taylor’s mother from Grace to Gloria.
