In the Dark (BBC1) | iPlayer
The British Garden: Life and Death on Your Lawn (BBC4) | iPlayer
Who Wants My Council House? (C4) | All4
Love Island (ITV2) | ITV Hub
I watched the entire opening episode of In the Dark and for the life of me can’t remember the first thing about it. That’s a tiny lie. It wasn’t a cartoon, nor set in space, nor a documentary on tardigrades. It was – oh do wait, it’s coming – it was a cop thriller. Set probably by default in Manchester. Or Brighton, which is what the Beeb does for the tang of ozone and home in time for tea. It featured a ballsy, headstrong female ’tec in mustard and leather, angrily pregnant, ambitious, but having to go back to her Peak District roots in Prolepiddle or some such to support an estranged best friend, in rattling rain. It featured a body being found by – and this will surprise you mightily – a dog walker. Some forensic scientists must have dogs, and walk them. Why can’t a beetled body ever be found by a forensic scientist?
DI Helen had some dark secrets, unfinished business from her boondock childhood. Two girls had been abducted. The press were, as ever, weaselly, venal and shouty, which is always a mild mystery: every similar story I’ve ever been on, the hacks have been hugely personable and courteous, if not above subterfuge: how else do you think they ever get people to talk to them?
Taken in all, it was supremely adequate. Ouch. As the DI, MyAnna Buring, all flashing eyes in the likes of Ripper Street and the underrated Banished, was irritatingly underwhelming. Perhaps it was the rain, just worn down by that decidedly non-Swedish rain. Her partner, Ben Batt, promises much, though we also got a turn from Ashley Walters as every too-smoove-for-the-groove black cop cliche ever. This fettling of two of Mark Billingham’s deserved bestsellers, directed by Gilles Bannier (The Tunnel), might have soared, because book adaptations often work: I’ve recently been catching up on ITV3 with Val McDermid’s jangling Wire in the Blood series. Instead, it has the feel of a committee process, dank, matted wings flapping to get off the ground, lacking even the loopy intricacies (and, not incidentally, singular vision) of The Loch, which will conclude tonight, to wholly unexpected regrets. Ah well. Perhaps I’m missing Broken too much.
Chris Packham, who is what happens when you get one god nudging another aside and barking “give me back that bloody Titchmarsh, I’ll make you something 10 times better”, hosted an enthralling, yes enthralling, hour of clever people in parkas, and nice families from Welwyn Garden City, doing fascinating things in supremely urban back gardens in The British Garden: Life and Death on Your Lawn.
What they were mainly doing was counting beasties – bright frogs and tits and bees and silverfish, the very occasional heron and painfully dull, snuffling badger or hedgepig, species that now look set for extinction because they can’t, you know, quite be bothered with anything else, like not getting run over always. Along the way we learned that just five decent-sized gardens can play habitat to a magnificent flourishment of species: arguably we know more about the upper reaches of the Amazon than the microcosm of our own back yards. Especially if we humans help them, and there was much simple, intriguing stuff about the results of letting the grass grow even one week longer in some areas, and it was also delightful to see so many children excitedly trying to eat worms. Why does their fascination for dirt, for new life, die so early? I blame them being dragged to garden centres at weekends. And, obviously, Alan Titchmarsh. His damned wheedle voice, and his MBE, and his “novels”, and all he rode up in.
Equally fascinating – and I mean this, though it was obviously a relatively quiet midsummer week – was the start of new C4 series Who Wants My Council House?, marking the revolution since 2012 in council house swaps.
The premise couldn’t be simpler: cameras follow the tenants, from first brush with home swap websites, along the motorways from Lincoln to Cornwall to Bristol to Dorset, to their new vistas. Along the way we get to peek in at everyone’s dreadful taste in home furnishing. But also learn much about people. Posh picky Tory Sarah, who’s “with Cliff Richard on the loo roll – always hang on the outside” but a bit sneery when it comes to Northolt, and indeed to people, wanted to move back to London. Astonishingly, even when offered a splendid pad in Maida Vale for £110 a week, she turned up her not inconsiderable nose. Contrast with the lovely Andy, 50, a boarding school victim and ex-rough sleeper, who wanted nothing more than a “dream” move to Poundbury: he found the perfect house but all fell through at the last minute. “I would have lived here the rest of my life,” he sighed, cheerfully. I’ll be watching Andy with interest next week.
And places. I had begun to laugh when “life coach” Karen declared herself “spiritually unfulfilled in Wootton Bassett”. Later, after putative swapees Dorothy and Savannah had visited and been made to feel supremely uncomfortable on the resolutely white streets, she broke down. “I actually hate it here. And they’re just the kind of people I could have been friends with.”
I have been ordered – at about 9.20am on Monday, despite having had my groin cut open under an alarmingly light dusting of anaesthetic, and a claw inserted to tie off a pseudo-aneurysm hanging charmingly off my pancreas, but that’s arguably another story – to look at Love Island. Jonny – and, yes, I even looked it up, and, obviously, sigh, no “h” – and Tyla broke up. Camilla and, I think, Jamie got together. Theo established some catchphrases. “You noticed me, like, immeeds, yes? Cos my personality’s, like, ridic?” There is much to like here, if only for the tits-in-the-face honesty of the whole thing. After years of pussyfooting around it with Big Brother, a group of supremely good-looking young beings are left for weeks in a Spanish villa to, simply, have sex with one another. Love was mentioned, yes, but along cheeringly light terms. As Tyla moped: “I was looking for someone I could just fall completely in love with. And then leave [the villa], and then, maybe, might spend a bit of time with.”
The villa itself is stencilled with bright, helpful hints. The bath says “wet”, the tap says “drip”, kitchen tops are variously adorned “spicy” and “yum”: and, indeed, it’s exactly as if some extremely well-endowed children have been allowed off for a few weeks to play at grownups having sex.
That’s not to knock it, nor its phenomenal success. It’s been a grand talking point, and some of the youngsters are indeed likable, charming even. But when there arrives such a disparity between the values placed on looks and those placed on brains, any frisson of allure, surely, simply flees. Doesn’t it? Isn’t that the very opposite of sexy?
The voiceover is sexy, because it has behind it a brain, the caustic burr of young Iain Stirling, going along with – almost – all of it. At just one point, having to pun his way through a battery of single entendres about sausages, sauce squirting and baps, did he stage whisper: “I’m a law graduate, you know” – and he is, you know. But as for the contestants, even ex-Fettesian Camilla, who gets ribbed for liking “books’n’shit”, exclaimed on her birthday morning, with a mix of delight, bemusement and genuine near panic: “How does someone even think of an idea like that?” Someone had made her avocado on toast, cut into letters, spelling out words.
