Intruder (Channel 5) | My5
Sort Your Life Out (BBC One) | iPlayer
Lights Up: Sitting (BBC Four) | iPlayer
This Is a Robbery (Netflix)
Wellington Paranormal (Sky Comedy) | sky.com
We are on a dramatic clifftop and a bitter, terrified man is pleading with his mistress not to go to the police. The path nears the cliff edge, stumble-close, and we’re all breathlessly wondering if he’ll dare, even though there are witnesses nearby. Angela (Helen Behan) cheerfully spoils the looming mood with: “What’re you going to do? Bash my head in and hope those ramblers don’t see?” A few minutes later as she, increasingly wild-eyed, is desperately downing white wine in a chi-chi seafood place, Sam (Tom Meeten) grabs her wrists. “You’re mentally unstable. You’re an alcoholic. You need help.”
Channel 5 has had a good run with its recent one-off dramas, split to run over a whole week, but I’m afraid Intruder didn’t quite match previous quality. Not that this four-parter was at all actively bad: in fact some little fiddles and twists were genuinely captivating, and I was glad to have made its acquaintance. But it’s when the maxim of “show, don’t tell” is so laughably flouted, as in the examples above, that you start to fully appreciate the tremendous subtleties of, say, Unforgotten or Line of Duty – both managing with just a fast double-take here, a raised eyebrow there, to merely hint at the picture window of the entire solution – or decide for yourself, with your quiet genius, that the window just displays another red herring on the fishmonger’s slab.
Neither did it help that most of the characters were, at best, only semi-likable. As evinced perfectly in the opening dinner party scene in a fab designer home, they were mostly over-entitled (and overcompensated) smugtivists; and the burglar, Syed, was trying, panicked and scared, to get away, and was stabbed in the back. It was left mainly to Sally Lindsay to bring charm, if a certain lack of likelihood, as the mild liaison officer who breaks the case singlehanded, while Kriss Dosanjh did a marvellous job as the grieving father. Also, I was a little queasy at the ease, or laziness, with which Angela was portrayed as the hysterical, vengeful, drunken mistress: every weak man’s go-to witch.
Lovely though she is, Stacey Solomon’s new programme, Sort Your Life Out, terrified me. Chiefly because the first clutter-rich house they tackled, the London home of Tash, Lawrence and their four children, so closely resembled in parts my own flat. Oh to have someone nice ferry all my damned stuff to a humungous warehouse, spread it in a neat grid over the floor and count all the dud pens and duplicate phone chargers. And, especially, oh to have a few of her “pals” – though I detect the guiding hand of some producer in the fact that these happened to be semi-professional upcyclers, joiners and the like – clean and transform the flat and move my stuff back in, only with half of it now gone to charity or the council tip, cleanly labelled, with a place for everything and everything in its place.
What was notable is how loath we all seem to get rid of “memories”, even when they’re negligible. I think at one stage Tash was grimly clutching a long-dead rock cake, because of reminders of the day the family did something or other. In fact she resembled at times the baby of the family, who was most sternly reluctant to lose any one of her toys. But Tash stiffened her lip, with a good bit of nudging empathy from Stacey, and the heartfelt joy of her return to a de-stressed home was her reward, and clear for all to see. Refreshingly non-preachy, with hardly a wagging finger in sight, this surely lent us hope that post-lockdown we could all do the same. With only the help of a giant, empty hangar. Nevertheless, I’m now addicted; well done, madam.
Sitting was Katherine Parkinson’s debut play, adapted for TV by BBC Lights Up, a remarkable collusion between telly and theatres throughout a land-in-the-days-of-Covid: there will be 18 in all, featuring such writers as Colm Tóibín and Frances Poet, and mesmerising themes for our times. And it just goes to show that an enterprise can be worthy, valuable – and yet gleefully witty and poignant.
There were surely influences of Alan Bennett behind the overlapping monologues of three “sitters” for a portrait, but the tone overall was singularly Parkinson’s. The story was simply told: the sitters, faced with silence, slowly begin to gab away to the unseen artist, and are thus revealed, early, simplistically, as Luke (Mark Weinman), a wife-hating sad man with daddy issues; Cassandra (Alex Jarrett), a wannabe actor and pathological fantasist; and Mary (Parkinson), a fading mistress with distressing sibling memories.
The overlapping of direction, with some voices cutting in and cutting off, some on triptych split-screen, the intercuts of monologue (“She’s really getting through the Rennies at the moment”/“I absolutely love sex”), all against the same drab studio curtain, leads you to thoroughly believe it’s all contemporaneous and unrelated. Which just leads to slow, eye-widening shock as the final 10 minutes reel by. A triumph, not only for the writer: Weinman and Jarrett also convince with consummate skill. Presumably, with BBC Four about to end commissioning of new content – without it we wouldn’t have, say, Charlie Brooker, or Detectorists – this has just scraped in under the wire, and I can’t tell you how glad I am, nor just how much the corporation is skittering away its own pearls.
Netflix’s This Is a Robbery is a fine enough exploratory doc into the 1990 art theft at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in which a couple of (we now think) mobsters disguised as cops were free to wander around inside for 81 minutes on St Patrick’s Day, ripping the likes of Vermeer, Degas and, most famously, Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee from their frames. It’s a cracking story but not exactly an untold one, especially in America, and last year’s BBC Four The Billion Dollar Art Hunt was equally valuable. And an hour long.
Crucially, we come no closer to knowing the culprits, nor where the art might now be, although there’s remarkable footage of the sleaze of the New England mob in those days. As increasingly often now, Netflix has taken a decent 90-minute yarn and crammed it into a mere four hours.
Fans of What We Do in the Shadows might love Wellington Paranormal, from the same team. It’s goofy, splenetic and rather a lot of fun, as two painfully stupid cops solve paranormal outbreaks in Wellington, which is apparently – for real – the most haunted city on the planet. But too often it feels as if all the contestants on Taskmaster have been invited to make a schlock antipodean spookfest, with only string and Blu Tack, which, now I think on it, might be even more intriguing.
