Jamestown (Sky 1)
American Gods (Amazon)
Why Did I Go Mad? (BBC 2) | iPlayer
What hokum, yet what pretty hokum, Jamestown turns out to be. The big, new, Brit-heavy Sky confiture purportedly sketches out the arrival on US shores in 1619 of the very first “maids to make wives”: a daintily shod yet roisterously seasick clutch of mainly middle-class gals bound for the New World, bought and paid for by the Virginia Company to provide helpmeets for the first male colonists, who had been working the flyblown land since 1607, gagging for 12 long years for a… dainty shoe.
There will be, I’m heartily sorry to be able to say so predictably, rape. But not until the 12th minute, and after that we are given ease. Where many horrors might have awaited, given the insanely conflagratory mix – all muck-sweat and hormones and booze ’mid the swampy backwoods – we get fewer genuine nasties than in an average episode of Emmerdale. Writer Bill Gallagher, who has form in the shape of Lark Rise to Candleford and The Paradise, has instead given us a masterclass in cliche.
There’s the feisty, red-haired Oirish lass, indentured to a drunk who turns out to have a heart of gold. The headstrong brunette, promised to a surly and ugly planter but so obviously, frottagingly in love with his impossibly handsome brother Silas that even the plug-ugly affianced bro, you feel, is tempted to sigh “oh, get a cabin”. The stuck-up, scheming blonde. The cartoon trio of villains, who include an oafish lout, a preening aristo and a fat hypocritical priest who ogles cleavages while pronouncing on sin and witchcraft. The creeping-Jesus governor’s wife. The chinless-but-malleable functionary for whom scheming blonde and her retroussé nose have high ambitions. The savage Indians who might just turn out to be noble… I’m just waiting for the emergence of some cheeky-toothed, doe-eyed beavers, quite possibly animated. For all that, it hits many highs, is an annoyingly moreish watch, and it’s actually a relief, these fraught days, at my fraught age, to have some respite from the hideously realistic violence of, say, Emmerdale.
Oh that I could say the same for American Gods, a long-awaited adaptation of the novel by the sainted Neil Gaiman, normally better known for his graphic novels. (Hush you at the back for saying “comics”.) Many said it would never get off the ground, such is Gaiman’s whorled imaginarium, and the book lacks neither erudition nor, on page, a mesmerising graphic quality: it’s a seriously grownup beast.
Within the first minutes, we see a disembodied arm arcing through the air, clutching, in reflex rigor, a Viking sword. We know, even then, that it’s likely to land badly, given the many nauseating gouts of ichor thus far offered, but it cleaves a warrior, and the resultant splurge of crimson washes the whole frame. A little later, a lady will swallow a gentleman entirely into her vagina. In these and many other scenes it is as if the camera lens has been smeared in a particularly lubricious mix of blood and K-Y Jelly.
Its premise is not half bad: the old gods, which America’s immigrants brought to the country – Odin, say, or Bilquis, Queen of Sheba (she of the nifty undercarriage) – are, by and large, forgotten, having ceded their vengeful places to the new gods of media and technology, and yet have one last war up their leathery sleeves.
But you can’t help suspecting the showrunners, in trying so slavishly to keep hiply ahead of internet biteback – this was, of course, a cult novel – have sacrificed lucidity of plot for huggingly pleased-with-themselves fidelity to the original, every written slice of gore and weirdness translated literally on screen. It’s gothically fabulous to watch, but you’re so busy wondering “how did they do that?” that the other half of your brain forgets the characters. Sometimes, awkwardly enough, the mantra should be – tell, don’t show.
The main story, away from Vikings and vaginas, is of a man called Shadow Moon coming out of prison and becoming a reluctant bodyguard for the mysterious Mr Wednesday. Ricky Whittle is Mr Moon, and plays it with just the right bitter innocence: Ian McShane, as Wednesday (spoiler alert: he’s actually the Norse god Odin) gnaws every scene with his handsomely raddled face, and one wonders what he was ever doing on 70s British TV: his always has been such a very Hollywood face, Mitchum with mobile facial musculature.
It’s unrewardingly confusing at the very moment, but we’re all adults now and can expect not to be spoon-fed: if you can push to the side of your plate the clever-clever blood-loyal production values, there might just emerge a huge, coherent, narrative delight of thumpingly timely relevance. But it’ll split viewers as would Marmite, or blood sausage.
No filmic horrors, however, can compare to the ones conjured up by poor Dr David Strange, unwitting star of Why Did I Go Mad?, an often insightful Horizon on psychosis. He saw, suddenly, at times of stress, despite his many anti-psychotic meds (and meds to cure the meds), spiny monstrous anteaters, giant scorpions barring his way across the floor, and rats, ever rats. He woke at 3am and vouchsafed to us, through waterfalls of sweat, what he had just seen; he suddenly pointed out, meeting an academic in a cafe in Winchester, that there was two-foot spiky crab sitting next to the prof. His bug-eyed conviction was enough to have me suddenly shift in my own seat.
Some sufferers from psychosis manage to “talk down” their inner voices, learning to challenge and confront them rather than running scared. Some even benefit from the experience. Dear Rachel bravely confronted some voices, chiefly the faceless threats she draws and names the “Not Yets”, and progress continues. I doubted her psychosis not one whit: I was less convinced by another, who seemed to have retrained her inner “voices” simply as aides-memoire: “pick up keys”, “remember cat food” and the rest – surely the kind of thing we all do, and thus wholly unhelpful in the context of the programme.
David’s and Rachel’s panicked woes were undeniable, and there’s strong evidence now that overproduction of dopamine, coupled with –as in David and Rachel’s cases – childhood abuse, are huge factors in burgeoning psychoses. The erudite David’s only kicked in – and very suddenly: seeing rats in a boardroom – a few years ago. This programme gave hope, that researchers are reaching ever faster towards true understanding, and none who watched this could help but pray for a genuine breakthrough before David tries to kill himself again. Wouldn’t it be… nice… were there first to be a breakthrough in how to stop parents and step-parents abusing their own bloody children.
