Sacrifice (C5) | My5
The Living and the Dead (BBC1) | iPlayer
Inside Porton Down (BBC4) | iPlayer
All the Way (Sky Atlantic)
There was just so much news last week that the bulletins couldn’t hope to contain it. It even spilled into Saturday Kitchen, where the lovely Michel Roux, possibly deliberately, misheard a romaine lettuce as “Remain?”, to much bitter laughter. Where do we go after such a week of news? Is it possible that all news has finally eaten its own fill and the remaining 26 weeks of the year will consist entirely, news-wise, of winsome footage of cats doing cute things (hilarious how the 55 million baby birds annually killed in the UK by our beloved moggies, oh my sides), and endless reruns of Marcus Willis (and how the bulletins and even Wimbers itself fell on that one, it containing relatively little mention of house prices and just a geezer with a pretty girlfriend and some thudbucket mates), losing to someone who could actually play tennis?
After so much breaking news news news, I was simply left with one phrase rerunning through my head… Nicola Sturgeon for England manager.
Most unedifying spectacle of the week was, of course, Nigel Farage back in the European parliament. As is now becoming habitual, Nigel judged the mood entirely wrongly. The mood was sombre yet conciliatory. Nigel behaved like an indecently tumescent sock-puppet. His “none of you have ever done a proper job in your lives!” was misreported: the actual sentence began: “I know that virtually none…” but, still, the tone was set. I’m not sure I’ve seen a politician judge a mood so badly since George Bush Sr told America in 1992 that he needed it to be “more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons”. I can overlook his trembling hangover – I’ve had a few in my time – and can approach any reasoned (defined as non-Twitter) debate on migrants, but can’t quite forgive his one-fingered gracelessness. Every one of the John-Bull English fans in Nice performed with more decorum. Nigel exited with the kind of fanfare that might have been accorded a streaker at Queen Victoria’s funeral.
Odd, this odd week, to get a couple of allegedly spooky thrillers on television, when we might have expected them around Christmas. It’s turning into an odd summer. Sacrifice could have been the perfect mix of Straw Dogs and The Wicker Man, if only its script and direction had not been undertaken by low-functioning ants. It was set on Shetland, except it wasn’t. It was filmed on America’s vision of Scotland, which is always Ireland. It featured ancient runes and a sinister sect, and Rupert Graves and Radha Mitchell, who, when she wasn’t saying: “All I’m saying is that there is something weird going on on this island” was saying things such as: “Are you saying he switched his sick dead wife for someone else?” Radha was saved in the end by her husband, who had decided not to join the sect – essentially the “sect for men who think they are far better than any other human beings”, as if there’s any other kind of sect – but by then I was past caring and could cheerfully have pushed them all off the nearest cliff.
Better by far was The Living and the Dead, which promises a toothsome much. There were flaws of course – the sinister rocking horse in the bedroom, the twitching of the tri-angled mirror to reveal a lurker. Had we moved on at all from the direly unwatchable Hammer House of Horror offerings? Yet Tallulah Haddon, who played the misbegotten young, possessed Harriet, is the owner of a remarkable face and acting skills, and the moment when she fed a little fluffy yellow duckling to the pigs remains remarkably unsettling.
The putative exorcist, Nathan, played by Colin Morgan with all the smouldering good looks of last year’s Poldark yet none of the concomitant unwatchability, and his wife, the exuberantly sexy Charlotte Spencer, make a fine team. This opener to a six-part series was a comparative breeze for them – think Federer against Marcus Willis, but with a twitch less goodwill and more underwater baptisms – but the stage has been set for more Morgan, more demonic possession, more grunting Somerset yokels, all in every way good things: I just wish it had ramped up the scare factor. Can we even do horror any more, proper frissons of? Just once, I’d like to cower beneath the duvet long into the night.
As so often, truth was scarier than fiction. Inside Porton Down, winningly presented by Dr Michael Mosley, began with him taking off his mask and being asked to tell a couple of soldiers his name. He didn’t get further than “Michae…” before dissolving into tearful gasping retches. This was only CS gas and I was actually worried he might die.
He didn’t, but he did go on to tell not only a terrific history of chemical and biological warfare but of, essentially, man’s inhumanity to man. CS gas was undoubtedly nasty. Mustard gas worse. Anthrax, supremely unsettling, and Gruinard, the Scottish island on which it was tested, has only recently been reopened to midges and tourists, who might in the end wipe each other out.
Far worse – demonic, even – was sarin, developed by the Nazis from an industrial pesticide and, famously, unused by them. No matter. Saddam used it in Halabja in 1988. Assad used it in Damascus in 2013. Between them, thousands were killed. In remarkably horrible fashion.
“Toxic” is a word that has been overused in the Brexit debate. You had to watch this programme to understand that, sometimes, words should have the power to retain their original meanings.
If Brexit is one definition of a faintly decent man, albeit an increasingly ham-faced and -fisted Old Etonian, getting a lousy outcome, All the Way was the opposite. It told the story of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a difficult, closed, often nasty, man doing good by emancipation of his own southern states. Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad made such a remarkably subtle portrait of this president that I was tempted to forgive LBJ. And then I remembered Agent Orange.
