The Moorside (BBC1) | iPlayer
Roots (BBC4) | iPlayer
Apple Tree Yard (BBC1) | iPlayer
The Good Karma Hospital (ITV) | ITV Hub
Karen Matthews was presented with a “good parent certificate” from her local Dewsbury council, which perhaps tells us all we need to know about such good-citizenry guff, an unsavoury melange of censorious preaching and all-must-have-tickboxes acclaim for low achievement. Karen Matthews, as we all now must know, was the mother who hoaxed the kidnapping of her nine-year-old daughter, Shannon. For three weeks in 2008, Shannon lay drugged and hidden in the base of a divan bed in the nearby home of Karen’s dreadful boyfriend’s dreadful uncle, while the Sun ramped the reward money up to £50,000.
The Moorside was always going to be a forlorn and tawdry story, because Karen simply didn’t have the up-theres to have even hoped to follow through such a boldly nasty deception. Even today, granted an alias after serving half her eight-year sentence, she is not considered mentally capable of maintaining a completely new identity.
This supreme slice of drama was indeed tawdry in places, mainly Karen’s home, where boyfriend Craig’s extended family of shellsuited sacks lumped around offering angry banalities. But also forlorn in, had she but known it, the redemptive guise of Julie Bushby, the closest thing to a hero.
Julie tried. Sheridan Smith played Julie, of course, with utter conviction, as she does everything. She rallied, she swore, she chucked tabloid snappers under the chins, she spoke the good speak of “shoulder to shoulder… when the chips are down”, she marched and photocopied and smokily wheeze-puffed into balloons and stomped her little feet. That little face, at the end of Tuesday’s first part, beginning to realise she just might have been sold (and selling) a pup throughout the most important weeks of her life, was the very definition of forlorn.
Karen Matthews and the uncle, Michael Donovan, in their actions, did more than let down just Julie: they besmirched an entire class, and allowed David Cameron to again mount his meaty ham-hocks on that groaning high horse. And, yes, there was much grubbiness: wheedling dimwit Craig, who was later (separately) convicted of possessing images of child abuse and tried, in the first part of this script, to top himself using Calpol; the suspicion that at least some in the community were more motivated by boredom, the chance of a piss-up, or glowering class resentment at the ongoing Maddie McCann saga and that £2.6m bounty.
Was the BBC justified, right, even, in making this? Shannon’s grandparents branded the drama “sick and disgusting”. I would hesitate to use even those words for what their own daughter, Karen, did. This brave programme differed not only in that it didn’t actually hide a kid under a bed for three weeks. Instead, by focusing on Julie, Neil McKay’s script attempted to recapture some sense of dignity for forgotten, “broken” estates, and to remind us that all generalisations are dangerous, even this one. Gemma Whelan, as Karen, had a hideously unenviable task: to somehow portray, with very few lines other than “she’s us princess, and I need her home”, a vulnerable woman, a stupid woman, a scheming woman. The portrayal was managed with magnificence, her every lolloping body-roll telling a tale of blank-eyed entitlement, and yet somehow, somehow, there was empathy.
And so to the Roots remake. My, they must have been anxious. Forty years on, and in those particular years, the United States and race have alternately enjoyed and endured more fractious relationships than the 1863 emancipation, or the civil rights successes of the late 60s, would ever have foreseen. Could justice at all be done? Could a megabuck-ambitious project succeed in a) necessarily reminding young black Americans (if they needed it) of a lost hinterland of pride; b) stalling dumb knee-jerk reprisals, from either colour; and c) recreating seminal television? They must have been twitching, psyches hurting, only a little ameliorated by having the original Kunta Kinte, LeVar Burton, as co-executive producer.
No anxiety leaks out. This is a sublimely confident project. From the moment the newly minted Kunta – ex-EastEnder Malachi Kirby, after a global star-hunt, and what a find he is – shimmies beautifully out, with his too-rare toothsomeness of happiness, it’s clear that this is a production that does not number the phrase “self-doubt” in its lexicon.
Bitterly well re-researched as to the extent that the Mandinka of the Gambia were not only slavers in their own right but occupied not mud huts but a relatively sophisticated 1767 city, it hurts. Even in the occasional cliches, it hurts: “Stop filling your head with dreams, and forget that girl,” Kunta’s father tells him, and yet 10 minutes later, under slaver decks, he dreams only small dreams, of his father’s farm. In such lavish increments our disappointments make us.
This towering and powerful Roots suffers only through the vagaries of modern television. It’s on BBC4 at an odd time, and the obvious made-for-America ad-breaks don’t translate too happily. But it’s one of the best big stories ever told, and I’m suddenly back in 1977, remembering the heartache of having to move on from Kunta to Kizzy, and from Kizzy to Chicken George, and this doesn’t spare us the pain of forgotten friends. It moves with blistering pace, often to our regret. It’s angry and beautiful, shameful and shaming, bloody and leathery and salty and viciously vital to any of our histories. If I, as a dorky schoolboy in lily-white Edinburgh, could be so urgently moved all those years ago, you can lift yourselves to turn on BBC4.
Apple Tree Yard turned out, didn’t it, better than expected? Almost. Certainly the boring hype, being exclusively about fiftysomething women having sex lives, was wholly eclipsed by week two, as we entered a nuanced psychological thriller about sad, deluded men. Sadly, as it moved from cup to lip, it lost its grip. What should have been a great denouement – the verdict – was utterly ruined by having the forewoman delay her sentence for a full pregnant 20 seconds, as if on The X Factor or The Apprentice, or delivering God’s final judgment. I’m sorry, but this doesn’t actually happen in court. God’s final judgment would be far quicker. A grand book, grand acting, grand filmic tension, retrospectively rendered risible by the pervasively foul influences of pre-publicity and a director’s tin ear for dramatic truths.
The Good Karma Hospital gets away with it, because it’s not pretending to be anything else other than a delightful sorbet of hope. Better than Death in Paradise, worse than almost anything else on terrestrial television excluding (obviously) anything featuring Alan Titchmarsh or Keith Lemon, it has sun, and Sri Lanka standing in for India, and Amanda Redman, and a surly sexy doc on an old motorbike, and an expat naif nurse, all of them standing in for any sense of plot, exposition, dramatic tension, credibility, reality or interest. It’s a lovely Sunday-evening snooze – especially if you’re in the habit of waking with a yelping jolt on Monday mornings, remembering that you actually are Mr Titchmarsh.
