The Nightly Show (ITV) ITV Player
The Replacement (BBC) | iPlayer
Broadchurch (ITV) | ITV Player
Prime Suspect 1973 (ITV) | ITV Player
Catastrophe (C4) | All 4
What a difficult business it must be having ITV as a friend. Brightly new-pin sharp some days, radiating intelligence; the next day a bleary, weary fright of a mess, both cock-boastful and wheedlingly needy. On one hand, the channel continues to produce some of the finest drama currently on show on, yes, the planet. On the other, the channel continues to showboat its contempt for news and current affairs by not only moving News at Ten to 10.30 but, now weaving like a drunk trying to remove his trousers, replacing it with The Nightly Show.
There is still a space, arguably an urgent need, for an American-style blend of satire, chat and to-the-second topicality on British TV (again, I’d humbly propose Eddie Mair for the job). But there are not italics sufficiently viciously slanted to express the opinion that this wasn’t it. There is already talk, unusual perhaps in any programme’s debut week – I don’t even remember this with Eldorado – of taking it with urgency behind the barn and hitting it with an axe. I’ll give it a chance to find what’s left of its feet, as it varies its weekly presenters, and Mel, Sue and Bradley Walsh are usually great value. But it was someone’s decision – an apparently unique combination of condescension and panic – to open with a week of David Walliams. To be fair, Walliams and I appear to possess wildly differing views on what is or might ever be funny, intelligent or interesting, so I’m coming at him with distaste anyway. All I’ll say is it’s borderline possible that someone has made a joke about Donald Trump’s hair at some time in the past year, and without being paid £1,500 a minute.
Back to that winning ITV drama soon, but for the moment the week still belongs to The Replacement, a very BBC (in a good way) psychological drama that fair gripped the thrapple, as they say in Scotland, though this was a very middle-class Scotland, all chi-chi architects and mews refurbs and lazy winter sun blinking through empty gastropubs. And a pregnancy, and needs-must maternity leave at the very bloody height of Ellen’s architectural success, and an impossibly nice replacement found in Paula.
It was remarkable for many things. The skill of the storytelling was one: writer and director Joe Ahearne ratcheted the tension in ever-credible gradations, yet to the extent that by the end you were left blinking, asking: how did it get to this? Same principle as boiling a frog. And, like The Girl on the Train, or Before I Go to Sleep, you would keep questioning the trustworthiness of the narrator: is Ellen’s burgeoning distaste towards replacement Paula the fault of Paula (her inappropriate invasion of personal space, annexation of Ellen’s pregnancy as celebration of all things mother, sly adjustments to the blueprint of Ellen’s big project), or the product of Ellen’s own paranoid, exploding hormones? The two leads, Morven Christie as Ellen and Vicky McClure as Paula, simply excel. Together they evoke, with hard stares melting into ersatz all-girls-together smiles, lipsticked moues snapping when out of sight into feral snarls, the very embodiment of passive-aggressive workplace feuds, reminiscent even of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford. There is, yes, a body, plunging through a skylight, but in truth it didn’t need it: the drama is contained in the too-credible scenario of two colleagues murdering each other with smiles. Might Ellen be wrong? Madly wrong about the succubus trying to steal her job, her husband, even her baby? Oh, but trust me, it’s Paula. Never mind frogs: the smart money says she’ll be boiling the bunny by the end of things. In a far-too-long fortnight when the third, last, episode arrives. Can’t wait.
Broadchurch, I’m delighted to say, veered back with a welcome clunk on to high good form. I actually liked Chris Chibnall’s second series – I had just interviewed David Tennant, in situ in Bridport, and was thus well disposed – but can still accept it was seen as a retreat from the impossible heights achieved by the original (which Chibnall had only ever intended to be a one-off).
Due to popular demand, he’s had to make it three, before going off to be the new Doctor Who showrunner, and there was no body on the beach this time either. Instead, a searingly distraught – to the point of amnesia, almost narcolepsy – Julie Hesmondhalgh, numb from rape. Which she’s taken three days to report.
The first half-hour of this re-established much. The awkward relationship between Tennant and Olivia Colman’s Ellie, by turns bickering and fond, but (almost) ever to the good. The impact on the community, that big trick borrowed from Scandi drama to supplant body-count; already there are dark untruths appearing. Chiefly, though, Chibnall’s ear and eye for all niceties and nastinesses of changing modern life, revealed here in the steady, slow, patient processing of Julie H – does another award loom? She was blisteringly good – with encouraging hand-grasps and whispers from Ellie, great care from crisis worker Anna, sensitivity in the swabs, overall empathy from police, overall belief from the police. Fabulous, with many winces to truth. Soon, Broadchurch’s locals will scuttle back to lying.
A great contrast, certainly, to the treatment of women in 1973. Not just within the police force: even the victims, such as a prostitute on a slab, are subjected to a dearth of dignity unimaginable today. This was fiercely evinced in Prime Suspect 1973, a reimagined timeslip from Lynda La Plante, à la Endeavour. And wow. It’s got legs.
As has (sexist critic spoiler alert) Stefanie Martini. As the desperately young Jane Tennison, she has been criticised for wearing too much eye makeup, for being too pretty, too silly – for, basically, not being Helen Mirren – but to my mind did an immense job of credibly balancing her impossible life. A nice middle-class gal from Maida Vale, with parents who can’t give her credit for not being her hairdresser sister, coping in probationary policedom with tea-making, vomit-clearing, every haughty misogynist slapdown while the whole cop-shop lusts after her. And meanwhile, trying to solve a nasty druggie murder, which might possibly foil a bank raid. And drunkenly, youngly, snogging her boss. No wonder the later Jane hit the bottle – swallowed the bottle. Tantalising, beautifully realised – even the rain seems to come from ’73 – and very moreish.
Catastrophe remains the funniest programme on television, despite its success. Horgan and Delaney might justifiably have grown lazy: they haven’t. Series three kicked off with the usual scatology from Sharon Horgan – it’s never a programme I would recommend to Irish nuns, though I don’t know that very many – mostly revolving around knicker-sweat. Hubby Rob Delaney, the forsworn teetotaller, is back on the booze, which is immensely promising. Mostly it promises an accident waiting to happen – just not a very interesting accident. Two milk-floats colliding. All you’re left with is the smell of spilt milk, going off.
The genius lies in the creation of a couple who can kick seven leathers out of each other and achieve impossibly stupid circumstances, but remain clever enough to know it is, still, and will always be, clever them against the world.
