The Serpent (BBC One) | iPlayer
Black Narcissus (BBC One) | iPlayer
Death to 2020 (Netflix)
Doctor Who (BBC One) | iPlayer
Spiral (BBC Four) | iPlayer
Kathmandu, Goa, Bangkok – especially the last – all serve as such perfect backdrops to The Serpent, the BBC’s first big drama of the new year, and a slow-burn triumph. Look beyond and under the prayer wheels, the soporific beaming mysticism, the garlands and the braids, and you see fat rats and crumbling masonry, gnarled disappointment, disease. It’s a pathetic fallacy for the hippie dream of the 1970s and has seldom been achieved better.
It has been achieved by a skilful retelling of the crimes of Charles Sobhraj, the Viet-Indian Frenchman who murdered at least 12 tourists in that decade. By so many accounts, Sobhraj, in every one of his various stolen identities and forged visas, was seriously charming, winningly amoral. Until he spiked your drink, lamped you on the head, burned you alive, you wouldn’t know he was a sociopath: merely a shady gem dealer who’d invited you, via one or other of his adoring acolytes, to recuperate from your “food poisoning”. Tahar Rahim makes a scarily good job of Sobhraj, albeit we don’t get to see the famous charm, which is, I think, to the good. Jenna Coleman shows she can do so much more than Victoria.
It’s a sprawling and astonishing eight-part story, but one that you might want to concentrate on. Often, the time shifts can lurch: but this is clearly shown, in clacking flight departure boards, and I reckon it allows us to give a nod of homage to the victims rather than focusing purely on the psychopathy of Sobhraj. It is desperately hard, as my colleague Andrew Anthony recounted last week about his meetings with Sobhraj, to pin down that precise drive. Hatred of hippies? Perceived racism, from all quarters? Just a bad-born dog? Yet what I took from this was not so much Sobhraj but the cultural dearths of the flower children, so often spoilt, heedless, alarmingly casual. Their trips (in every sense) were, before they ran back to moneyed Mom, every bit as patronising as the grand tours undertaken by Shelley and the gang.
I can almost appreciate why Black Narcissus was remade: the attraction to film-makers of revisiting the 1947 Powell-Pressburger shocker – a group of conflicted nuns; a scary, abandoned temple reeking of ancient carnality and suicide; a hugely tempting fall-to-death bell tower. Catnip. Add Gemma Arterton as Top Nun Sister Clodagh and Alessandro Nivola as Hunky Gentleman Handyman Mr Dean. Sorted.
But in the second episode, exactly the same happened: Sister Clodagh and Mr Dean indulge in a little more light eye-frottage; Tibetan shutters bang; Clodagh flashes back to a summery romp with a Chap and scourges herself; Dean looks even more like a manspreading Indiana Jones. Except by the time mad Sister Ruth gets to “Shivarti sees what you refuse to, you dried-up old bitch”, we are into decidedly un-nunnish language. Third: pretty much ditto, except I was now – Shiva forgive me – semi-praying for the now disastrously mad Ruth (a marvellous Aisling Franciosi, pretty much the only one given the freedom to act through the wimple) to get on with the deed and toss herself off.
There had been a little hope, earlier, in the scenes given to the underused Sister Philippa (Karen Bryson), the lovely gardener, particularly with her “if I stay I will forget my purpose. Since we came here, all I can think about is the beauty of everything. It is too much. The air is too clear. You can see too far. It’s as though the mountains are watching us, rather than God.” There was a kernel of something fascinating in this. Unfortunately, we were rather shoehorned into pretending that, for all Arterton and Nivola’s undoubted beauty, the chemistry was there, because it wasn’t. (Also, into pretending that this warranted three episodes.)
Many had high hopes when they saw the name Charlie Brooker linked to Netflix and a review of 2020: hopes of a Screenwipe of sorts, with frissons of Black Mirror. What we got in Death to 2020 was what some might call politely a salmagundi; what others might describe rudely as a mess.
One problem was that, for all the talent involved, there was no Charlie Brooker talking us drily through. It was as if a Netflix algorithm had somehow conflated this with the US show Saturday Night Live, which, through repetitively pointing out weekly since 2016 that Donald Trump was thick and nasty, famously brought about his 2018 impeachment and subsequent bell tower death.
Lisa Kudrow, Samuel L Jackson, Hugh Grant – all terrific, given the bad lines they were given. Kudrow’s spokesperson was funny the first time she challenged with an airy defiance the existence of recorded facts. By the seventh repetition of exactly the same gag… not so much. How many ways are there to say that Joe Biden is “old”, and how screamingly amusing will that saying-so of an established fact ever have been in the first place? After the year we wish never was, the recap we wish never was.
One of Chris Chibnall’s finer Doctor Whos – last week’s one-off seasonal special –raised its game by letting such luminaries as Harriet Walter, Chris Noth and John Barrowman do much of the lifting, the Doctor herself languishing in an alien chokey some 79bn light years off our port bow. It was also the least “messagey” of all recent output, not even preaching mimsy goodwill to all aliens – just as well, given that we’re always told the Daleks are the most terrifyingly amoral miscreations of all known universes. Quite why this should be has always mystified, personally. And this managed rather cleverly to address precisely my point – the Daleks have never been scary, apart from the voices, and as Edinburgh kids we were mostly used to folk speaking through tracheotomies – by separating the hardware from the software, as it were.
Noth’s semi-evil global industrialist made, out of Dalek shells, simple artificial-intelligence security drones possessed of a few extra bangs and whistles: the true nasties were the squid-like brains that used to inhabit them. Having one of these horrors drop on to your face from a bell jar and clamber into your spine: right enough now, that would give you a bad day.
This particular outing for Doctor Who was for once smart, warm, engaging. And finally someone’s wised up to the fact that, while soft-brained young BBC adults might grow misty-eyed at, say, the almost too long scene between Ryan and the Doc featuring some existential guff about change always being scary, and the answer (I think) being bravery and niceness, real actual children just start fidgeting.
Very sorry to see Tosin Cole and Bradley Walsh go, though. Ryan and Graham have been grand additions. We still have Mandip Gill’s Yaz. The jury’s still out, as it has now been for an alarmingly long period on Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor.
Spiral’s eighth series began on Saturday, with Gilou in jail. Tawdry, chic and principled in equal measure, it’s the best European televisual thriller since the passing of the millennium. I have watched, greedily, half the series on preview. It’s good, dammit. This is also, tragically, the last. I might get me to a bell tower.
