Trophy: The Big Game Hunting Controversy BBC Four | iPlayer
Kiri Channel 4 | All 4
Spiral BBC4 | iPlayer
Requiem BBC1 | iPlayer
Altered Carbon Netflix
A blue moon, a blood moon, a wolf moon and a talking whale featured, naturally enough, in the first week for a giddily long time in which President Donald wasn’t the most bloviatingly repellent American to hit our screens. In fact, charmed and softened by the Piers Morgan thing – truly it was Frost/Nixon for a generation that walks into lamp‑posts – and the Davos pampering, he almost went on to resemble, in his State of the Union address, a human being. Steady there boy: I’ll be voting Racist Nazi next.
Worst Yank on the telly last week was, without a rat-sliver of doubt, Philip Glass. Not the Fulbright scholar who has changed the way we hear modern music, but the racist Texan creationist who believes that, since God put all animals below man in his dominion, man has the duty to kill them, not for need but for sport. The rancid Phil, with his angry and dottled sense of patriotic entitlement, thinks it not even his privilege but his right as an American to go to Africa and shoot every last one, the more endangered the better.
Phil had harsh competition, in terms of unwatchability, during Trophy: The Big Game Hunting Controversy, with the Safari Club International Convention in Las Vegas. This was like some end-of-days festival of bloodied bad taste, from the soft-porn “Racks” calendar featuring a model in gingham crop top posing with an antlered skull sat in her groin, to the stuffed alligator frozen, mid-rearing, into a glass cocktail table replete with chilled martinis. But Phil still won, whether tittering as his rifle blew off the top of an elephant’s head or getting all emotional-gurny with “pride” after his first lion kill. From half a mile’s intensely safe distance.
I defy anyone who watched this impeccable Storyville strand, nicely free of narration – they just let the high-functioning pond life get on with hanging themselves by talking – not to feel a shame and a hot anger rinsing through them. But extreme cases almost always make bad law, and we were reminded of the Cecil the lion outcry of three years ago. Increasing liberal concern led, in 2009, to South Africa banning the sale of rhino horn, which in turn led to financial pain for one John Hume, who’s trying his best to save rhinos by pollarding – safely, painlessly – their horns every two years. So the horn-poachers won’t want them, and thus rhinos will live, and breed, and thrive. We watched Hume being shouted down in a London debate by the kind of social-justice warriors – presumably some of those whose satirical Twitter barbs have been oh so damned effective in bringing Mr Trump to his cringing knees over the last year – who, in their own ways, are as guilty of raging certainties as any Texan creationist.
Because there were immense questions thrown up in these 90 minutes. Whether, by permitting occasional, regulated “canned hunting”, African farms and safaris might earn enough from tourist-shooters to keep other immensely valuable conservation projects going; how African locals feel about being trampled, and sometimes eaten; why no righteous social-justice-warrior anger is yet directed towards the huge global market of those who insanely believe in the medicinal powers of rhino horn. What a bloody, valuable programme.
Kiri ended, way too quickly for my liking. There were terrific showdowns in the last episode: between Finn Bennett as Si and Steven Mackintosh as his father Jim, the very definition of an intensely weak man hiding an intensely angry man; and of course between Sarah Lancashire’s Miriam and her arse-covering employers, the most timidly bureaucratic of whom could only flail against the gale of her epithets: “and as for you, Billy Big-Bollocks…” Terrific, as most of this has been, though the third episode went too heavy on adoptive mum Alice (Lia Williams), good value though she was. And even writers of the calibre of Jack Thorne still get it wrong with the press. It’s not the pack of reporters you need to worry about, who in my experience can be grace and charm personified; you don’t get the story by shouting spittily in someone’s face, yet this was all the pack seemed to do. It’s the editors, back in London: in one chilling aside, Miriam murmured that there was an online petition to demand that she was refused her pension. How easily do we muster hate from afar.
Overall, a wise and provocative outing, though one that was driven, in its urgency for narrative plot, down too many twisty avenues, too quickly. I wonder whether Thorne, given a longer run, might have more truly focused on the anger that was at the heart of this: the quiet anger of the privileged, feeling that they’ve helped, in sometimes huge ways, yet are of the wrong class, or colour, ever to be allowed to expect gratitude. Such niggles, in soft minds, can fester and worm disastrously.
Spiral, which also ended, tied up the crimes, pretty much, in a rather satisfying double bill. This truly remarkable series still stands head and shoulders above any comparable police series on TV today, simply because it, and its characters, with all their French flaws and dirt and delights, is allowed to expand over 12 sprawling, immersive episodes. Redemptive humanity sweats from every clogged pore of Gilou’s big nose; and he and his fellows were left, at the last, wonderfully unresolved. Roll on series seven.
Requiem promises much, not least in way of sound. Nominally just another spooksome BBC tingler – old castle in Wales, birds flying into windows, locked room, pagan symbols, creepy locals – it is rendered a whole cut above by not having the heroine’s every move into peril foreshadowed by dissonant eek-eek strings. The music, and sound effects, are so muted, or subtle, as to constitute a revelation: why, when it can be done this well, was it ever done otherwise? This truly, and cleverly, intrigues (as does the heroine, cellist Matilda, played by Lydia Wilson) in a way no rusty hinge ever has. Hooked.
Altered Carbon will not be to everyone’s taste, being the adaptation of a 2002 cyberpunk novel set in 2384, with all that entails, but if you can get past the jumpy time-travel and body-double expositions of the opener, a lavish big Netflix-budget police noir awaits. As episodes progress, you start to wonder whether Philip K Dick and James Ellroy ever collaborated, locked in a ramshackle house overhanging Big Sur. Possessed of vaulting imagination, Carbon is flawed, but so are some of the best diamonds.
