Unforgotten (ITV) | itv.com
Who Is America? (C4) | channel4.com
Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema (BBC Four) | iPlayer
Prison (C4) | channel4.com
How good is Unforgotten? You must excuse me. I had simply… forgotten. It’s not just in the performances of the leads, Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar, though both performances are beyond sterling: Walker’s face, in particular, has a singular ability to move from her default gloomy-fractious to unbridled glee in the wink of a dirty joke. For series 3 of Unforgotten, writer Chris Lang has also given us a demi-stellar supporting cast to see us through the rest of the summer, and confound, as Lang will, our expectations.
Such as Alex Jennings, freshish from A Very English Scandal, playing an apparently nice GP. Do we really believe the good doctor would tell a dementia patient, as overheard by her daughter during a home visit, that he had “half a mind to stick you full of morphine and give us all a fucking break”, especially after said daughter is revealed as a vexatious litigant? We do after he’s caught being nastily sarcastic to a waitress over a corked bottle. Always a giveaway, being dastardly to staff.
And Neil Morrissey, who seems to have put his extended kidulthood so thoroughly behind him as to be in some danger of emerging an old, wise, serious actor. That lovely James Fleet, as a bipolar genius fallen lower than low; seldom will be seen such pathos in such eyes over the loss of a shaggy wee dug. Kevin McNally, a quiz-show-host, possibly on the cusp of National Treasure status… and so the four men are set up over the next six episodes, to be tossed on the storms of a cold-case murder inquiry, and one of our most human and humane cop shows, ever, can proceed with reflecting almost-real life.
The ring-round in which the increasingly forlorn team led by DCI Cassie Stewart (Walker) have to call the families of missing daughters, to ask whether the girls as toddlers ever broke a wrist in Cyprus, was both a masterclass in empathetic acting and, surely, one for screening at the next AGM of the Police Federation. This is what we all wish all our police were like.
It’s said that Tom Lehrer gently closed the lid of his piano on hearing Henry Kissinger had won the Nobel peace prize, declaring satire henceforth impossible. Respect as ever, Mr Lehrer, but you were a bit early: there was still much fun to be had in ensuing decades, not least by Sacha Baron Cohen. First as Ali G, then as Borat (2006) and Brüno (2009), he managed along the way to illustrate “how racism feeds on dumb conformity, as much as rabid bigotry”.
His latest, Who Is America?, arrives to altogether different times. Undoubtedly the sharpest section of this opener revolved around Baron Cohen’s “Colonel Erran Morad, anti-terror specialist”, trying to sell lobbyists his wheeze of arming pre-schoolers. Larry Pratt, emeritus executive director of Gun Owners of America, was easily persuaded to voice a nonsense proclaiming “a four-year-old can process images 80% faster than adults … like owls, they see in slow motion. They’re also uncorrupted by fake news or homosexuality.” Baron Cohen gleefully led Pratt to Washington, with a cry of “Let’s see if we can stop the anti-gun people getting everyone killed!”
But. There’s a but. As my colleague Nick Cohen has pointed out, political comedy works best in democracies (and decades) that “undoubtedly can be sinister, corrupt, stupid, incompetent and unequal, but are not, when you get down to it, so bad after all”. The real trouble for satirists when faced with Trump and his like, who exist to push caricatures to extremes, is that “when extremism flourishes, their jokes die”. When Larry Pratt can promise that at least a few Republican members of Congress could be persuaded to be “receptive… to the ideas” of arming four-year-olds, one can only sympathise with Baron Cohen: there’s precious little mileage in getting someone to say the unsayable, when it’s actually been said before, thought before, from Congress all the way upward.
No doubting that Baron Cohen is rather brave. As camp white Austrian fashionista Brüno, facing down an all-black American audience when he wheeled on “his” new black baby (which he had “swapped for an iPod”) … he was still, I reckon, charmed/lucky to have got out of that one actually alive. But this is far from the edgiest show he’s done. The nice polite Republican couple, faced with a revoltingly PC-liberal guest; the only tension was wondering when their patience would snap (it didn’t); likewise, the endearing California art expert confronted with an ex-con’s faeces: arguably this showed up only the hatefulness of achingly self-congratulatory social justice warriors, and shyster artists. Which might have been Baron Cohen’s intention all along: he’s sharp enough to take on multiple targets. But it’s not Channel 4’s (in America, Showtime’s): the broadcasters have set up this series more simplistically as “dangerous”, and have leaked a forthcoming encounter in which Sarah Palin makes a tit of herself. Fish die in barrel shock.
I try to make it a rule never to be too nice to colleagues, let alone quote two in one piece, but I have to say Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema was an endlessly refreshing delight. Mr K wears his undoubted knowledge gossamer-lightly, and with wisdom and not a little wit carved out before us pretty much the entire history of the romcom, citing influences and borrowings right back to the 20s and of course the gilded war years: but he surely surprised the more pompous cineastes in expressing his shameless love for 1984’s boy-meets-fish joyfest Splash, which he’s seen more than 100 times. Worse, he actually loves Love Actually.
This was a splendid hour, could have run for three: you not only get Mark’s insights, often lancet-sharp, you get to see a lot of snatches of films. Already, I now want to see The Shape of Water, and (500) Days of Summer, and many more. Which is, surely, job done? Next week: the heist. Already: yum.
An altogether surprising series began: Channel 4’s Prison was uplifting and depressing in savagely equal proportions. Producer/director Paddy Wivell and his gang have given us remarkable access to HMP Durham, and could this really happen anywhere but in the north-east? You got the feeling that cameramen, interviewers and producers actually got on with the damaged lags and traumatised prison officers, laughed along with the gags, shared the accents, in a manner that might have proved impossible to recreate in, say, a more multicultural London nick.
There was great leavening humour throughout, hugely personable characters, and a tragic waste, not least of ingenuity. The chap who’d smuggled three mobile phones into the nick in his arse, and was passing the bits down his cell toilet, via twine, through a choreographed ballet of synchronised flushes?
The downsides? The “zombie drug” spice; to watch its effect is to truly shudder. The generalised failure of the “war on drugs”; the generalised failure of the politics behind it, always, and the angst in the faces of wise guards when they can say, simply: “What we’re doing isn’t working.”
