Television
Too bad
Martyn Harris
Australian mini-series' is a cue for the kill button in this house, but The Leav- ing of Liverpool (BBC 1, Thursday and Fri- day, 9.30 p.m.) was not so awful, in spite of all the switch-off phrases in the pre- publicity: 'real-life drama', 'forgotten scan- dal', 'child sexual abuse' etc.
Based on the facts of the forced migra- tion of British orphans to Australia in the 1950s, it worked because of astonishing performances by the two 15-year-old actors, Christine Tremarco (Lily) and Kevin Jones (Bert), neither of whom had appeared on television before. Jones grew from bright-eyed, Eagle-reading schoolboy patriot to embittered republican with great confidence and is clearly another Gary Oldman in the making, while Tremarco, with her self-contained sensuality, promises to become a superior version of Emily Lloyd.
The Child Migrants Trust, formed in 1987 to help exiled orphans to trace their parents, says all the incidents depicted beatings, slave labour, casual deaths, rape `Damn! The place was always so popular. Why couldn't I see the potential?' and tortures — did happen. It is hard to believe, however, that they all happened to two children, and even if they did, the writ- ing and directing were not sturdy enough to take the weight. The evil Chinese over- seer, the queer Catholic priest, the icy social worker and the brutal farmer were too sketchily drawn to be credible. The righteous zeal of the 'factional' drama, with its need to nail the baddies and to right the wrongs of the past, ignores the fictional requirement that bad guys must also be good guys in part, or the brain does its own switching off.
Carlton TV, which inexplicably took over the London region this year, has been a total turn-off so far (who on earth is run- ning their continuity department?), but things are looking up a bit with Frank Stubbs Promotes (ITV, Monday, 9 p.m.). This is the latest clone of the much lament- ed Minder, and stars Timothy Spall as a West End ticket tout with larger ambitions.
There are two mysteries about Spall, the first of which is how somebody with so many chins does his tie up. (We decided it must be by lying supine on the bed with his head hanging over the edge.) The second is why such a good actor hasn't led a series before. He was Barry the biker in Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Aubrey the failing restau- rateur in Life is Sweet and an excellent Bot- tom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the National last year.
The answer must be that they are all, in their way, lovable losers, and losers don't play leads. Even Arthur Daley was a kind of winning loser, with his old Jag and camel-hair coat and the suburban semi ruled by the invisible `er indoors'. Even poor, downtrodden Terry had his Ford Capri, his Fulham 'drum' and his pulling power, but Frank Stubbs has almost noth- ing: no house, no office and no wife. Frank is all front and mobile phone, with a room in a Kings Cross knocking shop, and I won- der if viewers will stick with someone quite so pathetic.
Last week he was managing an Aus- tralian country-and-western singer, this week he was selling kit cars in a shopping mall, aided by his luscious niece Dawn (Daniella Westbrook) in a black mesh leo- tard and not a lot else. As her father has just died and she is pestered by joy-riding yobbos, Frank adopts a fatherly role. 'Now don't grow up to be like them, my girl,' he tells her. 'But I'm like them already, Uncle Frank,' says Dawn.
One mark of really confident writing is the ability to encompass grotesquerie: the characters in Minder were so solid that you never questioned the baroque language or the improbable plots. Frank Stubbs Pro- motes doesn't have that confidence yet, but In the final scene of this week's episode, when homeless Frank, his widowed sister (Lesley Sharp) and the sneering Dawn all sat down around the television and hummed the theme of Summer Holiday, I began to feel it was getting there.
Previous page
