Television
False notes
Simon Hoggart
Two big new drama series have just begun. The Sins (BBC 1) is supposed to be the British Sopranos, and North Square has been called the Ally McBeal One is, the other isn't. I'm not entirely sure why The Sins just doesn't work. It certainly should. It stars three superb actors, Pete Postleth- waite, Frank Finlay and Geraldine James. There are beautiful young women and car chases, and plenty of family tension spooned over the whole thing like gravy. Yet none of it rings true. Postlethwaite plays a small-time getaway driver who's just served four and a half years. Now he wants to go straight. His entire family and all his friends react as if he'd just told them he'd decided to take up full-time paedophilia. In one of the many clunky lines of dialogue, someone says to him: Worrabout your self- respect? Worrabout the face that stares back at you from the shaving mirror each morning?' — which is what the New Yorker might call an exclamation we doubt was ever exclaimed. (The lines get even clunki- er as the tone becomes more serious. One, singled out for special praise in the Radio Times, has Postlethwaite talking to one of his daughters: 'If you have sex, have it hon- estly, so it's the whole of you losing your- self in the whole of them ... ' Oh yeah? In East End pubs they all talk like that between jobs?) Little things niggle. How does a small- time crook with a face like a crash-test turnip get to marry the beautiful Geraldine James? And can all failed getaway drivers afford porticoed mansions to live in? When he is unwillingly drawn back to his metier, the gang is chased by a bunch of policemen even more incompetent than The Fast Show's Fat Sweaty Coppers. Memo to the writer William Ivory: 'If, while the police search an undertaker's for villains, the viewers are screaming, "Look under the sheets, you berks," then something is badly wrong.' The Sopranos it isn't.
Whereas North Square is wonderful. Set in a legal chambers in the — these days glamorous city of Leeds, it's funny, intri- cately plotted and written with the sharp- ness of a high-tech razor so that each line cuts twice, first close, then closer. It's about a harsh, amoral world in which justice and the law parted company years ago. The job destroys everyone's lives, but slowly. Noth- ing happens naturally. Nobody gets enough sleep. The excellent Helen McCrory as Rose goes to Liverpool to represent a schizophrenic woman who's about to lose her children because of a miserable misog- ynistic judge. But Rose is a victim too: the demands of her work mean she can't be with her own four-day-old baby.
There's a tremendous star in the bullying clerk, Peter McLeish, played by Phil Davis. McLeish knows what is good for everyone and forces it down their throats. But he's also fanatically loyal to his banisters so we loathe him and like him at the same time. It looks good too. (Maybe Kilroy should do a show called Men who wear purple ties with mauve shirts and the women who stand by them.) For all I know a typical Leeds cham- bers is really full of middle-aged men in tweed jackets. But I don't care. North Square feels cracklingly authentic. It can stand proudly alongside not only Ally McBea4 but also LA Law. The main point is that the writer, Peter Moffat, under- stands what works on television.
Brand New Bra (Channel 4) was a follow- up to a show from two years ago in which the designers Richard Seymour and Dick Powell reinvented the. bra from, so to speak, the bottom up. Now a company called Charnos is making their Bioform bra and since it is, apparently, nice to look at, supportive and comfortable, it's already a great success. This programme, too, had a star in the company's MD, Tony Hodges, a man whose immemorial gloom made Eey- ore look like Polyanna. Mr Hodges's moroseness was relieved only by his expres- sion of terror when he had to confront a woman's body. 'I'm getting really nervous,' he would confide as the launch drew near. `It's all very worrying.' Finally, orders poured in. He was moved to anger. 'We haven't invented a cure for cancer. We haven't abolished third world debt. We've invented a new bra, for Chrissake,' he said sinking back into his pool of silent misery. It's amazing what makes hypnotic televi- sion.
Simon Schama's A History of Britain reached the Black Death. At first I feared that the lack of library footage, contempo- rary interviews etc. would mean that we were stuck with moody silhouettes, sweep- ing shots of fields of the type which existed in the 14th century and paintings of the Grim Reaper. But the recreations of Bris- tol during the plague and the ghastly enact- ment of the victims' death throes brought the horror home more than the most meticulously written book. Schama's script added to the illumination. Apparently they believed that the plague was caused by, among other things, 'shameless adultery and lewd necklines'. Of course they didn't have the new Bioform bra.
The only thing that matters in a TV series is that you want to look at the paper before work in the morning and say, 'Oh, good, that's on tonight.' It cheers up your day. Schama's programme has this effect and so does North Square. But The Sins doesn't.
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