Police dramas give us believable characters. Then they spoil it with a bonkers murder
Gina McKee is an incredible actor, all the time, and at her best when terrible things happen. Her big sad eyes sing out sorrow like a cello. I could watch her all day, it's like masochism-by-proxy. That was the first smart move of Vera (ITV1, Sunday). It's a detective show; the sleuth is a bit of an oddball (I'd love to see a crime programme in which the superintendent was not odd. In which it was just a perfectly normal person, with a sound, rational mind. But anyway . . .). Brenda Blethyn is good, at times excellent, with the dark hint of a monumental intelligence. She could be figuring out anything, I thought. She could already know whodunnit, and be working out what had happened to the bee population, and how to do nuclear fusion. So the main lady is in place, and she has a handsome sidekick, but I wonder how this will work without Gina, whose role is central only to this first mystery of the series.
I have uncovered the problem inherent to police dramas: people just don't kill each other, do they? Spouses kill each other, and then it's totally obvious that they did, usually because they're covered in blood and saying "sorry" when the police arrive. And people who are drunk kill each other by accident, and very infrequently someone might have a homicidal episode. But the murders upon which this genre relies ? a Psycho-style oddball with a mother complex, plotting very weird and intricate executions; or a cheating husband, covering his tracks with scattergun stranglings; or a lady with a brisk manner who could have killed someone because she isn't all that she seems ? none of that, in life, actually happens.
So the scriptwriters go to all these lengths to create believable characters, whom we can like or at least empathise with, and they do so, sometimes with great success. Blethyn's Vera Stanhope has some marvellous aspects, besides the sharpness of her wits, a sort of maddening, myopic narcissism that bespeaks not vanity but a desire to concentrate. Her right-hand man, Joe Ashworth, is good too ? in life as well as art (well, telly), he defers quietly to her brilliance but has an impact quite distinct from reflected glory. This thoughtful dynamic, and many others, mount up into something that is more than just watchable.
But then this stupid murder happens: well, naturally, it happened at the beginning, but you don't realise until the culprit is revealed just how stupid and improbable it was. Why stop there? Why not give her some wings, or bring in some vampires, or synchronised swimmers?
Exile (BBC1, Sunday) is Paul Abbott's latest drama (he conceived it: it was actually written by Danny Brocklehurst) and is copperbottomed in this respect. Abbott has a brilliant instinct for never plotting things that would never happen. John Simm is a journalist, fired from a magazine, dumped by his adulterous girlfriend, low on coke ? in short, hopeless. He takes his fancy sports car back up north, where his sister (Olivia Colman) tends to their father (Jim Broadbent).
Apart from having such different accents that one of them must have been wearing a Walkman all the way through childhood, Simm and Colman make great siblings, and their relationship is a treat: familiar, tender, angry (on her part), flaky (on his) and, above all, quite funny. Broadbent is, I think, the male Gina McKee ? he is almost too watchable, even with screen Alzheimer's that gives him maddeningly little to say.
About 20 minutes in, Colman zooms off in Simm's sports car and it looks like quite a different sort of programme altogether. The cokehead with the midlife crisis, suddenly in charge of a frail and wholly confused parent, proves unequal to the task in temperament and in competence. The mood is ominous, and a very thinly buried past of violence between the father and son surfaces immediately.
Thank God, Colman then zooms back. For a while, we're in kitchen-sink territory, as they just worry about how they can afford to look after their father and stay half-drunk most of the time. Midway through, a mystery starts to wrap its smoky tendrils round the glum family. The central premise ? trying to get the truth out of a parent whose mind is going ? is a fascinating one, but also, I suspect, one whose fascinations will give way pretty fast to the exigencies of drama. In other words, Broadbent will either be given a shiny new, partial memory, at least of the 80s, or they'll ask someone else. I'll be tuning in to find out, though, for sure.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/01/tv-review-vera-exile
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