If you have a guilty secret, don't risk driving on a dual carriageway. In fact I would stay off the road altogether, if I were you. Part way through Collision (ITV1), a gripping five-night drama based on a multiple pile-up on the A12, I was ready to flog my car on eBay and shred my driving licence.
For this was some accident: tyres and metal spun at high velocity and with sickening impact. I watched it twice. Perhaps I am a sad rubberneck, but I wanted to check out the cause and chain reaction.
And that's just what Detective Inspector Tolin (Douglas Henshall) did, using photographs to reconstruct the accident. He even paced the road itself. By now I was certain: I would never drive again.
But this was more than a multiple motorway pile-up. There were colliding worlds as paths criss-crashed, with the fall-out that followed from secret lives exposed like physical wounds. Strip tease-like, each episode tantalised by revealing more of the moments that led to the big bang. One couple were smoking hash. High on weed and speed, they accelerated towards death.
White-van man Danny's Amsterdam trip wasn't a tulip tour either. Human cargo was his import. While Danny fled, an illegal East African immigrant was left trapped in the bottom of the transporter. As his wife worried, he lay dying, entombed in a white black hole.
Karen had copied her bosses' files about secret chemical weapons for an on-the-make, fake journalist before the fateful trip. She survived, only to be murdered, not bathing but drowning in a bubble bath of blood.
Tolin had that police officer intuition that screamed everything was wrong when all around were deaf to the problem. But he was hard of hearing when it came to personal relationships with his female colleague. All TV detectives seem to need personal counselling these days. No wonder police costs are rising.
But Tolin's wife had been killed by a drunk driver, leaving his daughter disabled too, on the very night he had been cheating on his wife. The driver's attempt at forgiveness almost led to Tolin throttling him to death. Restorative justice isn't meant to work like this.
The only apparent false note - the unlikely relationship between a wealthy property dealer and the service station waitress - was another deliberate twist, for we discovered he was really just a fantasist. She wanted to escape a dreary, dull future and dreamed of sitting above a foreign city listening to its beat. The Eurostar tickets he bought weren't wasted when, jilted, she decided to break free and flee.
There were more characters than in a Dickens novel and more plots than a Cabinet coup, all inter-connected. And the collision was caused by the swatting of a wasp. Roll on my free bus pass. Anyone want to buy a Mazda?
Ray Tarleton
Monday, 30 November 2009
Monday, 23 November 2009
Tune in, switch off - Geeks with chic
I last saw Peter Firth in the flesh, in pain and naked, on a sixth-form theatre trip in the 1970s. He was portraying Alan Strang, the deranged blinder of horses in Peter Shaffer's Equus. The pupils wondered how it passed the censor. Now here is Firth as Harry Pearce, the spy chief in Spooks (BBC One), where he again goes distressingly deep into the most painful areas of experience, testing moral boundaries. If there were a Bafta for long suffering, Firth would be unbeatable.
Spooks has the same formula that makes Stieg Larsson's novels best sellers: a convincing secret world, watched over by geeks using new tricks of surveillance to surprise. There are also ruthless young women like his heroine Lisbeth Salander - Ros and Jo are the blondes in black. Even the television newsreader was a bleached-haired, dark-dressed clone.
The flashback sequences in slow dream-time resembled those oddly coloured prints you get from the developers when you have bungled your camera settings. But there was no chance to get bored. In the first minutes of the new series we had a helicopter, handcuffings, fights, an execution and an amputated finger. All in the time it took for my kettle to boil. No wonder, as he faced a ruthless gunman, Harry tried to slow things down by asking to send a message to his family. I was ready for a break, too.
Expect the unexpected, and for it to be grim. His colleague Ruth was forced to watch - on a laptop - while her husband was murdered before pleading for her stepson's life to be spared. I always knew that computers were a pain - now they are weapons of torture as well.
Harry had the choice of allowing him to be shot or to tell their captors where the weapons-grade uranium was buried - a bomb that would kill not one but thousands of children. "I can only see mine in front of me," screamed Ruth, living every mother's nightmare.
His response to the kidnappers (he wouldn't say whether to kill the child or not) was super cool-callous, combined with a nifty goal-scoring kick to destroy the computer. Will Ruth ever forgive him? Actually, the computer he wrecked wasn't hers. But I'm watching mine now. It could be transmitting my every snooze.
Comedy Showcase: Campus (Channel 4) was also not for the squeamish. This wasn't so much A Very Peculiar Practice, the 1980s campus hit, as a series of peculiar practices from university vice-chancellor Jonty De Wolfe.
Towering over the campus - well, a model of it - De Wolfe contemplated making Kirke University so successful it would "gleam like a bleached anus in a line up of dirty arses". That could be a novel criterion to use when advising sixth formers on their Ucas applications.
Dreamer and schemer in academia, he mocked minorities that I thought had laws to protect them. He whinged and scoffed; I cringed and coughed. Depending on the censor, this could become a cult or a cut comedy.
Ray Tarleton
Spooks has the same formula that makes Stieg Larsson's novels best sellers: a convincing secret world, watched over by geeks using new tricks of surveillance to surprise. There are also ruthless young women like his heroine Lisbeth Salander - Ros and Jo are the blondes in black. Even the television newsreader was a bleached-haired, dark-dressed clone.
The flashback sequences in slow dream-time resembled those oddly coloured prints you get from the developers when you have bungled your camera settings. But there was no chance to get bored. In the first minutes of the new series we had a helicopter, handcuffings, fights, an execution and an amputated finger. All in the time it took for my kettle to boil. No wonder, as he faced a ruthless gunman, Harry tried to slow things down by asking to send a message to his family. I was ready for a break, too.
Expect the unexpected, and for it to be grim. His colleague Ruth was forced to watch - on a laptop - while her husband was murdered before pleading for her stepson's life to be spared. I always knew that computers were a pain - now they are weapons of torture as well.
Harry had the choice of allowing him to be shot or to tell their captors where the weapons-grade uranium was buried - a bomb that would kill not one but thousands of children. "I can only see mine in front of me," screamed Ruth, living every mother's nightmare.
His response to the kidnappers (he wouldn't say whether to kill the child or not) was super cool-callous, combined with a nifty goal-scoring kick to destroy the computer. Will Ruth ever forgive him? Actually, the computer he wrecked wasn't hers. But I'm watching mine now. It could be transmitting my every snooze.
Comedy Showcase: Campus (Channel 4) was also not for the squeamish. This wasn't so much A Very Peculiar Practice, the 1980s campus hit, as a series of peculiar practices from university vice-chancellor Jonty De Wolfe.
Towering over the campus - well, a model of it - De Wolfe contemplated making Kirke University so successful it would "gleam like a bleached anus in a line up of dirty arses". That could be a novel criterion to use when advising sixth formers on their Ucas applications.
Dreamer and schemer in academia, he mocked minorities that I thought had laws to protect them. He whinged and scoffed; I cringed and coughed. Depending on the censor, this could become a cult or a cut comedy.
Ray Tarleton
Monday, 16 November 2009
Tune in, switch off - Tucker is triumphant
We are almost halfway through series three of The Thick of It (BBC Two), one of the few political satires on TV, and there is no mistaking that Malcolm Tucker is back in town.
Plotter, rotter and rottweiler, Peter Capaldi's legendary creation combines the evil intelligence of Iago with the verbal dexterity of Billy Connolly, striking fear in the eyes, agony in the heart and laughter deep in the stomach.
Satirists have their work cut out mocking today's politics, now in a place so absurd they resemble an Armando Iannucci script. You couldn't make it up but he has done. Life mirrors art; satire becomes reality and, as Tucker would say, "we're all ******".
If there is any difference between this comedy and Westminster, it is that these characters have more personality than our politicians, who are as diminished and disposable as those plastic figures we used to get free in cereal packets.
Nicola Murray MP (Rebecca Front) is now head of the ragbag department, Social Affairs and Citizenship (DoSAC). She is a real person with dyed roots, stretch marks and a fear of lifts that will rule out visits to constituents in tower blocks.
Tucker tells her that she is unsackable after only 12 days in post, but that is before she has been informed of the massive, irretrievable data loss of 170,000 immigration records. Remind you of anything? No, the postal strike is not a clue.
"Who primarily should I be shouting at?" she asks her terrified team. "Somebody has done a huge poo on my desk and I want it cleared up." Ollie Reader, fresh-faced policy wonker and special adviser, has been watching too many Attenborough programmes and favours an ostrich plan: keep it secret and hide. But if there has to be a victim, there is always the one who makes weak tea.
Ollie is like the bright young things I meet when I go to sessions at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, where future policies are road-tested on headteachers for their reactions.
The teeny boffins are all boosted brain and limited life experience, though they might be able to write satire well.
Communications director Terri Coverley was headhunted from Waitrose, and proves how bad the private sector can be at developing people. "My bum is clean," is her defence as she guzzles her fifth banana.
As grand inquisitor, Tucker's explosive expletives have all the force of a scatter bomb. He is the Cerberus that does bark in the night, a slime dog who reminds us of the dark underbelly of modern politics. Modelled on Blair's Campbell, Brown's McBride and Cameron's Coulson, he is in the comic tradition of bullies such as Basil Fawlty abusing Manuel or Blackadder insulting Baldrick.
He does invective with genius ingenuity. He is scarily nasty and belly-achingly funny. "Wear brown trousers and a shirt the colour of blood," he warns his potential victims. If this were typical of the bullying we have to deal with in school, at least we would have a good laugh in the staffroom at the end of each day.
Ray Tarleton
Plotter, rotter and rottweiler, Peter Capaldi's legendary creation combines the evil intelligence of Iago with the verbal dexterity of Billy Connolly, striking fear in the eyes, agony in the heart and laughter deep in the stomach.
Satirists have their work cut out mocking today's politics, now in a place so absurd they resemble an Armando Iannucci script. You couldn't make it up but he has done. Life mirrors art; satire becomes reality and, as Tucker would say, "we're all ******".
If there is any difference between this comedy and Westminster, it is that these characters have more personality than our politicians, who are as diminished and disposable as those plastic figures we used to get free in cereal packets.
Nicola Murray MP (Rebecca Front) is now head of the ragbag department, Social Affairs and Citizenship (DoSAC). She is a real person with dyed roots, stretch marks and a fear of lifts that will rule out visits to constituents in tower blocks.
Tucker tells her that she is unsackable after only 12 days in post, but that is before she has been informed of the massive, irretrievable data loss of 170,000 immigration records. Remind you of anything? No, the postal strike is not a clue.
"Who primarily should I be shouting at?" she asks her terrified team. "Somebody has done a huge poo on my desk and I want it cleared up." Ollie Reader, fresh-faced policy wonker and special adviser, has been watching too many Attenborough programmes and favours an ostrich plan: keep it secret and hide. But if there has to be a victim, there is always the one who makes weak tea.
Ollie is like the bright young things I meet when I go to sessions at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, where future policies are road-tested on headteachers for their reactions.
The teeny boffins are all boosted brain and limited life experience, though they might be able to write satire well.
Communications director Terri Coverley was headhunted from Waitrose, and proves how bad the private sector can be at developing people. "My bum is clean," is her defence as she guzzles her fifth banana.
As grand inquisitor, Tucker's explosive expletives have all the force of a scatter bomb. He is the Cerberus that does bark in the night, a slime dog who reminds us of the dark underbelly of modern politics. Modelled on Blair's Campbell, Brown's McBride and Cameron's Coulson, he is in the comic tradition of bullies such as Basil Fawlty abusing Manuel or Blackadder insulting Baldrick.
He does invective with genius ingenuity. He is scarily nasty and belly-achingly funny. "Wear brown trousers and a shirt the colour of blood," he warns his potential victims. If this were typical of the bullying we have to deal with in school, at least we would have a good laugh in the staffroom at the end of each day.
Ray Tarleton
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Tune in, switch off - On another planet
Fasten your seatbelts and hold on tight. For we are embarking on a six-year exploration of the solar system with a group of moonwalkers. They may not rock like Michael Jackson, but they do rocket into space pretty fast.
Our astronauts in the new sci-fi series, Defying Gravity (BBC Two), have names like Maddux Donner (Ron Livingston, pictured) and Zahf Paroo. Actually, I lied: Paroo is a real actor who plays Ajay Sharma. It is supposed to be 2052 but it feels like 2009 with gismos. Sex and snogging take precedence over science. They may be in space but they seem spaced out.
The astronauts are on a quest to fulfil their "dreams, desires and illusions". I remember at university our nickname for Newcastle Brown was "journey into outer space". It was pretty good for desires and illusions, too.
The plot resembles one of Baldrick's cunning plans and the dialogue is so dismal you feel it has been vacuum-packed in a spacesuit. Actually, it might have been better left in orbit.
Our first "Houston, we have a problem" moment comes when Zoe is blown out of the spacecraft. Her rescue depends on the force of her spit. There is a scientific explanation for her need to expel mucus, but do not ask me to explain it. The crew applauds and blesses the President as Zoe is reeled in like a beached whale. Clearly, we need to teach whales to spit.
Dr Who was never like this. Last week in assembly, I interviewed Amy, a drama trainee, about her last job as casting director on that programme. She amazed the school with tales of Kylie and David Tennant. So why did she leave? She was inspired by teaching and young people. She gave up the glamour to be with them.
As Donner looks at the earth from space, he too seeks inspiration: "There's an ache for the mountains and the sweet smell of fresh air. How the hell did I get here? Was it the hand of God?"
The dialogue is about as realistic as a Dalek taking the stairs rather than the lift. I predict a rocket-speed return to our planet for a programme that does not defy gravity.
In Horizon (BBC Two), mathematician Marcus du Sautoy was also soul searching while on a scientific mission to find out who he was. Purple-gloved, he tentatively sliced a human brain but could not find a soul inside, though it did contain a banker's bonus of neurons - a hundred million or so.
Brain scans predicted his responses six seconds before he made them. We are an elite group of self-conscious animals, he decided. At a memorial statue to Descartes, he pondered the relationship between body and soul. I remember grappling with Descartes' theories at university, especially when a worried friend asked our professor about human consciousness. "Do I exist?" The wily academic pondered for several minutes before replying: "Who wants to know?"
No wonder we drank so much Newcastle Brown.
Ray Tarleton
Our astronauts in the new sci-fi series, Defying Gravity (BBC Two), have names like Maddux Donner (Ron Livingston, pictured) and Zahf Paroo. Actually, I lied: Paroo is a real actor who plays Ajay Sharma. It is supposed to be 2052 but it feels like 2009 with gismos. Sex and snogging take precedence over science. They may be in space but they seem spaced out.
The astronauts are on a quest to fulfil their "dreams, desires and illusions". I remember at university our nickname for Newcastle Brown was "journey into outer space". It was pretty good for desires and illusions, too.
The plot resembles one of Baldrick's cunning plans and the dialogue is so dismal you feel it has been vacuum-packed in a spacesuit. Actually, it might have been better left in orbit.
Our first "Houston, we have a problem" moment comes when Zoe is blown out of the spacecraft. Her rescue depends on the force of her spit. There is a scientific explanation for her need to expel mucus, but do not ask me to explain it. The crew applauds and blesses the President as Zoe is reeled in like a beached whale. Clearly, we need to teach whales to spit.
Dr Who was never like this. Last week in assembly, I interviewed Amy, a drama trainee, about her last job as casting director on that programme. She amazed the school with tales of Kylie and David Tennant. So why did she leave? She was inspired by teaching and young people. She gave up the glamour to be with them.
As Donner looks at the earth from space, he too seeks inspiration: "There's an ache for the mountains and the sweet smell of fresh air. How the hell did I get here? Was it the hand of God?"
The dialogue is about as realistic as a Dalek taking the stairs rather than the lift. I predict a rocket-speed return to our planet for a programme that does not defy gravity.
In Horizon (BBC Two), mathematician Marcus du Sautoy was also soul searching while on a scientific mission to find out who he was. Purple-gloved, he tentatively sliced a human brain but could not find a soul inside, though it did contain a banker's bonus of neurons - a hundred million or so.
Brain scans predicted his responses six seconds before he made them. We are an elite group of self-conscious animals, he decided. At a memorial statue to Descartes, he pondered the relationship between body and soul. I remember grappling with Descartes' theories at university, especially when a worried friend asked our professor about human consciousness. "Do I exist?" The wily academic pondered for several minutes before replying: "Who wants to know?"
No wonder we drank so much Newcastle Brown.
Ray Tarleton
Tuesday, 3 November 2009
Tune in, switch off - Enjoy getting lost in Austen
We know that the young will end up in love, but not until we have enjoyed their mistakes and mishaps. It's television comfort food
Come the autumn schedules, come the costume dramas. And Sunday evenings, those low points when we have lost the will to teach, are once again cheered by the donning of wigs and fancy dress, watching lives lived in National Trust properties in the timeless pursuit of love.
From the Brontes' broodings to confidences in Cranford, the formula is fixed. We know that the young will end up in love, but not until we have enjoyed their mistakes and mishaps. It's television comfort food, a national substitute for going to church.
We have only had two TV versions of Emma (BBC One) in recent years, so time for a third. Roll out Romola Garai in the lead role. Emma's a clucking, ducking manipulator with the emotional intelligence of a hat pin, misleading her puppet friend, Harriet, into expectations of a match with vicar of Highbury, Mr Elton. We are back to church again.
But Mr Elton is not back to church, and certainly not with Harriet. When he attempts to make passionate love to a soon distraught Emma during a carriage ride, the furnishings are the only soft thing he encounters. Rejected, he is off to Bath for a £20,000-a-year match. Charity, after all, doesn't begin in church, even if it does pay the salary.
Marriages are made in Jane Austen novels. The wealthy gossip and it takes ages for little to happen. A lady's stumble at the cliff edge is top news. A piano delivery is talk of the town for months. And, hold the front page, there is snow. It may be computer generated, but the flakes looked genuine.
Without the usual Andrew Davies script, there was no bonking or bonnet-bashing. So the surprises were in the real characters rather than the fictional ones. Was that Jonny Lee Miller from Trainspotting giving some bottle to the noble Mr Knightley - from Sick Boy to slick boy? Did you recognise Michael Gambon as Emma's weak-willed, weather-fearing father? Probably not as he was always swathed in scarves.
The final episodes were filled with ballrooms (useful if you missed Strictly), banqueting and Box Hill. Emma was sure footed on the dancefloor, but she sure put her foot in it on the romance score. Fast-forward 200 years and she could be running an internet dating agency.
Ray Tarleton
Come the autumn schedules, come the costume dramas. And Sunday evenings, those low points when we have lost the will to teach, are once again cheered by the donning of wigs and fancy dress, watching lives lived in National Trust properties in the timeless pursuit of love.
From the Brontes' broodings to confidences in Cranford, the formula is fixed. We know that the young will end up in love, but not until we have enjoyed their mistakes and mishaps. It's television comfort food, a national substitute for going to church.
We have only had two TV versions of Emma (BBC One) in recent years, so time for a third. Roll out Romola Garai in the lead role. Emma's a clucking, ducking manipulator with the emotional intelligence of a hat pin, misleading her puppet friend, Harriet, into expectations of a match with vicar of Highbury, Mr Elton. We are back to church again.
But Mr Elton is not back to church, and certainly not with Harriet. When he attempts to make passionate love to a soon distraught Emma during a carriage ride, the furnishings are the only soft thing he encounters. Rejected, he is off to Bath for a £20,000-a-year match. Charity, after all, doesn't begin in church, even if it does pay the salary.
Marriages are made in Jane Austen novels. The wealthy gossip and it takes ages for little to happen. A lady's stumble at the cliff edge is top news. A piano delivery is talk of the town for months. And, hold the front page, there is snow. It may be computer generated, but the flakes looked genuine.
Without the usual Andrew Davies script, there was no bonking or bonnet-bashing. So the surprises were in the real characters rather than the fictional ones. Was that Jonny Lee Miller from Trainspotting giving some bottle to the noble Mr Knightley - from Sick Boy to slick boy? Did you recognise Michael Gambon as Emma's weak-willed, weather-fearing father? Probably not as he was always swathed in scarves.
The final episodes were filled with ballrooms (useful if you missed Strictly), banqueting and Box Hill. Emma was sure footed on the dancefloor, but she sure put her foot in it on the romance score. Fast-forward 200 years and she could be running an internet dating agency.
Ray Tarleton
Tune in, switch off - Red, white and deeply blue
If you have ever seen The Home Show on Channel 4, this was like the bit where presenter George Clarke sprays arctic white everywhere. But this was not a makeover programme, this was a week's worth of compelling, chilling tragedy in Criminal Justice (BBC One).
From the snow-bleached kitchen, a flight of oddly angled stairs leading to the front door gave controlling husband Joe (Matthew Macfadyen) a bird's spy view of his wife, Juliet (Maxine Peake), distorting his own face to giant grotesqueness.
Deep in the night, Juliet wandered from the kitchen to their sleep-starved bedroom carrying a jar of Vaseline to ease her marital pain and a 7" knife to end it forever. White turned to red: with bloodied hands and nightdress stained scarlet, this woman was so traumatised her only link with reality was the sight of her daughter, Ella (Alice Sykes).
Ella pulled the knife from her father's chest seconds before the emergency services told her not to, causing herself torment. The blood did not stop as Juliet went to prison, as her self-harming cellmate gouged gashes in her arm and picked the scabs in the night before eventually cutting her own throat. The other inmates' practical jokes did nothing to lighten her gloom. The tampon-flavoured tea made me determined to avoid strawberry fruit drinks in future.
At echoing volume, doors were unbolted, slammed or locked. Nerves jangled. No more complaints from me about the sound of my alarm clock. A morbidly gloomy Juliet concealed her secret murder motive along with the anti-depressants in her mattress. Birth followed death as Juliet gave birth to a sister for Ella, and gloom gave way to post-natal elation.
The baby gave Juliet a reason to confess the motive for her crime - Joe's abuse. Juliet described Joe's rapes and emotional control in that sterile house, her planned suicide and the sword in the bed when "something snapped".
The final twist of the knife was the revelation that the baby's father was her GP, another man who had taken advantage of Juliet's fragility. The last abuser was the judge whose senseless sentence meant years of separation from the children she loved, tearing the hearts of everyone watching.
At five hours over five nights, it was the length of a Shakespearean tragedy, with as many destroyed lives. My Fool's commentary will do little to lighten it. The white was a mocking, shocking distortion, just like the life Juliet was forced to live
Ray Tarleton
From the snow-bleached kitchen, a flight of oddly angled stairs leading to the front door gave controlling husband Joe (Matthew Macfadyen) a bird's spy view of his wife, Juliet (Maxine Peake), distorting his own face to giant grotesqueness.
Deep in the night, Juliet wandered from the kitchen to their sleep-starved bedroom carrying a jar of Vaseline to ease her marital pain and a 7" knife to end it forever. White turned to red: with bloodied hands and nightdress stained scarlet, this woman was so traumatised her only link with reality was the sight of her daughter, Ella (Alice Sykes).
Ella pulled the knife from her father's chest seconds before the emergency services told her not to, causing herself torment. The blood did not stop as Juliet went to prison, as her self-harming cellmate gouged gashes in her arm and picked the scabs in the night before eventually cutting her own throat. The other inmates' practical jokes did nothing to lighten her gloom. The tampon-flavoured tea made me determined to avoid strawberry fruit drinks in future.
At echoing volume, doors were unbolted, slammed or locked. Nerves jangled. No more complaints from me about the sound of my alarm clock. A morbidly gloomy Juliet concealed her secret murder motive along with the anti-depressants in her mattress. Birth followed death as Juliet gave birth to a sister for Ella, and gloom gave way to post-natal elation.
The baby gave Juliet a reason to confess the motive for her crime - Joe's abuse. Juliet described Joe's rapes and emotional control in that sterile house, her planned suicide and the sword in the bed when "something snapped".
The final twist of the knife was the revelation that the baby's father was her GP, another man who had taken advantage of Juliet's fragility. The last abuser was the judge whose senseless sentence meant years of separation from the children she loved, tearing the hearts of everyone watching.
At five hours over five nights, it was the length of a Shakespearean tragedy, with as many destroyed lives. My Fool's commentary will do little to lighten it. The white was a mocking, shocking distortion, just like the life Juliet was forced to live
Ray Tarleton
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