This article was originally published in The Courier on 17th February 2018.
COLLATERAL: Monday, BBC Two
TRAUMA: Monday to Wednesday,
STV
It’s
typical. You wait ages for one homicide-themed drama starring John Simm, then
two come along at once. Now that we’ve got that obvious zinger out of the way,
let’s turn our attentions to the four – count ‘em - hours of Simm we were
treated to last week.
Fans
of this always watchable actor were spoiled for choice on Monday when he
cropped up in both COLLATERAL and TRAUMA, written respectively by veteran
playwright David Hare and Mike Bartlett of
Doctor Foster renown.
Simm
isn’t the star of Collateral, he’s
part of an impressive ensemble including Carey Mulligan, Billie Piper and
Nicola Walker. This is heavyweight territory.
Mulligan
plays an inexplicably smug detective investigating the mysterious murder of a
pizza delivery man. Piper was the last person to see him alive before he was
shot on her doorstep. She’s also the ex-wife of a Labour MP (Simm). Walker,
meanwhile, plays a gay vicar whose troubled migrant partner saw the murder take
place.
The
key question of course is: why would someone randomly assassinate a pizza
delivery man? Well, they wouldn’t would they? The crime was premediated and
carried out by a slick professional military officer. But why? The murdered man
was an innocent Syrian refugee. The obvious conclusion is that he wasn’t the
intended victim. And off we go.
Driven
by Hare’s eminently sincere thoughts on illegal immigration and the way we
treat vulnerable asylum seekers, Collateral
is a sombre state-of-the-nation address disguised as a thriller. It’s sometimes
rather earnest and clunky. You’d think that after all these years, Hare
would’ve learned how to deliver exposition more smoothly.
By
and large, however, his cast paper over the cracks. Piper, an underrated actor,
is particularly compelling as a cynical character wreathed in ambiguity.
Where
it goes from here is anyone’s guess, but episode one established a fair amount
of intrigue. Its slow-burning momentum and overt political subtext are quite effective,
but I have a nagging feeling that Hare’s lofty ambitions are in excess of his
reach. We’ll see.
While
one can’t argue with the calibre of Collateral’s
cast, you should never trust the judgement of talented actors when it comes to
choosing material. God only knows why John Simm and Adrian Lester hitched their
collective star power to TRAUMA, a
melodramatic maelstrom of utter tosh which never convinced for a moment.
Simm
played the father of a teenage boy who was stabbed and killed for no
discernible reason. Lester played the surgeon who couldn’t save the boy’s life.
Simm somehow managed to barge into the operating theatre at the moment of his
son’s death, and immediately blamed Dr Lester for failing to do everything he
could.
He
became obsessed with proving that Lester wasn’t fit for purpose. His stalking
campaign even stretched to finding work in the hospital’s coffee shop. That was
the point where I gave up on the possibility of Trauma being based in any kind of plausible reality. It was
laughable.
Simm
did his best, but his relentlessly angry, unbalanced character came across as a
strident mouthpiece rather than a three-dimensional human being. His vendetta
never rang true. I had similar misgivings about the equally contrived and
unlikely Doctor Foster, which
suggests that Bartlett isn’t a writer unduly troubled by notions of dramatic authenticity.
Suspension
of disbelief is one thing, but expecting us to go along with a total absence of
logic is quite another.
This
was ostensibly a drama about the unimaginable trauma of losing a child, but the
sensitive subject matter was fatally cheapened by Bartlett’s lack of subtlety.
ITV
would no doubt argue that stripping Trauma
over three consecutive nights was an attempt to create so-called event
television, but I suspect it was more a case of getting it out of the way as
swiftly and painlessly as possible.
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