TV Review: THE SPLIT + THE WOMAN IN WHITE

This article was originally published in The Courier on 28th April 2018.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

THE SPLIT: Tuesday, BBC One

THE WOMAN IN WHITE: Sunday, BBC One

Written by Abi Morgan, creator of The Hour, THE SPLIT appeared at first glance to be a glossy legal drama. That turned out to be window dressing, an access point for Morgan to explore the fragile intricacies of family relationships and marriage.

It stars the reliably excellent Nicola Walker as Hannah, a conscientious, empathetic divorce lawyer who works for a prestigious London firm specialising in cases involving the stinking rich and famous.

Hannah’s job places her in emotionally charged situations steeped in heartbreak and rancour, an area she’s more than qualified to tackle as, inevitably, she’s also dealing with her own personal issues.

She recently joined this company after leaving her family law firm behind. Naturally enough, this is a cause of friction, as she’s now in direct competition with her mother and younger sister, Nina.

This tricky situation was compounded when their estranged father, played by Anthony Head, suddenly returned after an absence of 30 years. It gradually became clear that divorce and abandonment have played an unhealthily prominent role in their lives, but at least it’s bought them nice big houses. Swings/roundabouts.

On the client side, Mathew Baynton from Horrible Histories plays a heartbroken stand-up comedian who’s written a brutally frank and litigious show about his ex-wife, while Stephen Tompkinson and Meera Syal play the Mackenzies, a multimillionaire couple going through a divorce.

This came as a shock to Mrs Mackenzie, as she didn’t even know why they were meeting with Hannah in the first place. Didn’t she think to ask her husband beforehand? Presenting her as implausibly incurious was obviously just a lazy excuse for Morgan to contrive an anguished scene. I’ve always considered her a good writer who’s occasionally guilty of clunky engineering.

When Hannah takes a dim view of Mr Mackenzie’s cowardly behaviour, he, with some sneaky assistance from Nina, decides to hire the family firm instead. Further complications ensue.

Morgan packed a lot into episode one, but the various subplots mingled smoothly. Legal environments have always been popular in TV drama, as they comfortably support a range of stories and themes. Morgan exploits this hardy perennial quite successfully. That aforementioned Mackenzie niggle aside, the dialogue and action are convincing, and Walker is typically authentic.

Etched in mature shades of grey, The Split is a thoughtful rumination on the incessant complexities of being human. It has heart.

One of the first lines spoken in THE WOMAN IN WHITE was “How is it men crush women time and time again but go unpunished?”

You don't often get the chance to describe the umpteenth adaptation of a 19^th century novel as timely, but this latest take on Wilkie Collins’ hugely influential murder mystery is particularly resonant in the current climate. It proves that a classic text can be subtly re-moulded without sacrificing its original essence.

Suitably shrouded in a haze of windswept romanticism and early Hammer-esque atmospherics, it follows a sensitive artist haunted by a nocturnal roadside encounter with a troubled young woman.

His new job as an art tutor connects him with a pair of charismatic, cerebral sisters happily out of step with Victorian propriety. What’s their mysterious connection with the wandering woman in white?

It was a comfortably subdued introduction to a story that will, I assure you, veer off into entertaining lunacy soon. It also features Charles Dance looking for all the world like a consumptive Jon Pertwee. What more do you want?

TV Review: COLLATERAL + TRAUMA

This article was originally published in The Courier on 17th February 2018.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

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.