Jack Taylor: The Dramatist; From Here to There; Penny Dreadful; Mr Sloane; A Poet in New York – review
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Version 0 of 1. Jack Taylor: The Dramatist | Channel 5 From Here to There | BBC iPlayer Penny Dreadful | Sky Atlantic A Poet in New York | BBC iPlayer It's rare that a fictional detective can breathe new life into the genre. Lucky old Messrs Hammett and Chandler, getting to co-invent the gumshoe before the herd kicked in, and I'll choose to utterly ignore the Christie oeuvre: if in doubt, please re-read Orwell's Decline of the English Murder. We can assign voices and faces to Morse, and Rebus (in his Ken Stott incarnation), perhaps Maigret, and I still have a soft spot for a fine few others – but, dear me, haven't there been a woeful number of anonymistes down this half-century? The number of books I've picked up which should truly have been described as "unpickupable". Blinking ex-alcoholic maverick ex-cops with a catalogue of spurious grudges and impediments. Jack Taylor , back for a second series, is an ex-alcoholic maverick ex-cop with a catalogue of spurious ditto. But Ken Bruen's novels, brought here to winning life by Iain Glen as Jack, do as the best do, which is to say nothing particularly different, just better. There's little new in police procedurals, simply the fine line between wanting to throw the book against the wall/into the telly broadcasting the thing, and thinking "Actually, this is great!" The Galway setting provides, as did the west coast of Wales in Hinterland, as much dysfunctional beauty as one could hope and dread to hold in one's heart. The tale revolved around a Galway campus featuring a murderous professor (nod to Morse), a maverick ex-alcoholic ex-etc, whose mother was to die on-screen of a stroke (nod to Line of Duty), various workmanlike coppish copping-off love-triangles (nods to everything excepting Columbo) and so far, so derivative. But the ending was a true shocker, the acting and story had a sheen of extra class, and Glen, with his big ex-Gardai coat and big deep broth of an accent (I'm no expert on the Galway demotic and stand correctable, but I loved it, particularly the way in which his pronunciation of "hesh" made the drug, perhaps rightly, sound like sweeties) elevated it to a mesmeric 90 minutes. I used to watch, not unjealously, in my school-uniform drinking days in the Antiquary, deep in the bowels of Edinburgh's St Stephen Street, Nicky Campbell and Iain Glen, best friends possessed of a slightly more expensive school and slightly too in preening love with their individual selves, as is the way with 17-year-olds. And occasionally wondered in my odd way what would become of them as men. I'm unjealously delighted to report that both seem to be making quite the grand fist of things. Philip Glenister, in From There to Here, a three-strand drama about the 1996 Manchester bomb, was wonderfully well served by a script from Peter Bowker which caught all the anger, the humour, the frustration, of mid-90s Madchester. Six minutes in, the bomb blew, startlingly, out of a clear grey sky. The fallout is only beginning – no lives were lost, though 212 were injured – but Glenister's Daniel, struggling to mediate between his martinet father, his loser brother and his own son (the ever-watchable Daniel Rigby), who is seized with zealous late-Thatcherite business-school dreams of downsizing the family business, goes slowly, inexorably, off his perennial straight and narrow. The bomb is, bizarrely enough, just a character in this, a catalyst: the story is of the city, and of England, not least the 1996 Southgate penalty outcome. Glenister tells his dopey smackhead brother, with an incredulity that can only be accomplished in a face such as Glenister's, "You bet ten grand that England aren't going to mess up in a major tournament?" This is, so far, barbed and brilliant, helped in no small way by the presences of Bernard Hill and Liz White: can there have been a time since the 50s when we were better served by such an array of supporting-actor talent? Sky's new supernatural-Gothic beast, Penny Dreadful, speaks to the hordes of us who don't want our werewolves and vampires lissome, jejune or, unless there's a good call for it, transgendered. It is proper scary. The gore comes not with sexy windblown teen frottaging but in dark spattered gobbets. Finally, here is chiller for people who have passed puberty: as besuits a Sam Mendes offering. We could have done without the hoary last-minute reveal where it was shown that the chap concocting a DIY corpse was a young and sly Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with the gossamer-thin difference between life and death. Anything featuring Dorian Gray, the wild west, and actors Eva Green and Timothy Dalton is gamey enough for my delighted palate: a winner. Expect a cult following soon. Mr Sloane is a made-for-Nick-Frost vehicle written by Robert B Weide, the producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm, who should have known better. Mr Frost is terribly good, seriously good, as a loser accountant in the 60s, and it's also got Olivia Colman in it. But, oh, the cliches. Did Mr Weide think we Brits had never poked fun at the very beige-ness of Slough in the 60s? Or seen a gag in which Sloaney offers up his seat to a pregnant woman, only to be slapped down with "I'm just prone to bloat"? Or, worse, never watched Reggie Perrin, from whom the subsequent entire crossword "joke" – "I'm not really doing it, I just like to sit in public transport randomly filling in clues, quickly" – was lifted? The characterisation and mood was great, the scripted "humour" less so: must try harder, and my enthusiasm is duly curbed. A Poet in New York was actually hard to watch. Not just to undergo the spectacle of Tom Hollander having piled on unsightly lard to gain, as if we were ever any doubt of them, his acting chops to do the Dylan Thomas thing, but to wrestle on a personal level, well into the night, with the question of what drives such men to destruction. I suspect many clues lay in the impossibility of his reacting to his wife Caitlin's constant anger – constant as the sea, constant as love – with anything approaching equanimity: poets don't tend to react with equanimity, the great poets (for he certainly was) much less so. In response he ran away to New York, to die, the only option in his eyes. Much has been made of Mr Hollander, rightly so – his readings, that delivery, all the sonorosities suddenly beseeched with such sudden light playfulness – but to my mind Caitlin, played by Essie Davis, should win a Bafta of her own next year, as rightly tends to happen to anyone associated with the very talented Mr Hollander. |