Murderland (ITV1)
Defying Gravity (BBC Two)
The Bigamist Bride (Channel 4)
Let’s face it — we all miss Cracker. We miss it like we’d miss The Angel of the North if it fell over; or the White Cliffs of Dover, if they sheared off. Deep down, we’ve got a pretty good idea of just how many perfect, satisfying and relentlessly not-stupid dramas starring compelling heroes we’re going to get to watch in our lives, and that was one of them; which means there’s now one less to go.
At the point Cracker kicked in, Jimmy McGovern and Paul Abbott were writing like Muhammad Ali boxed, or Apollo 11 took off — in their moment, on their stuff, ready to rock and roll. They still hadn’t done The Lakes, The Street, State of Play, Clocking Off or Shameless yet — God, they were full of it, in the best possible way.
As Fitz, Robbie Coltrane — an incredible actor who still, bafflingly, doesn’t seem to have locked into a “proper” career — was all over that role like the catsuit on Mrs Emma Peel. He had so much energy it was like being inside a car engine when it goes up into fifth gear, with everything slamming around you with immense precision, yet never once nicking your skin.
So that’s why Coltrane and Murderland have been all over the cover of Radio Times this week, and trailed every half-hour on ITV1. Because if Coltrane is back, solving psychotic riddles in a heavyweight ITV1 murder drama, it’s a bit like when someone chats you up, and you realise, with a sudden flip of your stomach, that he would look exactly like the lover you’ve been pining after for 15 years — so long as you make him wear a hat.
Murderland should, then, really have been called The Not-Cracker. Because it really wasn’t Cracker, and it needed to be more explicit on that. When we see Coltrane in a shabby suit, shuffling about a murder scene, we jump to conclusions. Murderland needed to be firm with us. It needed to take off the hat and say: “Sweetheart, I am a three-part ITV1 drama in my own right. Respect me for what I am.”
And it wasn’t as if Murderland were an unloveable one-night stand of a drama by any means. In three parts, from three different perspectives, Murderland told the story of the murder of Sally Walsh (Lucy Cohu), from the perspective of, first, her teenage daughter, Carrie (Bel Powley), then, in episode two, her secret lover, DI Douglas Hain (Coltrane), and, in the third, Walsh herself.
Walsh, it was slowly revealed, worked as a prostitute in a massage parlour; Hain had had sex with her hours before the murder, but obviously needed to cover it up, what with her now being dead, and all. There was a man taking photographs of Carrie, and another man, with a wound on his hand. At a party in a mansion everyone seemed complicit in some secret. The brothel was a cover for money laundering. Everyone at the police station seemed bent.
Murderland’s strong point was its cast — Cohu continues to play “abundant hotness, with undercurrents” better than anyone in this country save Andrea Riseborough, and, as Carrie, 17-year-old Powley had a fairly ferocious and constant nervous break-down, all water-world eyes and badly bitten mouth.
But the whole point of Murderland is Coltrane’s character, really — which makes Coltrane’s presence here ultimately paradoxical. For Hain is an essentially unextraordinary man, who reacts to a series of unusual events in a fairly predictable manner. As such, Coltrane plays him perfectly — ie, as an unextraordinary man. And in many ways that’s OK. After all, as an actor Coltrane is blessed with not having to do anything much in order to make an impact: to watch him is like sitting and staring at Windermere. It doesn’t need to do anything to keep your attention.
But when the actor you have employed is approximately 15,000 times more interesting than the character being played, you do have to wonder about the point of making the drama in the first place. I mean, it’s a bit like getting the Eiffel Tower to pretend to be a pylon.
And it’s ... just. Not. Cracker.
So onwards, into the week, and it’s time to enter the TV Imaginarium for a minute. Pretend that you are a commissioning editor at Fox TV, and someone comes into your office with a pitch for a new TV series. What is it he is saying to you, with his slightly nervous face? It is this: “Dude, dude, dude — what I’ve got for you is called Defying Gravity. And the idea is, it’s Grey’s Anatomy — in space.”
Yes. Yes. That was the genuine pitch. America still dares to dream. First, the idea of man on the Moon — and, now, the idea of hot young professionals with complicated love lives having endless soft-focus weeping sessions, soundtracked by Snow Patrol, while parked just off Venus. That’s what an infinite universe is for, baby.
So the hot young cast of Defying Gravity are off on a six-year-long mission across the Universe, on a spaceship filled with experimental crops, a mysterious thing referred to only as “Beta”, a lot of make-up and hair products, and a whole barrelful of emotional issues and sexual crosscurrents that will require hugely over-verbose monologues about “feelings” and “opening up” and “vulnerability” and “the true, good, real me inside”. All the deep-space essentials.
The show’s hero is a maverick astronaut called “Maddux Donner” — which, even by the standards of American TV stupid, is stupid with two patties, cheese and bacon, to go. Donner — lest you for one minute doubt otherwise — is incredibly hot and sexy. At one point, it is revealed that Donner is so potent that he appears to have spontaneously reversed his vasectomy, with sheer hunk-power.
“According to your [medical] charts, you had your vasectomy done — but not according to your scan,” the doctor says. Donner and the doctor then stand and stare at a screen displaying his triumphantly rehealed vasa deferentia. It’s one of my favourite causes of reaction shots in 2009.
But Donner — while able to reassemble his sperm tubes from sheer foxiness — is not without issues, as revealed in a neat bit of exposition from Zoe, the bird with whom he’s got an on-off outer-space thing.
“He’s not my type,” she explains, to her friend. “He left two people on Mars.”
And, indeed, a flashback showed Donner blasting off in a rocket, and leaving two people on Mars — one of whom appeared to be his girlfriend of the time, judging by the “big face-acting” going on. As far as “signalling a character has baggage” goes, it was both punchy and succinct. And stupid, as well — but in a show that goes out of its way to provide multiple moments of air-punching dumbness, scarcely alone. The next 20 minutes brought some serious competition — including a scene in which one of Donner’s shipmates sat on top of the space station, contemplating suicide, and Donner hovered next to him, inside a gigantic space jet, and said, all hoke-tastic, “You wanna hitch a lift back home?”
As the formerly suicidal bit-player climbed into the spaceship, all of Mission Control back on Earth burst into applause.
Finally, Channel 4. Oh, doesn’t it feel odd going over there, these days? If I punch in “104” on the remote, I feel like Madonna in the video to This Used to Be My Playground. I used to live on this channel. Nowadays, I only go over for Peep Show, and things with Kevin McCloud in. I certainly don’t go there for the freak documentaries.
Obviously these documentaries aren’t officially referred to as “the freak documentaries” by Channel 4 but, let’s be frank — we know what they get called when people are e-mailing each other, or talking about them in the unisex toilets. Thirty-four-stone teenagers, people with gigantic heads, pituitary-stunted and 2ft 4in — it all fattens Channel 4’s goose.
This week’s freak doc was The Bigamist Bride: My Five Husbands — the story of how Emily Horne, a 31-year-old fantasist, ended up getting married five times without once getting divorced.
You could see how — like Brad falling for Angelina on the set of Mr & Mrs Smith — Channel 4 had been initially unable to resist her lure. Horne was like a compelling cross between Anne of Green Gables and David Brent — self-deluding, self-important, and prone to gushing statements such as, “Chris was an innocent victim of a love that would tear the world apart — the love between me and Simon”.
Both Chris and Simon looked unlikely candidates to be at the centre of the passionate implosion of the Earth: were they sandwiches, Simon would have been cheese, and Chris ... maybe just “some butter”.
But as the back-story started to rack up — Horne’s divorced parents, her mother’s allegations that her father had sexually abused her, the bipolar diagnosis, the medication, and the recurring, disturbing theme of Horne telling each of her husbands that she had got pregnant, and then miscarried, their babies — you just boggled, and boggled anew: this wasn’t something to make a documentary from. It was literally an hour of human misery, confusion and despair, with adverts for Volkswagens, toothpaste and loans in-between.
This wasn’t a documentary — it was case notes.
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