Catch up TV...

Missed the TV moment everyone’s talking about? Nick Curtis looks at the shows you should have watched (and still can) and the upcoming must-sees
BBC
30 August 2013

Alec Guinness thought the key to a role lay in getting the shoes right. David Threlfall apparently feels the same way about hair, so you can tell whether he’s going to be good or bad by his barnet. That lager-grizzled horse’s mane was perfect for Frank Gallagher in Shameless, for instance, but the lopsided dreadlocks he sported for a play I once saw him in were a sign of severe miscasting.

Alarm bells therefore rang during What Remains (BBC iPlayer) when Threlfall appeared wearing a sort of two-tone cauliflower on his head, the colour of boiled pants at the front and of old cheese at the back. As the stubbled, widowed, soon-to-retire detective Len Harper, the actor was by far the most tentative element of this four-part crime drama, kicked off by the discovery of a mummified murder victim in the attic of a Victorian house.

All of the variously shifty other residents, excluding the newlywed newcomers played by Russell Tovey and Amber Rose Revah, are suspects. Tony Basgallop’s concept is CSI crossed with Big Brother, or possibly Cluedo, overlaid with the rather tired trope of a copper’s last chance to do good. But the underlying theme about the isolation of London life is strongly communicated, not least in the way the camera creeps around the arid shared spaces of the house and seems to spy on the residents.

Alongside the muted Threlfall and cocksure Tovey, the show is full of fine character actors: Indira Varma, David Bamber, Steven Mackintosh. And there are three more weeks for Threlfall to get hair and story straight.

Perhaps I was overly alive to the clichés of cop dramas this week because Charlie Brooker gave them such a thorough kicking in Touch of Cloth II: Undercover Cloth (Sky Go), which concludes on Sunday. In the returned crime spoof, John Hannah and Suranne Jones are once again superbly deadpan as the washed-up Cloth and his bisexual sidekick Oldman, investigating a bank robbery.

Brooker and his co-writers machine-gun the viewer with gags, and the level of observation and absurdity is high. But the pleasure of Cloth is marred by a niggling sense of disjunction. I have no problem with silly, obvious, offensive jokes (qv — my entire journalistic career) but it seems a bit rich for Brooker, who so regularly excoriates the laziness and coarseness of TV programmes, to get such easy laughs out of Oldman’s sexuality and, more nastily, the vicissitudes suffered by an Eastern European prostitute. But perhaps I’m being petty. Or jealous.

On the 50th anniversary of the great man’s “I have a dream” speech, Martin Luther King and the March on Washington (BBC iPlayer) admirably mapped out the history that contributed to that pivotal event. Earlier in the week, Richard Pryor — Omit the Logic (also BBC iPlayer) fleshed out the rackety life of a very different revolutionary in the race debate, a firecracker tearer of taboos destroyed by his own hectic impulses.

If they were alive today, King would be 84 and Pryor 73. Would they be more enthused by Barack Obama than downcast by the Trayvon Martin shooting, I wonder? And would they regard Top Boy (4oD) as progress or a great big shame? Ronan Bennett’s drama has a predominantly non-white cast but most of them are playing drug dealers, hustlers or trainer teefs. I’ve just Googled the charismatic leading man, Ashley Walters, and it turns out he has played several non-hood parts, although it sure doesn’t feel like that.

The plot of Top Boy is a low-level, aimless chunter of slang and nihilism but the acting, especially from the child actors, is riveting. And it’s beautifully produced, with a shiny cinematic carapace and a sense that what we are watching is unvarnished and “real”. I’m not suggesting that all black-led TV programmes should be The Cosby Show but I do wonder where “realism” shades into “voyeurism”. Oh, and I look forward to the fun Charlie Brooker will have with the cliché of the tough female lawyer who falls gooily into bed with her drug-dealing client.

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