Cracking original drama makes you greedy for more
WHERE to start in an extraordinarily good TV week in which there’s not even space for the B-words: Borgen and Birdsong?
Leading the way was surely Inside Men, billed as “original BBC drama“ that stamp of quality which rarely fails to live up to the hype. It was utterly gripping with a fine cast led by Stephen Mackintosh as John Coniston the popular manager of a cash-counting house who, we begin to suspect by the end of episode one, isn’t quite what he seems, but on the surface at least is someone who is both good at his job and happy to go along with (in a clever sub-plot) the clear desire of his wife Kirsty (Nicola “Spooks” Walker) to foster a child.
The opening features an extremely violent, brilliantly handled, armed robbery featuring a bunch of blokes wearing some unsettling rubber masks. They clear out what emerges as the biggest cash heist ever before we are swung suddenly backwards, nine months to where it all started.
This, as it happens, is when a plot to steal small sums of cash over a period of time is hatched by Marcus (an excellent Warren Brown) and an initially reluctant security guard Chris (a great performance too by Ashley Walters) who has hitched up with a Polish girl sacked for nicking £20. When £50k is discovered missing, John’s suspicions are triggered and the pair come clean. But what follows next is not what you think. It was a cracking hour of drama, during which I barely wrote down a word, transfixed as I was by the plot unfolding uncomfortably and destructively before our eyes.
This could well turn out be a study in how greed can destroy people and I, for one, will be happy to see things unravel in the weeks ahead.
Prisoners’ Wives surpassed my expectations by some way thanks to some terrific work by Emma Rigby as Gemma and Polly Walker as Francesca, two lags’ lasses whose coming and goings from jail to see their respective beaus couldn’t be more contrasting. Gemma, is convinced of her bloke’s innocence (of murder) while the older, savvier Polly lives in a huge pile – albeit sinking large glasses of wine at school chucking out time – while her husband does an 18-year stretch for drugs. This could have been a very gritty drama indeed on the women left behind and while it does do that some extent it is clearly aimed at an audience who doesn’t want to get too down and dirty.
Protecting the Children, a three-part documentary on the child protection team at Bristol City Council was very difficult, but utterly compelling viewing. I’d challenge anyone who got to the end of it not to have enormous sympathy and admiration for these and similar remarkable people across the UK whose reputations were shaken to the core by the Baby Peter scandal. It centred on Toby, aged three, unable to speak and with clear behavioural issues and his hopeless, feckless, slack-jawed parents, Tiffany and Steve, the latter who thrived on confrontation with their newly-qualified social worker Susanne. Their flat was an awful eye-opener. A dog roaming around, its faeces on the floor, empty food cupboards and, strikingly, no bed for Toby to sleep on and no toothbrush to clean his teeth with. It was parental neglect personified.
Eventually – eventually – an emergency protection order was granted allowing Toby to be taken into care by which time his mother was expecting another child potentially heading the same way. One scene in particular was extraordinary. Steve’s interaction was being observed during an access visit to Toby during which the little one played quite peacefully while Steve became transfixed with one of the toys he’d picked up. Rather than play with Toby, he simply ignored him and carried on, jaws wide open, eyes bulging, caressing the toy he’d found.
Tiffany and Steve thankfully split and even more thankfully she had the good sense to give away her daughter for adoption. Her life will, we hope, progress. For Toby, the issue had been to try, in foster care, to catch up with his peers before he reached the age of four and it became too late. That may not now happen and, all the statistics will tell you, he will be a very difficult child to place in adoption. Just like his parents – in care and with speech development issues themselves – it seemed history was repeating itself. That was the really depressing message of a very bold documentary.
Another very impressive hour was spent with Chris Terrill, embedded for six months with 42 Marine Commando in Helmand. He filmed, directed and produced Royal Marines: Mission Afghanistan and even trained with them to make sure he was up to the mark. His interviewees were revealing, all sharing a hatred of “bomb dodging” and a genuine emotionless detachment to killing the Taliban. The first outing, chasing the “dickers” (Taliban spies who phone over the movements of the troops) was tense to say the least knowing that every foot forward could mean hitting an IED.
As one squaddie put it: “This is bandit country. If you go out with five people in a car, one is going to die, one will lose his legs and the other three are going to be injured. You just don’t know which order it is going to come in. It’s literally not if but when here”.
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