After two episodes, the sublime Southcliffe, about a killer on the rampage in Kent, is the TV event of the year
*Southcliffe* (C4) | 4oD
*The Field of Blood* (BBC1) | iPlayer
*Make Me a German* (BBC2) | iPlayer
*Southcliffe* opened horribly and just got worse. It was stupendous. Every fantinkle of Channel 4's more dodgy output over the past 31 years is forgiven, mainly because I can't be bothered to remember it. By doing this, by giving us this one sublime drama, they are almost wholly redeemed, Big Brother apart.
What it opened with – Kent mists, marching rows of pylons so stoic in their relentless geometry and thus so at odds with we messy human buggers below – was an ageing lady, gardening in desultory fashion, thinking murmuringly of – what? Tea? Sex? Suncream? Death? Suddenly she took a sting in her abdomen; almost blotted it away, but there was too much blood for it to have been a sting. Savagely confused, she died.
It had been a stingy bullet, of course. Fired by random-nightmare ex-squaddie Stephen Morton (Sean Harris, in a devastatingly understated performance, excepting the brilliant sad eyes). What kind of bullet I'll leave to Southcliffe's forensics, and those who bizarrely care about this kind of thing – could have been a .22 dum-dum via suppressor, or a Sturm Ruger hollow-point with extra vanilla, or just a fierce metal thing possessed of cheap morals that makes people die. But Sean had gone on a rampage. Eventually. The first two episodes were seriously slow-burn. It continues tomorrow and concludes next Sunday.
Borrowing a half page out of The Killing, it concentrated less on the killer, far more on showing both the pre- and post-killing lives of those so hideously affected by the loss of one whom one had loved. They were far from saints in their personal lives, both the dead and the living. Rory Kinnear and Anatol Yusef – compromised, devastated – played in their individual ways absolute blinders as ambitious 80s geezers, hardly hindered by the soundtrack (Costello, Chrissie Hynde), the pub smoking, especially the cinematography (Mátyás Erdély).
Director Sean Durkin's portrayal of the moment when Morton attacks his mother, the faintly demented Queenie, will live long in the memory. He lovingly brings her her usual breakfast, the camera pans away for such a long, long time to an asymmetric shot of the doorway, then he returns and tells her softly to shut her eyes. And the killing begins.
Whether we'll get a fuller explanation of Morton's motives has to wait. I suspect they'll just have been "unhappy, angry". Which leaves no one the wiser as to the "killy". I don't mean to belittle the commensurate grief: quite the opposite. But I covered Dunblane, and Cumbria three years ago, and also Soham – I do seem to get these jobs – and yet struggle at 4am to work out any difference between Thomas Hamilton or Derrick Bird and the average sadsack.
I've often tried. At Dunblane, fed up to many back teeth with the intrusions in the pub of Norwegian and Japanese TV crews, my friend Alex Renton and I went to the candled church, filled with locals, and welcoming, warm and unbearably fraught. I thought I had glimpsed some truth. I reread my copy last week. It was embarrassingly tawdry, cliched. Journalism isn't the first draft of history; it's a trifling adjunct to the grief still lived.
God knows, by the way, what Claire (the jolie-laide and intriguingly good Shirley Henderson) is going to make of her daughter's death. This has, and only halfway through, been the TV event of the year.
For more fun, you just had to watch *The Field of Blood*. "Just past the Dead Hour. Right. Some bastard must be out there killing somebody." It was a cop drama – semi-serious, knowing, pretending to be drama but up against it, frankly, thanks to Southcliffe, unfair though the week's comparison might be. It was fiction, after all.
Fiction, albeit enjoyable fiction, in that reporters don't get to solve crimes, especially by being allowed to wander through police tapes and rifle the body for wallets. Fiction, less so, in that in 1980s Scotland they carved up the left-leaning media, although I don't think everybody was as good looking and shagging quite so frequently as David Morrissey, Jayd Johnson or Katherine Kelly: I was there; it was the rain, mainly, and the drink, and the burps, but mainly the pop socks. Good evocation though of Tom's Bar (the one that used to sit under the Herald). And an undeniable truth: our secret services did play severe dirty tricks on the NUM, whose leader was wonderfully portrayed here by David Hayman. In any other week I would have Harry Lauded it.
The one I couldn't take my eyes off was Bronagh Gallagher, as feisty reporter Jayd's mother. With her all-consuming Catholicism, mad hair and staunch eyebrows, she's fast becoming the go-to actor for "deranged Catholic lipless mother-witch" and, I have to say, I like her immensely, and may the road rise up to meet you.
*Make Me a German* was – such fun. The premise was a bit strange – BBC couple go to live in Germany for a while, taking as sole guidance a briefing from an ad agency about how the average German lives their life: most are called Mueller, rise at 6.23, eat an immense amount of fatso pork but still stay roughly skinny, yadda yadda – but the accidental revelations were intriguing.
"How come they work less than us, yet are more productive?" co-asked nice presenter Justin Rowlatt and his nice wife, Bee. Simple. They don't bugger around pouring their hearts out on Facebook or Twitter all day. Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés, as Florian, admittedly not a German favourite, once said – "In order to live well, live hidden". Instead, Germans just work, and knock off at 4, and see their families. And have very decent apprenticeships, and don't bother with everyone having to go to a rip-off university to obtain a degree in emailing virtual squonk.
On the other hand, women don't, pretty much, work, and have to do 4.5 hours of cleaning and bloody babycare a day, and virtually everyone has to join clubs, aargh, and everyone in this communitarian society looks out for eath other. Which sounds fine on paper, but translates as interfering if you don't comply. Which means just using the wrong signalling light or just letting your kinder make noise on a Sunday. Shame it didn't extend to just planning to annex the Sudetenland – sorry, swore I wouldn't go there. Fascinating: more needed from Justin. The choicest speckles from this were how little the Germans care about us Brits; but, with a little more application, he could start a third world war. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 week ago.
*Southcliffe* (C4) | 4oD
*The Field of Blood* (BBC1) | iPlayer
*Make Me a German* (BBC2) | iPlayer
*Southcliffe* opened horribly and just got worse. It was stupendous. Every fantinkle of Channel 4's more dodgy output over the past 31 years is forgiven, mainly because I can't be bothered to remember it. By doing this, by giving us this one sublime drama, they are almost wholly redeemed, Big Brother apart.
What it opened with – Kent mists, marching rows of pylons so stoic in their relentless geometry and thus so at odds with we messy human buggers below – was an ageing lady, gardening in desultory fashion, thinking murmuringly of – what? Tea? Sex? Suncream? Death? Suddenly she took a sting in her abdomen; almost blotted it away, but there was too much blood for it to have been a sting. Savagely confused, she died.
It had been a stingy bullet, of course. Fired by random-nightmare ex-squaddie Stephen Morton (Sean Harris, in a devastatingly understated performance, excepting the brilliant sad eyes). What kind of bullet I'll leave to Southcliffe's forensics, and those who bizarrely care about this kind of thing – could have been a .22 dum-dum via suppressor, or a Sturm Ruger hollow-point with extra vanilla, or just a fierce metal thing possessed of cheap morals that makes people die. But Sean had gone on a rampage. Eventually. The first two episodes were seriously slow-burn. It continues tomorrow and concludes next Sunday.
Borrowing a half page out of The Killing, it concentrated less on the killer, far more on showing both the pre- and post-killing lives of those so hideously affected by the loss of one whom one had loved. They were far from saints in their personal lives, both the dead and the living. Rory Kinnear and Anatol Yusef – compromised, devastated – played in their individual ways absolute blinders as ambitious 80s geezers, hardly hindered by the soundtrack (Costello, Chrissie Hynde), the pub smoking, especially the cinematography (Mátyás Erdély).
Director Sean Durkin's portrayal of the moment when Morton attacks his mother, the faintly demented Queenie, will live long in the memory. He lovingly brings her her usual breakfast, the camera pans away for such a long, long time to an asymmetric shot of the doorway, then he returns and tells her softly to shut her eyes. And the killing begins.
Whether we'll get a fuller explanation of Morton's motives has to wait. I suspect they'll just have been "unhappy, angry". Which leaves no one the wiser as to the "killy". I don't mean to belittle the commensurate grief: quite the opposite. But I covered Dunblane, and Cumbria three years ago, and also Soham – I do seem to get these jobs – and yet struggle at 4am to work out any difference between Thomas Hamilton or Derrick Bird and the average sadsack.
I've often tried. At Dunblane, fed up to many back teeth with the intrusions in the pub of Norwegian and Japanese TV crews, my friend Alex Renton and I went to the candled church, filled with locals, and welcoming, warm and unbearably fraught. I thought I had glimpsed some truth. I reread my copy last week. It was embarrassingly tawdry, cliched. Journalism isn't the first draft of history; it's a trifling adjunct to the grief still lived.
God knows, by the way, what Claire (the jolie-laide and intriguingly good Shirley Henderson) is going to make of her daughter's death. This has, and only halfway through, been the TV event of the year.
For more fun, you just had to watch *The Field of Blood*. "Just past the Dead Hour. Right. Some bastard must be out there killing somebody." It was a cop drama – semi-serious, knowing, pretending to be drama but up against it, frankly, thanks to Southcliffe, unfair though the week's comparison might be. It was fiction, after all.
Fiction, albeit enjoyable fiction, in that reporters don't get to solve crimes, especially by being allowed to wander through police tapes and rifle the body for wallets. Fiction, less so, in that in 1980s Scotland they carved up the left-leaning media, although I don't think everybody was as good looking and shagging quite so frequently as David Morrissey, Jayd Johnson or Katherine Kelly: I was there; it was the rain, mainly, and the drink, and the burps, but mainly the pop socks. Good evocation though of Tom's Bar (the one that used to sit under the Herald). And an undeniable truth: our secret services did play severe dirty tricks on the NUM, whose leader was wonderfully portrayed here by David Hayman. In any other week I would have Harry Lauded it.
The one I couldn't take my eyes off was Bronagh Gallagher, as feisty reporter Jayd's mother. With her all-consuming Catholicism, mad hair and staunch eyebrows, she's fast becoming the go-to actor for "deranged Catholic lipless mother-witch" and, I have to say, I like her immensely, and may the road rise up to meet you.
*Make Me a German* was – such fun. The premise was a bit strange – BBC couple go to live in Germany for a while, taking as sole guidance a briefing from an ad agency about how the average German lives their life: most are called Mueller, rise at 6.23, eat an immense amount of fatso pork but still stay roughly skinny, yadda yadda – but the accidental revelations were intriguing.
"How come they work less than us, yet are more productive?" co-asked nice presenter Justin Rowlatt and his nice wife, Bee. Simple. They don't bugger around pouring their hearts out on Facebook or Twitter all day. Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés, as Florian, admittedly not a German favourite, once said – "In order to live well, live hidden". Instead, Germans just work, and knock off at 4, and see their families. And have very decent apprenticeships, and don't bother with everyone having to go to a rip-off university to obtain a degree in emailing virtual squonk.
On the other hand, women don't, pretty much, work, and have to do 4.5 hours of cleaning and bloody babycare a day, and virtually everyone has to join clubs, aargh, and everyone in this communitarian society looks out for eath other. Which sounds fine on paper, but translates as interfering if you don't comply. Which means just using the wrong signalling light or just letting your kinder make noise on a Sunday. Shame it didn't extend to just planning to annex the Sudetenland – sorry, swore I wouldn't go there. Fascinating: more needed from Justin. The choicest speckles from this were how little the Germans care about us Brits; but, with a little more application, he could start a third world war. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 week ago.