Critical (Sky 1) | Sky Go
Broadchurch (ITV1) | ITV Player
Wolf Hall (BBC2) | iPlayer
South Bank Show: Mark Rylance (Sky Arts 1) | Sky Go
Immigration Street (C4) | 4oD
Mark Twain it was who said that Wagner’s music is “actually better than it sounds”, and my sentiments were somewhat similar when faced with the opening episode of Critical: didn’t understand a minute of it, but it was great.
The much-awaited latest hospital drama from creator and former doc Jed Mercurio, he of Bodies and Line of Duty, was viscerally, pun wholly intended, different from any other on either side of the Atlantic. Ostensibly a relatively simple show depicting the first “golden hour” in which a specialist team has the best chance of saving the life of a sputtering trauma victim, and depicted in 24-style real-time, it is so much more than that, being a mix of phenomenally speedy gabble-talk from the players and equally unforgiving shots of the pulsating, marbled fat inside living humans. Acronyms swim and waltz through a riot of haemoglobin. Impossibly scarlet things are demanded of scared young latex fingers while, before us, juts the wide V – so wrong, so unmeant-to-be – of the opened chest of a breathing man.
I quietly removed the bib donned for my takeaway BBQ and concentrated on working out a few acronyms and was immensely proud for having correctly noted down and later puzzled out ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation), but after that the notes grew muddled. I think someone called for a Peony with a standard 12cc of UB40, while elsewhere they got the spanjied lunaflex back to a serviceably boondocked azimuth (whew!) with 40 decibels of fog, but the rest was just gibberish. No matter: this is cramped, edge-of the-frenzy stuff, lightened if only a little by swift dark humour (the quiet order: “Turn the lever.” The even quieter injunction: “Other way”) and other nice Mercurio touches, such as that fact that for all the reliance on computer technology there’s no titting about in theatre with iPads: still nothing like a cheap Biro and swift small capitals on a Post-It note held with some urgency against a window.
One fear is that the 60-minute countdown format will, by pure default, mean a shocking dearth of character development for such good actors – Lennie James, Neve McIntosh, Claire Skinner, the relative newcomer Kimberley Nixon – which must perforce come in the tiny hinterland moments of at-ease banter. Though as the young people might still say, whatever. After an hour of this I found myself, as did the patient, gloriously and thankfully alive.
A few weeks ago I asked in these pages whether I was alone in suspecting, vis a vis Broadchurch, that the real killer was actually Danny Latimer’s father. Hearty thanks to all the commenters who rushed with pointless haste on my day off to tell me “yes”, sometimes even spelled correctly – and so indeed they were proved right, and me wrong. Joe Miller had done it: though the jury thought otherwise, and I wish, not for the first time, that English law allowed, as does Scots, for a “not proven” verdict.
And a rejuvenated Alec Hardy solved the other bluebell-murders, exposing faint echoes of a Maxine Carr/Ian Huntley scenario that left my stomach more thoroughly churned than anything in Critical, and Olivia Colman naturally acted her socks off, and Joe Miller was run out of town in a denouement disturbingly reminiscent of The Wicker Man (the good one, not the Nicolas Cage disgrace).
This second series doesn’t seem to have gone down so well with viewers, especially the online pedants (so the courtroom protocols weren’t strictly observed. And the number 68 bus doesn’t stop there, least not on a Tuesday, ’cept when it’s raining). Sic transit gloria, but I quite loved every mesmerising minute.
I can’t wait for the third series, and reunions between Tennant and Colman, and possibly Charlotte Rampling and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and a wee respite from that mad bloody cliff with its oddly whey-faced denizens (never mind the suspicion that when they meet on a narrow path they high-five with “give me six!”), and look forward too to writer Chris Chibnall and team breaking out into a full-fledged franchise of subtly intelligent shockarama.
Wolf Hall also ended, at least until Hilary Mantel finishes the trilogy. As we speak, HarperCollins and the BBC have her in lockdown at Guantánamo. Anne Boleyn – spoiler alert! – died, but she died, as befitted Mantel, adapter Peter Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky, with surprise on her lips. A bleached-bone dawn, a tawdry sky, filth on cobbles, and the executioner slipping off his boots. To pad silently to Anne’s left, hiss a command, wait for Claire Foy’s pale neck to turn wide in confusion, then dance back to the right , half a second, all the better for a clean cut on straining sinews. All superlatives have been exhausted. It’s been glorious.
Still, there was much blood. And for that, Thomas Cromwell must take both dubious credit and full blame: during his interrogations of Anne’s lovers – “I’ve found men who are guilty. Though not necessarily as charged” – we really saw the skull beneath the skin.
For some fabulous insights into Mark Rylance’s acting, I’d thoroughly recommend a South Bank Show special that popped up last week devoted to him. Rylance, dressed in impossibly stylish trilby and skinny silk tie and with a surfeit of vulnerable charm, opened up much of himself to Melvyn Bragg, dressed unaccountably in 80s velvet suit and kipper tie but still possessed of fine, winnowing questions. One of Rylance’s few conscious tricks is deliberate uncertainty (the rest of the time, presumably, he just acts). “Too often, especially with Shakespeare, they’ve made decisions about everything. But… no. You have to go on and begin the speech with ‘To be or not to be…’ and somehow, somehow, convince yourself you haven’t got the rest of the speech to say.” For any aspiring actor, he vouchsafed three little words. I’m not telling you. Watch it.
Immigration Street said much, none of it good, about the lamentable and possibly guilty confusion of the left over the issue. Love Productions had gone into Derby Road in Southampton with, I still believe, the finest intentions. They made Benefits Street for the same channel a year ago, and there were many queries over whether the risky successor possessed the right title. But the producers found some lovely Jamaicans and Poles, Muslims and Sikhs (hope that makes clear we’re not equating apples with oranges), from fresh newcomers to third- and fourth- generation travellers, to genuinely celebrate their odd inter-generational affability, and as they quite viably asked, when did immigration become a dirty word?
There were tabloid and broadsheet intrusions, rancid with blood-scent, which is much of the answer to the last. There was a public meeting full of such inane cloth-eared stupidity from many races, and in particular various Labour politicians, over-keen on over-use of the over-used “vibrant”, that I was forced to conclude, again, that there’s those that want to listen, and those that don’t. Love was, literally, run out of town. Oh for Dodge City, or the relative courtesies of fat King Hal’s court.
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