The Affair (Sky Atlantic)
Wayward Pines (Fox)
Benefits Street (C4) | 4oD Player
Episodes (BBC2) | iPlayer
It’s a fairly boggling 33 years already since Colin Welland accepted the Oscar for his Chariots of Fire screenplay with the mildly vainglorious “The British are coming!”, itself a down-the-centuries echo of Paul Revere’s cry. Welland meant by implication to Hollywood, but, with rare fine exceptions, nothing sturdily continued to happen except Brits got to play all the cheeky villains. Now, however, with so much US creative talent migrating to clever television, that is the new Hollywood – and, goodness, don’t the British now have their sensibly shod feet firmly under that table.
Three shows aired this week that actually could not have been made without British input – all right, technically yes, but only if by “being made” we mean “being made worse”. Dominic West, as he might, holds The Affair together with a powerhouse performance; Toby Jones, fresh from Marvellous’s Bafta triumph (during which he took a typically selfless podium stance behind the real Neil Baldwin) only put in creepingly fleeting appearances in Wayward Pines, but my money’s on him holding the cat’s cradle of plot strings. And, of course, Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan, making a welcomely dry return to Episodes; though it has to be said that this show still amounts to a fierce amount less than the sum of its parts.
The Affair could so easily have been a humdrum… affair. Middle-aged writerly dad, fraught with in-laws and children interrupting his sex life, is about to have affair with small-town waitress with good legs. It is elevated to something quite different, something strangely good indeed, partly down to the careful quality of the writing (and performances) but chiefly to the inspired retelling of two sides of the same story.
So we get to see Noah’s (West’s) memories of the start of the affair, and, half an hour later, those of waitress Alison (Ruth Wilson). They differ only in relatively subtle ways. Noah, say, recalls her as having been first to greet him, and with a grin, at the beach bonfire; and to be the first to suggest he take advantage of her walk-in shower. Alison recalls herself as having taken a slightly more heroic role in the choking-daughter diner scene; and, on the beach, Montauk on Long Island, is gazing mournfully out to sea (“the waves seemed even angrier than I was”) and is convinced it was Noah who first hailed her. I am sure it was ever thus: even with recent events, our fickle memories work hard to put the best gloss on ourselves. Listen to two people’s accounts of a minor car crash and you can begin to worry about history.
It’s all done with great style and skill, if an understandable frustration in hindsight on behalf of the third party, the viewer, to get at the objective truth. That will surely have to wait. Already, there are hints of dark consequences. To which branch of officialdom are they now separately recalling their memories, and why? Has something truly awful happened (pretty sure that’s a yes)? It is also, without showing too much, oddly and gruffly dirty-sexy for the land of Paul Revere; think Jessica Lange on the table in The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Way stranger and darker (even) than that, Wayward Pines clambered cloacally on to our screens last week. It is a cult looking for a following, and it’s already got me on board as a beady-eyed acolyte. M Night Shyamalan is better known for big-screen success with The Sixth Sense and a later stream of un-hits in which he attempted to find that same shock-reveal moment which had us genuinely shivered back then, and roundly missed, as in (they often say this in the rarefied world of auteur meta-criticism) couldn’t hit a cow’s arse with a banjo.
But he keeps on keeping on and, in fact, who better to exec-produce and direct this clammy, macabre slice of America’s tripe-grey underbelly. If you think there’s something of the deja vu about it, that’s because you’ve deja viewed it – Twin Peaks being the most obvious antecedent, but also, just about, The Truman Show, Fargo and, I’m told, The Prisoner (though as a child I could watch neither that nor, interestingly, Babar because they made me think that’s what being on drugs would be like).
A secret service agent, Matt Dillon, whose face as ever looks like he’s been twice round the world lashed to the wheelhouse of a dodgy Shanghai brothel boat, has his face look particularly so when he wakes up after a car crash in the exuberantly unsettling Wayward Pines. There’s something instantly passive-aggressive about everyone he meets: the troubled and troubling sheriff (Terrence Howard) and nurse Pam (Melissa Leo, channelling Nurse Ratched) and of course the marvellous little tweedy Toby, a study in sinister. And the crickets only chirrup electronically, and there are way too many hidden cameras, and time-travel conundra to come, and something wicked that way went called the Easter bombings, and a huge electrified fence round the entire weird zip code, and a pretty barmaid. And of course we’ve seen much of this before, but of course much of it was splendid. A warm welcome to Twin Pines.
Episodes has so much going for it. It’s co-written by David Crane, the clever writer mainly responsible for Friends! It has Joey from Friends in the shape of Matt LeBlanc, playing himself, Matt, as an older, greyer and slappably unwiser version of Joey from Friends! It has Tamsin Greig! And Kathleen Rose Perkins! And it’s really underwhelming!
Part of the problem must be that, while we Brits relished every last drop of the earlier battles surrounding the fictional couple Tamsin and Stephen Mangan’s sharp fictional script being dumbed down for America, the real US scriptwriters might now feel a touch of possibly justifiable unease at all the shrewd Briton/whalethick Statesider gags. And thus have to concentrate on affairs, and Matt/Joey’s vaulting new stupidities. But it’s a fresh series, and I’ll let it settle in, and admittedly Mr Mangan’s facial reactions to Matt’s financial woes last week – turned out he’d been scammed for half his lifetime earnings, and thus had “just” $31m left – were as pricelessly and stoically old-country as old maids cycling through the morning mists on cheap and broken bikes.
I almost couldn’t stand, after t’election, to go again down the avenue that is Benefits Street. The blaming and shaming, all the predictables. Glad I did though, because what was driven home (quietly, unstatedly: Love Productions and C4 showed but didn’t tell) again was that there is, indeed, a true and vast gulf between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
On the new street, in Stockton-on-Tees, where Love Productions were somehow wholly welcomed whereas weaselly national press were water-bombed – there’ll be media studies doctorates on that – there was Lee, and there was Maxwell. Lee was a bit depressed, but nice enough, and wanted keenly to work. How he would find a job, when there were none locally and he had the world’s most broken fridge, and had just had his benefits sanctioned – ie annulled – for forgetting just one appointment, was a… mystery. Maxwell, on the other, permitted a redefinition of the word odious. A serial criminal, who admitted to “doing” 42 cars but denied the theft of a strimmer – “what the fuck would I want a strimmer for? The council cuts my garden” – he spent most of his many benefits on daily top-up tanning salons and supplemented his valuable life by necking pills before court appearances. They were near-neighbours. Deserving and undeserving. How IDS and the Daily Mail sort this stuff out over the next five years I will, as ever, await with a light and a gladdened heart.
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